In Conversation with Josh Scott, Etched co-founder | A new offering to protect artists & creatives

0:04Josh Scott:We've come to Grind Studio in Old Street partnering with Etched. Etched is a new tech for the music industry and we've come to talk with one of the co-founders Josh about what it is, why it's valuable to the industry and how you can give it a go as well. So Josh, great to be chatting with you. Yeah, great to be here man. Etched, tell us all about it. What is it? Give us a summary of it and the inspiration behind it. Yeah, so Etched is a platform that captures evidence and prove authorship of creation, basically. The inspiration behind it, so there's three of us that are co-founders. One of our co-founders, Victor, he's an intellectual property attorney.

0:40And he's had countless situations throughout his career where people have been copied and copyright is there. but actually proving and having the evidence that's needed to show that they are truly the author of that work hasn't been there, hasn't been available to them. So Etched basically was born out of that conversation and working with musicians and artists and creators and kind of across the board with how people create and how we can help them capture that process and really have the evidence that they need should they ever need it. Amazing. So why is it such a unique prospect and what is it going to do for the industry?

1:20Yeah, so like one of the things that we use the blockchain, which basically anchors each piece of creative work with a timestamp that cannot be altered. So it's immutable, basically meaning that it cannot be changed or altered. And that's what the value in what we're trying to do. and that's what separates it from you know using other kind of systems that log and record things that you do also having a home where all of your intellectual property can be managed under one roof as we know like today's age you're really just a musician you know you're probably creating artwork for your albums you're you know coming up with podcast ideas you're coming up with story ideas and the platform enables you to capture everything uh in one place so you know you can like bring it all in and and then you can collaborate in that place and then you can share your work and actually track and have control out how your ip shared and managed so it goes beyond just storing it and and time stamping it is then now i have that anchoring i can now use the ip and and use the creative works a lot easier cool so music creation is typically

2:31Josh Scott:a really collaborative process for writers session musicians producers how does etched accommodate for such a wide group of people that are contributing to the art yeah i don't know no no no yeah no no so um basically we have collaborative workspaces um and within those workspaces different people can be invited and they can upload work that they're involved in you know if there's stuff that you do together obviously you can upload it to that workspace and you basically have something to fall back upon should discussions around splits and who did what fall down, you at least have that record to say, well, look, these are my lyric ideas or this was my melody line idea.

3:15So you kind of got something to fall back on. So it's a trust in the background. If the trust breaks down here, you've got something to fall back on. And hopefully people can work things out themselves, but we know that happens all the time. disputes happen all the time so having this is best practice you know we still sign contracts when we do with things with people that we that we know and love and our friends and our family because you know we have those things in case just in things in case things break down so yeah uh in that sense you can have everyone under one house kind of doing the same thing and working

3:46Josh Scott:together okay got it you've been you mentioned a few like musical jargon terms there like the melody line and stuff i want to josh do you have a relationship with music like yourself Yeah, so I grew up, I started learning piano when I was like seven years old. I've played music throughout my life. I did GCSE music, I did A-level music. I used to want to go into music tech when I was a kid. And this is kind of my roundabout way of getting into tech and music, but kind of a much more different path than maybe what I expected. But I lead worship at church. Yeah, music's part of my life. my sister's a musician you know people in my family musicians a lot of my friends and family are musicians so music is certainly close to my heart which is one of the reasons why i believe what we're building is actually really valuable to the music industry specifically sick amazing it's that perfect like venn diagram of what you're good at and what you love and you're together into this beautiful startup space yeah exactly exactly so startup space at the moment but what is your kind of vision for Etch?

4:49What does the future tell you? Yeah, I see a world where people are able to create more freely with the threats of AI, with creativity being pulled left, right and centre, who owns what, who does what, where does it come from. I think just being able to prove that you are truly the creator of something is going to have tremendous value going forwards in this world and I want Etch to be able to do that for people.

5:17Josh Scott:All right, so we've made the transition downstairs, which was a bit of admin, which got me thinking about itch. So I'm interested, I'm creative, we're creative. But the admin side of it, is that a blocker or do you feel like that's something that's really easy to use functionality wise? No, it's a good question. I think, you know, there is admin in life that we have to do things that we don't enjoy, but that are a necessity. and if you really care about something enough, then you'll put in the work that needs to be done to protect that or to look after that. Having said that, we are very aware that creators do not want to come out of their workflow and we are building things within the application that will enable people to etch, basically, without having to do it themselves.

6:02So automated processes, integrations in software that people use, Dropbox-style kind of like syncing mechanisms within the app, so we're making it even easier but already it's just a simple drag and drop so managing and moving those things into the platform i believe are really easy to do i think there might be a little bit of a learning curve for people but i believe it's a learning curve that's really worth taking because it's really going to support and protect people in the future amazing i mean i feel

6:32Josh Scott:appeased appeased by that it feels as good to me less admin than moving from downstairs to Yeah, 100%. You can etch something quicker than that transition. 100%. Cool, cool, cool. That sounds good. Actually, we actually etched our whole code base. So it was like nearly 2 ,000 etches. Oh, wow. Our whole GitHub repository. We did it in like less than 20 minutes. Goodness. With actually a direct integration into GitHub. So that was like a first bit of testing on how the integrations can work. So you got proof of concept within your own company. That's amazing. We got proof of concept within our own company.

7:03Exactly. You know, we got etched. If we weren't going to use it ourselves, then we wouldn't be it. Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. We'll be right. So we use it for everything we do ourselves as well. So we're here with Etch. We're here with the creatives. Speaking of creatives, your tagline is imagine more, worry less. How can Etch empower greater levels of creativity? Yeah, I think it's just giving people the confidence to collaborate and understand that the things they're creating are tracked. There's an audit trail behind it. there's something to show that they were the creator of that.

7:38And I think, as I mentioned before, with AI infringing on creativity, there's one thing that AI can't do, and that's have a creative process. And creators have a creative process. That's what separates us as human beings from machines. So the platform allows you to show that process, which gives you that confidence that no one can claim that this was done by AI or someone else or copied. I have my creative process. It's there. It's in the stones. So I can keep creating and worry less about the things I'm creating. And that's kind of how the tagline came about.

8:13Josh Scott:Sick. Very cool. Well, obviously we're here at Grindr and they have a studio upstairs, which is obviously perfect for musicians. But have you found use cases for this tech in other industries? Or have you been surprised by anyone who's interested in adopting it in their industry? No, no, no. It's a really good question. I mean, like I said and mentioned before, we're a tech startup. we've used it to secure all of our code base our marketing materials we use it for everything our company documentation data rooms all of that kind of stuff so the platform's super valuable for startups for people that are creating in any industries fashion we've been speaking with law firms and they see big use cases in fashions industries where a lot of intellectual property falls through the cracks.

8:57Things that you don't necessarily register, like copyright and unregistered designs and trade secrets. And there are so many industries that tackle those things every day. So it really does have a broad appeal in terms of what it can do and what the platform can do. And that also ranges from, you know, the individual guy that's making beats at home, all the way through to the massive, you know, high IP generating music industry company or film company etc that are creating loads of stuff and they can track the ip across the whole company so there's value from the little guy all the way through to the big guy yeah um so yeah i think it's very broad in what it can do um but obviously we're looking at the moment into the music industry as we believe it's ripe and ready for something like this with a lot of the stuff that we're hearing coming from the industry so that's why we're here doing things with musicians to start off with but yeah we'll be doing stuff with other industries for sure record so when you talk about kind of tracking ip i guess etch gives this greater level of transparency right and we're in like an era of music where everything is kind of so short-lived and it's swipe you swipe and see things in a few moments um and i guess now etched you'll be able to kind of almost swipe and see the history of a song being developed yeah how does that transparency kind of shape how music well music's value i guess yeah i think like you said we're called etched and the idea of etching something in stone is like when you create something is there yeah and it's there forever um and no one can take that away from you and you might create things that are a bit of a flash in the pan and you might create things that have longevity but whatever it is at least you know that your process is always there and always there to stay and if you want to share that process with people you can if you want to keep that process private you can keep that process private but people will still know that you have a process and that's the most important thing behind proving that you are an author of something um so yeah hopefully that answers your question yeah

11:01Josh Scott:that makes sense that's for i don't know about you but it all sounds all sounds great to me and so i guess in closing just wanted to ask you the final question of any creatives that are sort of watching this and say oh the concept of it sounds keen but in the whole concept of value people obviously have to split their split their finances in different in different ways and so just wondering how like people could maybe give it a go or if someone has like they might be like the idea of it but might want to give a tweak like how do they is is their scope to like liaise with etched how do people like get give it give it a demo yeah so we do have a free version of the platform that people can sign in, sign up, and they can give it a go and give it a try.

11:45Obviously, as we're launching and moving into this specific industry, we are going to be looking to run different schemes and things that we'll do with creators to try and help build around them. We want to build around what people need and what people want, not just what we think people need. Sure. So there'll be opportunity for people to collaborate on those things as well. And there'll be more things that are coming out about that over the coming weeks and months. Obviously, follow our socials. You'll be able to see all that stuff coming forward. And then, yeah, I think you can test it right now with that free version and see how you get on.

12:20And if it's something you like, then, yeah, you can go further than that. So hopefully there's an opportunity for everyone to at least see how it might fit into their workflows.

12:29Josh Scott:Amazing. Well, I think this week alone has showed, like, that you are giving value to creators in both the studio time and in the service that you guys are offering. So we'd definitely be interested to see how people adopt the platform. Hopefully it's something that happens swiftly and it can be something in the ideal world that is like industry standard in not too distant future. Yeah, for sure. I think for us, it's just, you know, we're providing technology to people, but we don't want to be like every other tech company that comes along and says, hey, we've got this tech solution that works for you.

13:01You should use it. We want to be human focused, human centric, the whole reason why what we're doing is to champion human creativity in whatever industry that might be so that's why we want to build the platform with people that's why we want to be with people that we're building it with we don't want to just be some tech company in the sky trying to solve an issue um so yeah i think this this this week has been a good example of that and meeting with people like yourselves and some of the artists that we've had in there hopefully people kind of get the essence of what we're trying to do yeah 100 yeah it's a whole new world of music is what it sounds like to me so it's a great new offering so yeah i'm looking to see looking forward to see how it like shapes how we listen to music but also how we see like the development of music as well being music nerds like we are looking at the breakdowns of songs and stuff it'll like might be into a case where we get to see breakdowns of songs of how each step in the history of their process 100 yeah looking forward to it man i think some of the best art

13:59Josh Scott:is definitely made in collaboration right so to be able to share that process and journey with people without the fear or the worry of it being like dangerous ground is definitely super valuable so well done massive respect to you and the guys for coming up the idea thanks man um and if this is something that sounds of interest to you do check out uh the bio we'll have all the etch socials and a website where you can go and find out you can use the free trial and hopefully you see enough value in it to sign up properly and make sure you're etching all of your work so that you can imagine more and worry less

14:33Bye.