Roneil Rumburg - Music And The Metaverse: How Decentralised Streaming Gives Power Back To The Artists

Full transcript: Roneil Rumburg on London Real

2:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Roneil Rumburg, the software engineer, venture capitalist and blockchain pioneer.

2:50 You are the co-founder and CEO of Audius, the digital music streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and their latest music. Founded in 2018, Audius is a fully decentralized, open source community based on both Ethereum and Solana blockchains, which has grown from 500,000 monthly listeners at the end of 2020 to over 7 million today. Prior to Audius, you co-founded the Bitcoin peer-to-peer payment company Backslash and, more recently, co-founded an early stage fund for the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

3:19 Here you were responsible for seed investments into blockchain and AI companies, including Lightning Labs. Last year Audius partnered with TikTok, and your aim is to challenge platforms like Spotify and put more money and financial tools into the hands of artists. Roneil, welcome to London Real. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

3:40 Hey, it’s great to be here, and, you know, I was wondering how to kick this thing off, and I had a flashback to a documentary film I saw recently, and I wanted to tell you about it. It was the Eagles documentary film, and one thing that became really apparent is that the Eagles were complaining that they were the artists and they never saw the revenue, and then I think it was Geffen that was complaining that he had to protect them from all of the problems that they had to deal with. The artists and, you know, renewal.

4:06 It seems like an age-old narrative of artists trying to, I don’t know, probably get the value of their creation. And again, record labels and artists have been fighting for 20 34 years. It sounds like you’re trying to change all that and maybe cut out these middlemen, connect listeners to the artists, maybe talk to me about the whole concept of Audius before we get into the blockchain. Is it about trying to end this argument once and for all, or am I understanding what you’re doing right?

4:36 It is exactly about ending that argument once for all. Our take here is that there should be a free market around content and a free market around fans’ engagement with artists, with content, with everything else. You know, the best way I find to kind of illustrate how things came to be today is with a little bit of a history lesson, and if you rewind back, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, when the first recorded music started to come on the scene. What I mean by that is consumers could actually start to buy records to play in their own home and to distribute If you think about the complexity of shipping an album at that time, right?

5:21 It meant running a factory to actually produce physical records. It meant a distribution network, a physical distribution network to put those records into trucks and send them out to retail stores, and retail stores only had a finite amount of shelf space, right? There were, in a given year, maybe a hundred or a few hundred artists that could reach national notoriety in here in the United States, because there was just not enough space available for there to be more.

5:52 And in that world where there was this massive upfront capex, complete kind of lack of clarity around how successful a record would be before you through marketing money and all that distribution tool chain added. The economic breakdown, which, you know, today is estimated to be about 12 of all money made in music goes to artists. Of the 42 billion dollars the entire industry generates, kind of makes sense, right? In that world, but the economics of the industry have not changed in the last 50 years, despite the fact that today digital distribution means the marginal cost of reproducing music is zero.

6:36 And the cost of creating music at a level of quality that’s equivalent to, you know, what you could get sitting in a professional studio with an audio engineer and everything else, that’s also declined substantially to a point where I can sit in my bedroom now, and create music that’s pretty damn close to what you can create in a studio with a team. So all of the all of that change has happened, but the economics of the industry haven’t changed, and that’s where, you know, we believe the opportunity for Audius lies. That’s a really important history lesson.

7:12 You know, it’s important. You’re taking me back to my childhood, you know, where there was kind of one movie in theaters for a while, like you said, a few big albums, a few big artists, and it was because we didn’t have this long tail effect, really, as well, right? We didn’t have the internet. We weren’t able to connect an individual to an individual artist, and you know, we’re kind of still stuck in that old mentality somewhat. I remember, I think I had Ice-T the hip-hop artist on, or one of the musicians that was complaining that, you know, even as recently as 10 years ago, in their contract there was like provisions for, you know, broken pieces of media, and like, you know, CD cases, and they’re like, wait a second, this has been digital for a while, but they were still being charged for things as if it was a physical space.

7:57 And that mindset, it just kept permeating to where, like you said, today with that kind of a marginal cost of creation and distribution coming near zero, that 12 doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense anymore, does it? No, it does not. And, you know, we believe the way to address that and to solve that is to say, you know, we don’t, we don’t know what music should be valued at. I don’t think anyone does, but a market can figure out how it should be valued, right?

8:24 And if you give freedom back to the artists to determine their own pricing and their own monetization structures, we believe they’ll be able to make substantially more than they can when there are these centralized intermediaries deciding, all right, here’s how much a subscription costs, here’s how much you make from it. And you’re, you know, either you’re in or you’re out, right? There needs to be a spectrum and a gradient of different levels of monetization centered around different types of opportunities, and that’s just the tools for that have never existed to date.

8:59 Yeah, this feels almost like the Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 conversation, which we’ve had on the show quite a few times, and, you know, just to bring people up to speed, in that Web 2.0 world you have these big company gatekeepers that, again, have created a lot of value but now take a big chunk out. We’re talking about the Facebooks and the Googles and the Amazons and the Apples. You know, they take between 30 and 50 of the transactions out, even though it at the end of the day it becomes a peer-to-peer transaction, oftentimes.

9:27 With Amazon, I’m a YouTube creator. You know, they’ll take 30, 45, 55 of those ad revenues, and in a Web 3.0 world where we can go peer-to-peer, you’re kind of like, well, let’s see where the market makes that, because it’s probably not 50, and we’re seeing this happen with crypto assets, and I guess you guys are now really the ones that are pioneering that way with pricing. Audio, right? And that music, it’s pretty exciting to be on that. Yeah, we’re very excited.

9:57 Our community of artists is excited. Now over 250 000 folks there, creating music and sharing it with their fans. It’s been a hell of a ride, and this community has never ceased to amaze us every step along the way. Well, I’d love to get into some of the details. You know, one of the things I’m sure you hear all the time as a comparison is Spotify, which maybe is in that Web 2.0 world, and again, you know, we always hear in the headlines that, you know, streaming services pay the artist cents on the, you know, cents, pennies, and everyone’s always up in arms, and the fans say and the artists say it, but also right now they do a lot of the distribution.

10:39 Do you compare yourself to them and say, look, in the future things will go direct? You know, how do you look at yourselves versus a record label and say, a streaming service, to now where you are now? It’s a great question. So we actually don’t see ourselves as similar to or even really compare ourselves against Spotify. I think Spotify is great for the type of fan that it serves, the less engaged sort of wanting to set it and forget it, like click play on a playlist, let it be, and treating music more like a jukebox of sorts, right?

11:17 The type of fan that’s really found their home on Audius is the one that wants to build a deeper connection with and a deeper relationship with their favorite artist. And that is a smaller segment of a fan base, but they are a far more highly engaged segment of the fan base. So, you know, tying back to that kind of 42 billion dollar market map of music where 12 is going to artists, the majority of that 12 is actually coming from live shows, merch, and other forms of direct engagement, not from recorded music, to a point where, you know, we have artists in our community that have millions of listeners on networks like Spotify, but they’re making more money from low single-digit hundreds of users subscribing to them on Patreon, or these other channels, right?

12:07 And that’s a crazy thing, right? You know, I think if you take that to its logical conclusion, you start to see a model that looks like Audius, where there’s a significant amount of content that’s free, freely available as a way for artists to build a fan base, but for that top percentile or a few percentile fans that really want to deeply engage with that artist. There’s a whole gradation of different monetization levels and opportunities for them to engage, where they’re able to hear stuff that they don’t get to hear otherwise, or they’re able to engage with that artist in ways that they couldn’t otherwise, going all the way up to, you know, kind of at the tippy top end, being able to do things like DM with that artist, or, like, you know, get feedback from the artist on music that the fan maybe is trying to make, or like a remix of that artist content that they’re trying to make.

13:05 So that’s really where we feel there’s more value to be unlocked here. And in music there really isn’t a comparable to that type of model but Patreon, OnlyFans, and others in different verticals have found a lot of success with this type of model. So we’re very excited to bring that to our community in a music native way. I think this is a really important point that if anyone who’s an artist is listening to this, I think it’s important, because the typical artist mentality is maybe I’ll make a little bit of money off the volume of the music I’m going to sell, but the truth is that a lot of the successful business models is like almost that freemium model where 99 of your users won’t pay you, but one percent might pay you in a healthy way.

13:52 So even if you can know that as an artist, you might behave differently. And, um, I think it was Steve Aoki that said something recently, like, in his last, you know, few NFT drops he made more money than in, you know, his music from years and years. And if you’re an artist, I think that could even change the way you think about how you create your content, focusing on the few, not the many, as one of my mentors would say. And, you know, if I’m honest, Roneil, it’s very much our business model here.

14:20 I mean, I’ve had, I think, our content has been watched a billion times, but the truth is a few thousand people come and join my DeFi Academy and pay for training and come into our live events and they’re the ones that really are the die-hard fans that want to pay for more access and more training, and the millions and millions of views on YouTube. You know, trying to get paid from YouTube is a fool’s mission, of course. Maybe I’ll be talking to you guys in the future.

14:45 But it’s an important thing to realize and are more artists getting the fact that maybe they’re gonna have this kind of freemium model and that would be the way for them to make money going forward. They are, because their economics have actually looked this way for the last five to ten years already, because they’re making the majority of their money as an artist from the folks who are buying concert tickets, merch, these other things along those lines. What Audius is trying to do is bring more of that activity digital and digitally native, from kind of the traditional world economy if you will.

15:24 Right? So yeah, I think folks have already wrapped their heads around it. I think the industry is slowly catching up and catching on to this. But it’s you know, I think over, especially over the last year or so, it feels like folks are really waking up to the fact that, you know, they can make a lot more money by just thinking about like breaking this mental model of one size fits all, every fan is the same, when you kind of like release yourself from that constraint.

15:59 So much more money can be made in these other channels, and just like you said, it, you know, to a point where, you know, your model starts to look more like you’re putting out content like this to source a large fan base, of which a small percentage actually convert to those paid offerings that you offer. Yeah, which like you said, I mean, the people in the front row of the concert are kind of that by definition. Yeah, you know, people to buy the merch.

16:24 It’s just maybe they haven’t done it digitally before, and that’s how Audius is going to help, and I want to talk about how you do that specifically. But just to make a final point here, I think it was Kevin Kelly, one of the first founders of Wired magazine, that wrote an article called “Your Thousand True Fans” back in the day, which kind of encouraged creators not to focus on a million, making a million people happy, but focusing on a thousand people. I had someone recently on my show in the crypto community that said, “Brian, that’s now 100 true fans.

16:50 If you can make 100 people really happy, you actually might be able to make an annual income.” And I’m sure you’re seeing that as artists now, and especially with some of the things you’re offering with NFTs. Is that a good message for artists to start thinking about, really focusing on, potentially, how they can make a small group of people really happy and connected as far as a business model? I think it is. With one caveat being that I think some folks have taken that to mean like I only need a hundred fans to be able to make a living and make a livelihood, and I don’t think that’s actually the case.

17:25 I think you need a large fan base, because that’s what gives you the opportunity to convert that smaller percentage into. So, I guess, if you define a true fan as, you know, someone who’s paying you directly, I think I agree with that definition, that 100 true fans should be all that it takes but, um, I think to get 100 true fans you need 10,000 fans. You know, just broader fans, and yeah, like that’s the craziest thing to me. Is there artists with millions of fans that, you know, see more money from 100 fans than they do from the millions, right?

18:03 And that’s where I think there’s a lot of opportunity to get that number from 100 to say 20, 50,000, and you can really make an incredible living doing that. Yeah. All right, really good for the details. Now let’s get into Audius. You know, you guys made a lot of headlines when you announced your partnership with TikTok last year.

18:23 I had Dan Morehead of Pantera Capital on the show last year, and I think you guys have just made that announcement, so we were talking about it obviously you know, they do an amazing job there. Really smart early-stage people. He’s been doing the Bitcoin fund since back in 2013 when you were still in college, I think, and so they were OGs. Obviously they’re big believers in what you’re doing. Maybe talk us through how someone uses Audius, maybe the details of the TikTok deal and then maybe get into a bit more of the economics, and we’ve got time.

18:55 Yeah, so I’ll start with the high level of how Audius works, right? When you’re an artist or you’re a fan, you show up on audius.co, or there are a number of other kind of front ends or clients that you can use to access the network. Now, but if you show up to audius.co, which is our first-party client, you can create an account. Drag content in to upload it, which makes it available on your profile then you can share links with that out to your fans. It’s very simple.

19:26 I mean, it looks and feels just like any kind of Web 2 era music player that you’re familiar with, right? You search for an artist, you click play on their content. You don’t need to create a wallet. You don’t need to set up, you know, some funds to be able to engage to get going. All of that is done for you by the product, but all of those millions of users that are on the network are Web 3 native, whether they know it or not, and that’s what gives them the opportunity, and gives artists the opportunity, to connect in these kind of novel financial ways beyond just that listening and following and kind of the traditional core social features.

20:11 So we have artists doing everything from, you know, sharing and displaying NFTs that they own or that they’ve minted on their profile page, and I’m linking to a marketplace where you can buy and sell those, all the way to folks running remix competitions where you know, I as an artist can upload the source files for my content and say, hey, like, anyone come you know, come remix it. I, you know, listen to everyone who remixed it next week on a live stream, and I’ll repost and potentially sign to my label an official release, like the remixes that I like the most, and these are both, I think, really great indicative examples of this broader concept of direct fan engagement, right? When you give artists access to all of the data, for who are these fans, where are they, how do they find your music and you have wallets and everything else associated with them.

21:08 You can actually now use that to engage in all of these different ways and deepen that relationship. So over time, you know, for our biggest artists on Audius, Audius starts to almost look like this kind of fan CRM of sorts, right? Because you’re able to build up a fan base and gather all this data around their interactions with you as an artist. And then you can target them better down the road too, right? If they, if you, if you could imagine, right?

21:41 Like knowing who all of your listeners on this show were right, and you could know that, oh, there’s this segment of listeners is based in Cleveland, Ohio, or something, right, and you’re gonna go there and do a live recording of a show at a theater somewhere. Maybe you could actually tell those people, hey, like, you should come, join and listen, and if you’re already a fan of me, maybe you get advanced access to those tickets. So that’s, I think, the broader vision for how this plays out.

22:13 It’s funny. Today artists are using Audius to build a great fan base, and under this belief and kind of notion that a fan on Audius is worth more than a fan elsewhere. It’s funny, because I spent the last six years trying to build an email list from my Web 2.0 provider, because I couldn’t get the information, you know, so I’ve tried to build to direct contact them through an email, and that’s end up how we end up doing marketing. And it’s funny that now you point that out, because it’s because of the fact that it’s not really Web 3.0.

22:44 And the truth is the Web 2.0 company doesn’t really want me to have access to the fans, right? Because that would ultimately cut them out of the market. So what you’re trying to do is basically pair those people up from the beginning, give them those opportunities, and create that marketplace from the first description. Roneil, how is what you different do different than, say, a SoundCloud, because we haven’t got into the token and some of the other pieces from that interface that you described.

23:10 I mean, it sounds a little more advanced. I can offer NFTs, etc., but does it differ much from what a SoundCloud did in the past, or is that what we’re going to talk about next? I think that’s what we’re going to talk about next, but the quick answer there is, the base use cases for Audius really don’t differ from SoundCloud. I think SoundCloud was a great way to build a fan base back in the day, and that back in the day is key, because I think they bungled the opportunity that they could have had to create this direct engagement economy.

23:42 And today SoundCloud’s usage is unfortunately a small shadow of what it once was back then, but that’s how I discovered my love of music was on SoundCloud. There’s a lot of kind of nostalgia and positivity from RT towards that product, because it was this incredible community. There was just this fundamental misalignment of incentives, exactly to what you said, around your Web 2 provider not wanting to share with you who are these fans and how do you reach them.

24:13 SoundCloud was in a similar position where it didn’t necessarily serve them anymore to have an open API and an open system, or so they perceived it, but when they shut those things down, they alienated that core set of community that led to this kind of hollowing out over time of users of their network. And that was really the impetus that led to my co-founder and I kind of like having this idea around a user-owned and user-operated streaming network was that users should be enfranchised in the decisions that the platform makes around how it evolves. But more importantly than that, if you can actually distribute ownership of that next generation network platform to users in exchange for them making the network more valuable, you get this really powerful flywheel effect around consumer adoption and consumer engagement.

25:12 You know, we’re a teeny tiny team. The team that built this initial version of Audius, everything that’s happened over the last two years has been through the work of the community more so than us, right? We just do our best to support them and lift them up, but, you know, they’re everything from like lots of new features the community built into the product, in the network, all the way to, you know, all of the users that we just talked about, right? Like our little team is effectively in a supporting role, helping to to you know, like provide as much leverage to the work that the community is doing as we can.

25:54 Yeah, that’s the beauty of something open source. And then what you’re doing, let me just stop you right there, Roneil, because you spent two years in a big venture capital firm, and so I guess part of me would say you know, Web 2.0 was born out of venture cap, and if you’re part of the venture cap company, I’m assuming SoundCloud had venture cap, but even if they didn’t, how do you go to Sand Hill Road and go into the people and say, guess what, we’re gonna open source it, we’re gonna connect everybody, and we’re just gonna let it, let the chips fall where they may, and guess what, we’ll probably get exponential growth, triple digit growth like we’ve seen and said crypto assets, but a typical VC from doing what they’ve been doing for 50 years that in their DNA is probably to say no, no, we don’t want to do that, because that’s not the typical business model.

26:41 I don’t know, clearly you’re not doing that, but can you speak on that, on that, maybe that paradigm shift of a venture cap that by nature doesn’t want to let go of that control, because that’s typically where all the profits were Totally. So yeah, I spent two and a half years at Kleiner Perkins prior to founding Audius, and the first round of financing that helped get Audius going in early 2018 was actually mostly traditional venture firms, you know, in early 2018, Pantera and Blockchain Capital were the only two crypto native funds like that existed, full stop. Right, there was no other kind of like crypto native venture community, right?

27:26 So we raised from those traditional folks under exactly kind of the pitch and the premise that you just laid out. And I think there are a few things there. One, like, venture folks love nothing more than to hear, like audacious, ridiculous things that kind of challenge them. So, you know, like the question we always got was, you know, how does Audius make money? Like, Audius the company, and we’re like, well, it doesn’t.

27:51 We never make money. We’re not ever going to make money. But, um, if this network is valuable, this underlying token that powers it, you know, you can form your own conclusion around whether or not that might be valuable. And that’s actually, you know, what you’re engaging with as an investor. Like, our company doesn’t really, like, we don’t really have any viable business model long term, right?

28:18 And that’s a very interesting kind of distinction for them. I think they, you know, it confused them, but folks in venture when they get confused actually typically get excited, right because it means that there is potentially a paradigm shift happening, and even if there’s like a 10 chance that that actually happens, and a 90 chance that this is like all, and I’m not like, you know, I’m an idiot, on a risk-adjusted basis, that’s still a good bet to make, right? And so you’d be surprised actually how quickly folks were like excited about it.

28:51 But you’re totally right that, um, I think what, um, the thing that got folks in venture excited about crypto originally and this kind of movement towards decentralization was how disruptive it could be towards centralized business models, right? And ultimately their fear of missing that transition, right? That’s, that’s, I think, another big driver of a lot of behavior in venture. But the folks that that have been along for the ride with us have been believers from the early days, and one of them even had a specific thesis around, you know, kind of what happened with SoundCloud, and was actively looking to engage with and back something that could be resilient to to some of those things that, you know, some of where SoundCloud misstepped.

29:43 So, yeah, I mean, you’d be surprised actually how receptive folks were. That financing was done in like eight days, I think eight or nine days. It was like a very, yeah, wow, and that’s back in 18 when it wasn’t exactly the bull market either. It was not. Although it was early 18th, so it was still the tail end of the 17 market, but I think it was clear to everyone that things were kind of collapsing at that stage but folks were still excited to back the next generation.

30:13 Right. All right, now let’s get into the token, because that’s where it becomes interesting. And again, I like your SoundCloud comparison, because I think we all went on there and used it back in the day, and it was it was it was great. You had your music, etc., but obviously then it, it seemed to not evolve. How is Audius different, because so far you’ve described it, it sounds very similar, but now I think comes in the token, which really changes everything, doesn’t it?

30:39 It does, it does. Um, so the, uh, AUDIO token, like you mentioned, has three kind of core functions within the network. It secures the network, so with respect to all of the community members that host content, that hosts metadata, that do work that’s necessary to keep this network going, they stake that token and they earn rewards back to dominated in that token in exchange for the work that they’re doing. Um, that the network is kind of paying them in a decentralized fashion for that.

31:12 Um, it also grants access to features. So as an artist, there are a number of features that consume significant amounts of resources from the network. So as an artist you can similarly stake the token and participate in those staking rewards, but there’s a level of stake required for certain features to be unlocked. Um, and then it governs the network, and that third piece, I think, is really where the resilience to, you know, management making poor decisions, and or management being misaligned with the community around the platform.

31:45 In the case of the Audius network, the community is management, right? Like, and our company, the work that we do is done at the pleasure of the community, and ultimately they can fire us or say we’re not doing a good job or do whatever they want. Right, this is like, once this launched, it’s really in their hands more so than ours. And the token backed and based governance is kind of how that is actually affected in the network. So, you know, any code change, any functionality change on the network has to actually go through a token holder vote to kind of accept or reject that change.

32:29 So that’s really where, you know, this kind of unifier of incentives across the network. We felt created this very powerful effect where everyone was aligned towards making the Audius’s network as functional as useful and as interesting as possible for its community. Yeah, that whole staking is a really important point, because you know, you’re the first one to say in, in when you do interviews is that you have a small team, and that you do so much because the community is there, and it’s interesting, because if it was just peace and love and let’s share music, then maybe that wouldn’t exist, but since there’s a token, it means that people can get those micro payments for making the network strong, robust, etc.

33:11 And so just having a token, even if you’re not getting all the tokens, or David Geffen’s not getting all the tokens, or the Eagles aren’t getting all the tokens, at least there’s something that allows the network to function in that decentralized way, and that’s an important component here that wasn’t there with the SoundCloud model, for example. So even if there’s some type of economics, it means that the network can grow and be sustainable. That’s kind of an important point that gets missed, maybe sometimes a hundred percent.

33:41 Um, I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s, I think that’s generally what will lead to a lot of disruption from these community-owned and community-operated media networks up against their kind of Web 2 incumbent counterparts is that when the users ultimately on a media network like Audius or like YouTube, or any of these, it’s the creators on that network that make it valuable, right? The process of serving content, getting it in front of the fans when they want it, etc., is, you know, it’s just not that hard, right? There are hundreds and hundreds of different YouTube competitors, but why is YouTube still there?

34:28 It’s because it has a network effect. It has the most fans and the most creators, and more creators to get more creators, more fans. We get more fans, and that’s all, you know, well and good and well understood. But when you have a kind of a platform native token or network native token, in the case of Audius or you know, what’s unless it you know, think about like the hypothetical decentralized YouTube of the future, um, if you could incentivize creators early on to overcome that network initial network effect chicken and egg issue where creators actually are getting ownership of the network in exchange for making it useful, and because they’re early, they’re getting an outsized or much larger amount of ownership in exchange for making it useful.

35:16 Um, once a network has a network effect going around it, it’s self-sustaining. but the hard part of any of these is actually like how does that initial network effect form? And I think this, um, you know, it, in the last 10 years of consumer stuff, and I, I, you know, saw this so often when I was at Kleiner Perkins as well. Um, this is the, this was the problem. It was almost like the, you know, the way people talk about like late-stage capitalism, we were in kind of like late-stage consumer tech, where this small number of giant giant incumbents had such a lead from a network effect perspective, there was no opportunity, no chance for anyone to potentially, you know, compete with that, right?

36:00 And I think the token model kind of flips all that on its head, because you can now, you know, in the same way that a network like Sushi swap could like parasitically attack liquidity on Uniswap. Um, these media networks can parasitically attack media liquidity that exists in these Web 2 counterparts. Yeah, you’re talking about the vampire attack. That’s who she did on, you know, sorry, vampire attacks, that’s right. Well, I think they kind of flood those users with tokens and get them incentives to use their network, try to try to provide an almost similar service and try to kind of hijack those use-overs and disrupt their network effect.

36:39 That’s what they tried to do, right? That was the kind of theory behind that. It is it is. Um, and I think those mechanics can be put towards positive ends in the case of like an and Audius or networks of that nature, but, um, I think the mechanics aren’t that different, right? Because as a creator if you stand to benefit substantially from, you know, this network becoming useful to the world, um, you put in your part to help it get there, and that’s why the community around Audius has really been the most powerful enabler of all of this, all of this growth.

37:19 It’s super exciting, and I’d love to go a little deeper on this, because I look forward to there being an audience of video in the future, and who knows, maybe you’re going to bring that to us at some point. Um, and I can, well, we can talk a little bit about you know, YouTube and some of those things, you know, after this. Just to finish up with the AUDIO token first of all, you know, you guys are big. Yeah, your market caps over half a billion dollars, you’re 120th in the rankings you guys have a sizable network.

37:46 When, as far as that AUDIO token, obviously I can buy it and stake it and help use the network and get a return. I can get, buy some AUDIO tokens and then get special access. If I just upload content, will I accrue tokens over time or how else, how else does that token get used or distributed if I was just an artist or a consumer? Yeah, so, so there’s this ongoing inflation in the token supply, and the proceeds of that inflation go to two places. One is the folks staking the token, and two is to folks who are making the network more valuable in like all of the different ways that that means.

38:30 Um, so, and to be clear, the network doesn’t somehow like have this premonition of how valuable a given user is. It’s actually there, there’s a direct chains of actions that a user can take that allow them to earn a reward out of that inflationary pool. So, um, so yeah, if you show up to Audius with no money in your pocket, nothing, but you know, interesting content or you know, a knack for curating playlists or doing things like that, you can start to go to work on the network, curating content, posting new content, reposting it, and engaging with it, and you can actually earn tokens over time through all of that activity.

39:13 So, um, so you have the opportunity, and you know, over time this will continue to be the case, to kind of like earn your seat at the table as a user, right? If you care about this network you want to effectively work for it through these different activities. Um, you earn ownership of it over time too through these fully, you know, decentralized mechanisms for distributing ownership. So, um, that’s kind of the cool, or I guess that’s, that is the mechanic that kind of makes AUDIO self-sustaining over time, right?

39:50 Like if our company went away tomorrow, all of that stuff would keep working. I’m not saying we are going away, but like, if we were to, um, all of these mechanics kind of self-perpetuate the core, like, mechanisms around Audius, and then the community can vote to change those mechanics over time. So that’s the other lever. Um, there. So there’s kind of a continuous changing of the different mechanics that folks can use to earn, to earn ownership in the network through their work.

40:21 Um, and then there’s also lots of like work being done by the community right now around anti-fraud and anti-abuse, right? Because there’s, you know, if there are mechanisms to earn ownership like this, there’s always going to be a small percentage of bad actors that, um, you know, try to farm, and you know, I mean, we even saw scandals like this play out on other networks where there were venture firms actually, like, farming airdrops on DeFi networks, for example, by, like, you know, using hundreds of wallets to deposit small amounts over and over again, or like doing these sorts of things, right? So the community has the power to define what is abuse and to, you know, put structures in place to stop it.

41:07 And but that’s something you you you you empower the community to do and you pay them a percentage of the tokens it’s anti-fraud, anti-abuse, and just to kind of police the network in a way. I guess the community ends up wanting it to be, but you’re being proactive about that, because if you’re not, something will go wrong, and it’ll, it’ll end up being a mess. That’s exactly right. That’s our take, at least, is that, you know, even thinking about issues like content moderation, right?

41:37 Giving the community power over them. Our community has actually like continually improved processes around, say, like, you know, dealing with copyright infringement, for example, and other things, because 99.9 of the community don’t want that stuff there, right? And I think it’s actually for that reason that many folks in the traditional music industry have started to get pretty excited about Audius too. Which I think is an important thing to note, that kind of ties back earlier in our conversation.

42:10 I don’t think Audius actually displaces labels, publishers, folks like that. I think what Audius displaces are these distributor and, you know, and kind of effectively like music supply chain middlemen that sit between the artist and the fan. Right? If an artist wants to sign with a label, that’s their choice and their prerogative, right? Whether or not that makes sense in their specific case, that’s up to them to decide, but Audius as a network doesn’t differentiate between those folks and the independent folks.

42:46 Everyone is on a level playing field and has access to the same tooling and tool chain. Well, actually that part’s not quite true, because I know folks that the labels have built their own tooling now to engage with the network. So that’s it, that’s actually an interesting bit. You know, with respect to the future of Audius is that, you know, the community around the network feels very strongly that they don’t want it co-opted by the incumbents of yesteryear, but those incumbents are equally enfranchised to engage here in the same way that any user is, right?

43:24 Which, it creates some really interesting dynamics, right? And, you know, you know, I have my personal opinions on this, right? I think if anyone is showing up and behaving in good faith on this network, the network should treat them equally, right? And it’s interesting to see some factions of the community feeling, you know, like, I mean, it’s such a kind of hypocritical way to behave, right? It’s like, we’re mad that the old industry behaved in this way, so like we’re going to make a new industry, and then we’re going to behave the same way, and it’s like, no, this is not how you address these problems.

44:04 But it is amusing, and, uh, look, ultimately it’s not my choice how these things play out. That’s, that’s kind of the most wild part of this whole, this whole journey, is that it is in the community’s hands at this point. It’s a fascinating lens into the human experience and society and how we all get along or we don’t get along, and is there a utopia in the future, and, right, I mean, this is being played out now on the blockchain. And you’re watching it because you’re like, look, we’re not making the rules, we’ll let the community decide, and do we really want to act in that way, or doesn’t everyone have a right to be here?

44:40 And then, you know, it’s, it’s pretty interesting because we’ve never really seen this played out where there’s not some power structure, a government or a corporation or you know, on the blockchain, it’s more transparent than probably we’ve ever seen it, so you get to see real human behavior. Um, you get to see transparency and hopefully the best of the human behavior, you know? Yes. Yes, that’s what we believe, and I think that’s, uh, a rule by majority tends to lead to that, right?

45:08 Because you don’t have these ever-increasingly vocal minorities of folks pushing their opinion on to what the broader, the broader community wants, and the community votes with its tokens accordingly, right? So there are very spirited debates around all these issues, and I found it so fascinating to see that, like, often the most vocal voices are not represented proportionally to how noisy they were in the ultimate voting right? And I don’t know, I’m not trying to make some like broader social commentary there.

45:46 It’s just interesting. It’s, it’s a very different world we live in, where everyone has an equivalently sized megaphone, and people use, you know, kind of choose to exercise that right differently. And ultimately that’s a good thing, right? For that vocal person who happens to be in the minority of opinion holders on that, like, that’s their way to convince people to come to their side, right? And that’s that’s not a bad thing, right?

46:16 But if they do that and not enough people come, you have to move forward in one way or another. So yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, I spent seven months of last year running to be the next mayor of London, and so I got an education in politics I’d never been involved before, and ultimately everyone voted, and, uh, so you know there was PR, there was marketing, there was my vision, there was the other candidates and the parties, and then on May 6th of 2021, everyone got to cast one vote, and you know, you got to see like you said before, that maybe there were these vocal majorities and these, this, and the headlines, but then everybody got a vote, and then we moved forward, and I wasn’t the next mayor.

46:55 And so it’s like, okay, so it’s fascinating. Blockchain, I think, is a combination of technology, marketing, and politics all in one place, and, um, it’s interesting how it plays out, like you said, because, you know, the vote doesn’t always reflect the loudest actors that sometimes are happening on social, and maybe this is all part of the process. So, uh, very interesting, isn’t it? Yeah, it is, it is, and I’m not saying by any means the process is perfect, but, um, I, I think it’s better, categorically better, than a process where, like, you know, uh, some board of directors or CEO in their, like, kind of ivory tower of sorts is making these decisions that lead to massive impact on the livelihood of all the people that are reliant on their products.

47:43 And I think that that fundamental difference is what will allow networks of this nature to women out over their kind of predecessors. Yeah, you know, you mentioned earlier, you know, that this process of a network and then Web 2.0 to 3.0, and you know, for example, if there is someone that will displace on the blockchain something like YouTube, how will it work? How will they be incentivized? And I’m curious what you think, um, as far as what happens going forward and then the concept of censorship and all these things, because they’re coming up and people are having these debates on Spotify.

48:20 I’ve been on YouTube for 10 years, uh, and in 2020 I almost got de-platformed, and it was a fascinating experience. Because, you know, I didn’t think I had done anything different than I had been for nine and a half years, and yet for that period of time my content was taken down, and I was in this very strange situation where all of a sudden I couldn’t access my network. I couldn’t, didn’t know who these people were, and I was being told I couldn’t say this and couldn’t say that.

48:48 Strangely enough, two years later I’ve put up the same content, and now it’s okay to be up there. And so it was a real education for me, and at the time it would have been nice to have an option, maybe like an Audius where there wasn’t a gatekeeper telling me what to do or what what not to do. How do you see, uh, the state of the union of that concept of censorship, and what Audius does differently, and, uh, what are some of your thoughts? Because obviously Spotify is going through a real controversy right now, where they’re being asked to censor content, they’re choosing not to censor content.

49:20 YouTube has done that proactively in the past and other networks do as well. And then there’s always the artist, and then there’s ultimately the community, and there’s ultimately some content that shouldn’t be up there, for sure, uh, if it’s, you know, fraudulent or it’s got, you know, uh, the dangerous speech to it. So what are your thoughts on all that? Yeah, so, this is, uh, this is such a, uh, a hairy and interesting set of problems, and, uh, I think, you know, at a super high level, starting from some first principles, like I think just philosophically there should not be a centralized company group in power of making those decisions, because it is a slippery slope once they start to say, oh, like, you know, it misinformation, uh, with, and I’m giving like bigger quotes there because there are a lot of things that people classify as misinformation that may or may not actually be, you know, misinformation.

50:24 It’s subjective, right? Uh, it is subjective, and, um, there’s not any objective standard you can really apply there. Um, you know, even thinking back to, uh, you know, I’ll watch what I say on this because I also don’t want you to get, uh, demonetized or anything in the process here, but like in the past they demonetized me over a year ago, so go ahead. So in the, in the early days of like the big, uh, you know, this big pandemic, right? Um, there were folks talking about like where did the virus come from, and, uh, you know, a lot of the things that were at that time censored, uh, because they were considered misinformation actually ended up kind of looking true, right?

51:07 Like, um, and I think you can separate, like, it’s not, uh, uh, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, there’s, there’s a line there between like we are now the arbiters of what is true and false and, you know, like, malicious intent around misinformation, which don’t get me wrong, there actually is, there is also a lot of stuff in that latter category, but long story short, um, it is such a slippery slope for anyone to be in a position to make those decisions. Um, the Audius philosophy, and I think the broader philosophy that like Web 3 networks take is that content moderation should exist, because, you know, there are, just like you said, there. I mean, I could, you know, sit here and name off lots of things that would definitely lead to this being, uh, you know, demonetized, flag, that no one, no one in their right mind believes should exist on these networks, but, um, the way that you implement that moderation is to, uh, push it to the edges.

52:08 So, um, there are like, in the case of Audius, there are multiple clients for accessing the network. There are also many nodes that host content on the network. Those nodes have the ability to decide whether or not they want to host a given piece of content, and the client also has the ability to decide whether or not they want to display a given piece of content, right? Um, so, so, uh, uh, in doing so, in that manner, if there’s ever a situation where, you know, let’s say, like, our first-party client, people think we’re, uh, you know, flagging something and that we shouldn’t be, right?

52:44 Those folks have the freedom to exit to other clients. Similarly, on the node side, if nodes are, uh, you know, refusing to host something that, like, the community believes should be hosted, those community members could run their own node, right? And, uh, uh, you know, in the case of, um, Audius, I think we are fortunate that, um, the types of abuse scenarios for Audius are just not, like, uh, nearly as kind of reprehensible, for lack of a better word, as they would be for things like video, right?

53:21 So we really haven’t, our community hasn’t run into, uh, very many situations of this nature, right? Whereas, uh, you know, I think a video equivalent for, uh, uh, descent, or, you know, video equivalent of Audius would likely have a much, much bigger problem on their hands around this, right? So, uh, anyway, yeah, I, I hopefully that that kind of encompasses, uh, what you were asking there, but I do think putting power in the hands of the community at the edges of the network is the way you avoid this slippery slope, right?

53:54 Because there’s now no single party that gets to decide what is it isn’t like misinformation or whatever it may be. Um, um, and yeah, I mean, I again, like, my personal opinions here are different from, uh, you know, I think how the network behaves, right? Like, um, you know, I do feel very strongly that, like, this malicious, malicious intense misinformation is something we need to figure out as a society how to grapple with and especially, uh, for, uh, folks who are a little bit older in, uh, our society, to be less susceptible to, like, believing things that they read on the internet and see on the internet.

54:34 But, um, that doesn’t buddy the fact that I, I think from a, like, a network and communities perspective, um, there’s a better way to do this than giving, like, Jack Dorsey control of, you know, what isn’t, is it truth? Yeah, no, that’s really well said. Um, and yeah, we, you know, you talk about the use case scenarios that we were involved with on a weekly basis back in 2020, and yeah, like you said, one narrative that at the time was considered controversial was later one that, you know, the President of the United States talked about a year later.

55:04 You know, the and we were hitting this on a regular basis, and we didn’t really understand why these decisions were being made, but they were being made, and I’d like to think if it was a decentralized platform, there would have been ways around that, so Uh, do you, with Audius, your content right now is short form, as in it’s more of like music, which is, I guess, typically, I don’t know, two to seven minutes, and so, but maybe if that turned into like longer form, like an audio podcast, you might have to start confronting these issues, because, quite frankly, some of my audio content was taken down in 2020 as well. Um, and now it’s okay, but do you think that’s something you have to deal with, and is that something you’re considering, uh, and is that about also go down to the, the size of your blocks, etc.?

55:49 Yeah, so, uh, actually there’s a lot of podcast content on Audius already. So Audius supports podcasts as, uh, first-class citizens in that, um, you know, when, uh, listening to a long-form piece of audio, even like the little, the little buttons to skip to the next track, previous track, switch to the, like, skip 30 seconds forward and 10 seconds backwards, or whatever it is, right? Um, so there’s actually a good amount of podcast content on Audius already.

56:17 Uh, the network’s nearing a million tracks right now, and, uh, the majority, the vast majority, of that is music, but, um, the podcast community has taken a an interest here, because I think a lot of the same problems I described for musicians apply similarly, or even more so. In a lot of cases, the podcasters, right, like, you probably distribute your podcast through Anchor, through one of those other RSS feed publishers, and same thing, you don’t know who’s listening to it, how much they’re listening to it, how much they like it, where they are. I mean, it’s just like on and on and on.

56:50 You have like very, very little visibility into what it, what is actually happening with their content. And, um, uh, I think that opportunity, um, around deeper, deeper kind of monetization opportunities with fans applies just as well to podcasts as it does to music. Um, so there’s no, like, time limit on content on Audius. You can have, um, well, actually, I take that back. I, I think there is some technical limit that’s reached at some point, but, you know, they’re, like, two-hour podcasts up on the network, that’s fine, right?

57:23 I think it’s more like someone tries to upload, like, an audio file that’s a week or like two weeks of audio. You don’t, probably want that to be allowed, right? So the network rejects it, uh, because it would just waste so much space, right? Who’s gonna sit and listen to something for two weeks? So, um, so, uh, you know, that said, um, there’s, there’s a lot of podcast stuff up there.

57:46 I think the same kind of moderation, uh, philosophy applies there as, as does to, um, uh, other parts of the network. Um, I think the, uh, the stakes are just different with, um, audio content from video, right? And I think that’s why, uh, you know, yeah, to your point, like Spotify has run into those, uh, censorship issues around, um, around audio, but um, the, it’s actually a much more nuanced conversation of like whether or not they should have made that decision around, uh, censorship, compared to, you know, I do think a lot of the cases in video that you could, uh, you could think of become pretty obviously like, this is terrible and you should not be here, right?

58:33 I think that’s why, uh, folks haven’t, like, the community that exists around Audius isn’t here because of censorship resistance. I guess that’s also, like, a kind of a thing that wasn’t, like, a core value prop for the network. The value prop of the network is to, uh, build more highly engaged fan base and, uh, monetize them more effectively. Yeah, uh, tell me about the deal with TikTok. What was it about?

58:59 What has happened on the back of it? Um, yeah, what do people need to know? Yeah, so, uh, this was a really exciting opportunity. So, um, uh, just setting the stage a bit. TikTok doesn’t have like an easy way to upload raw audio content into it, so, um, you know, it’s a mobile app, right?

59:21 And, uh, having, like, saying an mp3 file or something on your mobile device and having that file be accessible in an app is not an easy thing to, uh, to do, right? So, um, so we even, you know, as a result of that complexity, there were artists in our community that would, like, take their phone and hold it up to the speakers on their laptop to, like, record back their own song, and it was like, okay, this is stupid, right? And obviously, uh, I think that TikTok felt similarly.

59:53 So, um, they wanted to pilot, uh, an API to allow third-party developers to push content directly into TikTok, and, uh, they approached us about it and said, hey, you know, like, there’s, uh, maybe this interesting way for, for you all to get engaged on the network, because it helped our artists reach a new audience on TikTok if they can push content into TikTok more easily. And then vice versa, that helps TikTok, because now there’s, like, an easier way to get clean, uh, source audio into their network, right, because they can programmatically integrate and push it in. So, um, so it’s a really simple integration, right?

1:00:31 Now, on the Audius mobile app, you as an artist can push any of your content that you’d like over to TikTok, and then you can create, uh, TikToks with it, and then, you know, other folks in the TikTok community can use that sound to make more, uh, more content, that kind of thing. But, uh, it ended up being a really, uh, a really amazing kind of lift for the Audius network in the process, because, uh, um, it just, it connected, um, this community with this giant community of people on TikTok, and allowed for cross-pollination to start to happen. So, um, so yeah, it was a really fun, uh, kind of roll out and opportunity, um, you know, I think we, we just said, hey, there’s a, here’s a cool way to, uh, serve our artists, um, in a way that they’re like not being served right now.

1:01:24 Um, what we didn’t really anticipate from it was like how much engagement that would get from the Audius community. You know, we, yeah, that’s also a funny thing. You don’t really, you don’t really know what people are going to like until they, like, see it. You just sometimes have to try things and see if they like it, and then if they don’t, it’s like, whatever, that was, you know, that was a bust. But this happened to be a case of, like, you know, very, very low effort from the community and very high impact in terms of how much the community got excited about it.

1:01:59 So they loved it. They started putting their Audius stuff on TikTok. They told people that now if you want to get tracks easily on TikTok, you should get them on Audius. So it was a real win for you guys. And you did it.

1:02:10 How did you, how did you guys do it faster than anybody else out there? Is it because you’re a nimble team? Is it because your open source platform? I’m sure tons of companies were kicking themselves later for not trying to do that deal with TikTok, or were they never able to do it? I’m curious.

1:02:27 It’s a good question. So, um, I don’t, I don’t know that they were never able to do it. I think there were others capable of doing it, but, uh, many other networks aren’t in a position actually to be able to do it. So, like, Spotify, for example, there’s no way to directly upload content. Spotify, like, if you or I were an artist and wanted our music to be available on Spotify, we’d actually have to go through a third-party distributor and then authorize that distributor to place the content into Spotify.

1:03:01 But what that means is that Spotify doesn’t have the ability to further propagate or distribute that content, because they don’t actually have a relationship with that artist. Right? Whereas, in the case of Audius, the network can say, hey, if you’re the artist that uploaded this, like, sure, do what you want, because this is your content, and you, you own it. Um, and, uh, that kind of distinction is what allowed this to happen for Audius. I believe later, uh, you know, many months later, SoundCloud and there were others that integrated this API as well.

1:03:38 It was just, I think, to your to your earlier, um, kind of implication, there, they were just slow. Didn’t do it very quickly. So, uh, the virtue of being, uh, open source community led meant that, uh, you know, the, um, our community was is able to move on this a lot more quickly. I think. Yeah.

1:04:00 And then also Web 3.0, where you’re like, guess what, you guys get to own your content, and you don’t have to worry about third parties and distributions and rights and how we’re going to pay you, and Yeah, a beautiful thing about what you’re doing. Um, couple, couple questions. Uh, one of the biggest complaints I get inside my DeFi Academy is Ethereum gas fees, and it sounds like you guys are moving or giving an option to move over to the Solana blockchain.

1:04:26 Maybe talk about, you know, gas fees, transaction costs, and what you’re doing. I think you’re wrapping your token and moving it over the Solana network. Um, this is kind of a big deal, and just maybe walk me through your thoughts on that and what you think the future is. Yeah, so, uh, uh, uh, there’s two pieces of Audius that, uh, on chain, uh, that are, that are fairly large. One is the AUDIO token and all of the kind of interactions that happen around it: staking, governance, the, the things that we talked about earlier.

1:04:59 The other big half of the on-chain part of Audius is this content ledger, we call it. So any and all interactions that happen around content on the network, be it creating new content, favoriting, reposting, all of all of these sorts of things, actually trigger on-chain actions. Um, so even in the earliest days of Audius, that could never run on Ethereum. It was just way, way too expensive and slow, and, you know, uh, name, name your 10 other reasons, right?

1:05:28 Um, that was on this side chain called POA Network, that has since migrated to Solana, and that migration is almost complete. So, um, all of those content-related interactions happen on Solana, and on an average day there are hundreds of thousands of transactions initiated by our users every day on Solana. Oh, it’s pretty cool. Um, and what you’re referencing was about two weeks ago. This more scalable mechanism for AUDIO token denominated rewards rolled out, and that rolled out on Solana in tandem with a wrapped version of the token, and that’s really exciting, because it means for the first time users can earn like one token or fractions of a token at a time, without paying 30 dollars of gas every time they do it, right?

1:06:29 Even those hundreds of thousands of content-related interactions, that would really be feasible financially on Ethereum, right? So um, so yeah, we’re super bullish on, excited about Solana, because of how much it enables these kind of what I would call, like, low financial value use cases like Audius, where, you know, each interaction is not like you know, when I’m using Audius, I’m moving around lots of money, right? I’m engaging with music and content.

1:07:05 It’s a very different, like, mindset, and, um, Solana is such a powerful enabler for this type of this type of engagement, even, you know, the UX improvement of, on POA Network, blocks were produced on a five-second interval, so, and then on average it took two and a half seconds for your, you know, content-related interaction to clear on the network, and if you were doing something that required chaining of multiple of those transactions, it could be like 10, 20, 30 seconds in some cases, right? Um, on Solana that’s down to like low hundreds of milliseconds per interaction, and, uh, that’s really powerful for, for, uh, social products like this, right? Because as a user, you’re like, oh, like, you know, I do something that happens right away.

1:07:56 Uh, previously on Audius, it was like, oh, I do something, and you know, uh, uh, the, or the client would pretend like it had happened already before it had actually happened. Um, but then that created a different form of confusion, which was folks would, like, close their laptop or, like, close the page, and then that thing didn’t actually, like, happen for whatever reason. There was some error or something. So, um, uh, yeah, uh, we’re very, very excited about Solana.

1:08:26 It is the way the network is designed is especially well suited, I think, to a use case like Audius, because there’s not necessarily a financial part of every transaction. Like you said, it’s music, it’s about sharing, so that low cost is important, the speed is important, it’s got an amazing UX obviously, but there are other layer one options. You could have maybe gone with an Avax, or, you know, uh, Cardano, or a few others. You know, why consciously make that decision with Solana?

1:08:55 Yeah, so we, uh, we did a bake-off between all of the potential options in the market about a year and a half ago or so, like late 2020, and, um, uh, coming out of that, the, uh, the conclusion was that Solana was the only, uh, the only layer one, you know, layer two, layer whatever option that allowed for the scalability necessary and a price point that, uh, made interactions like this possible. So even a lot of the layer twos today or, or, you know, like, um, some of those alternative layer ones you mentioned, uh, transactions are still like a dollar plus each, right? But you’re paying a dollar every time you repost the track.

1:09:43 That’s like, that’s a problem, right? Um, but, uh, uh, that said, I think there are, um, some kind of novel next-generation tools and networks that are interesting. Um, I haven’t seen anything yet that comes close to Solana from a throughput perspective, but, uh, you know, it’ll, it’ll be cool to see, right? And I think the Solana team will tell you this too. They welcome and are excited for the competition, right?

1:10:10 I think, uh, uh, yeah, there’s, there’s, um, you know, more, more options in the ecosystem is better for projects, right? So I’m always gonna root for that, right? If there are more, uh, tools and more, uh, opportunities, that’s, that’s good for us, that’s good for the whole community, and, uh, I think it’s, I guess it’s, you know, at least in my take, a show of strength on the part of the Solana community that they generally feel the same. They’re like, we want to see more.

1:10:41 We want to see more good competitors be here, because that’s best, that’s what’s best for the whole ecosystem, right? Um, they’re confident enough in their approach, they’re not threatened by, uh, alternatives. So, um, so yeah, we’ll always be keeping an eye out. Um, and, uh, uh, you know, super excited to see, you know, at some point, I think Solana will also reach like saturation, right? Um, you know, over the last six months we’ve seen some times where, where that happened, right, where there was like a big NFT mint or something else.

1:11:13 Um, I think someday we’ll potentially even see like layer twos exist on top of Solana, then you can potentially have, like, you know, millions and millions of transactions per second when you think of the, like, composed aggregate of, of the two, but I do think having that base layer be much, much faster, uh, at least for us from a developer ergonomics perspective, is just way easier to interact with. Yeah, I’m calling these the layer one wars, and I’ve had about six of the top layer one CEOs on here, and, um, again, I tell my Academy, I said, guess what, we’re all gonna win, because we’ve got some of the best prairies in the world. We’re running out of Ethereum co-founders to create new ones, so you know, right?

1:11:54 And we got some smart people on it, and we’re all gonna win on the back of it. So again, if I looked at the whole ecosystem, we probably have, you know, an excess of brain power going into layer ones, and that’s also probably what we need, because speed is the thing we need more than anything to get, uh, users loving this. I think Google did a test back in the day where they found when they just sped up their search engine, that people seemed to think it was better at search.

1:12:19 It gave them better results, greater content, but it was really just the speed. So, like you said, it has a very subconscious effect on the user, um, in a big way. You know, Solana’s known for catering to artists and NFTs, and I know you guys are moving into the NFT space, or at least, you know, allowing direct interface with Audius, and if they stake, was that also partly to help that choice, and what do you see in NFTs and the future, maybe even specifically to your Audius community?

1:12:48 Yeah, so, so, um, part of the, the move to Solana definitely was motivated by wanting, uh, wanting to make, uh, things like issuing, minting NFTs more accessible to larger numbers of people. It costs like hundreds of dollars today to mint an NFT on Ethereum. That means the only case it makes sense to try and sell an NFT is if you can sell it for thousands of dollars. Right? Um, and, uh, getting back to, you know, what I described as this, like, gradient of different price options for different types of engagement, um, the costs around those activities needed to come down for folks to be able to explore.

1:13:27 Like, I want to see an artist mint, like, a hundred thousand copies of an upcoming album and be able to sell them for, like, five bucks a piece. Right? And, uh, you know, that it’s not possible to explore that segment of the price curve on Ethereum right now, but it is on Solana. So, um, so yeah, we got really excited about that. And more generally, I think, um, uh, you know, the opportunity around NFTs is in music, that is this kind of, uh, digitizing these concepts of merch as we think about them, right?

1:14:00 Like, I, I like to buy uh sweatshirts and, and things like that from, from my favorite artists. I, I think NFTs are just a, they are a new form of that merch, and they can start to have elements of, uh, you know, other, other things mixed into them, right? Where your merch is something that could, uh, generate, like, yield over time, or do things like that. Like, those things are really cool. So, um, uh, I think our community, uh, wrestles sometimes with this back and forth around uh, you know, like, audio should, the, the competing interest being like, audio should be focused, or like audio should, like, do everything and do everything for everyone.

1:14:45 I think the answer, the correct answer, is like somewhere in between. Um, but I think the level of activity and excitement around music NFTs more generally is something our community is paying keen attention to, and is, uh, in the midst of figuring out how, uh, you know, how that, how minting of and like more native engagement with those assets starts to play more directly in the Audius sandbox. Yeah, it comes back to what we were talking about very beginning, is how do you kind of monetize with those few, uh, small percentage of your fans?

1:15:18 And I guess if you think about it, an audible track is an NFT, right? I mean, it’s kind of a non-fungible piece of content, right? So you’re already kind of doing it, and now what else can you offer, uh, that user, um, more than just that very simple audio track, which again is, is a, is a beautiful thing about music, right? It cuts through culture and the human experience because it is only audio, right? And so that’s a beautiful thing, but then what can you build on top of that?

1:15:44 And a great point about the gas fees, because yeah, if you’re paying hundreds hours of gas, and we just did an NFT launch, we did a hundred pieces on the back of one of my live streams, actually. Roneil and I actually took pieces of my video live stream and I baked it into the NFTs. So we did a little bit of an Audius thing, and it’s now on the Ethereum blockchain. I did it, and we just paid the gas tonight. We actually gifted them to our fans, but we put a little piece of video content each into each one of the NFTs.

1:16:12 Um, and you know, we did it just to see if we could do that, and it’s potentially even a new form of video distribution, but, you know, it’s not practical to do that for a billion views, which is what we’ve had on YouTube. So, but if you could, it makes it very interesting, doesn’t it? It’s almost like you’re back to that, um, audio distribution model of the CDs and stuff, and maybe you can replicate that. That’s, uh, that’s absolutely right, and I’m, I’m super excited to get to, uh, to it, to, uh, uh, explore all of these possibilities, because, like, I don’t know, I mean, I’m, uh, uh, I’m at the older end of, like, crypto founders, right?

1:16:51 Like, I’m about to turn 30. I still remember what it was like to buy CDs, right? Like, I, you know, my, my parents would give me a little budget, they would, like, let me, uh, buy one CD a month, and that was, like, a lot of money, right? It was, like, 20 or 30 bucks. But there was actually something so special about, uh, that choice, because I’d, like, research it, I, like, read reviews of albums online, I’d, like, list the radio and decide, like, oh, like, what’s the album I’m gonna buy, uh, this month?

1:17:23 And some of those albums that I bought, like, at Enema of the State, by blink-182, in 99 or 98 or 99, that’s like, that was like one of my favorite albums, and I think that part of, part of the ritual of, like, collecting, uh, we’ve just lost in this era of streaming, because everything is, um, you know, immediately available. There’s no, uh, uh, kind of, um, choice or really scarcity required in that choice in the way that there used to be. Um, and, uh, uh, you know, I, I think, don’t get me wrong, overall I think that has been a good thing, but, um, I’d also miss the aspect of collecting music that we once had, because they’re, they, you, in a way, as a fan, you could form this kind of, uh, uh, this sort of deeper perceived connection with a given artist because I was like, you know, that was like my one album of the, uh, of the, of the month, whereas there were some albums I bought that were like terrible, and I was like, you know, then kicking myself for the next few weeks that, like, I spent money on this, like, stupid thing.

1:18:31 Right? Um, uh, and I, I won’t, I won’t say who I feel that way towards, but, uh, you know, there were definitely a lot that, um, you know, there are a number of albums from that time that, like, you know, are still some of my favorite albums today, and I think part of that was, like, just, you know, how much of a, like, moment that was. Like, oh, I got to buy this, and then I got to hear the tracks that were, like, not single releases on the radio, and whatnot.

1:18:54 It was, it was cool, you know? And, uh, I think we can digitally replicate some of those experiences through NFTs and through these other tools. Yeah, shout out to blink-182. What a great album. I think they’re from my hometown of San Diego as well, uh, near Solana Beach, which I think is where the Solana folks are from.

1:19:13 Uh, and yeah, great album. And I remember having the CD collection, and, you know, when you took the CD out of the case and you put it in the player, you know, you, you had that relationship with that artist, right? And, uh, like you said, you remember those albums that, where most of the tracks delivered, and there wasn’t just the one single on there that was good, and the rest wasn’t very good. And you’re kicking yourself, right? Why did I buy that whole album?

1:19:35 So, a hundred percent. I mean, we even used to call it filler, right? Uh, that was, like, the, the tracks that weren’t very good, but they had to fill an album, right? And then some 41 had that, all killer, no filler, album to, like, you know, make fun of that trope. Like, it is, it is, it’s, it’s uh, whereas today, yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, I, I can’t even remember the last time I sat and like listened through a whole album top to bottom, and, uh, that’s, that’s a really unfortunate thing.

1:20:05 There’s maybe something I should go do. But, um, yeah, yeah, I remember, like, when Snoop Dogg and Dre were dropping things in, like, 01 and 02, they would, you know, on the CD, they would have their, like, the joke tracks and stuff in between songs, right, where they’d be, yeah, playing, like, you know, these funny jokes or these scenarios or these voicemail messages, and there was a way to, like, pull the whole album together, and I remember when that first started happening on CD, you were, like, oh wow, it’s a different CD track just for the joke. Um, yeah, taking it back a little bit here.

1:20:36 You know, you mentioned someone like blink-182. Is this an important thing for Audius to do in the future? Is to start signing these big artists? Is that, or get their content on your platform? Is this important, or is that the old-school record label Web 2.0 mentality, where we’re thinking we got to sign the big ones, like Tidal did back in the day, in order to give it credibility, or is that still important for Audius?

1:21:00 It’s a really good question. So, um, I think the idea of content rights more broadly are becoming far more liquid than they ever used to be, and what I mean by that is like everything from these big fat catalog deals you’ve probably seen, where folks are like Bruce Springsteen and others are selling rights to catalog in exchange for these like massive, massive sums of money, right? But um, ownership of catalog and catalog assets, by that I mean the copyrights associated with content, is decentralizing right now, and that has nothing to do with crypto.

1:21:40 It’s just there’s this gold rush of, um, folks being able to underwrite debt against catalog and then being able to, uh, structure deals to buy it out, because you can buy out something, because catalog has this very predictable revenue stream created by streaming. Um, you can, uh, underwrite debt against it very easily, so you see these deals levered up like six, seven, uh, um, you know, 60, 70, sorry, debt and like 30, 40 percent equity to buy out catalog and then service the debt. It’s like the, you know, typical kind of like private equity model, right?

1:22:19 But that way that filters all the way down to the individual artist is that they, too, have more liquidity associated with their catalog rights than they used to. And, uh, it used to be that there was only one source of liquidity around that, which was a label, right? So if I am going to make a new album, I could pre-sell uh, ownership, or, or effectively, like, my copyrights in that album to a label in exchange for an advance that lets me actually make the album, and, uh, the label is taking on a ton of risk in that.

1:22:55 The vast majority of these deals do not recoup. The ones that do recoup, recoup so many times over that they kind of pay for the rest. It’s, it’s actually very similar to, like, venture as a business model, right, where they’re, they’re making these very broad bets and, uh, recouping them. So, um, anyway, I share all that to say, with respect to Audius, um, uh, I think there is, uh, certainly an opportunity, via helping artists make more money from their content, um, reduce, uh, the necessity for advances and these types of things, but I actually think the, the music industry is aware of that, not just with respect to Audius, but this broader shift around catalog liquidity and saying we’re not, uh, uh, going to be, you know, as sort of advanced dependent as we once were.

1:23:51 And similarly, to, uh, what I had previously described around, uh, you know, touring, these other pieces of revenue becoming a larger share of the pie, there’s been this evolution towards the so-called 360 deal in, uh, uh, recorded music, where rather than a record label just owning rights to the music and then trying to monetize them as best they can, and with the artist earning a small, small share of that monetization, um, they’re saying, hey, why don’t we capture a percentage holistically across everything you do as an artist, and be more full service as your partner, right? So, you know, they handle marketing, they handle, like, all kinds of stuff, so I actually think that relationship’s pretty symbiotic and probably not going away. But I think we’re in this period of refragmentation, both around ownership of rights and around, uh, you know, how, uh, how these folks are able to kind of, um, uh, you know, work with partners like that, right?

1:24:56 Uh, and that’s a really interesting kind of thing. So the music industry has spent the last 20 years consolidating into three major players. I think now we’re kind of refragmenting that, where through folks buying up catalog and then finding new ways to monetize that catalog, and then competing against one another around how well they can monetize these catalog assets, combined with folks who are offering more and more services to the artist. But, uh, you know, the labels have, um, been really quite smart and clever through this whole transition, staying on top of it.

1:25:34 So I don’t think they’re going away. I think it’s more like the market is expanding, and that’s creating space for more players to be playing around this same arena. Audius, I think as a community, um, you know, I, I can’t speak to what they’ll do in the future, because I don’t, you know, I honestly don’t know, but my opinion is that our focus should remain on monetizing rights and monetizing artist-fan relationships. Um, to the extent that, uh, Audius is useful for artists to make more money and be less dependent on advances, that’s, that’s cool and good, right?

1:26:15 But I think there’s a different segment of the market that’s going to start to target that board directly, right? Audius, I think, wants or should remain neutral, because if the network, we’re starting to sign artists, for example, or do things like that, now there’s an incentive to boost those artists over the folks who aren’t signed, and then you fall into the same kind of uh, you know, playing favorites mess that has played out like everywhere else. So, um, so I think to maintain neutrality, it’s, it’s kind of important not to head down that path, but Web 3 more generally is going to have I think a, a significant impact on how deals like that are structured and organized.

1:26:56 But if I’m an established artist, it probably doesn’t make as much sense for me to jump on Audius as it does if I’m an up and coming artist, because that way I’m monetizing, getting my fans, etc. Is that right? Yeah, that’s right. Like, I actually, I, if I had, like, an audience with blink-182 tomorrow, um, I don’t think I would, uh, try and pitch them on, like, migrating their whole catalog to Audius. What I would try and pitch them on is, like, upload some cool, like, B-sides, you know, rough cuts that didn’t make it to the album, etc., to Audius, because your fans will go wild for it, and, uh, you know, maybe you can, uh, uh, you know, yeah, there’s a whole conversation to be had there.

1:27:37 But, uh, they, as a signed artist, need to get permission from their label and from their other partners. There are a number of artists who’ve gone through that process on Audius, but, um, it’s, uh, you know, it’s cumbersome, right? Uh, artists who are fully independent are able to uh, be a little bit more nimble there, because they can just be like, yeah, I’m just gonna stick my stuff up and see what happens, right? I don’t need permission from anyone, right?

1:28:02 But if they could have permission, it’s probably an intelligent business decision to start that relationship with your fans on Audius, to start to identify who they are, because in the long run you’ll have more ownership, direct control, probably a direct NFT, you know, next steps, whereas probably that won’t happen as fast on your label. Probably, uh, I, I think that’s right. Um, although I, I think you can do that collaboratively with the label, right?

1:28:28 So the label also makes more money in the process. Like their interests are aligned, uh, uh, there, and that’s also, you know, that’s also why I, I do believe over time Audius is good for the broader music industry and for the existing labels, right? Because it gives them, uh, more opportunities to monetize super fans at, like, a higher, at a higher level. So, um, so yeah, I mean, I, I think that doesn’t, that doesn’t need to be an antagonistic thing, right?

1:28:56 Um, I think, uh, uh, that’s also been pretty neat to see, with, uh, some of the label, uh, uh, uh, the label engagement that’s happening on Audius today among indie labels and others. You know, there are a lot of them that are just as excited about this future as, uh, the artists themselves are, right, because they’re also feeling squeezed by the existing, this kind of byzantine tool chain of distribution and money flow and everything else that they have no transparency at all into, right? They just get a check, and they’re like, I don’t know how that happened or where it came from, or whatever, but, uh, you know, cool, I guess I’m getting paid.

1:29:35 Right, that’s a good point. You know, because they’re subject to, like, the technology companies, I guess, and they’re looking for new options. It’s nice to know that you guys, that they’ll want to work with you too going forward, and it’s not kind of, uh, wrecked the entire old system. Um, just a couple final things. Your biggest challenge, you know, as a CEO, I know you’ve got this path to 100 million users, but when you look at the next 18 months, what are some of your goals and then challenges for Audius and the community?

1:30:03 Yeah, so, uh, you know, I think my, uh, my biggest goals that I would hope the community rallies around are really, uh, towards monetization more broadly. So I think, uh, Audius today is a great place to promote music, to build a fan base, uh, to engage that fan base, but, um, uh, there’s a lot more tooling that needs to be built around kind of financializing that fan base, right? And that’s, that’s kind of, I think, the biggest goal, um, over the over the next year or so, is to really, um, kind of like open the doors to, uh, more opportunity for, for artists to actually charge for access to and make money from this engagement.

1:30:50 Um, and then, uh, yeah, the, I guess, the, uh, the other big goal, to, you know, to what I mentioned there, is kind of continuing to make more robust the entry and exit points to the network, right? So being able to um, uh, uh, kind of continue to move, uh, to move up the stack with independent labels, independent publishers, folks like that who, uh, need a little bit more robust tooling to be able to access, uh, things here, right? Um, and, and you know, everything from, like, being able to have one account manage multiple artists, for example, or, like, uh, you know, having a manager be able to sign in for an artist, right?

1:31:35 A lot of the way Audius is set up, uh, today, architecturally, is towards, um, kind of, you know, the artist themself engaging, which works for a time, but, uh, with bigger and bigger artists it becomes cumbersome to do that, right? They have teams of folks that work with them and help them do things. So yeah, you mentioned that you feel like one of the older founders at 30. I think that’s kind of funny. Personally, I’m 50.

1:32:01 Uh, but I’m curious what you think of this whole space. I mean, it’s changed so much in the past five years. I mean, you’ve been in this space for, like, seven years or more. What do you make of, you know, where crypto has come, NFTs, metaverse, decentralized finance, even what you’re doing? You know, what do you make of the whole landscape, and do you feel old as well?

1:32:25 Oh, man, I do feel old these days. Uh, you know, I went to a dinner recently of, like, crypto founders, and I was, uh, the oldest one there by a couple of years. Uh, that’s, that’s not uncommon for me. I think any space that’s new like this tends to attract uh, younger folks, just because they have nothing to lose, or like less to lose, right? And, uh, you know, um, and that, combined with, like, experience, is less of a differentiator here.

1:32:59 The whole space is like 10 years old, so most experienced people in the space have 10 years of experience. If you’re, like, uh, you know, um, a banker, person, or something, and I’ve been a banker for 20 years, like, why would you ever come here, right? Because, no, you know, your 20 years of experience is irrelevant here, whereas as a banker, you can probably make a lot of money and, like, do good stuff. So, um, so yeah, I think there’s, it’s kind of a fun, uh, dynamic, but I, I definitely do feel on the older end.

1:33:28 Um, I don’t feel like old, old by any means, but, um, you know, uh, I think, uh, you know, it’s just interesting how young this community skews, um, and how much younger it seems to go. I don’t know if you’ve been following some of these, like, uh, there’s actually, like, a very prominent developer in the Solana community who I think is, like, 13. Um, uh, he’s, uh, uh, he’s this very, uh, precocious kid from, uh, from India, and he’s just, like, an incredible programmer, and he’s, like, out there building amazing stuff, like, in between, you know, going to middle school or whatever.

1:34:05 Like, wow, this is, this is wild, right? Yeah, it’s, uh, yeah, it is, it is very interesting. But over the last seven years, I think the change I’ve seen play out, and I’m sure you have too, and have felt to some extent too, is this, like, kind of mainstream acceptance to some extent of what’s happening here. It’s not an embrace yet, but it’s an acceptance that something is happening. Um, everyone, you know, five, six, seven years ago when I first started playing in this space, I got, uh, stupid.

1:34:40 It doesn’t make sense, like, you know, uh, uh, just a fad, tulips all over again, like, in you know, I’ve, it hurts. I’ve heard every, every, uh, stupid, like, epithet in the book with respect to, like, this space, right? And I think the continuous defiance of all of that naysaying by the fundamentals that drive this, and the fundamentals I care about are, like, users, right, and, and usage. Um, but it’s also hard to, you know, deny, like, the price movement that’s happened around Bitcoin and, uh, the other large-cap assets, right?

1:35:16 Um, it’s, it’s cool. It’s cool to see, uh, you know, you know, folks like me and you and so many others were told we were wrong for years and years and years, and, like, now that doesn’t really happen anymore, right? The more common question is, like, I’m trying to make sense of this space, help me make sense of it, and, uh, you know, usually, my, yeah, like, unfortunately it’s, it’s, uh, it’s tough to actually allocate time to, uh, folks asking that, right?

1:35:45 Because I think that is the very expectation, the expectation that someone should, like, teach you this, rather than you should go figure it out on your own, that led to those people, like, not being here in the first place, right? Uh, because 10 years ago there was no one to teach you. You know, there was no one to be, like, to, you know, tell me why Bitcoin is important, and, it, you know, uh, now it’s sort of, yeah, the response there is, like, what’s up, my, you know, I don’t really care if you think it’s not important.

1:36:15 That’s fine. Like, I really don’t. You know, there’s no skin off my back. Um, that’s the other funny one is the folks who, like, expect you to convince them when they’re not convinced. Like, oh, I don’t care, you know, you can believe whatever you want.

1:36:26 Like, if you think what we’re doing is stupid, if you think what this whole space is doing is stupid, like, you know, more power to you. Like, it really doesn’t, doesn’t bother me, and sometimes that makes people, like, even more mad, which is, which is really funny, because they’re, like, trying to have a fight, and if you don’t want to engage, it’s like, well, you know, uh, what do you do? So, so yeah, anyway, uh, uh, that. And then the, the only other thing I would say here is the quality of talent coming into the space right now is just unmatched.

1:36:55 Uh, uh, there’s never crypto used to be the area of, like, the fringe, the people who, like, maybe couldn’t cut it in other areas or in, you know, traditional tech, whatever. Um, that is certainly not the case now. I think, uh, just like you said about the layer one, it is, like, I, I feel so fortunate that, like, I, you know, get to work with, uh, some of the smartest people in the world every day, uh, across projects, within our own team, everything else.

1:37:26 Um, uh, you know, and that certainly didn’t feel that way five, six years ago. Yeah, that’s a great observation, and we even, we’re seeing it in finance. I mean, I started my career on Wall Street straight from MIT, and, you know, nowadays, I, I literally have, I meet kids in the street, and I’m just telling them blockchain, you know, and they’re like, I want to go work for Barclays in London. I’m like, okay, but the blockchain is where you really want to go next, and a lot of them are choosing that.

1:37:51 Not to mention people leaving Google, Facebook, and AI to go into crypto and blockchain. And that’s super exciting. Uh, like you said, the fact that you don’t even have time to explain Bitcoin to someone means we’re at critical mass, which is a beautiful thing. Um, I had Max Keiser on my show in 2013 literally screaming about Bitcoin. Um, we were both complaining about how there wasn’t liquidity in the exchanges.

1:38:14 Um, I had Andreas Antonopoulos here in 2015, 17, and 19, talking about the internet of money, the future of money, before the term DeFi was even coined. And then, you know, once I, I lost the race for mayor of London, I, I took a closer look at the space, and I saw a DeFi summer, end of 2020, and I said, oh my gosh, this, I mean, I could see this as a former, you know, derivatives guy. I mean, this, I couldn’t believe what had happened. I was like, wow, how did I miss this?

1:38:43 We’re going all in on this for the next 10 years, and and so we’ve been, it’s been amazing to be here. I get to have amazing conversations with people like you twice a week, and we get to teach this stuff in the Academy, which, uh, as you know, the best way to learn something is to teach it. And, um, I had Professor Silvio McAuley on, talking about Algorand, another one solution, and he said Brian, in his Sicilian accent, he said, you and I know that the, this teacher learns more, than more from the student than the student learns from the teacher.

1:39:09 So it’s true. I mean, I have to answer hard questions every week for my students, like, why, what’s with the gas fees, what’s the layer one I use, what’s happening here. They’re all watching this now because they want to know what’s happening with Audius and with artists and NFTs. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been a fantastic space to be a part of. Um, and I guess I know what you mean about feeling old in this space, uh, but it’s, it’s exciting, a lot of energy, a lot of love, um, as well.

1:39:35 Um, and it’s great to have you here. We really appreciate the work you’re doing at Audius, and appreciate the way that you frame how the community is just doing so much heavy lifting, and so much help, and so much validation, and so much policing, or community work. Uh, it’s great to hear you, you know, say that. Just curious, any final thoughts? And also, if people want to plug in to this network as an artist, as a consumer, or as a developer, what are the next steps they should take?

1:40:03 Oh, that’s a great question. So, uh, I think the, uh, the best way to get involved is just go on the product, make an account, start listening to music, engaging with some cool artists. I, I promise you, you’ll find something you like, uh, on there. And, uh, for folks who are looking to get more deeply involved, the, the Audius Discord community, I think, is the best uh, entry point. So there’s, like, 30, 30-some thousand, uh, people in there talking about and coordinating on a lot of the things that that I spoke with you all about today.

1:40:36 So if you’re a developer wanting to get involved, if you’re an artist wanting to get feedback on your music, um, if you’re a fan just looking to, like, chat with some cool artists and hang out, uh, Discord’s an awesome place to do that. So, uh, come one, come all. We’ll welcome you with open arms, and, uh, excited to, uh, excited to see some of you there. All right, fantastic. And, uh, is there any possibility you’re going to do a video version of this in the future, because uh, we need it right now.

1:41:05 You know, the network effect is strong on YouTube. They work a lot very hard for that, and I do appreciate what they’ve done, but it would be really nice to have an audience version of video. Videos, I’m sure you’ve been pitched this. Is that possible, or, uh, or are you getting too old for another one? I think one of our early team members actually even bought that domain name, so we’ve, we’ve joked about it so much.

1:41:28 Um, there’s a, a lot of technical difference with how video distribution works versus audio. Um, you know, well, actually, it’s not necessarily difference in structure, because it’s just moving bits, uh, bits and bytes from one place to another. It’s just a much, much higher volume of these, uh, bytes of data, right? So compressed audio is like maybe a megabyte per minute for super high-quality compressed audio. Compressed video, like, think 4K, you know, 8K even, that YouTube supports now, right, is astronomically larger.

1:42:03 I mean, like, hundreds, uh, hundreds of times larger. So, um, so I think that, uh, is what made compressed audio tractable with this architecture, but video is just not there yet. I think our community’s shot off, bitten off enough to chew, uh, with respect to audio. If there is anyone out there that wants to build this, like, video uh, you know, this, uh, video hosting counterpart, um, would love to hear more about it and see if there are any ways we can be helpful, but I don’t think, I don’t think that it’s in our future most likely.

1:42:40 Yes, stay in your lane was the advice I got with, uh, from Ice-T as well. You know, you guys are doing something. Keep it simple, do it better, and execute on what you’re trying to do, and that’s gonna be a great service. So there’s some good, there’s some good advice there as well. So, uh, Roneil, thank you so much.

1:42:56 Uh, appreciate that. Um, again, we’ve been following what you were doing for, you know, many, many months, and, uh, obviously, you know, Pantera was talking about you as well, and a lot of our students and, and, uh, viewers, um, are big fans of what you do and supporting the artist. So, thank you. Wishing you all the best on this journey forward, and next time let’s do this in London, shall we? Right on.

1:43:17 Yeah, I’ll, uh, I’ll be there soon. I’ll let you know. All right, fantastic. Thank you so much. Stay with me here, but I’m gonna wrap this up.

1:43:23 Appreciate you all in London Real. We’ll see you next time. Take care.