30:00

that perspective that you could even have curation

30:02

modules that you pay for that

30:04

plug into this experience where by

30:07

building an open platform, it means there's

30:10

not only more openness in terms of

30:12

clients like you were talking about, but

30:14

it means people can almost monetize the

30:16

content indirectly in different ways too. I

30:18

could subscribe to a playlist curation service

30:21

or something along those lines. Yeah,

30:23

absolutely. I think it's resonant of your

30:25

point early about journalism too. We just

30:28

saw Pitchfork get folded in a little

30:30

bit, and that was probably the

30:32

best, at least if you're an indie head,

30:34

the best curation in music that we've certainly

30:37

seen in the last couple

30:39

decades. But yeah, to your

30:41

point exactly, there is nothing

30:44

standing in the way of

30:46

someone building a well-monetized, well-structured,

30:48

well-incentivized fandom around curation entirely.

30:51

And we've had a lot of conversations about this internally about

30:53

some of the features that we have coming up that we're

30:55

launching that we're really excited about. I

30:57

can't wait for someone to take the

30:59

audience protocol, use our SDKs, and build

31:02

a playlist-forward curation experience that they're able

31:04

to make money from. And people do

31:06

pay for curation. People go to live

31:08

shows, like you mentioned before. DJs are

31:11

basically curators. They're extremely talented and oftentimes

31:13

musicians themselves, but they're extremely good at

31:15

reading their audience and playing music that

31:17

resonates with them. And to

31:19

your point about live music

31:22

being one of the major revenue sources now,

31:24

that exists because people need curation. People like

31:26

curation. And especially in this world of AI

31:29

music and a lot of noise to

31:32

signal or signal to noise, whichever way you want, in a

31:34

trial comparison, finding that signal is

31:36

really important. And we do fundamentally

31:38

believe that there is a, at

31:40

least in today's world, a necessarily

31:42

human element to that. Yeah. I

31:44

think that's a really nice way to

31:47

look at that and sort of a good

31:50

value positive statement for how we want this

31:52

music industry to head. So

31:54

I want to talk a little bit about the usage

31:56

of the platform today, the artists that are on it,

31:59

the growth you guys have. experience kind of where things

32:01

are headed. But I want to start with that kind

32:03

of, that catalog experience

32:05

and sort of the artist

32:07

experience when they're uploading music.

32:09

So are you finding

32:11

these are, like Bandcamp and SoundCloud, I

32:14

think very famously, became sort of

32:16

like the B-sides. But you'd release

32:18

your main music and you'd upload it

32:20

to Spotify and Apple and YouTube and

32:22

all the main platforms. And then there'd

32:24

sort of be like the fan extras

32:26

would be on SoundCloud. And maybe you

32:28

went in or Bandcamp and you'd maybe

32:30

go and you'd buy an album. But

32:32

your primary experience was largely on other

32:34

platforms. And it was almost like the

32:36

super fans who were going and finding

32:39

distribution in these other areas. Is

32:42

that sort of the way you find

32:44

artists are interacting with audience? Are they

32:46

doing audience exclusives? What's the

32:48

type of music you're seeing actually uploaded?

32:51

Yeah, absolutely. I think that generally is

32:53

kind of the bread and butter of

32:55

where we operate today. It's mostly

32:58

people who are putting exclusives

33:00

or putting the B-sides or putting the extra

33:02

things that they think they can squeeze value

33:04

out of onto a

33:06

platform like Audius and likely posting on things

33:08

like Bandcamp and SoundCloud too as well. One

33:11

of the most interesting things that they've been doing recently

33:13

is doing pre-releases and publishing

33:16

things to Audius and

33:18

similar platforms before they go on Spotify and

33:20

so on and so forth in order to

33:22

build deeper relationships with their fans. And

33:25

that has been a really cool, interesting emergent

33:27

product behavior we've seen. One of

33:29

the other things that's worked really well for us

33:31

that's been a novel sort of feature offering is

33:33

the ability to do these remix

33:35

competitions where you upload files and stem files and

33:38

other pieces of content that you use to create

33:40

your works yourself and then for your fans who

33:42

are also creators for them to be able to

33:45

use those things and participate in direct

33:47

engagement. And as an artist, there's nothing

33:49

better than to build a super fan

33:52

and have someone use your own

33:54

source material to make music on top of

33:56

it. That's a really great way to reach

33:58

your audience. And so we've seen... people do pay

34:00

gated remix competitions where they would have to...

34:04

The creator has to buy the original track

34:06

and they get a download kit alongside that

34:08

and then they can re-upload things and those

34:10

get associated in a really cool way, like

34:13

all publicly on-chain in that you can see

34:15

this sort of music ontology, so to speak,

34:17

of where this remix track

34:19

came from and the creator's getting paid in

34:21

building fandom out of that. So

34:23

to your original point, yes, we really do tend

34:25

to thrive in this sort of super fan arena

34:27

but in this sort of changing tides of how

34:30

music and the internet are going right now, we

34:32

really want to bring in an unprecedented level of

34:34

social into that and a lot of the emergent

34:36

behavior has kind of been in response to some

34:38

of the things we've been putting out in the

34:40

social space. So from

34:42

a growth perspective, is

34:45

your goal to get Audius to the

34:47

place where it is the primary release

34:49

or do you think that the sort

34:52

of...what is missing

34:54

in either the technology stack, the

34:56

market stack, the landscape right now,

34:58

the adoption of Web3, knowledge

35:00

of the platform that's keeping Audius from going

35:03

from 4 million users to 400 million users?

35:07

Great question. Of course, there are

35:09

some technical hurdles. I think the kind of good

35:11

news for us is that the way we've built

35:13

Audius is that we don't necessarily

35:15

need Web3 adoption as a whole to

35:17

skyrocket for Audius adoption to skyrocket and

35:19

that's really where we see... Anatoly

35:22

certainly talks about this all the

35:24

time of how Solana is building

35:26

a blockchain to build killer consumer

35:28

applications and I don't think he

35:30

says, oh, these are killer consumer

35:32

Web3 applications, he says killer consumer

35:35

applications and that's what we would

35:37

like to have happen for Audius and we would love

35:39

obviously 400 million users would be incredible

35:41

and that is what we have our eyes

35:43

set on but that takes time and that's

35:45

why while we have been

35:48

iterating on and shipping a lot of

35:50

first party independent artists focused fan relationship

35:52

building features, we've also been building up

35:55

really deep relationships with the music industry

35:57

at large and working to... get the

35:59

catalog that does enable us to get

36:02

the primary releases and stuff. So to

36:05

use some of this sort of music industry

36:07

lingo there, Audius is becoming a fully licensed

36:10

music streaming platform. And that's very

36:12

different from what Audius started out

36:14

as, being this kind of scrappy

36:16

web3 product. But it is necessary,

36:18

one, in order to grow, to

36:20

be competitive with the DSP landscape

36:22

that exists today. Yeah, so how

36:24

would that work? So most

36:27

of the traditional music industry runs on

36:29

very complex systems of different types

36:32

of royalties that all interplay. And

36:34

it makes the mortgage industry look

36:36

transparent, in

36:40

terms of the level of different components

36:42

involved in that. So give

36:45

me a little bit of a

36:47

sense of how a deeply vertically

36:49

integrated licensing regime can mesh

36:52

with a decentralized protocol like Audius. How

36:54

do those two worlds come, if

36:57

not close together, closer enough together? Brilliant

37:00

question. So imagine

37:02

that we've done what we've done so

37:04

far in building Audius off the ground

37:06

and that it is a decentralized, node

37:09

operated ecosystem of music, metadata and music

37:11

files. Now, in order to

37:13

get content on from labels both big and

37:15

small, they

37:18

typically the way this works in the music industry

37:20

today is through this standard called DEDEX, which

37:22

stands for Digital Data Exchange. And it

37:25

really basically is like giant XML files

37:27

that have a bunch of metadata about

37:29

music and either FTP or S3 buckets

37:31

that actually have the files and those

37:33

get ingested periodically by the likes of

37:35

Spotify and Apple Music and so on

37:37

and so forth. So what

37:39

we've done with that is built a really

37:41

cool system where our labs

37:44

are very similar to how Solana is set up with

37:46

the foundation and the labs entity. Our

37:48

labs group is working on onboarding the

37:50

sort of traditional music partners onto the

37:52

Audius protocol by basically providing a white

37:54

glove first head experience of like, hey,

37:56

we support DEDEX and we will work

37:58

with the...