Building a business is hard. Building a business in the music industry is even harder. Artists and managers put their blood, sweat, and tears into their businesses, spending as many as 200 days at a time on the road. On this episode we hear from music industry executives, founders, and innovators telling us how they found their niches, how they built their businesses, and what advice they have for aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to enter the space.
Building a business is hard. Building a business in the music industry is even harder. Artists and managers put their blood, sweat, and tears into their businesses, spending as many as 200 days at a time on the road. On this episode we hear from music industry executives, founders, and innovators telling us how they found their niches, how they built their businesses, and what advice they have for aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to enter the space.
Welcome to the Drop the Mic podcast where we'll dive into conversations with some of the music industry's most established professionals Like all of our episodes, what you will hear today has been created and curated by Stanford students who are breaking their way into the music scene. I'm Jay LeBouef and I lead Stanford University's music industry initiatives. Whether you're aspiring to launch your career in the music industry are already a music industry pro, or just curious to learn more. We've got you covered.
Federico Reyes:Hi everyone. Welcome back to Drop the Mic Season Two, where we chat with music industry professionals to get an exclusive behind the scenes look at the industry. My name is Federico Reyes and I'm a senior at Stanford University. My name is Angel Smith and I'm a senior at Stanford, majoring in African and African-American studies.
Melanie Okuneye:My name's Melanie and I'm a student at Stanford graduate school of business.
Federico Reyes:and today we'll be talking to entrepreneurs who have built businesses centered around their niches. In spaces that they feel are currently underrepresented. First of all, we have a really exciting interview with Rico Brooks.
Ace:As CEO of a Delta Thomas management Rico Brooks oversees the music careers of some of the most notable names in the industry, including platinum selling producers on the digital international producers, Bobby Johnson, and iBeatz as well as hitmakers B Wheezy Beats, D Rich, and Grammy award winning songwriter, producer, Tasha Catour. Brooke's got his start in music as a sales associate of Peppermint Music and his start in management helping to shape the careers of various hip hop artists as a manager, then president of Black Entertainment. With plans on developing a career in movie production, branding and strategic marketing. The future holds limitless opportunities for this respected entrepreneur. Thank you for joining us Rico. Could you share a little bit about yourself and how you got into the music industry?
Rico Brooks:After I graduated from Morehouse, I started working at a record store and then that's. How I met a lot of people, a lot of relationships that I have right now, like Block, Russel Spencer who had a deal with Bad Boy through Atlantic, you know, Puff label and then I was managing boys in the hood and gorilla zoe. Then I started working with producers, with Sonny Digital, Metro Boomin. It was basically word of mouth. It was like one brick at a time. I did not know of or see that I would be managing some of the biggest names in the music. I just was trying to serve my guys and super serve them. And so when I did that the word spread and other people like, Hey, I want you to do this for me. Yeah. So, it was like, Hey, I like what you did for this guy. Can you do that for me? So, and then it became like word of mouth. It basically turned me on to other people because they saw what I was doing for other guys. And they spread the word, you know, it's not like I was out there advertising and say, Hey, look, I do this. Hey, look, I do this. I never went out for guys. And I never really just chased, like guys who had names, we were always building from the ground up. It's crazy to see a guy come from like living with their parents or financial success and then becoming like really successful financially and being able to, move out and get their first car and get that first bank account and just all that stuff. So I got to see these guys basically become from teenagers to grown men, you know, and that's a beautiful journey.
Ace:I know you also have a big focus on financial literacy. How does this translate to the mission of your business?
Rico Brooks:Yeah, I definitely want to make sure my guys get paid. You know what I'm saying? it's hard to be happy if you're working even be productive, if you're hungry. And if you're hungry, you can't pay your bills. So other things like your, just your existence. If you're not existing, then it's hard to be creative. Cause you know, it's hard to just tell a person who don't have food or clothing or shelter to say,"Hey look, be creative."
Ace:Absolutely. It's admirable to hear you take this into consideration into how you work with your artists. My next question is how do you see your business changing what do you look forward to when you go to work?
Rico Brooks:I want to always be finding the next new guy. That's, my joy. Honestly, when I find the guy that nobody's heard of, or, you know, we're working on stuff and then we get a placement and then that brings me joy, you know? if I find a guy like say let's see let me see the example, like when I was working with, I still work with IBeats, he's from Budapest, Hungary and he sent me a beat when we started working together and I sent it to Oliver, Drake's manager and the next thing, you know, Drake cuts it. So that's my joy right there. seeing a vision become reality. I love that.
Ace:I know you manage a lot of great artists is there anyone in particular you think we should be listening to right now?
Rico Brooks:Music is, just like art, you know, it's in the eye of the beholder. Music is in the ears of the listener. But, you know, I listened to, everybody's talking about pooh shiesty you know, I listen to some of the guys i'm working with you know, of course imma say listen to famous twins, and I know we have a guy on the label, a 24 K golden he's working on some good music.
Ace:I'll definitely make sure to check out these artists. I want to end with you by asking what advice would you give to entrepreneurs trying to make their way into the music industry?
Rico Brooks:Yeah. If you have an idea you know, write it down and then start building towards it, you know, and don't give up on it. Ask for advice and maybe find a mentor that's doing something that's similar to what you want to do, or that can help you. Our fore fathers or the early settlers they built these roads so you don't have to make a new trail, but you can trail blaze if something is totally differently, you know, but I would try to seek out avenues and just go forward, you know, persevere too don't get down when it doesn't go your way, because it's going to be part of the story and you know, it's darkest just before Dawn.
Ace:Thank you. We go for taking us through your journey. I admire the culture of respect and care. You've cultivated for your artist, as well as your business mindset of financial literacy that goes into your commitment to making sure folks get paid. We'll be looking forward to your continued success next i chatted with music executive Mali Hunter. Melissa, also known as Mali Hunter is a music industry leader, executive producer, brand marketer, Emmy and Grammy nominated artists. She has been a resource and driving force behind many major artists, such as J Cole, Lenny Kravitz, Missy Elliott, and Drake. Mali is the founder of EarthAngelWorldwide, a nonprofit birth out of the transformative EarthGirl Creative Camp experience that brought women from all over the country together for a week of healing and musical collaboration. Mali is a CEO of the retina agency, and since transitioning from her partnership with TreeSound Studios is focused on giving her energy to women in music, through the EarthGirl Movement. Thanks for being here. Mali could you talk about how you got into the music business and what your journey has looked like so far?
Mali Hunter:One of my girlfriends uncle's best friends was an executive at Sony. So I did some internships stuff for him. And, I started my career musically producing music for commercials in Chicago, for a man named Alan Moore who was a big music jingle producer. So for jingles, they have, Cleo's, which is like Grammys and he had them all around his room. So I would, have to train and get down there and intern and just kinda be underneath him doing what I could as an intern. And, got my first break when someone didn't show up to sing for a Gerber ad. and he said, I can't believe you've been sitting underneath me all these months cause he was stressing out the singer didn't come So, when I saw how lucrative it was. And I decided I wanted to be a producer. My popularity, came from creating dinner parties when the records were done and feeding the press to listen to 2 Chainz and T.I., and Killer Mike and David Banner and J Cole and you know, all my buddies in the business and it worked out really well for me. So I was able to learn the business side by being in like a lot of people, you know, think going to school the best way to do, but I think hands-on a lot of times, way more important than just reading about it.
Ace:Now that you've done a lot of work for other people, how you moving towards building earth girl is a business what's the mission behind the work?
Mali Hunter:Earthgirl girl was planted for women to understand you, don't gotta be the one female rapper. You ain't gotta be the one female attorny, you don't have to be the one A&R accountant, you know, businesswoman, rapper, singer, dancer, whatever. We're stronger together and, earthgirl is a very magical thing because it became bigger than me because women started to find their tribes. my goal was to bring in the corporate women that I knew that were powerful at Viacom. I needed Chinkes Ratner, Michelle and all women there who, support me and the Earth Girls. For years new I would get back in music and television production. And my way back in was to teach girls how to make music for television and film and Viacom. So what I was doing, my team had just finished 150 songs with Missy Elliott and we had our first singles and she performed at the VMAs so the timing of the EarthGirl ATL camp was just incredible because it came off of my camp that we did and hosted at my old partners studio, which now we have our new stone wood studio, but it came off, you know, and January, and it disrupted the whole industry because every single person that was somebody wanted to be there. Everybody was welcome to come and make music and it was super, super special. And I knew we'd get Grammy nominations and we actually won a Grammy and couple of platinum records out of it and it was a magical thing. So when that happened, I said oh it's time for the girls because of power that I had and the attention that I had from being a part of this magical time, I wanted to pour into the women and I did, and all of these brands and Viacom came together and we got catalogs that we put together from Earth Girl. It was awesome because we're able to pay a couple bills for some of the tunes that the girls were putting in and they were able to get back in money and understand, Oh, this is how the business side works.
Ace:It's incredible how the creative camp has already made waves in the music industry how do you see this mission growing and changing?
Mali Hunter:Earth Girl is takes a woman who knows to help a woman to grow. I just see it sparking this continuous movement of women pouring into women and understanding that we're more powerful together and killing those old, it just has to be one queen in the room, you know? For years I've heard we're going to go in here and change the industry. No, ma'am I never wanted to. What I wanted to do was be a light understand aint nobody no victim over here, anywhere around me, we gone learn how this works and we going to play the game the way we play it, because every contract is different. Let me read and understand and know and fight for what's right for me and my friends. And that's what I do.
Ace:Hmm, that's really important work. Thank you. Finally is there any advice you would like to give to young entrepreneurs making their way into the music industry?
Mali Hunter:Well, it would depend on the person, I think, my dad used to tell me, don't give advice cause you'll send somebody down the wrong path that's not theirs. But I think I dropped a few gems earlier. One I'd say, because young people always say music is my life. And I always say, your life is your life. Music is part of your life, if you want to be in the music industry, you have to understand what you want. It's like saying I want to play football. Okay. What part of football do you want to play? Do you want to be the referee? What's your ultimate goal, you want to be a running back, quarter or what, what do you want to do? I would say if you're going to do music and it's something that you search after don't be fairy tale about it, figure out who's done it. How many years it took them to get there. And look at it like a long journey that you don't put a time limit on.
Ace:Great advice. Thank you, Molly for sharing your journey with us. It's grounding to learn how you've cared for artists and making their careers and how your committee to grading even more opportunity for women in music through earth girl. We have many more inspiring entrepreneurs in this episode so stay tuned for our next guest Pedro Cañas.
Federico Reyes:It's my pleasure to introduce our next guest. Pedro Cañas is an American house DJ and record producer. In 2020, he founded Midtown house LLC with a mission to reclaim Manhattan as the nightlife capital of the world. That same year, he began to work at Sony music entertainment in global digital advertising and graduated from the NYU's undergraduate music business program soon after. Welcome to the show Pedro. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What kind of education did you get?
Pedro Cañas:Yeah. So, I went to NYU and prior to that in high school, we didn't have a music tech or middle school, actually, we didn't have a music tech class, and I was already super into the idea of producing electronic music. So I took some courses in, in New York City. I was like the youngest kid there. I was like 14 and everyone else was around 20 years old to like their early thirties. Dude, I didn't understand, what they're producing, they're producing some techno and I'm listening to like Skrillex and deadmau5, what's this boring stuff you're making.
Federico Reyes:You have your own business. You started a record label. Tell us more about it. What is the mission or goal?
Pedro Cañas:I was living in mid on mid town. I was living in Chinatown, but I was living in Manhattan, basically in the city. And, all the underground house events were happening in Brooklyn. And I was just tired of listening to hip hop and reggaeton and pop music all day. And so I began to say, you know what, I'm going to have my own events, my own house events in the city in Manhattan. I'm going to, book DJs from Brooklyn underground scene to come play in Midtown. And so that's how it started. It was just Midtown House events solely. On classical house music or minimal house music, and the other mission is to educate people and to, bring house music back to Manhattan. That says as simple as it can get Sure.
Federico Reyes:Yeah. Do you have any mentors along the way that helped guide you through.
Pedro Cañas:Yes. In terms of mentors, earlier in the career, I call it a career because actually is a career. Like I choose to make, music, not only because I love it, but I actually want to make a career out of it. I, I love the idea of being able to produce records and sell them and have DJs play them around the world. Before I was talking about the unz unz unz techno stuff that these guys were making, there were 30 years old. Uh, I got dragged into it. I moved to, Zurich, Switzerland, and I began to notice underground scene. At a young age, I was 18 years old coming from the States. I began to go to the clubs there. I would stay there till like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM in the morning. And I got very into the underground house, scene. And in terms of mentors, to answer your question, I would say I've had a bunch over the past couple of years from, friends like Adrian Calvet who in a way he got me into the underground scene as well He's from Paris or from Bordeaux actually but now he was living in Paris and France. and he got me into like French disco. Then I had a Carlos Olandi from the basement discos in Spain, really guided me into the underground disco scene. And believe it or not. my most important mentor right now is, a person named Misha Hamadi who actually works at a bulge bracket bank.
Federico Reyes:Would you say that underground music is your niche?
Pedro Cañas:I started with EDM. It was great. I had no problem with it. And then as soon I hit the scene in Switzerland, with the minimal house, it's just, it's a whole different thing and I just got carried into it. So my niche is just house music. in the sense it's just more underground. Tracks are like six minutes long or 10 minutes long. And, uh, it's what you would listen to in a, in a basement, in a sweaty basement or like, on a beach in like Tulum or, in Cannes or something like that. Or in Bali. It's a whole different scene that I wasn't, exposed to in the U S at a young age, but I'm very happy now. I found my place within the electronic scene and it's definitely underground and a part of the niche actually is trying to, recognize that, classic house came from, neighborhoods in Chicago and New York from latinos and blacks as well. And, part of what Midtown house is, or the mission of Midtown house is to try to bring house music back to Manhattan, the idea of recognizing that house music's roots came from the U S and yeah. Trying to bring it back.
Federico Reyes:Yeah. What do you see your business going? How do you plan to grow it?
Pedro Cañas:The label had a residency. So basically every week I was booking DJs, I was playing and it was Thursday nights and it was just a great atmosphere, unfortunately, due to the pandemic I had to pivot the business completely from the live industry to the digital industry. And so that's when I already had some recognition in live events, within the local scene of New York and I started to, release music Midtown house. And it's been going well. Not only are there DJs that, represent New York or the U S but I have DJs in the roster that are from Argentina, from Switzerland, from, UK, from Russia, from France. And they all have some connection to manhattan, which has been a beauty. and in terms of, the team, it's just myself. I have things outsourced. But these people that I outsource to are part of the community as well as the team, because it's always just the same people it's basically pretty international. All done digitally.
Federico Reyes:Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. How do you see your business changing? Where do you want it to go looking forward?
Pedro Cañas:The business strategy for me is to be present in online streaming services that are not super big yet. I think it's very important to be, in line with other companies that are also in the come up trying to make it. What I see in trending is to try to figure out a valuable way of starting a business, just digitally making everything digital. In music consumption, I love when there's applications like TikTok these apps that just come out of nowhere and a high volume of users just begin to use them because they're unregulated and they do not have any forms of like ad credits in the beginning? I mean, take talk does now, so maybe time to move on to the next one, but in a sense that nowadays, as you might notice on Instagram, and we've even seen this on TV, on radio and Spotify, you name it, we're given ads. We're not really choosing the music that we're listening to. it's all being served to us in one way or another. Yeah. over the past year or two, we heard a lot of breakthrough artists, like BENEE for example, or, uh, you know, we heard the Rick Asterly track, res other than memes, right? So these are just things that just happen. And that's the beauty of, people and these types of sites, because it's not the big players that are controlling the music in that instance, it's the actual people that are sharing. So, um, I hope that continues. I hope people can just, you know, be sharing music and forget about things being served to them.
Federico Reyes:Yeah. And, to finish it off, what would be your advice for young entrepreneurs in the music industry?
Pedro Cañas:My personal advice for people that want to go into the music industry is to perhaps, study computer science or be in a finance role, and then minor in music business, or try to figure out how to intern in a music business company over the summer. The reason I say this is because studying computer science or finance is just so valuable in the industry And there's so many job postings for these types of roles. Spotify is always, posting about engineers and things like this. In a digital world that we're in right now, those are the best two majors to do. It also just depends on what you like because, the music industry is very different. There's the corporate ladder. and then there's the entrepreneurial ladder and the creative side. And, you know, everything's very different depending on who you talk to. And I would say that, I guess I'm, I'd say I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing at the moment. People, might think it's hard to create an LLC, or start a business. And it's really simple. You just look at your state, go to on your website, on the state's websites and try to figure out how to open an LLC. It's not super expensive to do. In New York, I think it's like 250 bucks maybe and you could start your own company. I think it's just very valuable for people to have this, especially at a young age, if you have that drive to be an entrepreneur, you should just do it from the beginning.
Federico Reyes:We just got some great advice from Pedro about putting yourself out there, building a business and going for it. Thank you so much for being on the show. Next up we talked to two entrepreneurs who are working hard to build their own businesses in this ultra competitive music industry
Michael Oguike:My name is Michael Oguike. I'm from Nigeria and I'm currently an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before my MBA, I used to work in energy for an oil and gas company in Nigeria, but my passion for technology really moved me to build my startup. So my startup is called Amplify Music and basically it lets people create collaborative playlists and enjoy social music. So think about the time where you're at a party, maybe a house party, we take group of friends and then you have different people who want to control the music. Some people want to play R&B. Some people have very bad taste in music, but you want all your friends to be able to come into one playlist and add and vote the songs they want to hear. So amplify music allows people to create that democratized playlist. Where people can enjoy social music and everyone gets to hear what they recommend and people are happier.
Melanie Okuneye:What kind of challenges do you foresee within the current music ecosystem or within, how people consume music? How do you plan to get over them?
Michael Oguike:So specifically speaking for Amplify Music, I think a key challenge for us is, monetization, firstly, and then secondly, with licensing for the service we're providing. So I'll talk firstly, about revenue or monetization. We currently do not host any music on our platform. What we do is we integrate with Spotify and Apple music APIs. So the challenge that introduces is if we provide this platform who is going to want to pay for both Spotify and then also pay for this other app. Secondly, in terms of like licensing, one opportunity we have is to say, take Amplify to a B2B model where our customers are going to be a restaurant or say hotels or for public places where it can serve as a jukebox in a more public environment, but the challenge with that is even in a public environment, the restaurants have to pay licenses. So there are organizations like BMI or ASCAP that require those companies or those restaurants to pay certain amounts of money to broadcast music. So when it gets into that kind of scenario, then you see that there's a legal implication of providing a service to those kind of customers, because they're going to say,"Hey, well maybe we're playing music illegally".
Melanie Okuneye:What would your advice be for young entrepreneurs in the music industry?
Michael Oguike:You know, people would usually say,"believe in yourself","believe in your idea" and all, but I think one thing that's very important is to build fast, grow quickly, build fast, learn fast, fail fast, and a hard lesson I've learned is sometimes you have this flamboyant idea or this product you have in your mind that you want to build and from the get-go you want your product to connect artists. You want it to have chat features. You want it to have emojis. You want it to play music. You want to be able to sell tickets from day one. I think it's very important for you to identify the most fundamental and primal value that your product is going to give to the customers and build on that very foundational level.
Melanie Okuneye:Michael. Thank you for sharing your experiences and learnings from your music technology startup in Nigeria. Now, we are going to shift the focus to Sameen Sameen, please tell us about yourself.
Sameen Singh:My name is Sameen Singh. I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Create Music Group. I wasn't always in the music industry. I actually started in Finance. I was doing Investment Banking on Wall Street: Private Equity investing, always with a focus on media and entertainment. And then I made the switch into working in music, starting at a music festival company, in Europe, which was a lot of fun and, I guess, a relic of the pre-pandemic era,(hopefully it will come back). And then I got my MBA and joined a company called Create Music Group.
Melanie Okuneye:What does Create Music Group do?
Sameen Singh:We started as a YouTube company back in 2015 or so. We developed this technology to crawl Youtube to identify primarily user generated content that was using unlicensed music and therefore not paying royalties on that music and back in 2015/2016 YouTube's content ID system wasn't as robust as it is today. So it actually was really meaningful money for artists. Their music was being played in people's videos and they just weren't getting it. They weren't getting any money from that. And especially in the electronic industry, for electronic DJs and stuff, this was like meaningful revenue and that remains a big part of our business today. Today, we distribute for over 5,000 labels. After getting into distribution, we started doing direct distribution with artists. And so we work with close to 90,000 artists that we distribute music through. And on top of just plain vanilla distribution, we are more of a label services company at this point where we're offering everything from digital marketing services, to publishing and synchronization, to licensing, to even advances, which are the traditional record label products. The third major piece of our business is a digital ad agency called Flight House, which is a Tik Tok based ad agency. They are the largest brand on Tik Tok today with over 27 million followers on that platform and with Tik Tok being a music based, social network, social discovery network, it's an opportunity for us to amplify a lot of the music that we distribute through Flight House by, doing dance challenges and like other viral campaigns. We got number two on the Inc 5,000 fastest growing companies in America lists this past summer. Which is the, I think the highest ever ranking for a music company or even a media company more broadly.
Melanie Okuneye:So can we actually talk about monetizing music? How do you think about this in the music industry?
Sameen Singh:I mean, if you look at the history of listening to a song and how much that is valued in the market, we don't have to start at the beginning, but let's start in the nineties and early 2000s with CDs, right? As a consumer, you're paying$20 to buy an album and that was the market value of that content. Then there was a period where with piracy and everything, where content basically came free and artists weren't making any music on the monetization of their recorded IP. And then with streaming it saved the industry in the sense that you went from free to actually making money off of your recorded music again. But the monetization rates are so low. A stream on Spotify premium is still like three tenths of cent, right? So the market rate of a stream is three tenths of a cent. On YouTube, it's a fraction of that. That's why you see artists look to other ways to monetize their music and, whatever it is. That's why you saw such a huge growth in the live music industry in the last 10 years. The live music industry from a revenue perspective is actually bigger than the recorded music industry. But that also creates a problem because artists are on the road for 200 days a year, which is, in any line of work, that's a pretty taxing lifestyle. Even if you're staying in really fancy hotels and flying on private jets, it's still hard to be on the road for that much. And on top of that, you're expected to continually make new music and engage with your fans on other platforms. It's a pretty daunting job. So recorded, save the music industry for some time. Obviously with the pandemic you saw when that went away, how the recorded industry got so exposed again, and this is why you saw a lot of artists, big name artists, go back and look at the recording contracts and were like, wait, why am I giving up so much? Why am I not being paid as much on my recorded? Because when the money's flowing in from all these different sources, it's fine. But when it dries up you start to re-examine things. The recording saved the industry but I think that's why musical artists are always looking at new ways to monetize whether it's their art or their engagement or their relationship with their fans. That's why you see things like Cameo, right? Come up as another way for an artist to monetize with fans: Only Fans. These subscription platforms, and even like the next, the newest thing, whatever it is like this week, just because we happen to have been talking this week, the latest thing is NFTs. Right. Which, in my opinion is a bit of a fad, but it's just artists see that they can actually monetize these valuable assets that they've created. And so whatever medium or platform or network they're able to do it on, they're open to doing, but it comes down to, because on the recorded side the structure doesn't work for them.
Melanie Okuneye:So one thing you talk about a lot asCreate Music Groupis empowering artists. How do you empower artists?
Sameen Singh:You know, a traditional record label deal is 80/20 in favor of the label. And the label owns the master i.e. the IP is registered to them. They own it in perpetuity. Our deals are 20/80. The opposite and in the artist's favor and they own their IP in perpetuity. So everything down to the art core product, and then even more recently, we introduced a credit card, which is the music industry's first credit card for artists and creators. The biggest pain point in music has always been payments: artists, getting their money fast. Not even getting their money fast. Knowing what they're making and then getting that money. We were there about a year and a half ago. We're still the only company that does it, which I'm surprised by. Our daily earnings portal, which shows artists how much money they're making from the three major platforms, Spotify, Apple, and YouTube on a daily basis. So, you know, yesterday you got a million streams. That equates to$30,000. That's going to hit, but you're going to get it eventually when the money flows through the system. No one else shows that even to this day and the artists that we work with, literally check that thing 10 times a day. Cause you can see how much money you're making on a real-time basis is pretty crazy. The next evolution of that, which is getting that money, right? Like it's great that I can see that I'm going to get paid$30,000, but I want to get that money. And, it takes anywhere from, as quickly as a month, if it's just traditional streaming from Spotify, who's probably the quickest to pay to six months to a year. If you're talking about publishing and it's international and it has to flow through that whole complex system. So the natural, next step was: showing you that money's cool, but how do we get you that money? And, we can't as Create Music Group, no one, even if you're the biggest music company in the world can tell Spotify or YouTube or some collection agency and Germany to, pay that money quicker. But because we know that the money is earned, we're comfortable. And we figured out a way to basically front you that money through a credit card.
Melanie Okuneye:Thank you Sameen for your time and for answering my questions. One last fun question for both you and Michael. Who should we be listening to right now in music
Sameen Singh:So I'm more of a Hip Hop person myself. So right now two artists that I'm listening to are Pooh Shiesty. You know, he's got that song"Back In Blood" with Lil Durk and SSGkobe who is this really up and coming artists. He just came out with two awesome songs last week.
Michael Oguike:I'm trying to fight the urge to say Burna Boy. I remember in our first quarter, a lot of the TAs used to take song requests for people who wanted to just request songs and I knew there was a class I was in and I requested Burna Boy, and the next day when Burna Boy was playing in class, the TA actually said Burna Boy is the most requested artist across like the entire class.
Melanie Okuneye:Thanks to our listeners for sticking with us. We just heard from five individuals in the music business with very different perspectives from working with artists. Running a label residency. Raising money supporting others and our communities and the blood, sweat, and tears needed to build something in the industry. Thanks for tuning into drop the mic