A New Platform Where Indie Artists Can FINALLY Make Money?

Author and entrepreneur Zack James shares the motivation behind launching the new platform Starscript.com. The website enables creatives of all kinds, from writers to comic book artists to musicians, to build their fanbase, connect with other artists and, perhaps, FINALLY start making money from their passion projects 

You can reach out to Zack at Starscript.com 

You can reach me at chrisbournea@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've heard a million streams on something like Spotify only generates like three thousand dollars. And if you have a band, three thousand dollars dividing that, you know, trying to pay out your your band and co-writers and the producer, that's that's not a sustainable living.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

So we've had this degradation of the value of a play for a song. And while that helps for the can on the consumer side, it does not help on the creator side. And it's like you said, where millions streams on some of these platforms yield such a small amount of money, it seems completely unsustainable. And yes, there are other revenue streams for musician musicians, as you and you named them. There's touring, right? There's the licensing, there's the uh merchandise, but yet the product itself, the main product itself, which is the music, is not valued.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Hello and welcome to the Culture Beats Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Bournet, and my guest today is Zach James, founder of Starscript, a self-publishing and entertainment platform for independent creators. Zach, how are you doing? Great, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for making the time to speak with me. I appreciate it. Yeah, so tell me about Starscript and how you got the idea to found it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Yeah, sure. So um both myself uh and my brother are writers. Uh, we're very passionate about storytelling and that um uh storytelling is the most powerful way that we can deliver a message. Um and so throughout our time writing our stories, like many writers out there or creators, we were working on our creative work, uh, thinking that you know, we just need to make a good, a good story and then uh and share it, and hopefully it will be successful. So the focus was on the quality, right, of what we were creating. Um, and this is you know probably true for many different creators out there, whether you're a musician, uh, whether you're a filmmaker, uh podcaster, uh comic book creator, uh, even visual artist, your, you know, your first thought is, hey, I'm really passionate about this medium. And I've got a story, uh, even you know, in the music world, that you could say a music album is a story also. Uh, and I'm in I'm want to share this with the world. And so I'm gonna focus on making a really good quality product in a sense. And um, over time, you know, you kind of determine whether or not you want to do the kind of traditional way, where you're basically gonna find, if you're, you know, an author, you're gonna find an agency, uh, or if a musician, you're gonna find a label. Uh, or uh many of us now choose, hey, there's this pathway to self-publishing that we could sort of do this on our own and we get all of this freedom. We don't have a huge chunk of our revenue being taken by some third party. We have creative control over what we create. We can go on our own schedule. So there's all these benefits that come with self-publishing. However, and now there's platforms, of course, out for self-publishing, but there's still a lot of uh challenges that come up. That's not sort of the the end of uh, you know, that's not sort of the determining factor of your success, is just making a good product. Because what is really taking place is that you are choosing, when you choose, when you say, I want to self-publish, you're really choosing to become an entrepreneur. And my brother and I realized that through our writing of our sci-fi and fantasy series, that we thought to ourselves, well, geez, like, yeah, once you get it out there, like how is it really gonna get discovered? We can publish, let's say, on Amazon self-publishing and Kindle. Um, but is it really good that is that on its own gonna then create enable discovery? People are gonna find our work. I mean, there's what thousands of different uh uh books on that platform. Like, how are people going to find us? We have, you know, a lot of maybe the discovery is based on reviews and existing popularity. So then, you know, we think to ourselves, okay, well, we'll have to create social media accounts and we'll have to build a social media following. And, you know, you may do all this work to build a social media following and then discover that you really don't own your audience at the end of the day. I remember famously, uh, and this is over probably 10 years ago at this point, that Facebook had announced or disclosed that uh once you when you make a post, not a hundred percent of your followers are gonna get notified. In fact, you don't even know how many of your followers, and this is the same for YouTube, get it in their feed, right? Get their your video in in the feed. Uh so now it's like you're doing all this work to get followers or subscribers, but you don't actually, they're not actually your audience that you can get in contact with. So it was kind of really disenchanting to hear something like that when you, you know, maybe many self-published uh creators don't even want to do marketing because they didn't realize that they were, they were embarking on this path of entrepreneurship. They were, um, they just thought, hey, I just need to focus on my product. I'm a writer, you know, that's all I am. Okay, I'll do some marketing on the side, but really the product should sell itself, as a lot of us idealistically think, which is really not reality. So, anyway, um just kind of coming to terms with this, my brother and I started hypothecating uh, you know, what really we would need we need as a self-published author, you know, to make it successful. And and that realization was that really there's nothing that exists. We would have to combine different technologies together in order to make a sustainable business. And so then that kind of led us on a path of doing a lot of market research because you're kind of in the beginning, you're looking for yourself to make your own project successful. And that led us to look at just the broader market and that this was not just us in isolation that were have was having these problems. It was many creators that were having this problem. And we realized that there's a lot of really good quality content out there that struggles to be successful, and it it kind of uh leaves a lot of um creators on a path of sort of being a starving artist, or they have to basically have it as a passion project and uh basically maintain a day job because they can't sustain themselves on their the work that they're creating. So that led us to want to create a sort of ecosystem um which became Starscript. And this would be an app that has technology uh that utilizes maybe a lot of different technologies that we're already familiar with, but sort of pieces them together in a way that uh makes a it to where we don't have to just create our own technology stack off of like disconnected pieces. Oftentimes those disconnected pieces fall short and even fulfilling their own isolated objective for what you're trying to achieve, but we wanted to put them together and sort of change, sort of uh, you know, improve those uh those different pieces while we're doing that and make an architecture that's gonna enable uh creators and self-published entrepreneurs to become more successful and to make more sustainable projects.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Yeah, you really raised a lot of good points there because a lot of like you said, a lot of artists, whether you're a writer, a musician, what have you, have that kind of if you build it, they will come kind of mentality of like like you said, if you just make a quality product, then you will just attract uh readers or listeners like a like a magnet. And as you said, that's not reality. So how does Starscript work? Is it like um so it sounds like it's a one-stop shop for for creatives? So is it basically like a you use it like a so like there are social media schedulers where you can connect all your social media accounts and schedule one post to run on different platforms? So how can you kind of break down how Starscript works for Yeah?

SPEAKER_01 8:17

So I'll kind of give you the different features in in layers and communicate in it in a way with some language that we're already familiar with. So we started building the social layer first, and that means you as a creator uh um create an individual account. So you will have a profile. You can search other creators by the type of creator they are. Maybe you want to search by, let's say, uh a book editor or uh you want to find a drummer for, you know, that's uh maybe a rock drummer or something like that. So you'll be able to sort of what you can do is you can search the search filters, they are all focused on sort of the the medium and the genre of um of that creator type. Uh in addition to that, you can post your experience. You can also post job and service offers to create connect with other creators. So if you're offering a service, let's say as a drummer, while you may on the side have your own band as well, and you might want to recruit uh a guitarist and a singer or something, you could do all of that in the same place. So we wanted to start with social first because communication is um is one of the most important things that we need is we need to be able to not only communicate with our team, but we also need to communicate with uh the our audience as well. Uh so that was kind of that's kind of like the first layer. So we have a post feed, we have a search of the different creators, and we have profiles, we have a messenger where you can uh DM people if you connect with them, and we have groups, you can create groups. Uh so that sort of gives us that social layer. But rather than having like a universal social platform like a Facebook or an Instagram, where it's basically for every possible thing that you can imagine, this is purely focused on the entertainment industry and then sort of breaks things down into the category of the industry you're in. So are you in, you know, um, are you dealing with books or comic books or podcasts or TV and film, um music? So it sort of breaks things down like that. So that is the social layer that we have. Now, one thing I want to mention in this social layer that people are, you know, really not familiar with is that we've removed the idea of needing an algorithm in your postfeed or basically who you can who the if for in the discovery process, I could say. So in your postfeed, you can actually just filter by the mediums and the genre that you're interested in. So if you want to have uh, you know, like a self-help podcast in your feed, uh, plus the horror books uh plus um documentaries, you know, on maybe environment or something, and that's your post feed, then you can filter it so that's what appears. It's all of the creators who are posting on that subject matter. And in this way, we don't have to try to make some type of formula to kind of guess uh what you, you know, what you're interested in. You can just simply say, I'm interested in these things, and this is what I want to see. Now there's a kind of a discovery filter that you can use on the post feed as well as a following. So you could just kind of filter it to say, hey, I only care about those that I'm actually following. I, you know, and or you can just go to discovery mode and say, I want to discover new creators in these sort of mediums and genre. So if it, you know, I think all of us have had this sort of experience where, you know, if we could put all the ads aside, where I think uh Facebook, Instagram is about 20 to 25% of the content you see is ads. So let's just move that aside and just focus on maybe your discovery feed. We've all had that feeling where maybe we accidentally looked at something for a little bit too long. Maybe our phone was open, and now the algorithm thinks we're interested in that thing. YouTube does the same thing. If you accidentally look at something, and maybe you look at something you don't even mean to, like I think on Facebook I saw some violence or something on there, like some violent thing was about to happen. So you look at it because naturally, as a human, you're concerned about uh, you know, some violent thing happening, right? And then you see that, you look at it for a while, uh a few seconds, and now Facebook thinks, oh, this person is interested in fighting. So we're gonna show them more fighting or whatever. So the algorithm's trying to guess my interests and it just fails at that. You know, YouTube the same way. If you accidentally look at something for a few seconds, the algorithm thinks that you like that thing, and then boom, it starts showing more videos like that to you just because of your behavior. And your behavior could not even be intentional. It could be unintentional, it could be that your phone, you put your phone down for a second and didn't lock it or didn't close the app. So we've removed the algorithm uh element, and that means there's no trick behind the scenes of where what kind of content you see uh in on the social layer. It is simply what you choose to see, and then things are kind of appear in date order. So that's our first layer. So the next layer that we focused on building is the production layer, which is actually where you create a profile for your projects themselves, whether it's a book, a movie, podcasts, any of those types of media, you can actually create a dedicated profile for that. And then, of course, in the search, you can actually search by books, uh, podcasts, uh, movies, and things like that. And then you could further refine your search by the genre. Um, so so that was the next layer that we um we focused on building. Now, one thing unique about that is a lot of the platforms out there that sort of have a revenue model to help people, maybe a lot of people will filter from YouTube to revenue models on another platform that that kind of fit their needs. Um that uh that the we believe that your work belongs in a library, not a postfeed. So we obviously are aware of all the streaming libraries that are out there that you can buy a subscription for, major ones like Netflix, Amazon self-publishing, Disney Plus, things like that. And that that and then now we have this library uh interface for uh rather than something just isolated for let's say movies and TV shows, it's actually a library for books and movies and podcasts and things like that. And so, furthermore, what we uh what we have is we actually have a few different filters for this live streaming library type of interface. Uh uh the first filter is for you as a creator. Like what are the projects that you're creating? So you can see all your books, let's say, in one place. Next is the projects that you're contributing to, because maybe you're a team member on a project that you're actually getting revenue from, and you want to see all of those projects that you're participating in. You're not necessarily the originator of those projects, but you're someone who's contributing to them. So that's another filter. And then we have for another one for the projects that you're following, and another one for the ones that you're actually subscribed to. So in this way, we've established a sort of build your own streaming library from the consumer standpoint. It's a build your own library type of interface, which brings me to another challenge we have. Uh, every for your audience out there and for yourself, ask yourself um, how many streaming platforms are you currently subscribed to? And for each of those, what percentage of the content are you actually interested in viewing? And what percentage aren't you interested in viewing? Is it uh 10% of the content you're actually interested in? Is it five percent? And so that doesn't seem right that you're paying some monthly fee and then you're only interested in a fraction of the content, uh, fraction of a percentage of the content that you're actually interested in viewing. So that means you have to kind of every time you go on those platforms, you actually have to filter yourself with your eyes what the content is that you're interested in. And often these platforms, what they do is they re-show the same content under different rows so that you can actually scroll down. I remember the other day, it was like four times the same movie appeared within one screen. I could see it. With different categories under different categories, you mean under these different categories, like, oh, because it's under this category, even though I didn't choose it the first time, I'm gonna actually choose it the second time because they put it under some different category. So in this way, they're kind of making it look like there's more content there than there is or something. So with ours, it's more like a build your own. So that way you individually either follow or subscribe for the paid uh um productions, um, that those now get added to your library, and essentially you're building your own library to where when you go on there, it's a hundred percent of the content is what you are actually interested in. So those are a couple two aspects. You got the social layer, and then you have this sort of streaming layer, and then we can kind of talk about how those things coalesce and the the way they work together. And there's the other elements again on like the where we can kind of break down like there's the production side, which is more of like the building side. It's the you know, the team recruitment, the team communication, and actually working on the production. And then there's the consumer-facing entertainment side, which is you connecting with your audience. And we can go deeper into the sort of issues that currently exist on existing major platforms um that um kind of uh make it to where we simply it's very difficult to connect with the other people other who are who are um who are sort of currently consuming that content. Uh on so like let's for example, let's say um if I'm reading a book that I'm really interested in, I just finished chapter 10. Currently, if I'm reading on Kindle or let's say Amazon, um, where can I go to connect with other readers about that chapter? Okay to kind of, you know, maybe if there's some philosophical concept in there, you know, maybe I'm reading a self-help book or something like that. And so I want to find the community of people that I can have a discussion with. I'm gonna have to leave and go to another platform because all Amazon really has is a reviews, and that's not really discussion-friendly. It's not a forum, really live forum, yeah. It's not a live form. And really just a post feed of a post also isn't necessarily the best discussion platform. You'd want to be in like sort of like a messenger or a group. So do you go to Telegram? Do you go to Discord? Where do you go? But the point is you have to go somewhere else, and wherever that is, might not necessarily even be hosted by the author or the creators of that work. And so that challenge kind of exists on Netflix, right? Who do I discuss after I watch this show, you know, this show or movie on Netflix, or who or for even let's say a podcast as well. I just listened to a podcast episode. Where do I go? And maybe the the podcast host is gonna lead us to join a Telegram group or a Discord group or something like that. So now if people don't have an account there, they've got to create the account there. And we get this sort of again, this stack concept where the the creators have to combine these different technologies together and basically try to inspire their audience to create all these different accounts if they don't have them already, and then sort of put it all together to um make a working model.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

So it kind of sounds like um Starscript is kind of similar to LinkedIn, where LinkedIn is niched down to people who are interested in business, basically, like professional, professional interests, not just you know, photos of my cat or whatever, but it's even more niched down to just the people who are interested in the inner or or working in the entertainment industry and are independent in doing so independently for the most part.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Yeah, so entertainment focus with job and service opportunities on that level. And then of course, if you have a a project like a film project or your podcast and and maybe you're looking for someone, you can do job offers on the production level as well. And so you can actually recruit, right? And then you can create a group for your team so that way you can communicate on that same platform that you're publishing your content on. You can actually communicate with your team about this next upcoming episode, what needs to be done. Maybe you have iterations of the cover image, or you want to talk about the strategy for your advertising campaign or your promoting your promotion campaign or something like that. You can do that there. Then boom, once it's published, you can then post and say, first thing, once it's published, your followers, 100% of your followers, so long as they get, as long as they have their permission set where they're saying, okay, yeah, please send me email notifications or push notifications, 100% of them will be notified. So where there's no hidden algorithm of, you know, based on how often you publish, you know, that how many percentage, what percentage of your followers or your subscribers get notified. They all get notified so long as their permissions uh enable that. And also you can simply make a post on the platform as well and say, hey, this this podcast here is actually published and available for anybody else. So now it can be in Discovery or your followers. see it in the post feed and then also they of course can get notified simply on the production level that it's new and it's in your it's already in their library, right? So they can just go there and watch the latest episode.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Right, right. I know with um a lot of independent both writers and filmmakers, one thing that frustrates us is that um on huge platforms like Amazon and Netflix, if you're fortunate enough, let's say you're an independent filmmaker and you're you're able to license your movie to Netflix, you don't get any demographic or personal data from the viewers. Like you don't get email, you can't see email addresses. They won't Netflix from what I understand won't even give you demographic information like oh 55% of the people who watched your movie are, you know, women over 50 who live in the suburbs. You have no way of knowing who your audience is you know all you all you're told maybe is the number of views. So does Star Script enable uh people on the plat creators on the platform to collect that kind of information or is it is it is is that not necessary since everything is kind of open and people are all connected.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

So the first thing the good thing about your audience having profiles themselves is that uh you can uh view the people who view your let's say your production profile page or the the readers who who read this book this month you can view them um now we do have a star script subscription which is a um of just about four dollars a month for the subscription and that does enable you to see this so that is kind of behind a subscription though it is very um cost friendly uh to get access to that where you can see wow these people are the readers that I have and you can go visit their profile page and see who your readers are where you're not gonna get that ability on other platforms because they're not for for let's say for books for example because they don't have the social element to them. So it's just not built in uh that your individual profile let's say on Amazon cell publishing is not going to show that kind of stuff. Additionally we have this kind of this um let me actually address your anal analytics question but our goal would be to give you those types of analytics about the demogra the demographics uh that you have so that you can basically make better product you could say you know because a lot of times you might have um some idea for your for you have your book concept your movie concept whatever it is but you might also want to get to to see you know the the data of you know who your audience actually is maybe it's a little bit different than you expect maybe it's not the same as your general market research and maybe the general market research the external data tells you one thing but then you start releasing your product and maybe it's ongoing like like a an episode episodic like a book a chapter at a time a comic book series a podcast a TV show that is happens you know where you keep releasing more and more content as time goes by you say wow my audience is actually this age range and not this age range so I definitely feel that that all that analytical data will be useful so that you can create a better product. You can say wow okay my audience is younger so these pieces aren't going to work as well because maybe that is um targeted towards a maybe an older audience. So I can now further refine my product and make it connect deeper with my audience. And so yeah you're you're right and that's actually an issue that I don't hear people ask very often that you just you don't have access to that data on some of these platforms with when you're licensing your content. And so it's hard for you to refine that product and this kind of goes actually into the deeper meaning behind the name star script uh becoming a star as like the Hollywood term we usually usually use it on the individual level someone becoming a a star shining bright everybody can see them and then script would be the term for a story. So the idea is to create better stories. How can we create better stories? And so with this platform our goal is to um is to enable uh people to create better stories from a collaboration standpoint from an audience connection standpoint audience feedback standpoint and analytics play a huge role in that so yes we want to give those analytics from a demographic level uh from an activity level uh and also from a revenue level so that way you can make your project more sustainable so is star script just for creators or if someone is just a fan of whatever music books movies can they uh get onto star script or subscribe to star script or is it just sort of a creator to creator platform? No it's it's both it's creator to creator and creator to consumer uh which kind of brings us to some another issue is that a lot of other platforms out there are not discovery friendly. Now we're a smaller app so in the sense that we don't have millions of people on the platform right now because we're new and really just launching some of these features um that we that uh we don't have that massive discovery element but also there's a that there's a pro to that in that the platform's new so that means it's not saturated with a bunch of you know a bunch of content but yes the goal is for people to actually go on the app as a consumer and to discover content on the app rather than being funneled from another platform onto this app because we have one or two features that the that is beneficial for them. We want it to be to where the they creators come on the app and they're like I'm sorry not creators the consumers or the fans they come on the app and they say hey I'm looking for this type of content here they go through the search they search they check out the profile they find it and they say you know what maybe I'll follow this I'll check out their free content for a while and then uh either or maybe straight away they look at the membership tiers and they say wow uh this is actually quite affordable. I'm just gonna go ahead and subscribe to this person uh this uh this production here and I'm gonna get this content added to the to the library which uh actually kind of raises another issue as well is on some platforms out there that are uh would be maybe competitors or other platforms that people are finding solutions on um there's a lot of people when they create their subscription tiers that they choose something like five dollars a month or seven dollars a month or $10 a month. And we found through market research that this is actually not sustainable for creators. This has really maybe less to do with the platform and more to do just with the the kind of the analytical side as if people are paying 10 to 15 to 20 dollars streaming platforms where they get hundreds of different pieces of content. And then a creator is saying hey come on and check out my work maybe maybe here's some free free some free content but maybe then if you want to get access to the exclusive content, maybe get access to a private group also as well where you can get early releases or further connection with the creators or something that it's $5 a month or $8 a month or $10 a month we find that that's actually an unsustainable model because how many projects can the average um fan contribute to if they're spending five to eight to $10 a month for each one and then you got the major platforms that there are also maybe subscribing to where they're paying $10, $15, $20 for a lot of different content. So it turns out that one number I found through market research is about nine months that your average supporter for something like five dollars and above a month a month is actually only going to support you for nine months before they look at their bank account and maybe say hey this is getting too expensive. I can only support you know maybe five people at this rate and so I've got to go ahead and let this one go, let this one go, let this one go. And so that you know and think about why what's the whole point of the subscription model uh for from a creator standpoint, the point of it is so they can get residual income. They can get recurring income that maybe is somewhat predictable that they could sustain their project with. But now if every nine months on average they have to basically re-earn or reconvert a whole new audience that's going to pay those amounts then they don't have a residual income. They have a nine month residual income right and every nine months they have to re-earn it or every month they're constantly trying to re-earn the same money rather than building higher and higher revenue streams. So we're finding that it may be better to do a lower amount a lower barrier to entry for that restricted content so that it's just it's it's negligible amount and so the number I like to kind of go with is a dollar a month as an example. Okay. If I'm as a a a a fan going on a platform like Starscript and I can contribute simply a dollar a month to become a member. Now maybe they have some higher tiers for some more exclusive diehard fans or something that's fine. And and again I was star script you have the freedom to do what you want if you want to make something for $100 a month you know or $500 a month you you can do that. However when you do something like a dollar a month then people are going to contribute to you and they're our theory is they're likely going to stay longer because the the dollar amount is less and they're gonna think more of do I like this creator? Do I want to just simply support this creator? Is me unsubscribing from them and losing that or gaining that dollar really going to change my financial condition at all? No. So I'm gonna keep contributing to them because I like what they're doing. I want to support them and if a lot of people this is the crowdfunding I concept here is if a lot of people contribute a little bit of money to this creator, that's gonna support that creator to the point to where they're gonna be able to keep making this content and it stops them from having to get also outside investors, which can actually affect the quality of their content and kind of shift things which we you know we know in many ways. I think it's very famous in the music industry oh yeah this band was producing really amazing content until they signed with this record label and now they changed their content to be more mainstream or something to you know and then now I don't like their music anymore or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

It's kind of a famous thing like sold out right as we as we call it yeah so also do it do you does Star Script give the option to just have to allow consumers to pay a la carte like for example there was a podcast that I used to listen to that um I joined their subscription and I think it was like five bucks a month but first of all they didn't have any customer service like I you had you could only access the bonus content through an RSS feed and I couldn't figure out how to do it uh how to how to access this feed and they didn't have any kind of email support or any any kind of customer service. But if they had a buy me a coffee like once every couple of months I could throw them some spare change I would have done that. So I ended up like you like you the example you gave I ended up canceling my subscription because it's like first of all I can't access this content. Second of all they don't have any customer service to walk me through it. Third of all I don't I don't want an ongoing payment another yet another ongoing payment. If I could just throw you a donation like I do with you know political candidates that I support here and there, I would gladly do that. So is that an option to have you know to be able to let consumers pay a la carte?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

So we don't have like a one-time purchase uh option uh as of yet and one of the reasons why is because there's different considerations we plan on having it but there's different considerations to make because let's say uh I purchase your content that I now have permanently but then you want to delete your account there's some different considerations clearly there's still ways that it can be done because other platforms do it but we haven't built that part yet because there's different you know things we need to take into account for the rights of the creator. But uh as far as making a contribution that's let's say once a year or something and you get access for the whole year, that option is absolutely available. In fact by default when you set up a membership tier for your content first thing is let's say you have multiple pieces of content you can mix and you know you can add one and do one piece of content all a car like let's say you do season one for your podcast you could do season one for your podcast and a membership tier and then you could do that's a dollar a month and then for two dollars a month you could do seasons one two and three of your podcast with a group an exclusive group on Starscript and so with and so with that structure we what we have by default is that you could is that it it automatically gives you unless you choose not to have it it automatically gives you a monthly quarterly semi annual and annual uh uh pricing so you could just say yeah it's a dollar a month but uh you can get X amount discount if you just buy the yearly so you could pay uh whatever ten dollars or something like that but you get it for the entire year and then simply it will renew unless you cancel it will renew a year from now so you can make a simple a one-time payment and now you get access to that content for an entire year. And we sort of like I said we build in these automated discounts to kind of give you like a template to say hey try this as an option and you could adjust it uh as you deem fit to have to have different discounts. But it that that solves one issue there is the is that people can just purchase they don't have to worry about recurring. And then of course if you purchase more uh for more term you can get a discount for that uh you know because you're doing it for so long and then as far as the RSS feed that leads us back to the whole should this content belong in a post feed or should or some type of feed or should it belong in a library? And so our uh theory is that it should belong in a library. And yes you could still post on the platform to promote uh and but that's for that promotional kind of content not for the actual content itself right the home of the content is library focused. Um so that takes care of that issue with the feed and then you're talking about customer support. So Starscript of course itself has customer support technical support we have a chat um that it has both like a sort of an AI if you have just kind of quick questions and stuff like that and then also the human element as well. So you're not just stuck with an AI. So we have that for our platform and because it's a smaller newer platform, you know, where we try to be as responsive as possible and we really take feedback into account because we are building based on demand. And then also of course the the actual production itself can have a group for all of its followers and with that group they can answer support questions uh or give some other type of contact way if they want to but actually on the app they can actually just have a group um just for their followers and of course they can have exclusive groups for members only and then they can have a group for their team. So in a set in a way at this time they can have three different group types for a different audience.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Right, right. Do you think that a lot of um a lot of uh artists of different genres authors uh uh musicians are becoming are going independent uh sort of out of necessity or be or and also becoming um like as you said entreprene entrepreneurs because I think authors are one of the last few um creatives that can make money on like for example if you build up enough of an audience you can make money on on you know publishing your books on Kindle but if you're a uh if you're a musician it takes I've heard a million streams on something like Spotify only generates like three thousand dollars and if you have a band three thousand dollars dividing that you know trying to pay out your your band and co-writers and the producer that's that's not a sustainable living so as a musician I would think you have to sell merch and do live shows to make money because you can no longer sell physical copies of I mean vinyl has made somewhat of a comeback but I guess my question is a lot of creatives are becoming entrepreneurs and and selling merch and doing all these different things be out of necessity to to make a living or or make any kind of money off their art.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Yeah so that's actually brings up a a really good point so at least 40 years ago maybe more if you were to go to a bar and you wanted to play a song you go to the jukebox and put in a quarter to play that song one time. So not counting for decades of inflation 25 cents a song playing a song was worth 25 cents okay last I checked with platforms like Spotify I think on average a play is about half a penny. And so yes we are dealing with really a huge and and and by the way there's been no quality change to music. I would say music is equally even though there's an improvement in technology there's equally amazing music 40 50 years ago than there is today. The quality of the product has not changed yet the and the value the intrinsic value of that product or um the let's say monetary value of that product you know theoretically shouldn't have changed you know and it uh because also that what was kind of cool about music is that one song doesn't necessarily compete with another song in many ways because everybody wants to have a huge you know everybody requires listening to many different songs right to and for entertainment purposes. So we have this degradation of the value of a play for a song and while that helps for the can on the consumer side it does not help on the creator side and it's like you said where million streams on some of these platforms yield such a small amount of money it seems completely unsustainable. And yes there are other revenue streams for musician musicians as you and you named them there's touring right there's the licensing there's the uh merchandise but yet the product itself the main product itself which is the music is not valued but could it be valued? And so if if a a band that I like uh were on a platform and said look our music is being released on this platform here and we're asking for and star strip doesn't necessarily have this structure yet but it's just theoretically just to get the idea if they said hey you know what five cents a play for our music would really support us. It would help our band continue. Right now we all have day jobs and for us to you know continue making music for us to make this next album you know we're looking to get X amount of subscribers that commit to this much amount of time uh uh I would say most listeners would say five cents like it all I gotta do is click a button and this and I and then this person gets five this uh band gets five cents or or maybe even 25 cents a month or something like that. That's a no-brainer. Like of course I want to support them especially if if they them not getting it is going to stop them from making music. And we don't even know we don't even see the statistics on uh this type of stuff because the data I don't think really exists how many of our music of our fans or sorry how much of our beloved music out there that we really like did not and there's not new music by them being produced simply because they cannot sustain their project because they don't have that those commercial licensing deals. And this brings us to kind of another issue is why can't I go on these major platforms and license a song? Like because licensing actually makes up a fairly large portion of successful musicians' uh revenue but yet the major platforms that host all the content actually don't even have the ability to license you know so you have there's other and of course there's other platforms there's like you know audio jungle there's other platforms and clearly we have an AI coming into play as well but there's other platforms out there that have the licensing the kind of Adobe stock type of non-exclusive license structure right for music um and for visual art as well right and for also now um video content as well right but those are sort of different than the platforms that host the the content themselves the content that we're actually kind of interested in maybe licensing that it that revenue stream isn't even available. But with Starscript we intend to actually make that available it's part of our uh roadmap that we have licensing structure in fact we want to have the licensing and include blockchain technology with that for better accounting for the licensing of content whether it's exclusive licensing or non exclusive licensing we want to enable that on the platform and so that is part of our uh part of our vision for the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Well Zach, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I just have a couple of final questions for you. So you talked about what inspired you and your brother to start Starscript. What inspired you to originally become a writer? What influenced you, or was there a particular author that you read that you thought, oh, I want to, I want to do this?

SPEAKER_01 44:10

It actually happened yet in different pieces. I would say the most major three would be Star Wars, um, Harry Potter, and um Spider-Man actually. Um, and I'm not saying Spider-Man is necessarily my top three favorite stories that have ever existed, but there's specific points in time in my life that I remember thinking, like I remember watching Spider-Man and thinking to myself, it was one of the Toby Maguire Spider-Man movies. And then I remember going home and like buying this comic book that was like the first hundred Spider-Man comics, just like in one book, right? And I was reading that. And I remember like, I want to connect. Yeah, I remember wanting to play that the video game because I want to connect with this the story more and more. Now, some people would maybe go to that next level and they would do like the live action role play, or they would dress up for Comic-Con in the Spider-Man outfit, dress up for Halloween. And um, and there's my most, my biggest influence, I actually haven't mentioned yet, which I will, but the the need that I found was that I wanted to connect with the story on a deeper level and I couldn't. Because as you grow older, uh maybe for some, dressing up in the costume by itself is not wouldn't be enough. Playing the video game wouldn't be enough. Not to say that that's there's anything wrong with that medium, right, of connection, but it isn't what I what I'd actually want to be is like be the character in the story. How can I play that character without being, let's say, the actor itself and auditioning for the next, you know, Spider-Man role in the future or something like that. So there is a connection with the story problem that I found that I felt myself hungry to connect deeper. I felt the same thing with Star Wars. I felt the same thing with Harry Potter. Now, of course, things the mediums evolve, right? Harry Potter was a book and then it became a movie. I felt more, maybe some more connection there. And then uh now we have the Universal Studios, right? Harry Potter World and Dygon Alley, things like that. I felt now more connection, right? Maybe I could dress up as Harry Potter. I think I did dress up as uh one of the uh Gryffindor Hogwarts student one year for Halloween. Okay, I've got a little bit deeper of a connection. But that was kind of my the thing is I felt like I I wanted to connect deeper and deeper with stories. And then that kind of inspired me to create stories myself, right? As well. I was like, well, I want to create my own world. And funny thing, as an author, I have full control over what happens in this story, you know, and I so I like the idea of taking my imagination, putting it on paper, telling a story, and then maybe also like I was saying in the beginning of the interview, is that I maybe there's some messages, maybe some philosophical messages, messages uh that maybe can't be explained in a few words that I wanted to deliver. And I feel like I could deliver that through storytelling. And then the the number one influence that I had for pursuing the path of being a writer and a storyteller and also an entrepreneur to create star script and even what the other products that we want to release in the future with Star Swift was which isn't just this app, which is actually gonna enhance the creation or I'm sorry, the connectivity between the audience and the story by maybe becoming a part of the story. The number one influence would have to be Walt Disney.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Just any Disney uh uh property or a particular movie or it would be Disney himself, Walt Disney.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Oh, Walt Disney himself, Walt Disney himself, because as an innovator, he as far as I know, by watching documentaries on biographies and stuff, he started out simply as a cartoonist, right? And he made, what was it, um Oswald the Rabbit, I think was the first character he made. And back then you'd actually sell your rights to your content, like the all the rights to the distributor. So he'd like lost the rights to that, and that's why he ended up creating Walt Disney Company. And you know, an audience member can correct me or whatever if I'm wrong on any of this. But this is from what I recall from the documentary, and so he ended up creating uh a mouse as something else that he would own under a new company called Walt Disney Company because he wanted to own it. That's why he named it after his own name for that reason. And I think his wife actually kind of changed the name to Mickey. Say, hey, how about Mickey? And he see, I think it was going to be Mortimer Mouse or something. But she said, How about yeah, she said, How about Mickey? So then he created that and then he innovated even more by not just creating an iconic character, an iconic cartoon series that he owned. So that's kind of his self-publishing journey, right? Then he went into the world of creating uh full uh feature length um uh movies, which was Snow White was the first one. Now, a lot of people thought that this wasn't gonna work because the a child doesn't have the attention span for feature length, and an adult isn't going to be interested in watching a cartoon. So they that's and his thought was the opposite. His thought was no, this is gonna connect the uh parents with the children and through imagination, right? And we're gonna do that. And then he went beyond, right, and to say, oh, I'm gonna actually create a place where where the parents and the children can um can enter these worlds in a different way. So that's that's very inspiring that he innovated in the storytelling space to as went to went independent for one, and then innovated on the feature-length film uh for on another level, and then also further innovated with Disneyland. So that's sort of my dream and my goal is to do the same thing. I and he also was working on creating stories himself, right? So he has his stories, then he has his entrepreneurial endeavors to enhance the storytelling space. So that in in that way, he would be my biggest inspiration. So looking to make something different, but still having those underlying characteristics.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't think most people think of Walt Disney as like probably the most uh successful independent creative ever. They think of Disney as like this huge international brand and don't really know the origins of how it came to be that.

SPEAKER_01 50:26

Yeah, yeah. And also we've just got advancing technology and we've got, I think, an ever-ending thirst for people wanting to connect with stories on a deeper level, and also like it could be your product, you know, for the audience members out there who are working on some type of self-published project, it could be your project that people are looking to you know to connect with, right? On a deeper and deeper, deeper level. They want to connect with what you're working on, they want to connect with you, they want to connect with others that also see the value in your work. And with Star Script, we hope to unify that, you know, and to be the home for that world to exist.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

Right. So if people want to get involved with Starscript, if they want to subscribe or get on the platform or reach out to you, how do they do that?

SPEAKER_01 51:20

So um they can go to Starscript.com if they're on desktop, or if they're on mobile, they could also go to Starscript.com, but it's just gonna link them to the uh Apple and Google Play Stores where they can download the app. So it's all available there. Most all features are available across uh mobile app and desktop uh as well. I've even got a some projects myself on there that I've uh started putting out. Um, and uh so that's how they can connect with it. And I just ask people, even that we are a new platform, right? And so this could be a great opportunity for them to for uh to self-publish their work, to connect with a new uh growing audience and to even help invite their audience to come to a platform that has the architecture, you know, that's gonna enable them to build a more interconnective uh environment around their work. So uh yeah, so that's all there for them. And if they want to uh contact uh me directly, they could, you know, uh just use contact at starscript.com to send an email. And um, you know, I'd love to engage with people that are on the platform, they have questions, they have feedback. Uh, we're like I said, we're very responsive at this point to the demand to our to our audience and really want to make something that works for all of these different mediums. Um, so that's how, yeah, that's how they can connect on there. And um, one last thing I wanted to just say about our architecture is that uh um that it allows for a uh episodic uh structure or a series in series structure where you can release a piece of content at a time. So for those self-published authors that might be in your audience, you while you might already be on another platform, you might want to consider uh re-releasing on Starscript and releasing a chapter at a time, which will kind of give you a different structure for you to kind of release a piece of your content, uh, promote it before, promote it after, engage with your audience about it, and then go ahead and promote and then release the next piece of content. Um so uh, but yeah, we invite anybody on your audience to uh to come on and and join. And we really appreciate uh the time investment they give to uh see if this platform is right for them, and we really hope it is, and we believe so.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

Well, Zach, thanks so much for speaking with me and for creating this outlet for creatives. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 53:46

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks so much for the opportunity and for having me today.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

Thank you for listening to the Culture Beats Podcast. If you like this content and would like to lend your support, please leave us a review, a rating, andor a comment. That helps other people discover the podcast. Culture Beats is an independent endeavor. Views expressed by guests are their own. Thanks again, and talk to you soon.