 It's the mat work. Welcome to music news that matters. We're on the first of each month. We help you sift through the noise to bring you the most important music industry news. We never so much information out there. So we're going to bring you the most important stuff and give our perspective as well. We're going to focus today on TikTok to make slightly new features, ways to monetize your content, as well as California's music economy, which could be about to collapse as well. Yes, crazy. And before we get started, since these videos are only once a month, make sure you sign up to our newsletter to get notified of the latest news and why it matters to you between episodes. You can find that in the link in the description below. So let's get right into it, I guess. We're going to start with TikTok. We keep banging on about how important it is, but it is crucial. Yes, yes, extremely. So they're testing out some brand new features in the social commerce sector. So users could soon be able to put URLs in their bio. Same as Instagram's got right now, you know, linking the bio. I'm currently on TikTok. There is no way to put links in here, but this would be a good opportunity for artists to put smart links to their music on there to direct people to other platforms to listen to the music. And they're also experimenting with ways to sort of advertise your products and merchandise in the app. So you could post a video and users could directly buy your products straight from the app by opening up third-party websites. Yeah, man. I'm going to tell people why to me this is so important, all right? Because if you're on TikTok right currently, yes, it does allow you to do your YouTube link. It allows you to do your Instagram link. And I have ran so many campaigns with artists at this point where I've tried to tell people the greatest thing that I found on TikTok is the fact that it's transferable to other platforms like nothing I've seen before. People hear your sound and they go listen to your music. They're not even necessarily even looking for you right off the bat, but they're they're going to hear your music and then becoming a fan or they're on your profile and they're following you. But then they go to see your Instagram if they're following you as a content creator. But it's not even you having to ask, all right? They people are just going for whatever reason they're going and gauging on other platforms. I don't know. It's just because TikTok currently has limitations, which is where they're actually trying to build out to make that less of a thing. I don't know if that's what they want, but currently they're hopping over to other platforms. And why that's so relevant to me is because when you're talking about adding a URL for e-commerce, all right? Or whatever other URL that means people will go. I've seen people go run a campaign and now the Spotify song has plus 100,000 listens just from a small TikTok campaign, right? That's a very real thing. And people currently are going, they're seeing the sound, let me go Google search it, right? That's the current behavior or let me go to Spotify actively. It's not clicking a link to then just go straight to the song. So the fact that they're doing that going over that barrier, making that barrier of entry even smoother is going to be crazy. So you often see as well in the comments like fans asking, what's this guy's artist name or what's the name of this song? And they'll like comment, like, you know, go here, like search this on Spotify. Like they're all very actively engaged on the comment section. So you can see it just from that level as well, the impact that now URL is going to have. Exactly. People are looking. They're looking, they're looking, they're looking. Now, some cases, I'm like, why are you asking? Because if you just click the sound, it'll show right there. But yeah, people are already looking. They're hungry and they're trying to find this information. So just making it easier for that to happen. I could only imagine. You, I remember you mentioned earlier when we were talking at being able to add a fan link now as an artist, which can be done before, right? All of these artists at this point, well, most artists at this point are using some kind of link where you can choose Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple, all that on Instagram. You can't do that on TikTok, but it's still having an impact. So you being able to do that, I could, I could only imagine that impact. I'm excited to see what happens. Because I'm also interested to see the stack because some of those fan links, right? You can see the actual stacks in the back end, how many people put through and where it went to. That part is going to be really cool to be able to see. But just making things constantly easier to, you know, to monetize, like it's just everything they, all the features they add have such a good purpose. Like, so obviously, the first thing was live and beyond the tip artists. And now suddenly you can advertise your very merchandise or products in-house. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually going to share the screen. So Josh, I would definitely love, before I even get into this, in my opinion, I'd love to see what you think in terms of how this would feel as an ad or e-commerce link. But what I like is how subtle it is. Obviously, instantly your eyes are drawn to the panda and then obviously the caption. You can just see the little pandaloon costumes in the, in the bottom left above the at handle. But I'll see your eyes not drawn to that for quite some time. It doesn't feel like an advert because I could regularly post. Exactly. That's my thing. So for those who are actually looking and not just listening to this, there's just, there's this panda on the screen, right? But it's this small thing where it says pandaloon where you see the yellow box next to it. That is essentially the click-through. The part that says www.uplabesea.com, that website, that's not a part of this. That's not a part of the post. That's more just somebody adding their watermark. So really it's only that yellow box that you see and it's so clean. If you actually watched this, the first thing that came when you watched the live video, we're not going to show it's kind of weird. A great example, but yeah. Yeah. But those are the examples they gave us. It shows your eyes go directly to the video. So it feels organic right into the platform with anything else versus, yo, when I'm on Instagram, you didn't even think about the line of scrolling. As I scroll up, the first thing I see, I can read that it says sponsored before I even see the post. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And at the very least, this is the opposite. Like it would be cool. That makes me think if on Instagram, if they could at least put the sponsor thing below the post, right, to give it a chance of feeling organic first, that will make a huge difference because this does that. And of course, your videos, this is all video on the platform, it's motion. So you're not even looking to read first. You're looking to engage and get into that before you even look at the rest of it. If you're advertising like your music, it's a music video, it might just come up like a regular TikTok video, won't it? It won't look like something that's sponsored or advertised. If you've got this little tiny sticker in the corner only, it's good to watch another video. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm excited about that. TikTok is doing a lot of things right. I can, I could definitely attest to that. And I'm interested to see where things go. I can't wait till it gets to the phase where other people are on the platform outside of, you know, a lot of dancing and comedy because it's going to go that way. It's going to have the deep side. It's going to have everything in the same way Instagram does. At some point, other people are going to figure out a way to make it make sense for them, all right? They're just going to have to. There's already churches, there's already motivational speakers in some aspects. If you look at somebody like Gary Vee, right? That's just his persona on that platform. And it's successful partially because he's already bringing people over and also the main advertiser for people to come over. But at the same time, the engagement is true, that's happening on that platform. So he's somebody to model and there's artists on the platform, like visual artists. There's all these aspects on TikTok. And once it starts to evolve and the power of these organic ad systems, that's, that's going to be really interesting to see. And they're not far away either. You know, like Instagram's got over a billion monthly active users, but TikTok's already over half a million. Like it's really quickly catching up with the growth this year has been ridiculous. It was the number one downloaded app on the App Store in the first quarter of 2019. So yeah, not going to take long next year for it to be, you know, the main place like, because where would you rank TikTok right now in terms of the power as a social media platform? Like where would it rank in your list? Ooh, social media, I always put YouTube in there and realize that I was like, that's technically not social media. So I would say Instagram and TikTok. Twitter is a weird space, but it's so specialized and why people use it right now. So right now, currently, I would say Instagram then TikTok. You might say Instagram, Twitter, then TikTok. But yeah, Twitter just says, I don't think any Instagram or TikTok have any competition with Twitter. Twitter is just such a specialist place. They have a complete monopoly on that behavior and the way that works. If you know what I mean. So yeah, I don't, that's it. It's only one in the way. That's it. You don't consider like, obviously Facebook's, you know, the power of the advertising still got the biggest reach in the other platform. You don't consider that like the main player. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to put it number one because of the, you know, because of the size of the user base and the reach and everything. Okay, true. So because of the size of the user base, yes, because I think they're at two points, something billion. Yeah. All right. Like they're literally around like a third of the world, which is a whole nother thing. Why the government doesn't want them to do their own cryptocurrency is like, y'all are trying to really become more powerful than the United States. But I, yeah. So in sheer power and reach, you're right. I would have to give it to Facebook. I just always forget about Facebook. There's number two behind Facebook companies. That's what we're saying. It's still, yeah. It's number one behind Facebook and Instagram. Like obviously Snapchat is, it's still got its place, but I'd put, maybe I'll put Snapchat above Twitter and in some cases because it's obviously a young audience. Snapchat is so fringe. The reason I don't put Snapchat as a true place of power is just that, that lack of lasting content. Right. The lack of creating catalog and truly branding off of it. The lack of being able to be discovered off of it. That's why you don't see so many Snapchat posts shared in news or blogs and things like that. Right. So yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. It was the number one place for like 16 to 24 years to consume news. I think it was either last year or the year before. It was like the number one platform for consuming news. Yes. But that's news that's curated news. Right. And the curated news is one of the, in my opinion, it's any platform that's just that in today's era is that by nature is least powerful because so much of the news and so much of the power of the news is not what the news is, but what happens after the news. We think about social media, the conversation after the news. All right. And how that gets shared, how that gets placed and where. So you'll see again, Twitter posts, right? Get posted. Like this happens and somebody said they can't do something or tour got canceled. And then you see all the news people posting that from Twitter. Right. And you might even see them talk about that on the news and then Instagram. You see some similarity of that on Instagram, but you know, just the interaction is completely different when you look at Instagram. So that's why I put Snapchat. It's just a little too enclosed in terms of impact. It's strong within its own core, but it fails to reach outside of that where you become viral within the platform or something happens in the platform and it starts to impact other places. That's the issue I see with that. The only thing I saw was DJ Khaled, right? He was the only one who really had something going heavy on Snapchat to the point that it became super advertised. And a lot of that was partial, like media relations. It wasn't natural and organic, right? That's what I'm saying. Obviously he had the machine that was kind of helping push that. So yeah, I would say Facebook to your point, though I agree with that completely. And you can't forget about the older audience. There's still a lot of old people in the world, right? They do have the most comprehensive ad program, which goes from Facebook and Instagram accounts for both, which is another thing that you just have on anybody. Like there's no, TikTok is still beta testing their ad platform. Twitter is less desirable. YouTube, I love it for some very specific reasons. But just as far as the complete depth of it is nowhere near Facebook, nobody can touch Facebook as far as their ad platform, what that allows you to do if you know how to use it. And yeah, and then Instagram is just the more popular side of Facebook. We'll just call it that, right? The more younger hip side of Facebook. In one year, TikTok has become the number two player behind them, which is crazy. Like last year's 18 months are the rise, right? Exactly. I think TikTok is, I'm interested to watch this because we haven't gotten a chance to see something like this, something that stands as this true threat in a long time. Yeah, exactly. And we still need to get to people with messages that it's still not, it's not just Vine 2.0. There's still a lot of people who think it's just another version of Vine, but you couldn't get any of these features or this reach on Vine. It was just the videos. This is so much beyond that. Way, way more developed. And I hadn't thought about that though. Just to share marketing message of it being Vine 2.0 to a lot of people, it has kept people from being on a platform, probably from the standpoint of the fact that Vine didn't last, right? Yeah, exactly. That's what our generation thinks anyway. We've got generationals, the younger generation, they love it, they're obsessed with it, but my generation grew up on Vine. They just think, oh, TikTok, that's just Vine 2.0. Far and beyond, far and beyond. So what's up? We're going on to another topic related to sort of creating content. There is a brand new open source AI tool called Splitter, which has been made by Deezer, a streaming platform from France, and it allows you to essentially isolate certain parts of songs, certain stems. So if you've got a track, you could isolate the vocals from the instrumentation, the backing track. You could also isolate individual instruments as well. It's a really powerful new tool. There's been loads in the past that have tried to, you know, isolate vocals so you can use them for remixes and stuff, but this software is free and it's the best that's been released so far. It's the best on the market. And a lot of people have been taking notice of it of late, but I feel like it's not got massive global attention, but the Verge Ryan asked for it and there are some interests being taken, but it's a great opportunity to, you know, take vocal stems for DJ sets, for mashups, for karaoke. Like, it's a lot of potential. Yeah, I think this is extremely cool, especially where it's going to go. I'm going to try to play an example. Hopefully it's somewhat smooth. And we can put a little link in the description to this, this page where people can test it out for themselves, but let's see if I can play something. All right now, hopefully YouTube doesn't identify that as something that they want to take down, right? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that was the vocal for Lizzo, Truth Hurts. There's a few other vocals on this page, Marvin Gaye. I heard it through the great Vine, Billie Eilish, bad guy. There's a few really dope, just isolated parts that people are going to listen to. And I think this is cool. Obviously, just like having all my friends that are producers and DJs, just how easy that process is. That'll be really cool. And I don't know if you could have told through what I just played, because obviously this isn't completely set up for that, just yet we're working on something like that. But you might not have heard the quality, but it's actually pretty good quality. Some of them aren't great quality, but it's the best I've ever heard, you know, there's loads of different tools you could try out before. There's so much bleed from other tracks. This one actually seems to really pinpoint just like the vocals or you can use, you can program it to do two stems, so vocals and the backing track. You could do four stems, so vocals, drums, bass and another instrument of your choice, or even five stems. So vocals, drums, bass, piano, guitar, like it's been well trained as machine learning software. Like, also, you have to have some sort of knowledge of coding on how to do it, because you have to set up, download the code from, let me find the actual information. So I was going to ask you that, how accessible is it? Use Python or Google's AI toolkit called TensorFlow, because you have to download the code from GitHub, and then you have to run it through one of these two programs, and you have to be comfortable putting in lines of code and things to get it to work. It's not got all this space, but my friends have been trying it out and he says, my friends have been trying it out and says, it's actually not too bad to set up, but if you follow YouTube's tutorials, it's quite easy to do, he said, but it just requires you to take some time to go in and set it up, like it's not something you just download and you can just use it. Got it, got it. So that's, I mean, that's still cool, so that's early, right? Early, and so I'm sure once you learn how to do it a couple times, it becomes real easy for you, and it's worth it if it's a part of your job. This is, essentially, it hasn't hit commercial usability by your description, right? Where I don't know how to do any of this stuff. I just want to do it just for fun, and I might put it in a TikTok video or something like that, right? It's not there yet, but it is at a point where if I'm a producer or DJ, it could be very well worth learning how to do it. So that's cool. And what's great about this is that if you're a DJ and obviously, you have to buy stems online or find, you know, find illegal downloads of stems from vocals, but that's just only really for like, you know, really big, well-known songs, but with this, you are in control of what you put through the program. So you could pick any song in the world you wanted instead, whereas there's not that freedom of choice on the market right now. So it uses MP3s or waves. Yeah, that's the idea, there's this freedom of choice now, because there's a lack of availability of certain songs on the internet. That's huge. That's huge. I didn't think about it in that way. I love that. That's not fair a bit about it, I think, yeah. Yeah, this is going to have a, this is going to have a pretty cool impact, a legitimate impact, especially as it starts to build out. You mentioned that this is one of Deezer's platforms. Yeah, Deezer's is like this program, yeah, which is really an interesting idea for them to be getting involved in this. Yeah. I guess they know that Spotify has such a stronghold in the market. Let's invest in innovating in some other ways as well. Yeah, but they are sort of not going to make it like commercial usable. They're not going to go any further with it, but other companies can take this and do that. But they're not interested in making it like really, yeah, they're not interested in making it like a nice interface, a nice easy accessible product. So are they leaving it essentially open source? And then, yeah, it's open source so anyone can do the one with it. So other companies probably will take it on and make something a bit more friendly for them. Oh man. Yeah, so. Definitely. I'm trying to think if I could figure out the right use case, I might, I know a few programmers. Yeah, exactly. Like, but yeah, imagine for TikTok in the future, you can, you know, make your own mashups, right? Yeah. It'd be really cool, right? That's cool. That's super cool. Definitely check out the, we'll put a link in the description and definitely check out all the examples. Like, you know, there's been just some quite funny ones. I know it was one Twitter where a guy put, we didn't start the fire and he, by Billy Joel, when he put that on the friends team tune, mashed up them and it works out surprisingly really well. Really? Yeah, it works out quite well. That's funny. Big topic next. An interesting one that I only was brought to my attention a few days ago by a few producers from California because the headline essentially is that California's music economy could be about to crash because there's one particular bill that could go into effect in the new year. I'll just, I was telling you about this earlier but it's such a massive thing to unpack and it's just... Yeah. It was crazy when you first told me about it because I was looking at it and I understood some of the general things it was saying and I guess, you know, you can go ahead and get right into the description, but this to me is huge and hopefully is not an indicator of some other things that might spray it into other states. Let's leave this thing in California. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So let's try and have a go at trying to break it down, but this new bill is called AB5. It's coming into effect on January the 1st next year. It's already been passed in California. It was essentially designed to support workers' rights for like people who work for Uber or DoorDash, but rather than making a law just to help them, they made it generally for everyone. So outlaws all independent contractors. So essentially for musicians, I'll break it down for musicians context. So how a law is written, if you're an artist and you want to hire a bass player to play at your gig for, let's say, $100, you want to pay them, it means you have to give them a contract that legally designates them as your employee. So you have to hire them as an employee, put them on payroll, provide benefits, et cetera. But basically you have to sign a contract and make some of your employee, which is just crazy because it's just for one gig, but you've now got to sign them up. And this means also for venues that if you want to play a gig at a venue, let's say the bootleg in California, they wouldn't have just give you a check, you'd actually have to become an employee of bootleg. So you wouldn't just get your check, you'd have to put tax on that as well and you have to go on their payroll. It's just, it's crazy. Yeah. And from an artist standpoint, I know that sounds tedious, right? And it might sound annoying as well that that typical $900 check you might get or that $900 cash that you might get instead becomes $870 or something like that, $830, because you have to pay all these other taxes that are associated with being a regular employee to something like that. Actually, the number is probably, especially in California, it'll be that $900 would probably be more like $700 or something or six something, right? But I know that sounds annoying from an artist standpoint, but what's even greater is the business impact from a business standpoint, right? That can encourage you not to have artists. Let me figure out a different way to go about this. Unless the artist is willing to take for one all the impact, right? Okay, no, I'm not going to pay you more so I can equal back down to $900, right? That'll be one thing you're not going to see businesses shifting to that, I don't think, but even bigger than that, still having to put something on somebody on a payroll, still having for me as a business to pay those unemployment taxes on that individual and do all this other due process that doesn't make it worth it unless this is going to be an ongoing employee of mine, it'll actually discourage people from hiring artists for gigs, where as instead, I might start to look at easier options like, look, what can I play off of Spotify, right? My employees that that, you know, like that could be our jukebox, let's play off the employees phones or figuring out other ways creative options that provide entertainment, maybe musical entertainment specifically, that doesn't create that particular hurdle, because if my whole thing was bringing in new artists weekly or something like that, it's too much of a headache. It doesn't make sense. Maybe an ongoing residency as well, that will be a simpler at least solution that might help in that aspect. But I think what's crazy is just more and more I deal with things government related is people underestimate how one law meant for one thing impacts everything else, right? If this somebody is dealing with injustice over here, and it just seems like a X issue, right? A gay issue, a race issue, or whatever, you know, issue is like, no, that affects all the groups to actual rolling. If this is for people who are doing postmates, like you said, no, that affects other industries unless you specify which they never do. Right? That is just for this particular thing, because they have to leave it flexible. It's interesting how these things and unfortunate at the same time that I don't know if it feels like laws like these are or lazy. But I'm sure there'll be some pushback. Hopefully, there'll be some pushback. Because artists won't want to tour there either. You know, this happens, they're going to skip California altogether, because it's just going to be too much hassle for them. People aren't even going to book them, are they necessarily? Venues aren't going to be paying acts to come, right? If it's so much hassle and... You know, I thought about this initially from the smaller gig space, right? Yeah. You know, in a bar and things like that. But yeah, like, so let's just say Beyonce, right? Yeah, let's just say Beyonce comes in, and she's at a venue in California, the stable centers or something like that. This still was the same would apply, right? Yeah. We're talking about the fifth largest economy in the world, California. We're not talking about some small state, you know, we're not talking about this. This is a massive, this is like the entertainment capital of like the world. California. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of their, if they're a way around it currently, like, could you hire them as a contractor at least? I don't know. I wonder how that will work. Well, the biggest thing for me is what I can't understand is that there are loads of exemptions in this law. We're talking like lawyers, dentists, physicians, vets, photographers, but musicians were not included in this. And I don't know how. Like, that's what I can't understand. Like, I read that there's one group from musicians that are in favor of this, which is, they're called the American Federation of Musicians. They've got about 80,000 members. Obviously, there are millions of artists out there, so that doesn't mean anything. So the RIAA and A2IM, they were both against this bill. So it was the Music Artist Coalition, which has got artists like Anderson Pack and Mara Morrison, Megan Traynor, they're all members of that organization. They were against it as well and fought against it, but still passed into law on the 18th of September this year, without musicians being included in the exemptions. That comes from lack of representation. You see those exemptions that already took place, that means there's nobody in music in a strong enough position to have had that impact in that particular place, because I'm obviously just probably affecting some other industry that we're not thinking of that also wasn't listed as an exemption. So yeah, that just has to be a lack of representation in the decision-making space of where that happens, but hopefully that gets appeal. As it gets larger, I can only be clear that yeah, I think there'll be more of a ruckus created on that. Things are moving. Ari Herstan said that he's going to have a meeting with the Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who proposed the bill in the first place. They're going to have a sit-down with some musicians and discuss in the coming weeks, but they've only got a month to turn this around. I'm interested, well look, the government stuff, man, they can go forever, forever, man, appeals and things that take two or three years to get done. What I'm most interested in is the group that's actually for this and why, what are their points for being for this? I would like to hear that. Definitely, yeah, exactly. I think most of the American Federation of Musicians, I think there's a lot of orchestral set musicians and things in this organization. I was going to ask you if you had any idea what the makeup of the type of artist it was. That was what I read very briefly. I think it's largely, yeah. Yeah, that makes a huge difference. But apparently what they're annoyed about is what no one really heard about is because you got rushed through, you got rushed through the government like this, this law about much opposition because there was no time to really oppose it, is very sort of like quickly in and out, which is very unheard of for most, for most of the ages to pass. So it's only getting picked up now, even though it was passed two months ago. So that's worrying for the industry. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it's so many things happening at one time, it's almost hard for all of them to get the visibility. I don't know if this one was pushed or rushed through with some sort of specific larger agenda or there was a reason that it kind of kept it was kept a little quiet. But man, there's just so much happening at once. It's like, how do you keep up with it? Yeah, exactly. But for not to not be aware of it for like two months, it's a bit, it's a bit concerning for the music industry wasn't really picking up on this. Yeah. But hopefully they will get the exemption that rightfully should happen. It's ridiculous. Like, you know, you really put in the entire music economy in jeopardy, if this doesn't get resolved. So it's a massive story. We'll definitely keep tabs on that and give an update in the next one. Moving on to Spotify, we talked a lot about them extensively in the last video about the opening of the two-sided marketplace, how it wants to really empower artists and monetize as much as possible. They're doing the push notification adverts now as well for new music for you. But people have been breaking down like what it would actually take for Spotify to achieve their mission. Daniel Leck, the founder has said he wants one million artists to live off income solely from Spotify. So David Turner from the Penny Fratch newsletter has broken down what that would actually mean. So currently 30,000 artists are in this top tier that are living off Spotify income, which is 0.733% of the artist currently on the platform. So to achieve this goal, there would have to be 400,000 million musicians on Spotify, which is 5% of the global population. So 400 million? 400,000 million. That's 5% of the global population would have to be musicians on Spotify. And currently Spotify's got 158 million listeners and 71 million of those are paying into the premium description. So to achieve this goal of one million artists living off income on Spotify only, you need to have 7.2 billion people subscribe to Spotify with three billion of them paying. So that's basically the entire population would have to pay into Spotify. Obviously this is all hypothetical means nothing, but when you put in the context that this is with the current model just with the subscription plans. So you really Spotify need to open up more ways to monetize content on the platform because otherwise they can't get nowhere near this mission if they don't do that. That's the bigger debate at large is that they need to do more because look how stupid this goal is when you've only got income from subscribers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because we already know a huge majority of their current subscribers anyway aren't even paying for it. Exactly. So that would work. Yes, there's some ways to help with touring and merch that Spotify does for the people who have enough data for it to actually be relevant. But there has to be a lot more done from a monetization standpoint, but from artists, it's pretty simple, right? We know touring and merch. What else can they do? Where else can they go from that in terms of Spotify integrating needs other than boosting fees and paying something that might be a little bit more fair? I can't even think of it right away because those are the main ways that artists monetize in general. Is there a new income stream that doesn't currently exist or doesn't really get tapped into enough in any other place that Spotify can help out with? Well, what I'll take the direction of this conversation is now is that Spotify needs to make a decision about what it actually wants to be because does it want to be this? Because currently it's obviously a consumer facing company. It's not an artist focused company at the moment. And it's also a general audio and podcasting company, not just a music one. But if it wants to help a million artists live off the music and needs to go more down the route about being creating tools focused towards artists. And most of the companies they've bought over the past few years were geared towards helping the artists. But more recently than investing in companies that are more focused on rights management and original podcasting content and stuff. So they're kind of contradicting themselves with what their actions. So obviously back in the early days they were trying to help the artists and they moved towards becoming the Netflix of audio more recently. But now they're saying their mission is to allow one million artists to live off music and income on Spotify. So they don't really know what they're doing, do they? They don't really know what direction to go in. It's awkward crossroads. I mean music is taken off, right? And such a large reason that people have Spotify in general. I think the consumers think of it as a music space. They don't think of it as a podcast space or the Netflix of audio, right? Consumers don't even create their behavior like that. But with that being said, yes, there are these other opportunities as a business, podcasting and all that stuff. So I'm sure they want to lock it down. The contradictions though will probably create a lot of issues down the road. To me what I personally see right now is all these partnerships that y'all create in music. All of these, you know, you're in bed with all the labels, right? Because it's pretty much necessary for you to even be on a platform. And now from there, you know, you're trying to do something similar in podcasting, but never even fully getting down to serving the core, which is the artist itself, right? For them to be able to continue to want to be on your platform. It's kind of like SoundCloud in a sense where this music and these artists have came onto your platform because it was helping them out, it was helping them distribute. But as you guys grew and start to look for more and more opportunity, you start to do things that's antithetical to the core user. So we have to say the core user is not the consumer. Even though the consumer is a consumer-spacing company, the core person you're doing giving service to has to be the artist first. So they can be inspired to continue being on that platform. Even though it's like, yo, we got this, all these consumers on the platform. So we have a monopoly on it. So you have to be on Spotify. That doesn't always add up because now you eventually open yourself up for another company to come in in the same way SoundCloud had Spotify and other companies take over the position that it once had, right? Because now the artist will see, hey, look, let me go over here. You just need that company to hit a certain scale and have a certain amount of investment. This is the danger. So Spotify do decide they want to go down, you know, become an official audio route. They're going to do less and less geared towards the artist, which is going to move them elsewhere. And then they just can't decide right now. So they're saying, they're doing one thing and they're saying the other. So they don't like saying we want a million dollars to live off Spotify. But then everything they're doing right now is geared towards investing in companies to do growing their podcasting and audio consumer-facing side of things. I don't know if you remember, but they tried video for a while. Yeah, exactly. They figured out that that wasn't going to work, but they tried it. Yes, but their actions right now contradicting their mission statements, it feels like. And I think there's some very important time coming up for the company. And hopefully a lot of it's just experimentation. Of course, some of it is market share and needing to be able to access and serve the podcast market because it is adjacent. And some of it does make sense. But hopefully a lot of the other stuff is just learning, right? That R&D part of investment, not necessarily something you want to apply directly to the company as a whole. It's just all research and development budget. That's what the hope is. Well, Stock Exchange will be pushing them to go down the consumer-facing route anyway. They've only just turned a profit in the last quarter of a day finally. And they'll be keen for them to continue on the consumer-facing expansion route rather than developing features for artists to monetize. So it's a really interesting time for them to try and figure it out for them. So you said their first quarter finally happened when they were profitable. But I think they finally turned a profit in Q3. So obviously, I've known about them not having a sense of their inception, which is out the norm for these types of companies that are user-driven marketplace, having to do the chicken and egg situation. But the fact that they've actually turned their profit now, to me, that actually is when it becomes dangerous in one way. Because now, all right, so you have the company, and this is Spotify being on the public markets as well. Once they start to turn a profit, typically these companies get pushed in an direction where you want to continue to see profit, right? And you want to continue to see that profit grow. And then you see the incentive lineup like that, because a lot of these companies aren't necessarily doing what's best for the company. If we're on the stock market, we have to speak to those people on Wall Street who want to see that number go up and up. So our incentive is now to do things that make the books look good versus creates a better company at long term. Amazon has been so great because they kind of ignore that and continue to invest in the future far longer term than other people. Spotify, I can't say that they have such a keen leadership as Jeff Bezos, right? Those are rare for those types of companies, especially once it starts to be the general executive board of directors type of things leading the company. So I don't know, to me, that can be worrisome just from the fact that making a profit sounds positive, but what comes after that can be against improving a great user experience and even bigger understanding the value of investing in the artist stuff that might not bring an immediate profit, but will be worth it for the platform long term. It's always been a problem for Spotify. I've never personally really known what it is. I think anyone really knows what it actually is if you were to define it as it's what the actual company is. It's always been doing loads of different avenues. It's always been really hard to describe compared to a lot of other companies in terms of the biggest on the market. What do you mean? What do you mean? Well, obviously, the news extreme platform is one avenue, but they have the podcasting and they have the artist network and the Spotify for artists. They do a lot of different things. If you've described the company in a nutshell, they never really know themselves, it seems like who they actually are and what they want to focus on. They always try on different avenues of different ways to go down. That can be fair. I understand. I guess I actually get caught up so much just because of what I do in the music side that I just think about that part so heavily, but I do know so many people who aren't involved in music that they only use it for podcast. I'm not gonna think about it. So it's interesting to hear that outer perspective and more objective perspective of Spotify from that standpoint. I think that's been their biggest problem, I think. I think that's been their spots always been holding them back. They've always tried to do all these different things and never really know what's really honing in on. And that's where they could be usurped in the music streaming market if they're not careful. Yeah. And when you've got these disruptors like TikTok coming in, you know, and bite down to launching their own streaming platform now as well. Yeah, that's gonna be interesting. Yeah, we shall see. But it's definitely such a massive topic and debate in that will they figure out some point hopefully. But finally, we'll do some quick hits and find a round up of the news that's happened this month. So as we mentioned earlier, Instagram is now hiding likes for users in the US. It's a massive deal, but they haven't really gone far enough as far as I'm concerned with that. I think, you know, if you're gonna go down that route, you should get rid of the likes altogether. Yeah. So you want to see a more radical move. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to achieve a more active, more authentic engagement, then remove likes altogether and encourage people to comment instead and actually have you know, DM people. Wow, you know what? So here, I'll share my screen actually. So initially, it wasn't doing this. And now it says what you stated, right? Where it says like by the black beauty and 1236 others. Before it would say like by let's say the black beauty and brand man, Sean, right? Yeah, exactly. Yes. That's all it would say. And I would have to click for it. I didn't, I didn't realize that they come back. I've also seen ones where it says like by, for example, the black beauty and literally in words and thousands of others doesn't say an actual number. It just says and thousands of others in written text. That's probably this format right here, right? And it just has to get to a higher number probably because it says 1200 others. All right. So that's probably a similar format to this one when it gets that's given you that's given you an exact number there. Yeah. It just says, yeah, just saying thousands is written as a word. Yeah. It's interesting. But before it was literally just saying it was just saying likes by this user and this user. It wasn't giving any other information away. So again, they're kind of, they're already going back on what they tried to do. Yeah, I'm interested to know why like what that data might look like or if they're still just experimenting because I don't know. I've had plenty of things that happened with on Instagram where it'll happen in my profile, but it won't happen to people around me, right? So I don't know how to choose the categories or where you're seemingly to be located, maybe because my number is different than other people in my area. I don't know. But yeah, I wonder what's happening elsewhere. I'm interested to see or hear why they bounce back because I can't see the effect being that dire. I know there's going to be a lot of, so they have so many brand partnerships and corporate partnerships and things like that. So maybe there was pushback on stuff like that, but yeah. And it really affects the top tier users as far as I'm concerned. This move, yeah, the influences and just like, you know, exactly. And they might have leaned too heavily on that. Maybe that might be a part of why they wanted to get out of that, but I'm trying to figure out that process. So we will see. We'll leave it at that for there. Yeah, we've also got Linkfire has struck a new partnership with Apple Music to provide additional streaming data. So Linkfire is like the smart URL we're talking about earlier, but with this one, you can actually, if you have an Apple Music Threatist account, you can actually see data and see how people actually interacted with the Linkfire link and who's clicked through to go and listen to you and Apple Music, what they listened to, how long we listened to it for, things like that. Lots of data information if you've got a Linkfire account. So just thank you for your mind. I like that. How long people listen to part? Yeah. Yeah. The only downside of this is you have to have, Apple Music has to be the first link on your Linkfire link. This is in the small print. You have to be the top one. That's funny. I like this next one. DistroKid users, members of DistroKid can now easily claim YouTube official artist channels. So you had to apply before in quite a long winning process, but if you use DistroKid, you can just log into their platform now and register for an official artist channel on YouTube. Another conversation for another day, but I still have a draw. I just have a lot of drawbacks in terms of having an official artist channel, especially for a young indie artist that's aspiring. I'll be good to unpack. Yeah. That's a whole another conversation. But so they're expediting something in my case that could be negative or more restricting. But maybe they're also evolving some of the YouTube official artist channels. But I think it's cool that at least it's easier to do if you decide to do it. Yeah. SoundCloud artists can now pay to promote their music if you're a SoundCloud premiere user. So similarly with Spotify, where it did with the New Music for You alerts, if you're now on SoundCloud, you can now pay to push your music to the top and push it to new audiences. So you can push your music to the top of people's feeds and push it in front of new listeners. It's about time, man. Yeah. It's just so wild that this is news in 2019. How long has SoundCloud been around for a long time as well? But yes, dope. Check it out if you're still on SoundCloud. And finally, some students in the US have created an app called Localify. It localizes Spotify music. So if you use this app, it collates and makes a playlist for artists from that particular area or artists who perform a lot in that particular area as well. So it's a good way to discover new artists. Yeah. I think this is going to be really dope. I like that a lot. It's in one way with some other platforms have done as far as trying to connect people with more aspiring artists, indie artists. It's not the same because you know, you could have a bigger artist in your area. It doesn't have to necessarily be new and indie, but just having that proximity is a decent, it's a piece of information that creates different types of interactions possibly. And maybe it might be able to, I don't, I haven't got a chance to see and get into the platform to see what some of the advantages are. I definitely want to talk about this later today though. They're tucked into a good, into a good area because obviously we really value the data that Spotify writes gives in terms of geographic locations and listeners to the artists themselves. But now to give that to, you know, the listeners as well, to now listen to hyper-targeted content, it's a really great move moving forward that it's probably doing on a larger scale. 100%. Hey, look, if I'm an advisor, I would definitely say, yo, this is a great idea just from a standpoint of as they hit a certain level of scale, Spotify probably acquired this company. So they're good luck. Congratulations to you guys. Good for them. Good idea. It's a good work. Yeah, you guys will be rich in probably about two, three years. And that's a rat break. That's pretty much your, you know, your big news from November. Hey, one thing I want to add before we get out of here for anybody who actually is still listening. For one, thank you for listening as far through to the second episode of music news that matters on the first of every month. But another thing that's just really cool that I've recently discovered is the Bose sunglasses that have speakers on them. If you have not tried those out, go to Best Buy or HH Greg or whatever your local electronic store is, try those things out. The experience is unreal and they're only like $200. Yeah, I know it sounds like I'm advertising for them. At some point, I probably need to get like an affiliate link, but I literally has told people if I had all the money I wanted, I would probably like buy it from all my friends and stuff like that. It's Christmas or something. It's an unreal experience. Joshua, definitely try it out. I need to. Yeah, it's crazy. And I didn't even know that they had been out for, I don't know, all this. I've never heard of them. It dropped like in April or something like that. I just discovered them last month because I was going in and out in Best Buy trying to buy new equipment one day. I said, let me try these. Unreal, man. Go try it out and hit me up when you try them out. I'm telling you, this is the future. We're probably going to talk about this in a longer conversation. I'm telling you, it's the future. If Google Glasses should have started here and evolved from here, but yeah, anyway, just try it out. I'm telling you, you don't have to buy it. Just go in and try it out. It'll blow your mind. That's it. Thanks for listening, guys. It's the network.