Why Spotify’s Purchase of SoundBetter Could Be The Best (Or Worst) Thing To Ever Happen To The Recording Industry

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 98

[inaudible].

You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the

six figure home studio podcast. I am your hype, Bro. Brian Hood, and I'm here on my bald, beautiful purple inserted. Amazing, super supportive cohost, Christopher J. Grant, how you doing day Chris? Always great because when I come on this podcast, you just tell me how awesome I am and this is just lovely. Thank you. Brian. How are you sir? I'm feeling gracious today and generous today. We had a group coaching call today with my students and I got to critique a lot of websites, so it was fun to get all my anger out this morning, so I have none left this afternoon. I saw some really good websites, really bad websites today. I'll say that. That's amazing. Well, I had a really fun week this week in part because my middle son Jeremiah got his first electric guitar amp. Ooh, I remember my first guitar amp. What did you get or did he get it himself?

Dude, let me build up to it. Let me build up to, well, last week we talked a little bit about like the nature of wealth though nature of money and how there's not like a set amount of money on earth. By the way, did you see the Facebook community chat about this? I did. There's been fascinating conversation. I haven't participated yet either. I mean I am like, I don't want to open this wormhole further than it already is. So it's like, yeah, I don't, yeah, I want to like let, let's see where it goes on its own. It's some of the longest posts I've seen in a common thread ever. Yeah, super interesting. And so I bring that up because when I was a kid, my first electric guitar amp was a crate like GX 15 I don't remember what it was called, better than mine.

What was yours? Mine was a custom with a k. That's the brand. Oh, custom 10 watt guitar amp. Well, but if you get an old custom, those were dope and a sin Sonics Guitar Sense. My first guitar was in Electra brand new guitar and it had two humbuckers and a single coil in the middle and push pull pots so that you could do any kind of guitar ever. And then I took it all apart and never got it back together. So, uh, there's that. Anyways, so here's why I bring this up. When I was a kid, I think it was maybe like 180 bucks or 200 bucks for me to get this little crate, 15 watt thing that had a crunch button. Dude, mine had that too. Oh, it was soup. My mom and I would get in a fight and I'd be like, hey, you mom and I go upstairs and be like, crunch button.

My first song ever played on that guitar was my own summer. Bye. Was It def tones? Daredevil, Darrin, Darrin, Aaron or Daren or dare dare to dare to her room. Anyways, that's my song for the day. Continue on your story of your son. We need more of that. More of you singing songs there and [inaudible]. We would put a sound clip in, but we'd probably get some sort of copyright infringement so that's the best I can do probably. So here's why I bring this up. My electric guitar amp was a crate. It was pretty expensive and it sucked. It did not sound good. It was kind of cool. It sounded kind of like a nope. Screamer. Nope. You're going to, you're going to get [inaudible] here. Come on. Come on. Anyways, so I'm going to get a couple more on this episode, but here's what I bring this up. My first amp costs about twice with my sons ant cost. We got him a black star. It was like $109. It's a little practice amp. It's got built in effects and it's stereo, which is fascinating. This amp is amazing. My son has been playing the crap out of it. I've been playing the crap out of it, but it's just a little tiny like it's like the size of two shoe boxes and it's an interesting illustration to talk about how there is not a set amount of wealth on earth.

I can't wait to see how you tie this into that conversation cause I have no idea where you're going here.

Well here's the thing that amp cost $109 and it sounds awesome. It is a great sounding amp and I'm used to my fancy vintage fender Princeton reverb. It's, yeah, but it is an incredible an and it's incredibly fun and it's wild to see how the market has brought the price of a great practice amp much lower than when I was a kid. And the quality is significantly better that you can't compare my amp as a kid to my son's question. For your kids, for a stamp, does he buy it through like money he's earned or do you buy it for him? If I think I can get my kids hooked on an instrument, I'll buy them anything. I don't care. So I just sort of randomly bought it for him. 109 bucks on Amazon showed up the next day. We Love Amazon and has like delay and reverb and multiple kinds of overdrive and distortion. We're not sponsored by Blackstar. We why would we be sponsored by Blackstar? Yeah, but I think it's just interesting to point out that like it's kind of like a TV. When I was a kid we had a 32 inch TV when I was like 13 and that was amazing. Now we have a 65 inch TV that costs less and has five times the resolution. The Blackstar amp tone core v too I think is what it's called. Unbelievable. Wow. So we had a lot of fun

regardless of what brand or make or model. I had this shittiest guitar amp and guitar possible and freaking loved it. So I'm just, it's a big moment when you get your first, unless your guitar as a kid, although it's probably changed now because kids don't even listen to like real like guitar and stuff. Like all, it's all electronic music and that kind of stuff now, which is also cool.

Yeah. And that's been kind of the fun thing with Jeremiah is he likes to make spooky sounds with an electric guitar. So he's just like making like horror movie soundtrack stuff cause he's just learning how to play guitar and it sounds legit. I was always [inaudible]

it's kind of attracted as a kid to the weird, like as a child I was attracted to the weird darker sounds. So like when I was a kid playing in our piano, I only would hit the black keys cause it just sounded weird and dark and cool. And then, and then like going through like band and stuff. When I played Trump, I played trombone in the middle school band. Did you know that? Didn't know that. Yeah, I did. I was like first trombone player of course. And I loved all the minor key stars. So super nerd. Uh, is there like a band

nerd alert? We had a neuro alert in the last episode, so maybe I don't use it here. It kind of feels like you're tooting your own horn pretty hard right now, Brian, to be God with you. We should definitely have a sad trombone right there.

All right, so let's move on to an actual valuable topic today. If we wrote our title right, you know what we're going to talk about today, we've got the required banter so that, I don't know why we actually haven't even do it. Mostly because we don't get to chat about this stuff. When we're planning the episode, we kind of just go straight to business and we don't really get to chat and catch up on what you've been up to. That's actually true. We don't really like small chat. No, we don't. We need to have an episode in the future about the power of small talk cause I see so many audio engineers that are like, I hate small talk and you're like, well actually it's an important part of social skills and if you refuse to have small talk, you're going to miss out on a massive benefit that you could otherwise get if you just give in to the small talk.

But anyways, let's talk about what we're going to talk about today. Big News dropped today this morning already posted about in the Facebook community and by now it's over a week old, like two weeks old, so this is old news by the time this episode comes out, but Spotify just purchased sound better.com and there's no need to explain what's Spotify is. Everyone knows what Spotify is, I assume, but sound better.com for anyone who is not aware is basically a platform where they're the middleman between audio engineers and musicians and they basically facilitate services between those two parties. I wanted to kind of really sit and chat with you, Chris, about what this acquisition might mean for the future of sound better, what it might mean for our audience and if there's a way to potentially cash in on this as audio engineers because I think there are some potential changes that are going to come to this platform and we can talk about all this stuff as we go, but I'd love to get your initial thoughts on what you think it means.

Well, I would say a few things to start out. For those of you guys who've been listening to the podcast, you know that one of my businesses is home studio lessons.com and that's basically a platform where people go and teach one on one lessons remotely to people who want to learn how to make their mixes sound better. So I've had my eye on sound better for a while cause it's not a terribly dissimilar marketplace to when I'm trying to build with home studio lessons. However, I have some hesitations with sound better. I like rock and roll, right? I love the freedom aspect about like you know, it's your thing. Do what you want to do. The lifestyle of rock and roll, not just the music. This lifestyle is like, oh, you know, I'm on employed, I've got a business that sounds more like punk rock.

It's like punk rock. Very like against the man type. Yeah. I am suspicious about having something as broad as like, Oh, if you need mixing or mastering the one place to go with sound better.com Geesh, here's why I have a problem with that. On the one hand, like I love marketplaces like Airbnb, Lyft, I think it's a fabulous thing for our society, but I'm nervous when it comes to the creative arts with something like sound better because if they were really, really, really successful and the only way for you to make a living was to play in their sandbox, that's a little intense to drive for Uber or to rent your home occasionally on Airbnb, that's great. But if you're entire living comes from one website and you don't control the rules

ish. Yeah, so that's like one of the major cons, the negatives of relying on another platform or someone else for your income. So sound better. It would be like a middleman between you and your clients. I want to step back actually a little bit further and kind of like the 30,000 foot view real quick. So we haven't really talked about sound better on the podcast before. That's because I haven't really been a fan of that platform, so I really want to talk about the negatives of sound better first before we kind of go into what could happen in the future. Now that Spotify has acquired sound better and what the benefits are because I do know people that are doing really well on sound better, but I want to talk about the negatives first and just go ahead and get those out of the way. And this is why we haven't talked about sound better so far.

Well, and before we dive into those negatives, I want to say like my personal jury is still out with sound better. I'm open to it, but I do have hesitations. I do have some like red flags here, but it could turn out to be something awesome. Who knows? Sound better.

Sounds like a silver bullet and that's what a lot of people think it is. They think they can go to sound better. They think they can sign up for an account and you think they're just going to get leads trickling in and they're going to start getting paid for projects that they find through sound better. And that's the case for some people. But what I've noticed is the ones I see that have success on sound better or also successful office sound better. I don't know anyone who is not successful off of sound better but is successful on sound better. And that's because if you are unable to make a career work in audio outside of someone else's platform, what makes you think it's gonna work inside of another person's platform? Great Point. Now there's a ton of negatives that are associated with this, whether you are successful or not on sound better.

There's just a lot of, I would say baggage that comes along with using someone else's platform cause you have to play by their rules. So I think one of the big cons or big negatives of sound better is you have to keep everything on their platform. If you try to take them off the platform for a phone call or to get their email address to put it in your CRM or to send them a file via file pass, you can't do any of that on sound better. You have to use everything inside of their app. And so that means you have no freedom or control over the conversation or how revisions go or how things are done. It's 100% on sound. Better to dictate what you do in your business. And that's my biggest gripe with sound better because you are dependent on someone else for your income and how things play out.

Totally. And here's the caveat with that. If you are making your living on a website like that, and again to differentiate, there's two types of these gig economy websites. There's side hustle, gig economy websites and there is career gig economy websites. A career Gig economy website is scary because here's the thing you could get on there, you could build a great career and you could invest in that ecosystem rather than investing in building your own ecosystem. And then you could wake up one day and get an email and they could say, hey, you violated our terms of policy or we've changed the rules. Oh did you see this all the time with Amazon sellers, people that have built their entire company with 30 40 products and making millions of dollars a year on Amazon. And then all of a sudden something happens that Amazon decides to either put out a competing product with yours or just to say your accounts banned.

And now that you went from $10 million a year to zero, similar things can happen in sound better. If you built your entire platform on sound better, then they could take it away with one click of a mouse if they wanted to. And if you do something that violates their terms of service, like say you send somebody your phone number, if you do anything to try to pull them off the platform, they can ban your account for that. As far as I know, and I haven't read all the terms of service, I'm not going to say that, but I know that they really strict about keeping everyone on the platform. Yeah. One of the things you could use to talk about the dangers of a business model like that is maritime military history. Oh right. We're going full nerd here. That is the what? Well, let's imagine that you live in Ohio.

That sounds super unfortunate and pioneer times, that's even worse. Let me back up here. Louisiana has the city of New Orleans and New Orleans historically has been a very powerful area in commerce because if you live north of New Orleans and you are a farmer, back in the day you're going to grow some corn or some rye or some wheat and then you're probably going to turn it into alcohol with a still and then you're going to ship it on a river boat down through New Orleans. This used to be a big problem for America because New Orleans wasn't actually American. It was owned by the French and it wasn't until Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson struck up a deal for 3 million bucks. I might be right about that too by the Louisiana purchase. This was really good for America because now Americans could transfer their goods down the Mississippi river to the ocean and then you know, the world was their oyster at that point.

It was a choke point. 15 million in 18 oh $3 which is a lot of money. It is, but it was something like five times the size of the United States at the, it was a massive deal. Incidentally. Fun Note. Thomas Jefferson did not have official legal presidential power to make the Louisiana purchase, but he did anyway. He asked for forgiveness, not permission. Probably a good idea. What's your point here and before you get to your point, I want to say that's $333 billion in today's money, but go ahead. Would you buy the middle of the United States for that much money? I would have to say yes. Let's continue on with your actual point and hopefully it's going to be a good one. Me Too. If you are a farmer and you are in Iowa or Ohio or Kentucky or whatever, there's a choke point south of you. If you want to get your goods and services to the world, you have to go through New Orleans and if New Orleans isn't friendly to you or if you know Napoleon is like, no, we're not letting anybody through, or we're going to charge a huge fee for you to export through where we live, it creates huge market problems for you.

Sound better. Sounds really, really cool. Again, I'm open to this being a great idea, but I'm really weary about anyone building their entire career. When there's a choke point there that somebody that you don't know, somewhere on earth could say we're not going to offer that service anymore. We're going to raise our fees 300% and then all of a sudden the life that you've built stands to be destroyed.

Yeah, that's a really good point. So that is like one of the main cons in the big caveats we have for this whole episode as we get into kind of some of the potential benefits in the future that we see with Spotify. But I want to mention one more big negative that comes with signing up for a sound better account and that is SEO [inaudible] I found a few guys that are successful on sound better. I even have an account and I've just realized that I signed up for years and years ago that I forgot. I even had, if you Google four, five, six recordings, I think sound better is the third result, something like that. It shows my studios website and then my Facebook page and then sound better.com my profile in there, I see some people that if you Google their name and their studios named sound betters, the first thing that comes up, oh, and that's where you do not want to be.

If someone goes through sound better to book you instead of your website, you just pay the commission for somebody that was your lead, someone that you brought to sound better's platform. And that is a huge, huge negative because sales letter only cares about getting the customer. They don't care who it goes to, they just want to get the customer no matter what. So it's not set up to facilitate you. They could come through and book you on sound better and then you lost that lead and now it's in sound better system. So next time they may book someone else on sound better, that's not you. So you lost that customer for the future. So that's a massive negative as well.

That is deeply concerning. So let's imagine you live in Cincinnati, Ohio and you've signed up on sound better your search engine results. If someone searches your name studios or your name mixing or your name mastering aren't super great when you search your name, you're like one of the results of the 10 that are on there. If that's you and you signed up for sound better sound better, it's probably going to be the first result. Let's say your neighbor John Decides he wants to hire you, he googles you when you tell him. Yeah, bug me through the website, finds you on sound better and books you through sound better ish. Yeah. There's an important piece to consider here and this is something that we have been trying to like get everyone that listens to this podcast to really deeply consider and it's that when someone's gonna hire somebody, they're probably going to Google them first. They're probably going to do a little bit of due diligence and be like, is this person legit? Cause I'm going to give them a bunch of money and I'm going to give them my musical baby and hope that they treat that baby with as much care and love as I do. If they Google you and you don't look like a Badass, you don't have a great shot at getting hired. It's much, much more difficult if you don't have any about

your work and you know that you're not accessible so sound better. You bring up a really good point Brian, is if you launch that now sound better essentially owns some of your search results. Probably your top few search results. Shout out to our podcast editor James. He's got his recording studio. He's the one that pointed that out. He said he deleted his sound better account because it showed up so high in the Google results when they googled his studio. So James, we can thank you for that.

Taking the clients for himself there, I'm sure

because he does. All right, so that's a huge cabinet. Is there any other like major negatives you can think of before we kind of move into some of the positives and some of the things we might see in the future? I think that pretty much sums it up. I just want to underline it just one more time. The temptation to look at a marketplace like this and just say, oh, I'm going to make all my money on here. This is my new career, and then you're done and then you have to start from scratch. That's scary. Yup. So that's all over caveats out of the way. We might actually have a few other negatives we come up with as we're going in this episode as things pop into our heads here, but that's all the stuff we have right now. Here's the big thing though.

If you are familiar with sound better, you may be on their waiting list right now as an engineer and that's because the marketplace has been completely imbalanced over the years. As long as I've seen them, they've always had more producers and engineers clamoring for gigs than they have had musicians who are looking for people to hire. That's the really the big challenge when you build a marketplace platform like Ebay or reverb.com or any of these other platforms is there's the chicken and the egg problem. The engineers are the chicken and the musicians or the ag or vice versa. However you want to put that. Which do you go for first in the case of sound better? They went for the engineers first because it's easy to say, hey, sign up for a profile here and in the future you'll probably get some work from it when we start getting musicians to the platform.

So I signed up really early on with that sort of thing in mind cause I was thinking like, Oh I'll take a few extra gigs here and there if they come through and I may have actually gotten a couple of, it's been so long because I signed up, I can't remember. But then it never really panned out. That's why they've had such a long, I know somebody who's been on the waiting list for like over a year, maybe longer than that. That hasn't been led on the platform yet. So I don't know what the criteria is for people that get onto the platform versus the ones that don't. Do they filter based on your quality of audio? I Dunno how the behind the scenes work. Maybe we can get the founder on the podcast sometime in the future. I don't know. And I feel their pain. They're like with the whole home city lessons thing, it's been tricky.

A ton of people applied and you know, there's plenty of people I haven't even responded to yet and I felt terrible about that. But yeah, it's tricky to have. So many people want to be on a platform like that. So I understand there's a lot that they're trying to navigate. So it's easier to get the sellers first on a platform. So in your case, the person selling their services are the ones teaching and sound betters case. The ones selling their services are the sellers, the audio engineers and the musicians who are doing remote recording and stuff like that. So all that to say it's been imbalanced so far and I think the Spotify acquisition is going to be kind of the turning point. And so right now there's gonna be a transition period. But I think in the future Spotify, I saw on a tech crunch article that Spotify has over 400,000 artists on the Spotify artist platform.

So those are 400,000 artists that are signed up through Spotify to put their music onto Spotify. And that means that as a pool of almost a half a million artists that will at some point be pitched sound better because Spotify own sound better now, they will be pushing people constantly over time to go on to sound better, to try to book a musician for their project or a studio for the project or a producer or mixing or mastering engineer. So I think there's going to be a massive, massive influx of new artists who are finding sound better. And I think it's going to shift the imbalance too. There's gonna be more musicians than there are high quality engineers. There will always be trashed people on sound better trying to sweep up the crumbs and that's fine. But as far as good engineers, good mixing, good mastering, good musicians to do remote session work, there's going to be a scarcity of that.

And so I think that's the opportunity for maybe our listeners, for our community too, where if you go through and sign up for an account or get on the waiting list now, you might can reap the benefit of that in the short term. While there's a massive imbalance in your favor when there's more demand than supply. Cause right now if there's way more supply of audio services than there is demand on sound, better.com and I think that's going to shift with this new acquisition from Spotify. Well yeah, I think one of the things with sound better that's interesting is now that they're on teams, Spotify, there's money. Yeah, there's money to spend on advertising and who knows, maybe all of a sudden we're going to start seeing ads everywhere for, hey, if you're new, you know, audio engineers. And it's important for us to talk about this because if sound better is run well, if they get a good marketing team, if they've got, you know, a visionary leading the team there, it could really change our industry a lot.

Let me state something. I don't think it's not run well now. Like I can't imagine what sort of challenges they're going through as a company to build this marketplace. And I fully understand from the company's perspective why they require you to stay on their platform. And it's just like any other marketplace. It's because if they spend a ton of money advertising and they get a ton of leads through that, the last thing they want is for their engineers on the platform that mixing engineers to poach those leads and do future work off of the platform because that means they lose money on that on when they're the ones that brought in the lead in the first place. Totally. And one of the important things to think about there is what is sound better's business model, I'm guessing, but I would imagine that what it looks like is it sound better. It gets engineers to sign up and then sound better, spends money on advertising to get musicians to surf through their results. That's exactly how I think it works. When one of these musicians decides to hire one of the audio engineer's sound better makes a cut. Here's the thing you got to remember though, and what most people don't understand is better, probably

doesn't make money on the first transaction. Sound better. Probably only starts to make a profit after someone has hired an engineer on their platform for more than three or four or five projects. Yeah. At that point, sound better starts to make a profit because they spent all this money on ads in the front end. What they're looking at is something called cost per acquisition. They're looking at how much do we need to spend to get a musician to hire us and spend on like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, all those sort of things. And once they do that, how many projects on average they need to book before we start making profit. So when you're on sound better sound better might lose money on you until you've booked that third project with that artist. And so that makes it tricky. I think most people look at that situation and assume, oh well sound butter's making money hand over fist. They might not be, they might not be making any money, they might be spending way more on ads than they're making. And that's particularly tricky. They have to figure out like how do we not burn this thing to the ground while we build it and build something that over the longterm becomes something great. That's tricky thing to do.

They're in a tough position, so we're not trying to insult anything they've done, cause obviously they have built a company worthy of Spotify buying it. So that's a great place to be. Hats off, sell something to Spotify. Whew. Yeah, hats off to them for sure, but that doesn't mean that it's the best platform for our community. I do think though, just saying based on what I said a second ago, that there is a potentially short to mid term opportunity where the panel is going to swing the other way for a short time and if you are ahead of the curve there before they start advertising for engineers before they start actively seeking out more and more people to sign up for the platform. I think if you get him before that, you're going to be in a good spot. There are, in our community, I'm not gonna name names just because of our community's private, but there are people that, there's somebody who said they've made 40 grand from sound better already from that 25,000 of which came from one project.

Oh, if anyone in our community can get into sound better and get a $25,000 project, I'm all for that. I want to see more of that, but also understand that you have to be actively building your business outside of sound better if you want longterm sustainability, which that person is actively doing, so it's not like I'm not trying to insult anything he's doing because he's obviously doing well. I think an interesting question is who is on sound better looking to hire right now? Are record labels going on sound better? Is it independent artists? Is it primarily bands? Is it heavily skewed towards one particular genre of music? I don't know. I would imagine it probably is. I would assume that it's going to be pretty well fanned out the same way the music industry is if it's not already. Yeah.

I think an interesting question here is now that Spotify is conceivably, we would imagine footing the marketing bill because they want to grow their investment with sound better. What will happen to Google search results at some point? Are you going to Google audio mastering and it's going to be nothing but sound better results or you're in a Google online mixing or whatever the keyword is and it's just sound better. Sound better, sound better and better. That's a little scary to me. It could be amazing. It definitely changes the rules a little bit where you need to be successful on sound better and all of a sudden you're going to live and die based on your reviews. That's kind of cool and that's why I think getting on the platform now before the swell of new people come in, trying to get reviews on the site so that you are, you know, you get a good handful of 10 1525 star reviews on there, it's gonna be a lot easier for you to take advantage of this new influx of people that are going to inevitably be on sound better when Spotify starts pushing it.

I just think that's gonna be an important point. You said something interesting when we were talking about doing this episode today. You talked about what you think is probably going to happen, and I think I would tend to agree with you, is that, let's say you're an artist, you're a quote unquote Spotify artist and you go to release a song and at some point you see some sort of like, you know, Newton audio engineer Trudeau tone better, no comb. You know you're going to see some kind of ad and it's gonna push you. There's a little bit of problem there. If you're going to Spotify, you're probably going there to release music. Eventually you're going to be like, I'm working on this project. I need an audio engineer. Oh that's perfect. The timing is awesome. But I don't know. It's a strange thing because the artists that are on Spotify are at an interesting spot and their life cycle and their life cycle is that they have released, not that they are preparing to release.

We're assuming that they're also preparing to release and that creates some timing issues. I Dunno, I'm about to destroy that argument real quick. Please do Brian. I would appreciate that. So Spotify is a multibillion dollar company. They have more data than any other company. Maybe apart from apple on the release schedules of artists, both major labels and independent artists. Do you not think based down to even the sub genre level that Spotify knows exactly when you're about to start recording new music? Oh my gosh, that's such a good argument. Do you not think they have the data and the analytics to prove exactly when they should start pushing sound better to their artists? I'll tell you what, if sound better shut up and was like, hey we want a sponsorship on your show and we wouldn't do this if you guys are listening. But if it was like yeah, if we can get access to all a Spotify data net roster just like drew over, that would be absolutely cause you brought up a great point there and I think one of the things about Spotify, let's kind of transition tech by Spotify a little bit here.

One of the things about Spotify, and I am not an expert on this, I'm not like a touring musician or a musician who releases music anymore, but the data that Spotify has available within its walls, but probably not to artists yet at this point fascinates me. And here's the question. I would want to know if I were a musician, what percent of people listen to my song for the first time and skipped after 10 seconds. This piece of information is so, so, so, so interesting because if you know how appealing you are to somebody who's never heard of you, never listen to any of your music, and if they become a fan, if they decide to finish the song after 10 seconds instead of hitting skip, this sort of information would get really interesting and it would start to change how us as people on the music creation side of things would structure that first 10 seconds.

If you're listening to a playlist and you know they pitch you a song on that playlist from an artist you've never listened to and you get 10 seconds in and you're like, oh, this is dope. I like this. I'm going to keep listening to this song. I have formed an opinion about the song and I probably not gonna Change it and I'm not going to hit fast forward. This sort of data is fascinating to me because if this was available to producers about what works on an intro to a song, we can start to get real actionable data about what wins hearts and minds out there and listener world was Spotify.

I'm going to just say, first of all, that's like a rabbit hole. I don't want to go down because like I just, that's getting too nerdy when it comes to like a piece of art and I think most people are going to be turned off by the thought that you just proposed there. But you brought up a thought in my head. That is another interesting thought. This is more speculative, but so is most of what we're talking about today. Now that Spotify owned sound better, there's two opportunities that brings up. One is actually getting proper credit for the work you do on recordings. So now Spotify who owned sound better is going to see that yes, you worked on this project, so you're automatically going to show up in the Spotify credits. So that's an interesting thing and I wonder if that's going to be integrated properly. Second thing is, are you going to be able to have any access to any sort of stats on the songs you've worked with on sound better now that you can track it from there into Spotify.

Oh snap. Yeah. Oh that's fabulously. So let me say this, I'm dubious, I'm suspicious of sound better. But if it was like, oh, well if you use this as one of the main platforms to accept clients and as a result you get all that type of data and you get to start to see your credits properly done and you start to see all the data based on listens for your projects. That would change everything for me. I would be absolutely fascinated because here's the thing, all the time I'll be talking to an artist and they'll mention, oh yeah, we got a million views on youtube, or oh we've got, you know, 4 million plays on Spotify or that, you know, peaked at such and such position on billboard. And I'm like, wait, what? It did, come on,

we'll find a music video that has 4 million views on it for a song I produced like four years ago. And I'm like, wait, that blew up. There's so many things that slip through the cracks as you know, if you have a successful career in audio that if this was all automatically tracked into your account, that is like actually a big positive for this sort of thing.

Huge. Yeah. If I could log in and get notifications of like, FYI, this song you mastered four months ago has just gone platinum. Cool. I didn't know that cause they're not going to tell me. That would be amazing. That would absolutely be a game changer.

And then one other thing, which is will Spotify start putting some sort of credit or stand out on

tracks that were produced or mixed through sound better? So this is a sound better track. You know, if they start doing it in the Spotify app, that's another way that they're going to be bringing more and more leads to sound better.com for audio engineers like us. Oh, okay. I'm warming up to sound better. We're getting so far into speculation land, but this is just fun to think about. Yeah, well, I'm hoping that somebody from sound better from Spotify listens to this and borrow some of our ideas and gives us credit and equity. Here's the thing. Let's say you're on Spotify and you're scrolling through, you're like, oh man, this new Lizzo song is so dope. Who mixed this? Oh, it's So-and-so. Click on that link and you can see all their credits on Spotify and it takes you right to their sound better page. If as an engineer, you're getting pitched in Spotify to sound better, it almost becomes a necessity to be, and that's actually a scary thing because you're taking your credit.

It is scary that she would've gotten from someone googling your name and finding your website. Now it's going through sound better. So that's actually almost a negative. Yeah, it would be a game changer. Again, I'm really scared of one person owning this entire sandbox. Yes, but that's fabulously interesting. Let's pause for a minute and let's talk about can we trust Spotify because here's the scary thing. Let's say they do all these things. Let's say it goes pretty well. Let's say they start to, um, get a stranglehold on this entire marketplace. What's their intent? Make money. I mean, just like any public companies to make a profit. I understand that, but their duty I think extends deeper than just their fiduciary responsibility because we're talking about music, we're talking about culture, and maybe it's raw as form. I know you hate me right now, Brian, but no, I don't hate you.

I just think that like the second you go public as a company and you have shares and you have shareholders, the art goes out the door maybe. However, there has been a lot of marines and even some, I'm gonna forget the name of the organization, but there have been like CEOs from giant fortune 500 companies trying to refine what the definition of a corporation is and what the responsibilities of a corporation are. There's been a lot of movement on this even in the past like month of this idea that a corporation has a duty that is deeper than just making money. And this is interesting because here's the thing you've got to keep in mind when you're a corporation, at least in the United States, the United States recognizes that corporation as an individual. It's like a human being and that has its own rights and as a result of that, this is the tricky conversation.

When it's something like music or dare I say health care or you know, some other thing that's instrumental to the fabric of society. It's not just like, oh, we sold TVs. Great, cool, awesome. A lot of people sell TVs. We're talking about art here and we're talking about for a lot of kids in our country, the most positive, most healthy, most sacred thing they have going for them is an iPod and a pair of headphones or they listen to their favorite bands. Let me ask you this, what are you getting at or what are you concerned with as far as trust? Because to

longterm, any company that takes over any one industry is a threat. So it's like you have to have external competition from people like title and from Apple Music constantly leveling the playing field so that they can't just diminish realities even lower than they are now. They can't just take the rights away from, you know, anyone who's done something on Spotify, like they can't just do whatever they want because they know that people will just flock to on these other platforms. I don't think we have anything to worry about as long as that's kind of the playing field we're on. So I think the real threat we have is if Spotify basically takes over the recording industry and has a situation where now everyone's going to sound better to book recording gigs and they're not really focused on the individual, that's when things are fully commoditized in our market and no one cares about the individual or the art aspect of it. I don't think we're going to get to that, but I think it's going to be a threat for certain people. It's going to be even more important to stand out. If you go back to episode 49 how to answer the most important question, why should someone hire you? That's going to be even more important to people in the future because otherwise it's just gonna be like fiber. It's gonna be a race to the bottom for pricing. You want to $5 mixes, but rock Mary,

I think that there is a war brewing and I think that that war is going to end up being between apple and Spotify. Apple, let's not forget apple owns logic. Logic is probably second or third, maybe s, maybe second most popular doll on earth. There's a lot of changes coming and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of, I don't know, man. It's going to be really interesting to see what the future looks like over the course of the next five years.

If there's a way for us to profit off it as a community, we'll cover it here on the podcast and try to do kind of like what we chat about today. I still think just moral of the story is if your approach sound better with some hesitation with a little care and understanding that you don't want them to own all of your deals, all of your leads, all of your projects. You don't want them to own everything, but you want to take advantage of this potential huge influx of new artists that will be on sound better over the next year. I think if you do that with some hesitation with some boundaries, you could potentially make a lot of money from sound better on what's coming up, especially if you figure out how their keyword searches and rankings work in sound better and can start gaming that system.

Yeah, I feel like there's a lot more content we'll have on the future because I think this purchase really signals that sound better is going to be a bigger and bigger player in our space, so we can't just ignore it. We can't just avoid it. We need to figure out the best way to take advantage of it. We've been just ignoring it, but I think it's too big to be ignored now and I think the Spotify purchase was basically the catalyst we needed to bring this into the forefront so we can talk about it, dissect it, and hopefully maybe even get some interviews on here from people that are a part of sound better and maybe people that are in our community who are profiting off of sound better and see what kind of the best practices are. Because it's irresponsible not to talk about this because there is people making a lot of money on it and I feel like our community can be the people who benefit from that. It would be really, really to kind

of get an inside view and a pitch from them about what they're doing, what they're hoping to build. But you know, our promise to you guys is that we're going to continue to be honest about what we think and to hopefully ask good questions. And right now I think there's a couple of good questions out there. I would say, first of all, let's say sound better takes over. Let's say they're doing really, really well. What's a healthy level of clients to be getting from Spotify compared to clients that you get outside of Spotify? There's probably a healthy number there. If 20% of your projects are coming from sound better. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah, that obviously it depends a lot on how much you're making in total. Can you afford to live without sound better, but yeah. Brian, what are some more questions? My mind,

it goes to my time with airbnb. You can analyze a lot easier when you take the creativity aspect out of it because this is just a transaction happening on the Internet. And the value that airbnb brought to me was I could take my property, I could listen on a website. I didn't have to build my own website and it had to create my own lead flow. I didn't have to create a calendar and a booking system. They did it all for me and I loved it. I didn't care that I couldn't take things off the platform. I didn't care that I couldn't put them in a CRM because I didn't need to because airbnb did a great job of handling all that for me. I made a lot of money in the three years that I did airbnb and I am 100% okay with all the money I paid out to Airbnb as their cut because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do what I did.

But the other thing is I wasn't fully dependent on Airbnb for my living. If they decided to cut things off or something happened and I couldn't do anymore or someone destroyed my home and I couldn't put it on Airbnb or didn't want to put on airbnb anymore, I wasn't going to be just completely destitute because I fully rely on them. I was diversified enough in my income to where I wasn't fully dependent on Airbnb, so I sound better, could be a really good thing for a lot of people that don't know how to or they don't want to build out all of the things that it takes to build a good platform for people to find you. And I think people that are browsing for something specific might end up finding you that you would've never otherwise gotten before. So I think there's a really good niche of people and audio engineers that will do really well on sound better that would've never otherwise made it because that's what my story was at Airbnb.

I would have never made money doing vacation rentals if it weren't for Airbnb. There's probably elected, but then there's also people that are going to take that too far and when sound better does something to effect your business, it affects your entire life and you do not want that so there's a lot of value sound better brings. There's a lot of cons that come with it cause we talk about those first so use your best judgment but I don't know, it's super intriguing to me. I can't wait to kind of see what the future holds.

Do all this. Yeah, it is super intriguing. One of the questions I've got is what does the engineer look like? Like who are the engineers that are going to benefit the most from this? Pardon me initially thinks it's the weekend warrior. If you've got like a pretty solid day job and you're like, oh I'm doing kind of some of this on the side, you don't really have a whole lot to lose. Everything that you make an audio is probably gravy. If you've got a well paying job that's full time.

I still think there's a lot of big names. The big names that are on

there. They can be as selective as they want to be with the products they get coming to them. I think if you listen to this podcast, a lot of the stuff we talk about using social proof elements, getting good reviews, doing things where you're understanding the needs and desires of the customer, so when you're writing your profile out, you're speaking to their desires and end results. Understanding that your portfolio is one of the most important parts of your entire studio because they're hiring you for what's in that portfolio. All these things that we talked about on the podcast can be directly translated to a sound better profile to maximize the amount of customers you get. Whenever I was doing an Airbnb, I focused on my copywriting, my headline, I focused on what I said in the all of the description of my airbnb and I tracked the stats between the amount of views I got and the amount of bookings I got and I optimized for that number to keep increasing.

So I was meticulous about this and I think sound better brings the opportunity to be just as meticulous about it, but that's if you're that type of person, not everyone's that type of person. A lot of people just want to put a profile up and expect things to start rolling in for them and that's probably not how it's going to work. Well, and that brings up an interesting point. We've talked about social skills on the podcast in the past and now there are certain engineers out there who have prospered because they're good at talking to people. They're good at building friendships or building, getting relationships, and it's the phone call where they really prosper. I would probably put myself in that category. I like to talk to the people that I work with. I don't want it to just do that on sound better, Dan, I don't know about, I don't like that.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the future that there was a specific way that you could, like whether it was video chat or whether it was audio chat on something like that so that you could have that interaction. It's very difficult to collaborate on art without normal communication like talking. I think another thing is you have a lot of specific systems built out in your studio that you can't use any of those on sound better because they handled the file delivery. You can't organize it or label it the way you want. They don't have any of the apple script stuff. If you go back to episode two of the podcast where Chris talks about all of his crazy automation, when he hits a button, you know it sends a link to people from Dropbox and it organizes folders and it does all this crazy hippie dippy shit.

Go back to the interview if you want to hear all that stuff, but you can't do any of it on sound better so that again, there's pros and cons and you would be a horrible fit on there. I think Chris, because you've set your business up so well. Yeah, I think I would. So you have no control as an eight on the Enneagram, we crave control. So we're not really cut out for the sound better life. But I think there's a lot of people that are well, and like I said, starting out, I am hesitant with sound better, but I'm open, I'm open mind with this and if it's done well, if they do things that serves the community well, they could dramatically level up the quality that we're able to offer as a community to musicians. That's really exciting. That could be really, really cool.

And Spotify has a lot more resources for flushing out the platform than sound better has on their own. Well, I think the most interesting idea I can't stop thinking about is this idea of I'm on Spotify, I'm listening to an artist and I'm like, man, this mix is awesome. Who makes this? Oh it was, you know, fill in the blank and I click their name and it says hire them and I can click a link and it takes me directly to there. Sound better profile. That's fabulously interesting because right now if someone likes your work and they see your credit, they see it and then they Google for you and then if they're lucky they find you to integrate that whole system or someone can go right from your name in the credits in Spotify to the position where they can reach out and contact you. That's really cool. That's very, very exciting. And in a situation like that, the cream is going gonna rise to the top. Those that are doing great work are going to get more clients. And what's fabulously interesting about that is one of the biggest things that we preach against from day one in the podcast is this idea of if you build it, they will come. Being good is not enough. If they built this ecosystem out in that way, being good someday could be enough. That's interesting.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. We are getting dangerously close to our hundredth episode. We've got a nice, a somewhat special episode planned for that one, so make sure you stay tuned for that in a couple of weeks. Before I forget, I want to make sure that you know that I've got an upcoming, a free course about to be released. I just wrapped it up recently. I'm gearing up with a couple other things before I put it out, but if you want to get sign up for my free jump start your marketing course. You can go ahead and get on the waiting list for that by going to the six figure home studio.com/funnel that's slash f U. N. N. E. L. This course has nine in-depth lessons that go over everything you need to know about jump-starting your studios marketing from the top of your funnel, Aka how to generate awareness for your studio to the middle of Your Funnel, Aka how to turn that awareness into interest and then the bottom of your funnel, how to turn all of that interest into actual paid projects.

There's nine lessons. I'll give you examples and breakdowns of other successful recording studios. Marketing funnels in plenty and plenty of takeaways and actionable steps that you can take to improve your studio's marketing efforts. If you want to sign up and get on the waiting list for that free marketing course, go to the six figure home studio.com/funnel and you'll be the first to start getting the lessons from that new course. Next week's episode is episode. What is it? 99 good Lord. Next week we're going to be talking about killing sacred cows and this is not any kind of sacrilegious thing. We're talking about being a contrarian, going against what everyone says you can't do, you must do or you must not do. There are very few absolutes in the business world and in next week's podcast episode, we're going to dive in to the sacred cows that we must kill. If you want to continue to have success in 2019 and beyond, that'll be out bright and early 6:00 AM hopefully you enjoyed last week's little snafu where we had an episode go out early on a Friday instead of a Tuesday. I don't think anyone complained about that, but this one will be coming out for sure on Tuesday, Brighton, early 6:00 AM, and then again, I'll start building height now for episode 100 where Chris and I have a little something special planned. So that is it for this week. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.

Oh.