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

I just saw this video of Beyonce the other night.

She was up in the car in the car and the car started going.

Dude, could you imagine if you were the guy that killed Beyonce?

Oh,

she was stood on top of a car.

Beyonce dies in Eddie Guerrera-style catastrophe.

I was thinking, I was wondering, like, what in the world is she thinking while she's up there?

She's got to be scared.

I mean, she was up really high.

Is she harnessed in?

I think that she was.

She's got to have some sort of backup.

Yeah.

I mean, could you imagine the fucking insurance policy on Beyond Set?

Oh, yeah.

It would bankrupt a country.

That was crazy to see that.

To imagine some type of a problem like that.

You know that that's not going to happen again, though.

Ronnie Radke, one of his, was it his drummer who got second-degree burns from flames that came somewhere and he just fired everybody.

Everybody's fired except for the band.

Everybody's fired.

No one's allowed to do this again.

Run it back.

We'll get somebody new.

You know,

when you're dealing with that kind of stuff any type of pyro

what when i was at the metallica show i was 30 feet from the stage but but at the same level and when they

and and i asked kirk i said

how do you know that to what happens if you're somewhere you're not supposed to be goes oh they're in our ears saying okay pyro's coming pyro's coming

no get to a get to a mic oh because all the mics are in safe yes areas yeah right okay so but it's it's hot from

when you're 30 feet away.

And I said, How hot is it in stage?

He's like, oh man, it's insanely hot on stage.

These things are going, the flames are up, going up 20 feet.

You've seen the Ramstein build where they have that big set of exhausts that come up the top.

Yeah.

Those kind of setups are, it's going to be a nightmare to do that, really, to

the liability with that and

to make sure that that's right every night where nobody gets

nobody gets blown up.

But it used to be

having accidents

was not an uncommon thing in the past with

those

anytime you're doing something that there's

bound to be some

issue.

What do most people not understand about the process of making a pop song now?

I think everybody's got this allure of music.

It really is pop music is moving into pop culture it's crossing over people are seeing behind the scenes instagram stories relationships tabloid journalism whether it's from tick tock or you know citizen journalists or youtube channels doing reactions but i think that the process of getting to the stage of this song is now live seems to have changed quite a lot so what is it that people don't necessarily get about what that process looks like now so i just made this video where i was talking about the people that are behind the scenes that help write the songs and in many cases write the songs songs

and

people

have the impression that because somebody sings a song that they are the writer on it or if they have co-writers that the co-writers are are a minor part of this right but but in reality most pop songwriters not all but most

have very little to do with their songs other than choosing them.

They might come in and say, okay, I have an idea for a story of a song.

They'll describe it, and then these professional songwriters will help them realize that idea.

Or the people might have the song completely done and they come in.

Hard to generalize, but does Taylor Swift

write all of her lyrics?

He probably writes most of her lyrics, I would think.

But

typically,

it used to be that

when you

in the 1980s, rock bands,

there were very few people that were songwriters that worked with artists.

Desmond Child was one.

He worked with Bon Jovi, worked with Kiss, and he would co-write.

He was a specialist that would write with rock bands, but it was very rare.

Rock bands wrote their own songs.

And

a lot of pop artists wrote their own songs, but Madonna always had co-writers.

This has been a thing since the 1950s.

People have had songwriters.

They've had co-writers.

The thing now about pop music is that you have to be your own promotion department, basically, to be really successful.

So you have to be,

you kind of have to be an expert in social media.

And I see people that

one of the people is Tate McRae is a huge pop star.

And she started on YouTube.

She knows how to make her own videos for, and she'll make 20, 30 TikToks for a song, for a single.

You can't beat that for advertising.

And people that have that advantage, they can just put up their phone and they can lip sync, they do a dance, they can cut the stuff themselves on their phone and upload it.

And you're a big pop star, if you can do that, that's a tremendous advantage.

And

this is how songs become hits because

if you don't have a viral moment with a song, that's,

you know,

the days of the record labels creating your career are pretty much over.

Yes, they can help, but

it's very difficult if you don't have something that's on TikTok blowing up to

have a successful single.

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Is there a problem with so many songwriters contributing to the end product?

Is there an issue with that?

I get the sense that

maybe some people, when the veil gets revealed and they understand how the sausage is made, go, hang on, 15 people wrote this Coldplay song?

It's vocals and the guitar and programmed drums.

There's Chris Martin, then there's the other one.

I think there's two more.

Who the fuck in the who are these 11 people in the room with them?

Well, I always wonder that too.

Like, who are these people?

Coldplay,

the first

to me, the first two Cold Play records are great records, really.

The second record to me is an absolutely brilliant record.

As people get older,

I've made videos about this.

That

once people hit 30 or so, artists,

they begin to

lose the spark, if you will.

The Beatles broke up the year that Lennon and Ringo turned 30.

Otherwise, Paul McCartney was 28 when they broke up.

George Harrison was 27.

These guys were young guys.

They did 12 albums over the course of eight years.

Some of the most important songs ever written, and they weren't even 30.

They literally broke up.

Lennon turned 30 on november 9th 1970 they were already broken up by then how much do you think that's due to the fact that they were 30 and how much of that do you think is due to the fact that they released 12 albums in the space of eight years because it seems to me that the pace of release i know you've talked about this is now slower yep that people are producing an album every 18 months something like that maybe if you're cranking right and then tour on it once twice come back run it run it again um well that would you know extend that you're talking about a 20 year career off the back of the same pacing so how how much of it do you think is, I don't know, some sort of wall that creatives hit at 30?

And how much of it is I've just exhausted my juice?

I think, I think it's both those things.

So,

one of the things, if you think about writing songs is like working out, right?

So, the Beatles in 1965, they released the record Rubber Soul on August 6th, 1965.

Then on December 3rd, they released,

or they released Help, I'm sorry, and then they released Rubber Soul on December 3rd, and they released Revolver on August 5th.

So in 364 days, they released three 14-song albums.

So they wrote, recorded, and released,

and they toured three records in one calendar year.

That's insane.

But, and, and they had so many hit songs on it, but that's like working out.

You know, it's the more you work out.

Whereas nowadays, if you go, most bands now, they do a record, they go out and tour for 18 months, they tour for two years whatever then

then it's you're kind of out of shape writing because when you're on the road most people don't like to write on the road so what do you have to do you come back you put down a bunch of ideas and no those aren't very good that's the they're starting to get back in shape again you know it takes a couple weeks to

how did the beatles do it

the beatles were just

they

Well, first of all, they were so famous that they couldn't do anything else.

They were stuck in hotel rooms a lot, I guess.

And

they had incredible competition between Lennon and McCartney and George Harrison to write better and better songs.

Plus, they were competitive with bands like the Beach Boys as well.

But

Beatles are kind of a unique.

Yeah,

it's like, I don't know, talking about Usain Bolt's ability to run fast or something.

So, just explain:

how would you

identify or categorize the difference between a producer-driven song and an artist-driven song?

Is there such a thing?

Or

is it just meritocracy and whatever sounds best at the end of the day is what matters?

Producer-driven songs are songs like

would be something like Since You've Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson.

That was Max Martin and Dr.

Luke wrote this song.

They wrote the song.

They wrote the lyrics.

They recorded everything.

She came in and sang sang it.

And that's a producer-driven song.

Literally written by the two guys that produced it, including the lyrics.

So

most music nowadays, or a lot of music, is producer-driven.

Whereas

people come up with a track, whether it's country music, whether it's

pop music,

even rock music, there's some bed track first.

Now, to be fair, historically, almost every songwriter writes the music first.

They sing a melody, and then they write lyrics to the melody, Elton John being the exception.

Bernie Toppin was Elton's lyricist.

They co-wrote the stuff.

Bernie would finish the lyrics, give them to Elton.

Elton would sit at the piano, improvise the song, sing it,

record it on a half-inch or on a dat,

and then they would cut the song.

He would basically improvise it to the lyrics he had.

I mean, this is very rare.

I think in the Beatles catalog, from what I know, there was one song across the universe where John Lennon had the lyrics first.

So, so he's like the juice world of the pup

era.

Yeah.

So, this is, this is when, when I went to Nashville to do some songwriting, I told you I had a

one number one song, the only country song I ever wrote.

But then I went to Nashville and I, they, if you have a number one song, they put you in with all the A-list songwriters.

So, I went there and I, uh, in first probably three months in 2014 and I wrote with all the top songwriters in Nashville.

So the first session I went in and

it was always three people.

And I was like, why is it three people?

Well, that's the way that we do it here.

And I was like, why?

Well, because we want to involve, you know, at the time, as many publishing companies as possible, different publishing companies.

So I was signed to Sony ATV.

There was a guy from, there'd be a writer from Warner Chapel, or maybe two writers from Warner Chapel.

And you get in a room.

I was a track guy.

So I came in with my laptop and I would have five tracks that I programmed drums.

I played guitar.

I played banjo.

I played whatever on.

And I had a full track.

What do you think of this?

Oh, that's interesting.

What else you got?

Play my next song.

Oh, I like that.

I think I might have a chorus line.

Everybody opens their laptops.

What do you think of this?

And then they're looking through.

typing through.

Oh, I got this line from someone else.

And then they would have to be included in on the song rating too, or whatever.

So that would be,

that was in Nashville.

But at that time period, that's when track guys started.

The track guys are basically the producers that would come in and

that would be a producer-driven song.

And almost everything you hear on country radio now is producer-driven.

I don't think people, and I certainly didn't.

I don't think people understand just how much of a music factory Nashville is.

It is a...

Always has been.

It is the Chinese sweatshop of music producers.

People go in and write, you know, they write five songs a week.

It's amazing.

It's really amazing.

I have a friend who produces at least five songs every single week.

Yeah.

I went into back then in 202014.

I have a lot of friends in Nashville.

I know all the

friends at publishing companies at record labels, everything.

And I know a lot of session players.

And

when I first started going to Nashville back, you know, 10 years ago, I sat in on some songwriting demo sessions.

They don't do them as much anymore.

And what they do is they have these

session players, about five or six of them.

They'd have an engineer that was also the producer, and they would produce demos.

And

they'd had songwriters come in and do three songs.

So a songwriter would come in or two or three songwriters would come in.

They'd stand in the control room.

They'd hand out sheets with the tracks

or

the guy that was running the session.

They'd listen to it once and they would write down their parts and then they cut it.

These guys would just cut it there.

And that was it.

Yeah.

I've heard that these session musicians are like the Navy SEALs.

Oh my God, they're amazing.

Yeah.

One,

yep, got it.

And then that's it.

One take, two takes, and then they fuck, they're in the next room.

It's so, they play so well.

So I did a video where

I have a good friend, Tom Bukovac.

He's one of the top guys, like the top guitar session guy in Nashville.

So I was going up there and I said, Hey, Tom, I want to do a video where I want to get

a few of your players and we'll sit in the room and we'll just talk and everything.

He's like, Why don't we do a song?

Why don't you just produce a track and I'll get my guys to come in and play on it?

It's like, okay, so he's, he, he had a, um,

this guy, Daniel Tashian, who's a great songwriter, did, uh, and had produced Casey Musgraves.

Um,

her,

he's had many, many hits with Casey Musgraves and other people.

So Daniel sent me a couple songs and we decided on the song.

So I go up there and I knew a couple of the guys in the band and he introduced me to everyone.

So I'm making the video.

We're going around talking to each individual person.

Chris McHugh is the drummer.

And

so

they get their sounds.

I go in the control room.

The engineer has everything dialed in and they...

they play it

they play it down and they play their parts perfectly

they did a couple takes but it was perfect singing the vocals at the same time too harmonies two microphones in the same room daniel and this uh uh cecilia castleman was a was a singer and they um they were singing the harmonies in the same room and that was the video basically a live recording it was essentially a live recording for studio studio quality kit yeah so so tom uh bukovac he's like i think that uh he overdubbed the solo then he's then he's like

what do you think about me doubling it at Octave Down?

I was like, yeah, it sounds great.

Like, there's no producing to be, you know.

And then he plays it perfectly.

And that's it.

They literally, oh, the guitar player, Todd Lombardo, he said, my fingernail touched a string on one of the chords.

Can we just punch that one note?

And I mean, it was ridiculous.

That's the level of.

Yes, my fingernail

accidentally touched a string.

Okay, so we've got this big engine going on.

Nashville is kind of

maybe patient zero for it, but it's happening all over the place.

Is there, should people feel differently about Sabrina Carpenter's new song, knowing that maybe she just changed a couple of words in it, but it's, you know, it's all about, oh, it's meaningful.

Who's it about?

Like,

what's going on in her life that this is something to do with it?

And I think you can read into the lyrics the

deeper sentiment when the song has been written by the artist that's performing it.

I think that adds allure and canon, as the kids say, you know,

there's lore attached to this, but there isn't.

If we think that if Sabrina, people are wondering who she's dating and what her dating life is like, and if we do this song and she can come in, oh, why don't we make it seem a little bit more open-ended and vague in this regard?

I wouldn't quite say that.

There's two things, you get your songwriting credit, and then you do it.

Is this gaslighting the audience into thinking that their favorite artist is more of a creative than they are?

Or is this just kind of the way that music is evolving now?

Should people be bothered?

I think it's the audience is the one that thinks that the artist has more to do with it.

That's the problem.

It's not like the artist is going out there saying, oh, I wrote this song.

And, you know, it's like

the Nashville,

when Nashville songs are written, most of the artists do not write their own songs in Nashville, or many times they don't, right?

So, but they don't go on and get interviewed about the songs songs that they wrote.

They, they, you don't see those kind of things.

It'd be like, um,

there's a famous song, one of the most famous songs of all time, Wichita Lineman.

It's Glenn Campbell did the song in 1968.

It's one of my favorite songs.

And this guy, Jimmy Webb, wrote the song.

And I interviewed Jimmy.

He's, he's in his 70s now.

And, um,

and Bob Dylan said, one of the greatest songs ever written.

I mean, a lot of people think this is the greatest song ever written, Wichita Lineman.

Well, Glenn Campbell sang it.

Nobody interviewed Glenn Campbell about, how did you write?

Tell me about Wichita Alignment.

It's like, well, I asked Jimmy about it.

He's the one that wrote it.

You know, they're not going to ask him, what do the lyrics mean?

What were you thinking when you said this in the second verse?

So that's the same kind of thing with the Sabrina Carpenter thing.

Do you think that the audience is that aware?

Do you think that they know this?

Because I get the sense that they really don't.

I think that the entire

story arc from the music video to the shoot to the single artwork on Spotify to the cutdowns that go onto social media.

I think it very much is playing into this arc that this is a

genuine outgrowth of something that the artist is feeling or going through.

And I suppose maybe somebody else can write a song that you then perform and own that is resonating with what it is that you're doing.

That can be the case.

Yes.

But the level of prefabrication does seem to make it feel a bit more kind of perverted.

I think when people see the videos of these songs, like this, the Sabrina Carpenter song, when people saw the video, they connect it with her

writing it because of the way that she performs it in the video.

Whereas if you take a song like Hurt, that's a Trent Reznor song that Johnny, that Johnny Cash did, and Trent said that that

song is owned by Johnny.

It's his now.

It's his now.

Right?

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Can you tell people that Johnny Cash story?

I'm sure you've got a nice version of it.

It's just, I saw a really lovely cutdown of someone explaining kind of where he was at with his life and what happened.

And I thought it was just such a beautiful story.

So

that song Rick Rubin produced

with the song Hurt, right?

So Rick, I mean, it was right at the end of his life.

And Rick had,

he told me the story when I interviewed him.

He said that he had put this song as the first song on this

CD that he'd give Johnny.

Multiple CDs.

It'd be the first song.

And Johnny never said anything about it.

He keep listening to it.

And then, so Rick, Rick said,

how come you never say anything about that song?

He goes, oh, I don't know.

It's just kind of, it has a couple of weird chords in it and everything.

And, and Rick's like, let me just do a version where I think you can really,

I think this song would be amazing.

So Rick had somebody come in and play guitars and do a rough demo.

And then Johnny heard it and sang over it.

And

he was like, oh, yeah, this is amazing.

But when he first heard it, because it has a couple dissonant dissonant chords in it on Trent's version, the Nine Inch Nails version, and he didn't hear it at first.

He was like, I don't know, that song's kind of strange.

And

it was really interesting to hear about the backstory of these things.

And he was.

You know, there'd be days where he couldn't sing because he was very ill when he did that, when he was

singing the vocals on that.

And

And

so Rick had to be available whenever Johnny was feeling good enough.

Yeah, but

amazing.

What is it then that a modern pop star brings to the table?

Like primarily, what is their value add now?

Depends on who it is.

To me, somebody like Billie Eilish, her and her brother,

that's a rarity, really, where they create all the music on their own.

Phineas plays a lot of the, you know, they co-write all the songs, and they're a self-contained band unit, whatever you want to call them.

And

it's hard to think of

other artists that are pop artists that

can function like that without outside songwriting.

So if you're not Billie Eilish,

what are you bringing to the table?

Well,

it's gotten to the point where you need to be famous in order to be a big pop star.

You need to be famous prior to being a big pop star.

So think of all the Disney people from

Demi Lovato, Hillary Duff,

who's Selena Gomez.

Jake Paul.

Yeah.

There you go.

And Sabrina Carpenter.

So the Jake Paul, that's funny.

These Disney stars that were already famous, and then you put them together with songwriters.

Oh, Addison, what's Addison Ray is a TikTok TikToker, which is same.

She's famous already.

She's got 80 million followers on TikTok.

I'm waiting for Charlie D'Amelio.

I don't know if she can sing or not, but she would, you know.

Someone must be eyeing her up to get safe.

Charlie D'Amelio to me is kind of like a pop star, too.

These people that can dance.

This is interesting to me.

Athleticism has been part of pop music forever.

James Brown, people that could really dance, Michael Jackson,

Prince,

then modern pop stars like Tate McRae.

Her mom is a dance teacher.

She's a professional dancer.

I saw Benson Boone do a backflip off a stage.

Yeah, these people are athletes.

And you have to be.

Dancing is a massive part of pop music.

There are routines that you have to be from Lady Gaga to Beyonce to whoever.

MGK now?

Yes, there you go.

So it's,

and I really respect

the athleticism of these people.

Right, but we're still not, at no point here have we said, you know, the tonality, the ability to understand form and musical function and a deep knowledge of where this comes from and control of the voice, the vibrato.

You know, like

As of yet, I haven't heard you talk about anything to do with songwriting capacity, creativity, vocal, like know-how.

Well, there's plenty of people that are

Ed Sheeran.

Ed Sheeran's a real songwriter.

He can write his own songs and he's a pro.

Not only can he write his own songs, but Ed can go out and play him with an acoustic guitar.

He can fucking loop that.

Yeah, exactly.

Amazing.

Ed is a pro.

I mean, so there are people,

there are people that can, that can do that, that are great songwriters, that are really talented, that can perform, put on a show themselves.

Chris Martin can go out just with a piano without even the rest of Coldplay can go out there and entertain the audience.

Or the 11 other people.

Yeah.

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 prefabricated DJs yet.

It's coming.

You think?

Probably.

I just get the sense.

You have someone,

Charlie D'Amelio.

Let's assume that, let's say that she was a dude and she couldn't, and he couldn't sing.

You're like, oh, we've got the platform.

God, this motherfucker just cannot hit a note.

Make him a DJ.

Make him a DJ.

Where's Skrillex?

Sonny Moore must be around.

Get him in.

Get him to.

Where's Fred again?

Speak to Fred.

Fred will do us a track or whatever, right?

Get 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 a, she doesn't 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.

You'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 don't even think it was down 24 hours.

Yeah, it was like eight hours or something.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it keeps getting extended.

That band keeps getting extension.

I 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 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.

So we've sort of, I guess, explained at least part of the process of what's going on, which is pretty interesting.

When I watch your videos, which everyone should go and check out, it kind of feels to me like seeing a translator who understands a language that you enjoy, but actually have no idea what's going on.

Right.

I can't break a song into its constituent parts.

I can't tell you what's, oh, there goes a full step down here.

This is, oh, that's interesting.

That's sort of a discord.

You'll notice that there's some swing in the beat or whatever.

And I'm like,

nice,

good vibe.

You know, that's my muggle level interpretation.

What 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.

Once radio stopped being something that was

stopped being dominant, then

people just didn't have any shared narratives.

Go back to

up until 2000 or so, or we'll go back to Nirvana, because Nirvana was

a band that really changed radio formats, changed everything.

So

Nirvana comes out,

glam metal, hair metal, whatever people want to call it, was huge in the 80s.

All of a sudden, MTV comes out, 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 the alternative music.

I mean, it literally overnight changed music, killed pretty much all the hairbands except for Guns N' Roses

and

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 with the record labels,

radio promotion team.

They go out to their,

you know, to their regions that they, you know, 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 this band.

We're trying to get on the radio, and then you start gaining traction.

Then you, then if, 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.

Okay, so you're going to get it, you know, we have a budget to hire indies to go and promote the record.

And if we can get it on K-Rock, it's going to put it over the top.

So we're going to pay extra money to get the person.

This person can get it on K-Rock.

It's just, you know, that's the old music business basically run like the mob.

I was going to say, it sounds very sort of nepotistic.

Yeah, it's,

you know,

to have a hit single back in the day, you know,

it's going to cost $500,000 or so of promotion money to get it, where to

pay the people what they need to get paid.

Usually it's the independent people.

They put people, when they made Payola illegal, they put people in the middle of these things to these independent promoters.

So you didn't, the record labels wouldn't directly be paying the radio stations.

They pay the independent promoter that would interface

and get the songs played.

But as far as dominant trends nowadays,

I don't know how it will ever return from that.

Everything is controlled algorithmically by massive

platforms, Spotify,

you know, YouTube, TikTok,

Instagram,

Caesar.

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.

So how do you square that circle?

Do you understand what I mean?

Does that make sense?

If you think about how the Spotify, how Spotify works, you put in a band, bad omens.

If you like this, then you're going to like Sleep Token.

You're going to like...

You go through the list of bands, whatever they are.

We could look it up right now.

We could pick any band, and then you're going to see other bands that are similar, cross-referenced underneath.

Um,

and that's how these platforms work, period.

And, and, uh,

uh,

the

they 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.

Um,

and

most of the people are

okay with it, you know, they like the recommendations.

YouTube cut the cord with, you know, subscribers getting every video.

YouTube will send you a video if, if

it

is something that they think you'll be interested in, just like YouTube,

uh, people that are more ad tolerant get more ads.

Yeah, it's like feeding the hardest guy at the table the spiciest meal.

Yeah.

I think your channel's one, 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 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 to your next video, they're distracted by something on the fucking sidebar.

Yeah, so 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 goths, 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's very working class.

It wasn't anything very refined, there 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 sorts 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 to chase where the algo's going.

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.

Music 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, they're just things are too immediate.

People are too connected.

And because of that, it makes everything more homogenized.

Yeah.

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What's the issue with music being too easy to make?

Um,

the

if 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 me, however many I have in the background.

Well, most people nowadays don't use guitar amps.

They use these,

whatever, Helix or Axe Effects 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, right?

So they have the same sounds.

Yes, you can program them.

You can change this.

You can 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.

Oh, well, that sounded amazing.

Where's the mic?

It's laying on the ground right there.

Well, that's an an amazing, you know, incredible 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 I, you and I talked about this last night a little bit: about that, there's not as many

professionals, like professional producers and mixing engineers, for example, example, that are working in rock music, pop music, country music, yes, that, but in rock music, because there's not the financial incentive that there was.

For 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, you'd make uh you know, $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?

So multi-platinum 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.

That's right.

Now there's been a whole generation of people that are making records without producers and engineers that 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 well you know that is that is your fault

it's uh

you know it's

when i go back and listen to um 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 have something that's really

mixed well, I was listening to

a Chevelle record from

maybe 2003,

Wonder What's Next, I think that was the name of it.

And

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's one of the best mixers 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 Gem records.

You mix 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 it's like, I hear drum samples.

I hear guitars that are recorded digitally with the same AMP simulators.

And

there 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 workstations.

Like everything is this, you know, everybody's using all the same stuff.

So it's hard for it not to get this homogeneous 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 front man 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?

Yeah.

I think that's always been the case, though.

I know, but

you would slash, 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 they're not molesting their tracks in quite the same sort of a way.

It's a 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 decapitators and whatever the hell else it is that they're doing.

You didn't think I knew that, did you?

Shock.

If that's the case, then where are the remaining points of differentiation?

And I 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 rollout from an advertising perspective?

That's what it is.

That's how you differentiate yourself is through that.

Not through the actual art, but does somebody in the band have a big social media

platform?

Are they big on Instagram and they're bringing people to the shows?

Because that happens.

That does happen.

There's a band from Australia, Carnival.

I love Carnival.

Carnival's amazing.

So the bass player, John, they have a new record coming out.

He 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 26th that was supposed to come out, Chris, and it didn't.

What day were you?

Mine was the 26th, but they're a day ahead.

Yeah.

So I've had this before because I'm still on British TikTok, British TikTok, British Spotify.

Yeah.

I get access, even in Austin, I'll get access to songs at 6 p.m.

Because it was six hours behind.

Now, the fact that it's a full day, that's something else.

My entire theory is going out the window.

But if you set your Spotify to Australia time, you'll get access to songs 18 hours ahead of you.

Well,

he sent me the link, and I wrote him back.

I'm like, John, that doesn't play.

I imagine he felt good about that.

Okay, so

I did a breakdown of a song, Goliath, that's on

what record is on.

Came out in 2007, but the

Carnival Record.

Yeah.

Forrester Savals was the 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 rooms in them.

They're done through amps.

I mean, it's impeccably recorded and mixed.

John, the bass player, his bass sound is just unbelievably great, distortioned, most aggressive bass sound.

And it's

and this is 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.

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.

So for every zig, there's another zag.

So if everybody is using the same sounds, the same presets, the same 808s, 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, laugh, loving of music production, that it's it's very prefabricated.

But

that would just open up the door for more inventive artists, 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.

So surely we're just going to see this swing back in the other direction, do you not think?

I hope so.

It still comes down to, do you have a TikTokable 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, then it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

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 was the year she was born.

Yes, she was born.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that song, it was a good song, but it kind of languished, at least in terms of their bring these biggest songs for a long time.

Okay.

How do you come to think about the impact of TikTok on music generation?

Because 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 bi-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-upable.

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 TikTokable?

Okay, so I've thought a lot about this and

I believe that there's a formula for having a successful song

that is figure-outable.

This is

my word.

Using

there's a lot of data out there that's available.

I have different apps.

There's an app called Chart Metrics that will show you,

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 daughter Layla, 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?

So I play, that came out in 2005.

It's because Imogen Heap's 20 years old.

Yeah.

So that came out in 2005.

So I play, she said, yeah, I heard it on

YouTube Shorts, and I want to hear what the whole song sounds like.

Right.

And so

I play her the song.

She's like, ooh, that's really good.

I said, you know, there's another song on here.

There was a bigger song called Hide and Seek.

Yeah, it was huge.

Huge.

So I start playing.

She's like, yeah, I've never heard this.

All of a 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.

It's the bridge of the song where the singing, where it gets into the faster singing part.

And she knew that.

And so then I go back and I open up this chart metric.

I started looking at it.

It's like, okay, so this song had a spike six months ago.

People started playing on TikTok.

And then I, and I started looking at it.

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.

They weren't the same

TikTok, but they had the same, a similar payoff.

And

they were from some anime.

And then one influencer that had 3 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 until she became aware of of it.

So what is the

constituent parts of a song that has that virality?

What is it that makes that sense?

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

can 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 sense of it.

Maybe someone's got the formula.

You know, 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?

Ocean Spray doing the dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

Okay, so this is so.

Creed.

Fucking Creed, dude.

Yeah.

I guess that was partly like Texas Rangers winning the World Series and that kind of being a part of it.

Yeah, where's this coming from?

So I,

when I first started on YouTube, I used to have things not only content ID'd, 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 song, Go Your Own Way, but it was written by Lindsey Buckingham, whereas Dreams was written by Stevie Nix.

And I argued, I made a lot of videos about blocking.

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 you're making money on it.

Why do you want to take down a video that has a million views, 2 million views?

Like, what's the point of it?

It's just free promotion for them.

So finally, when that TikTok 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, 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 got 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.

If you have a particularly good, quotable moment, there's a famous bit from

Lex interviewing Huberman.

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

like taking the piss.

There was one, I did a thing called Finn vs.

the Internet.

Finn Taylor is a like a friendly roast comic from the UK.

And it's half a skit and half a sort of real roast.

And anyway, he brings his pretend stepson out, Jeffrey.

And Jeffrey is sat on a 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.

And he says, all a man needs is 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 the equivalent of that.

It's the only sort of equivalent thing that if you capture a small piece of something that it can,

that was not what this was intended for, right?

It's just part of a skit that the guys wrote.

But yeah, I suppose the same thing goes with music.

I think the thing that

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, right?

It's the byproduct.

It's the fact that it feels naturalistic that's cool.

It's the fact that the Fleetwood Mac 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 trampolining videos and shit to that song.

That 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 TikTokification thing, that 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, it's like a, I don't know, 5D chess.

I don't know if that people can really create things that are going to work.

I've had a lot of viral videos, and I never know what's going to go viral.

I have no idea.

I do know that it's almost all my viral videos are just me talking to camera.

Almost all of them invariably are that.

But other than that, I don't know what

I never, you know, I can't, you can't plan anything.

You never know how video is

going to do.

And

it's.

To me, I just make it move on.

I wonder how many, I wonder how many times, I don't know, over the last 10 years, I'd say.

I wonder how many times people have got into a studio, finished the final master on a track.

I mean, like, guys, 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.

No.

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 even wrote it for a different genre.

You didn't even write it for the genre.

And it was like 10 years later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you don't, 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,

of it

going number one or being really successful are exponentially higher.

It's less so to do with the artistic merit of the 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 AR department, the head of the label.

Well, maybe this is going to be the single.

Well, we send it out to our radio guys.

They think this is the single and they think this is the single.

It's just like, and to actually have your song picked is, is just the first step in that.

And then it has to be,

you know, and 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 I make them and people don't watch them.

It's like, well, people ultimately vote with their attention

because we're in the attention economy.

And that's,

and that to me is not predictable.

What, yes, you can, 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 that we kind of have an idea that this thing worked before the same way as you i use the example of you and dr mike isratel uh in terms of appearance quite different but in terms of content strategy actually quite similar no i like mike i like dr mike yeah yeah but he's got a strange shaped head uh he described himself as a human callus

to me

He was kind of like if a Varuka took human form.

But very similar.

Very similar.

okay.

We're going to do some sort of, I have a degree of expertise in pretty specific area.

I'm going to break stuff down.

Musically,

there 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.

That'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.

So he,

the thing that I've, I

thought was interesting when it comes to the music industry is the, we find a format that works and then, okay, how do we, how do we sort of crank this until it becomes old?

And then we go again and we sort of, 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 the early mid-90s, corn limp biscuit linkin park god i miss pod and uh pod

so so new metal was the dominant force in rock music now called divorced dad metal is that what they call it now divorced dad rock okay so so um

and then you had bands creed was not really a new metal band they were more of a hard rock band like breaking benjamin stuff breaking benjamin was was an would would be a new new metal band one of my really dear friends

produced Breaking Benjamin.

But

it was this dominant force in radio until it wasn't.

And why?

What happened?

Was it the nickelbackification of

all roads lead back to Chad Kroger, man?

Holy shit.

Is it that he had too many hits?

I can overreach it.

It's interesting.

So, so the engineer for Nickelback, Joey Moy, that worked with Chad on all those records, moved to Nashville, and he is

one of the biggest producers in Nashville.

And

he is

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 move to Nashville,

but

for some reason,

I think that

I thought like maybe it's, I used to say that when blues left rock music, when there was no blues riffs anymore, If you think of like Audio Slave or,

you know, as an an extension of Raging Ass Machine, a lot of the bands, the Pearl Jam Sound Gardens, the bands of the 90s had a lot of blues elements in them, but a lot of new metal does not.

Lincoln Park does not have blues licks.

Like

crawling or, I mean, a lot of the songs on the first Lincoln Park record are

not bass.

They don't have blues melodies.

They don't have 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, you know, the same drum loops that you hear in pop music, you hear in, on Morgan Wallen songs, and like a lot of country songs that are, that you hear that hit top, top 40 radio now.

I mean, it's amazing how much country is in top 40.

We need to talk about this.

What has happened with the ascendancy of country over the last

five years?

What's going on?

I think it's that I think that 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.

Doesn't sound like the country music of when I was going to Nashville and

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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 psy-opt

way for an English person to decide to move to America.

So 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.

You have to.

We went to Lake Norman.

We didn't do Dollywood.

Went to Lake Norman and then finished up in Norfolk, Virginia, and then I flew to Canada.

And, 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 of July.

We got up and we we ran the Nashville 5K,

which was fun.

Had a little nap back at the hotel and then went out to Broadway.

It's like 4th of July.

Let's fucking go.

This is going to be cool.

So I go down onto Broadway and I see Whiskey Row.

I'm like, 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 a truck cap on.

No one's looking at the band.

It's 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, it's beautiful, windows are open, it's money.

And everybody's at the bar.

It's like, what the fuck is going on?

Why does he, this band's all the crushing?

I've never heard this song before, but it was cool.

It was kind of like it sounded a bit emo, I guess, but it was definitely country, twangy.

I was like, what the fuck?

Anyway, this dude is partway through the bridge of this song.

And he grabs a shot and puts the shot in the air.

And everybody in the room, like they were part of a cult, lifts a shot up as well.

It's like, what the fuck is going on?

Like,

is there an email that went out that I wasn't a part of or something?

It was a song Tequila by Dan and Shea.

And there's a bit where

it goes like a full step up.

Well, there's a little change as it goes into the final verse, the final chorus, sorry.

And

when I taste tequila, everybody knocked this shot back.

The room explodes.

I was like, I am fucking moving to this country.

Consider me sold.

And then then I got to, it turns out that he's friends with those guys, right?

He's a fan of the show.

So I got to go and see them and got to catch up and got to see this ridiculous bus setup.

He's got, oh, yeah, the way that we put the bus together, it's the same way that Taylor Swift's got hers.

Because if you put the bed at the back of the bus, you can actually have more wit than it's over the back wheel, which means it's a this is fucking insane.

But I mean, it's a superstars, right?

Super, super production.

And

I

saw kind of in that moment, I was like, this sounds so familiar to me as somebody somebody that hasn't listened to that much country.

And that summer, the summer of

2019,

Luke Combs' massive album,

Hardy with like Rednecker,

you know, we had this bro trip playlist.

And I think about all of that music.

And I 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,

two and a half years.

I'm like, listening to this music,

why the fuck?

Like, this seems like a really, really good scene.

So, 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

fuckboy country, if that's what you want to call it,

easy access country, I suppose, pop country.

I could see that country music was moving that way.

When I

got involved in the scene in the, you know, in the teens.

It was during the Bro Country era.

The Bro Country era lasted for a few years.

And then, but the era of the track guys, there were people moving to Nashville,

you know, starting in 2015, 2016, and then Nashville just blew up.

And then the music started to change in style.

And

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 in the you know in the mid-teens.

And

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.

Like all power,

I think all of Jelly Roll's band, X, you know,

suicide something or Amity, the something, you know what I mean?

Like everyone was part of some very black wearing like death metal band in the 2000s and then grew up to do this.

But yeah, Jelly Roll, massive pivot.

Post Malone, massive pivot.

Beyonce, massive pivot.

I guess Taylor Swift pivoted away, but you.

Well, she moved to New York and

changed her music.

And 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 start hitting

you know pop radio?

Because it was a different thing back when she did in the and uh whenever it was 2012 when she started working with Max Martin and other outside songwriters like that, Max Martin and Shellbeck.

And um

and

then she started having massive worldwide hits.

So

the

it's just, you know, I look at this stuff, Chris, and I think it's just tough for

musicians to,

they're 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

uh of momentum going right with with a song that

or with with any type of artist to get to that hundred million plays you know talking about the

bring me the horizon song that's uh 500 million now seven what's that how much is it 500 million 720 million plays it's insane right if to get over a hundred million plays on a song 100 million plays is i was talking about this this morning actually it is about um

three hundred thousand dollars i think

something like that no three million dollars three

oh geez i just

i know three hundred thousand dollars i think a billion yeah a billion plays song is is about three to five million dollars depending can you imagine if me you had a billion play video

it'd be like baby shark

yeah it is that's what you should do next 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, we need to talk about AI artists.

Yeah.

AI artists, uh-huh.

What's going on?

What's going on?

AI 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

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 sounding songs.

I always have said in my videos every time, I've made many videos on AI.

I testified at a Senate hearing in 2023, went to Washington.

I was one of 19 people.

It 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

about, no, this is about ai right okay i was gonna say i don't i don't think i'm they invited me in music ties they they invited me in with all the people sag after

um spotify people

people for all these different that worked at all you know 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 asked me questions, the senators asked me questions, I don't think that anything that's completely, fully generative AI should 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.

If Spotify can put out fake artists and people stream it and they're perfectly okay with it, 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, the Vale of 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.

And

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 on the video I just made yesterday, well, these are all bots that are on here.

It's got over 600,000 followers now on Spotify in a week.

Went from zero to 600,000.

It's crazy, right?

Is the song any good?

Well, there's a whole record there.

And

it's,

I don't think it sounds good to me.

It doesn't people are voting with their ears, though.

Did you not say earlier on that it's a 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, you know, young Paul McCartney or young John Lennon, whatever.

And 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 will 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 going to happen.

That will happen.

There are going to 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?

Do you think that Spotify should ban AI music?

Should they ban it?

Well, there's so many workarounds with this.

I mean,

you can create your song via a

have AI, a completely AI-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 sues you?

The Suno or Yudio or whoever owns the thing.

Hey, that's our music.

Like, wait, wait, no, no, it's not.

I prompted it myself and then I covered it.

Yeah,

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.

I think that's a really interesting one.

Because if you're a real person, but 80% of the process is AI enabled, where does the line get drawn?

You know, you can lock me in a room with some parchment and a quill and say,

write 60,000 words,

no source material.

Or I can prompt ChatGPT to do it all for me.

Somewhere in the middle is where most people are.

And some people are basically zero.

Some people are essentially a quill.

But then they've got source material.

Ryan Holiday's got reams 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.

You're telling me that this was not inspired by anything?

Well, when I look at the saxophone that you're holding, you're holding it it the right way up.

You're blowing into the bit at the top and not through the bit at the bottom.

So you've been inspired by all of the people that came before you that taught 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.

Oh, that made me think about this thing.

So

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 Midjourney just came and decapitated,

people were up in arms about it and tried to make a big issue around it, but

it happened.

Podcasts, there is a website where you can put any topic in.

Yeah.

And it will create a pretty listenable podcast that explains

Notebook LM is really good.

If you like learning stuff, they have the ums, they have all the

oh, 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 up 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 your take on this.

The 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, 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.

Right?

So the level of investment, the moat 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.

When 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 aficionado at playing the keyboard or at playing the drums or doing something like that.

And I think that this is the reason that musicians have a particular bee 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,

wow, it took me ages to learn to play the drums.

When I talked about this, about the being a good prompter, I mean, there is an art to writing a prompt.

I use AI programs all the time.

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 the title for my video.

Gemini, I want you to create 10 variations of this title for a Rick Beatto YouTube.

It knows me.

I've trained the whole thing to do this for my, it knows my, my video titles and things like that.

And

then it'll spit it out.

It's like, make it more clickable, make it this, make it that.

And, um, and a lot of times it'll be like, I like the first part of this one, I like the second part of that one, and I'll do that.

And, um, or sometimes I'll be like, you know, I need something for a, for a thumbnail, a background where I have a cutout of me or I'm trying to do something, but I, um,

uh,

you 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 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 instrument.

But there is, you could argue, I'm not arguing this.

One could argue that being

prompting is the same kind of skill as learning how to play an instrument.

And I'm not saying that it is.

Being very diplomatic today.

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 me, mastering.

And I don't mean to upset any mastering engineers or anything, but to me, that seems like a great use of

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, but I sure love to be able to say, hey, could you mix it?

There's a guy, Serban Ganea, that's that mixes every big pop song.

And then you have,

you know, you have your rock mixers, Chris Lord Elgy, Tom Lord Elgy, Brendan O'Brien, Andy Wallace, all these famous rock mixers that,

you know, oh, could you mix it in the style of this guy or mix it in the style of this guy and instantly have your thing or in 15 seconds seconds have 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

AI as opposed to AI creating the song from scratch.

To go back on what I said, I think it's a difficult argument to make that music is some particular protected class.

All that being said, I do not like the idea of listening to music that's been 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, that it sort of operates like a human, but behind the scenes there's nothing going on.

If it's the musical equivalent of that, like up front, it sounds good and behind the scenes there's nothing going on.

But 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, 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, and, you know, then you give it to the, to the person that had nothing to do with it that sings it.

It's like, well,

you know, well, at least there were real people playing it, but are there really real people playing it?

There's like one guy that played the keyboard parts and put all the drum loots on the fucking music.

Drums are fucking sequenced.

Yeah, exactly.

But then when you think, okay, well,

electronic music, dance music that's done, 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?

Do we need to have to identify AI artists?

I 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 AIs, 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, oh, what does it mean?

What does he really mean?

That, you know, it the rain fell like blood.

Like, what did, oh, that's so steep.

And it's like, I don't know, like, it was influenced by some fucking Marilyn Manson song from whatever, 2005.

That 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 Beato AI, but yeah, which would be great because you could retire.

But also 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 there's a program called 11 Labs that I use.

And

when I trained it on my voice, it's weird because I inputted

dialogue

from

I have a mic that's about

it's out of out of camera range it's probably four feet in front of me that's about this high or so it's a little

it's a stereo mic stereo condenser mic that's what i typically record my my youtube videos with so it's a it's a there's a little bit of room ambience in it but it's pretty dry because i'm in a recording studio you know so uh and then i had i trained some of it using a 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.

So

when I try to use that, sometimes I want to punch in on a video, but I don't have access to this.

And so I try and use 11 labs, but it's like

it's sending me results back with the close mic when the thing's done with the distance.

So I talked to 11 labs and they're going to do

two different voice profiles for me: one with a close mic and one with a distant mic.

So, let me give you this from 11 labs.

This is crazy.

So,

uh, Archer on 11 Labs, you know, that it's the it was the go-to British AI voice, yeah, yeah, right, Archer, you remember that?

Yeah, they updated it recently.

Okay, 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

Shilajit is a powerful tar-like resin found high in the Himalayan mountains, formed over centuries from ancient decomposed plant matter.

Where's your royalty?

It's loaded with over 80 trace minerals, fulvic acid, and essential nutrients your body needs to function.

So how does it work?

You hear that?

Work.

Work.

Work.

That's me.

That's that's Middlesbrough.

That's it.

It's been trained on my voice.

And that's now.

So if anybody has an issue with my take around AI coming and taking people's jobs.

Right.

So that's now, that was an ad for Shilajit, which is like a mineral testosterone thing.

I have no take on Shilajit.

I'm not associated with whatever that Shilajit company is,

but it's using my voice.

Do I own the likeness to my voice?

That'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 and make sure it's you so you're not stealing someone else's voice, which is cool.

It's very smart.

Verification.

Yeah, verification.

And then you have 15 seconds to do it.

So you have to read this thing.

And it's like, yeah, okay, it's you.

Recognizes you.

But I still haven't gotten it to where it

doesn't sound natural.

Mine doesn't sound natural because maybe I have a

odd way of speaking.

I use different registers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know,

but I have used 11 labs as an experiment where I'll go to some b-roll and I'll put 11 labs line in there, see if no one, 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 it is

where it works so that um 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 sometimes I'll I never use scripts I always improvise what I do but sometimes I'll improvise it and

and I'll

have it transcribed and then I'll feed it in there and I'll and I'll listen to it and

I was using 11 labs this morning actually

for

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 Archer, did you?

I'm not reading your ideas back to you.

I was going to 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.

Why do you want to listen to it?

I said, because I wrote this down and I want to remember it, but I want to 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?

Well,

live music is definitely a place to, that if you excel, if you want to make

a lot of money and you have a successful live,

I mean, there's not the money in,

just say rock music.

There's not money in,

there's not as much money in streaming as there is in live music if you're a huge band.

You know, Metallica's not out there

living off their streaming.

Well, maybe they are with their streams because they have songs that are getting streamed that were that came out.

With the fucking lifestyle that Metallica's probably got, yeah.

So, um,

uh,

it's

live is incredibly important.

Can you, um,

Can you make a living

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.

But very few artists made money from actually selling records.

They'd make money from publishing.

They'd make money from 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 that goes for any level, whether you're playing at your local pub, whether you're playing at the Enormo Dome here, wherever it is.

I don't know what Austin with the Moody Sunday.

Okay.

That's why people go out on these long tours.

That's why ticket prices are incredibly high.

If you can sell tickets, that's where 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 in streaming for huge pop songs.

You know, there's plenty of

plenty of artists.

Post Malone, you look on his thing, or The Weekend.

They have multiple songs.

They have over 2 billion streams.

Cold Play.

Anybody that's in the top,

any of the top 25 artists on Spotify, those people are making a fortune from streaming.

As 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 overexaggerated 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 weren't a 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.

So, 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 allmusic.com

to it's not in

credits.

Credits on Spotify are they'll have the songwriter and they'll have,

but they don't have the people that played on the record.

Okay.

So you have to either go to to um

wikipedia would you

those things should be connected so you think it would be a good idea for spotify to just absolutely

absolutely and they're so bad about

um

if you look at sabrina carpenter's newest song when you go to man child for example amy allen and jack antonoff both have hundreds of credits but amy allen only has a little triangle that oh you can click on it you click on it and it shows you all the list of her songs from the most streamed down.

Jack Antonoff's doesn't have that.

But if you go to a different song of Sabrina Carpenter's, 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 Antonoff to see all his stuff.

Why is that?

It's just that they haven't gotten around to updating it.

I mean, it's stupid, right?

You'd 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?

And then, of course, you go to the streaming thing on Spotify.

It takes you to 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, it's ridiculous.

All that information should be contained in there.

What, what's the good, the bad, and 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've i have tons of music that i paid for that are part of the apple ecosystem and i pay the monthly fee and um but i use spotify predominantly

i 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 MySpace?

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 has given everybody some cost fallacy.

Yeah.

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 yeah.

Chris, I have hundreds of playlists on Spotify, private playlists that I refer back to.

Hundreds.

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 podcasters, me included.

Thank you, Daniel Eck.

They treat me very well.

I'm super happy with what they've done.

But

it's very rare that I speak to a musician and they say, yeah, Spotify, thanks.

Really good.

People will get mad at me when I do my, every four months I do a Spotify top 10 countdown video.

And I do that so that people know.

And people get mad in the comments.

They're like, I don't believe that these are the top songs.

What do you mean?

I'm just reading them off the thing.

Easily verifiable.

Yeah, I'm not part of a psyop to make you believe that Sabrina Carpenter is higher up than she actually is.

Right.

It's like, 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 because it's,

these are all bots in this thing.

It's like, yeah, well, where's your evidence that it's all bots on?

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, you know, even medium-sized bands doing hundreds of thousands of plays.

monthly, what are you going to do?

You're going to protest Spotify?

You're not 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 an unsolvable equation here, which is that the artists, many of the artists that 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 fairly?

Yeah, the compensation is

insufficient.

The

removal of staff that happened, I think, about 18 months ago, two years ago or so, resulted in much more algorithmic curation of playlists rather than human curation of playlists.

That

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 gamed 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 means that if you can bypass the record labels and go straight to the AI artist, there's also an even more large concern, which is, well, if Spotify is able to reverse engineer its own AI artists, then kind of like if OnlyFans developed a VR girlfriend

company, that you would end up completely bypassing all of the poor OnlyFans models that were no longer needed because you have both distribution and creation contained within the same platform.

So I think the last two around the AI bans and this reverse integration 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 what artists can do.

They need Spotify.

They do need it.

It's kind of like people that complain to me, oh,

I'm being shadow banned on YouTube or I'm doing this and that.

Your content sucks, dude.

You know, the algorithm hates me.

It's like the algorithm's the audience.

It's like

there's nothing to hate.

It's, 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

feel it.

It's,

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

I forget who was talking about this about using blockchain to verify that something is a real

artist as opposed to AI, right?

And that that's a

would be a great use of that technology.

And

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.

So it's none of them are missing any meals,

as they say.

So it's, I don't hear about the struggle.

No, I have friends that are that are

that I have on the channel, younger musicians, 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 in Animals as Leaders.

He'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, they've 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 a pedal company, or they've got their AMP model that is made by Neural Neural DSP or whatever it is.

They've got their whole recipe of special Yamaha leather strap or whatever it is.

Whatever it is that,

or they're doing, you know, some people do these lessons, group lessons before shows.

They do VIP meet and greets.

I mean, there's so many different places 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 a two, three hour long episodes, the RPMs can get, really get up there, especially if you hold on to 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, and I got paid.

a rounding error on my sandwich for today.

That feels unfair.

And I think it feels unfair largely due to anchoring buyers that in the past, that CD would have cost 1099 or $7.99 or something.

And fuck, like, that, like, I missed that.

Imagine if I got the streams I did,

you know, a million plays a month, but they were all say, they were all single sales at $3.99.

That would be amazing.

But, 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, subscriber-only content.

You can get easier access to merch.

I've 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.

Which is a great idea.

Yep.

You have the

listing on your Spotify page for your upcoming events that will geotarget 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 were were going to, or fly posting, or putting in the newsletter, or putting it on paying for fucking radio spots.

Okay, so we've got that.

We've got merch.

Merch can be sold through a merch shelf on Spotify.

We don't have that yet.

Podcasters don't have that yet.

Whah, I can't sell my merch on Spotify.

You can sell courses same way that you do, the same way that Gabe from iPrevail 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 in order to, you know, so it's kind of just a changing of the times.

But I, 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 aren't going to be as good.

The listening experience is going to be worse because it's going to be more homogeneous 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 a difficult argument to make that it's their job to do it, but

it kind of is their position in the market

to enable that at least.

And I think that this little Gordian knot is kind of where people get caught up

when I open Spotify.

If there's a band that's in town in Atlanta, I say, oh my God, they're playing.

I mean, that's, it's,

that's amazing to be able to

you're, you've shown the interest, and you go to this artist.

I would never have known because there are no magazines or anything that I look at to see.

I, I Fred again's coming to Austin.

Right.

I didn't even see that.

Yeah.

So it's, it's, uh,

uh,

there'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, they'll be here next week.

And

I think that there are so many opportunities for people to,

you have to be creative, though, to make, to, to take all these different

income streams and combine them to make a living.

But

the

my friend Tosen, Tosin Abasi, Tosin has a guitar company.

He

has plug-ins 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 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 a living.

And it takes a lot of work to do that.

That's the drag of it.

It takes a lot of work that is

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 going to select for business people, not for musicians.

And

that's not fantastic given that we're all here to listen to good music.

And

yeah, I...

Chris, when people complain to me, and I didn't 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 segment music industry.

Stop.

Right.

Stop making your music.

Yeah.

That's cool.

There's other stuff that you can do.

Why don't you go be a music teacher?

Why do I want to do that?

It's like, all right, then 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, quite rightly so, at the fact that they were about to be killed and supplanted by the automobile in, you know, 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.

Within the space of five years, all of the muck shovelers were gone.

Okay, that's some.

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 live.

Because AI cannot come and replicate live.

What would that mean?

What would it mean to replicate a live experience?

I was just talking about the state, robots going out and playing the AI songs.

Okay.

Of course, I'm joking with this.

Yes.

So this is,

of course, this will be somewhere in the future.

It'll be robots that can really shred on the guitar.

I think people will go and see it as a spectacle.

Yeah.

But it's not going to have.

And again, okay, so you have this Waldoff 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 on stage and do a two-hour TEDx talk with fingering jokes, which I am doing, actually.

So come and see me in Chicago, Boston, Denver, New York, Salt Lake City.

And where's the fucking final one that I've forgotten about?

Austin

this winter.

Come and see that.

Everywhere else is sold out.

In order for me to do that, I don't just get to do the thing.

I don't just get to replicate things that I say on a podcast.

Like, it's a whole new fucking, yeah, it's a 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 LL comes

fucking human centipedes me out of the front of this industry, I'm going to have to have a new moat that can't be replicated.

And

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 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, 2,000 videos for you, whatever, to 2,500

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 you know, Netflix is on.

And I'm sure that someone will record it and put it on YouTube and I can just watch it through my whatever.

Like, I've heard it on Spotify a bit.

Like, do I really need to go out?

So,

times are changing, man.

And, um,

I know, I, my,

for 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 with it.

I really hope it doesn't damage the creation of music, because that would make me really sad.

It's been a huge part of my life.

And, um,

it would suck.

It would suck to not have the kind of emotional depth that people access through good songwriting be

taken away by

we're in an interesting time right now.

Just the fact 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's Spotify's AI artists, is it Suno?

Is it Udio?

Whose artist is this?

Is this in conjunction?

Is it one of these AI company 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.

And the main fear that people have is it's an open loop.

It's like, okay, what's going to happen?

And we don't know.

You know, if we come into land and, oh, okay, there's, yeah, 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, you know, five of them are AI?

What if that makes it twice as hard to get to the stage that I need to?

And 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.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, I'm sure that there will be platforms that will arise that are

non-AI just so

human only, yeah.

Which is pretty funny to think of, right?

That you have to do that.

But

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 have AI artists.

I don't, you know, it's like buying

organic.

No.

Organic music.

Funny.

Rick Beardo, ladies and gentlemen, Rick, you're awesome, man.

Your channel fucking crushes.

I appreciate it.

Same, same.

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.

Hopefully not.

All right.