Modern Music Marketing

Andrew Southworth (00:00)
Andrew, if you only had one minute to give music artists the best advice you possibly could, what would you say? One minute.

Andrew Batey (00:06)
The advice I always give artists is to stop following what everyone else does and go analog. I think a lot of the artists don't do the heavy lifting anymore of carrying all their shit and slowing it to every single show, staying after the show and meeting fans one by one by one by one and converting them into being, you know, followers into your own database. So whether that's on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, ⁓ these types of emotional reactions and interactions with fans is what hooks them forever.

And there's a tried and true path that worked for decades where you send an alt rock group on the road for four years so that you build that base brick by brick by brick and that brick won't leave you. Like once you have that foundation, it sticks with you. So do all the sort of unscalable things, the things that seem really crappy, ⁓ the analog sort of offline things. Those are the things that are gonna carry you for decades.

Andrew Southworth (01:00)
Nailed it. 57 seconds. Which is honestly interesting. I agree with the advice 100%. Interesting advice coming from you.

Andrew Batey (01:09)
You know, I'm a digital guy. I cut my teeth in social. was known for breaking artists on social media in 2006, seven, eight, when Facebook was still EDU based. I found a kid at a bonfire in Nantucket and we helped make him number one iTunes, number seven, Bill World with no label. I signed tons of big acts over the years. We worked on a lot in 2022. I released my own country music song for fun. We went number four in the U S number four U S country music single. So I have a lot of practice at this.

But the thing is, you can have a gimmick and run a gimmick and run the charts quickly. You can't have a sustainable career on gimmicks. So I can break an artist and help open the path up. But the underlying engine of the things they've created is what's going to carry them for decades. And I think of guys like ⁓ Jeff Weir's, who's a friend who's in this band called The Expendables. He still sells shows.

He'll sell out shows, he'll sell out 40, 50 shows, no problem. Cause all of these fans just love him, love the Expendables, have this nostalgic feeling from the time when they were younger and saw him when they were younger and heard Bull for two playing and they all smoked with their friends. like, there's this thing that just happens that you're excited to go and see that show 30 years later, 20 years later, it doesn't matter. So he can sell shows all day long and keep being on tour and support his family and pay for his house.

everyone in the band can live. You don't do that when you're just a gimmick. You do that when you've built these bricks layer by layer by layer over decades, and that's how you have a sustainable career.

Andrew Southworth (02:47)
Nowadays we see a lot of artists that go viral on TikTok that they have really big numbers on Spotify and Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. But then they go to launch a tour and they're not selling anything out or they're in fact having to cancel shows because of how bad tickets are selling. Whereas I'll know an artist that has like 5,000 monthly listeners or something that can tour and sell out all their dates around the country. Granted, not huge venues, but like they're making a living because they can draw a crowd.

Andrew Batey (03:16)
It's crazy too because in today's like touring costs have gone up 50 % year over year over year. So what that means is that ticket sales have only gone up like 20%. So you're making less and less money on tour. There's an artist I know of that did like an 80 city tour and lost like $75,000 at the end of it. So the tours are now becoming marketing for merch or marketing for other things.

Whereas streaming used to be the marketing for the tours and you're seeing this erosion and the only people that are really truly make money are people that can sell stadiums. And that puts you in a weird spot as an artist because if you're a pretty well-known act and you're doing like 5,000 cap rooms or 10,000 cap rooms, now you have to jump to arenas or you have to jump to stadiums in order to like make the unit economics work. But you might not be able to sell that many tickets in every market. so.

It's really difficult, puts a lot of pressure on the artists to deliver at those levels and probably prematurely pushes artists into that area when they're not ready yet, which I think sets a lot of them up to fail. Like there's a big country music artist I know of and I won't mention her name, but ⁓ I think she only sold like 3 % of her tickets at Bridgestone. And so they were literally giving these tickets away. Like you could, they were like a dollar each. It sucks. It's like a tough.

It's a tough pill to swallow if you're an artist because you have to be able to make ends meet and pay everyone that's supporting you. But tours have become really expensive ⁓ marketing vehicles for a lot of artists. that's, you're running out of places to make money as an artist in your art form. So it's been really difficult, I think, to do that. But then there's other people that I like. When I was in North Carolina for Confluence, actually, I went with Mark to a show.

And there was this band there called Junior Astronauts. I don't know if you ever heard of them. But they literally play once a year on their birthday. And I've never seen people have so much fun in my life. And they sold like 300 plus tickets. I mean, the entire place, it was a small place, but it was packed. Shoulder to shoulder, everyone knew their songs. It'd been like they were the hometown heroes who only come out once a year, sell the entire venue out for his birthday and just give no fucks. Like they were.

screaming, jumping on amps. They were wild and amazing to watch. And I just thought, I don't know how these guys didn't truly make it, but how cool that they can come back every year and sell 300, 400 tickets, no problem. They didn't even have a set list. They showed up and they were just winging it. It was amazing. It was one of the best shows I've been to in years.

Andrew Southworth (05:57)
You've done a lot of things and we're going to get through your journey because you have a pretty like badass journey from kind of where you started and working in film and TV. And then, you you get the restaurants and then you have the social media kind of growth hacking and the agency. And now you have this company called BeatDapp, which I want to start with, does all the fraud detection for every, I don't know if it's every DSP, but all the ones that all of us are thinking of in our heads. You guys do the fraud detection. Tell us a bit about, about.

what the company is, how it works and what it does.

Andrew Batey (06:28)
Yeah, we started BeatDev actually as an audit tool. So we had a label come to us and say, we have no idea how many times a song is played on a streaming service. They just give us a CSV that says artist A did a hundred million streams and there's no actual receipts or anything related to it. So every three years they go in and do what's called an audit. They have a three year window to look at that. The audit composes three pieces. It's, they look at the subscribers for the platform to make sure that they've been accounted correctly. Cause

The money that gets paid out is based on subscription and advertising pools. So you want to track the money first and track the subscribers first to make sure the pool you're talking about is correct. Then they look at the pro rata usage. So then they say, is the numbers they gave us for this artist actually correct? And the only way to check that is to actually pull the server logs of the songs being delivered and match it line by line. And that can take up to two years to complete an audit. So you do this audit after three years. It could take up to two years.

So you're looking at in 2025 being paid for tracks in 2020. Now there's only one pool of money and that money gets paid out roughly every month to three months. So if it's wrong and you thought you did a hundred million, but you've actually found out that you did 150 million, you should have been paid 50 % more money most likely for that period. And so what happens is they have to go back and argue for that money, but that money's already been paid out. So you end up with these weird concessions like,

specialty promo items or help on advertising or special placements. you sort of like take a less great outcome in order to sort of help that artist or help your roster of artists move forward in the future. Sometimes you might get money, but it's not as likely, or at least not what you should have been paid. It'll be cents on the dollar.

The label at the time said, could you build a real-time auditing solution that would tell us when the numbers are wrong so we can get it fixed right away? We want to know the month we get the report. We don't want to know five years later. So we started by building a real-time auditing tool that would track the number of times songs were streamed in real time. As we did that, we found all these weird users. So we found like 8,000 users playing a song 63 times on a Sunday. ⁓

Users that maybe only played 10 songs but had the exact same cadence in the same days, ⁓ same song progression, same skips at the same rates. Just weird things that showed they were programmatic. And it reminded me a lot of the days when I used to hack platforms. So I started thinking about all the ways I would hack the platforms and what my data footprint would look like. And then our teams went to go look for those data footprint, those prints and find how bad the problem was.

And what we found was a massive amount of fraud. So at the time I was saying, if it's less than 1%, not a big deal. We'll continue with audit and it's a rounding error. If it's over that, it's a substantial amount of money. So we need to sort of be prepared to fix it. And it ended up being over 10%. So the question was, like, if we don't fix fraud audit doesn't matter. I can't tell you here's the number, but wait, it's not the number actually. We have to go remove these other numbers on a different path.

We have one system for tracking the numbers and a whole nother system for removing the fraud. Like it doesn't line up. So we had to actually solve fraud before we could solve audit. And as we started getting good at catching fraud, we became the leaders in the space. And I guess we just never really got back to audit because the fraud became such a massively, we realized how big the business was. I mean, we're talking, know, two to $3 billion a year being stolen from real artists. Like these aren't independent artists trying to run.

Andrew Southworth (10:11)
It doesn't sound crazy at first glance, but when you think about the fact that like Spotify does like 12 billion a year and

Andrew Batey (10:20)
No, it's not a big number. mean, it's 10 to 15 % is on average. Some platforms

Andrew Southworth (10:25)
The

is like $100 billion per year of streaming revenue. That's like an enormous sum of money that's fraudulent, you know?

Andrew Batey (10:34)
sure. mean, and it's growing. You figure payouts are going to be 30 billion by 2030. So I would expect somewhere between six and eight billion stolen a year from the industry that way, you know, as we move forward in the next five years, ⁓ annually, the numbers alone, like the majors probably make an extra two and a half to three billion just by having us in place, because they're the victims. If you think about it, the pro rata model benefits the people with the highest number of streams. So if the

But it benefits everybody equally. So if you're an independent artist, you make proportionally the same amount more money when we stop fraud. It's just that maybe you only made 10 grand a year, now you make 11. Whereas if you make a billion dollars a year, now you make a hundred million dollars extra. So the numbers line up quite like, you know, stack up heavily if you're a large catalog owner, because it applies to everyone equally. So the incumbents have a lot here to lose by not having us in place.

And it's because they're not the ones causing the fraud. Major labels make up less than 1 % of all the fraud in the industry. And so arguably the fraud they're dealing with is probably artists just trying to move up from number 10 on the chart to number from one. So either way they were going to chart, either way that the damage is financially actually not that big. They're chasing maybe a chart position, but they're already a really known.

credible artist who has a fan base. like their incentive is very different than an independent artist trying to break out. And what we see by and large is it's not independent artists trying to do this. It's organized crime, financial scammers, ⁓ money launderers, cartels. These guys are pretending to be artists, loading millions of songs on the platforms as if they're artists.

and running a thousand streams against each song. No one cares about the song with a thousand and twenty streams. Like this is irrelevant to most people. But if you stack up eight million of those and you do that every single month across a hundred platforms, you can make a significant amount of money.

Andrew Southworth (12:36)
Yeah, so for everyone watching, we first met in Amsterdam, ADE, because you were giving a talk and then we both, well, you were going to meet up with Gio from Smart Noise and then we were also meeting up with Gio and then we chatted. But when I watched your chat at ADE, when you said that most of the streaming fraud was from fraudsters, organized crime, terrorist organizations, I was sitting there like, what the fuck? I would have thought,

The majority would be for major artists trying to juice their numbers, second by indie artists trying to juice their numbers or accidentally juicing their numbers. so I found that to be genuinely like, I was shocked when you first said that.

Andrew Batey (13:20)
No, it makes sense too. Like if you think about it, it's kind of a perfect industry to move money and wash money. If I have a bunch of cash in Columbia and I need to turn it into dollars to my partners, maybe I have to pay my partner off in Hong Kong or my one partner in the Middle East because the money flows, you know, they send me drugs. I have to send them money. ⁓ It's hard. Money weighs a lot of pounds. It's hard to move millions of dollars across.

So what you could do or what they have done is they'll set up all of these entities in these different jurisdictions. So you could have 14 different labels in the Middle East that all have songs under them. And what you do is you pay all the local residents, there's Bitcoin ATMs all over Latin America. So you're basically a drug lord. So everyone in your community sort of has to do what you say.

So you tell every one of these people, go take this cash, turn it into ATM, make Bitcoin, send it here. They all go and do it slowly. Everyone moves the cash that you have into Bitcoin. The Bitcoin gets sent to streaming farm operators who are told, play these songs. Now they go and stream those songs as many times as they have to. But what happens is every month, the money being paid out, 12 % goes to your partner in Hong Kong, 12 % goes to your partner in Canada.

40 % goes to your supplier that has an entity out of Doha. And every month, no matter how many streams you do, the beneficial owners are getting this cash. And so what happens is it washes through the streaming service. So you pay a streaming farm operator to run a bunch of streams. The money gets siphoned out of the revenue pool that's being split with artists. And then it gets paid as clean money as if you have a real label delivering that money across the border to wherever you've told it that you own this right.

and they send you millions of dollars to that entity. And now it's clean. You can buy real estate, businesses, payroll, ⁓ buy yourself Grammy tickets, like whatever. Like you can do whatever you want and then act like you're part of the music industry when it's all just one giant front and you're moving money from one country to numerous other countries without ever having actually had real artists.

Andrew Southworth (15:39)
Yeah, and I guess the problem is, even if they're to physically get that cash in the country, the person who is collecting the cash, if they report that in their taxes, it's going to be like, well, how did you just randomly get millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Andrew Batey (15:55)
Now they're a successful label owner.

Andrew Southworth (15:57)
Right, so that's their excuse. Like, yeah, we just, we promoted our artists, we made a bunch of money. And then it would be incredibly hard to prove that it's all fraudulent until you guys get paid.

Andrew Batey (16:08)
Sure. So we can show that that's fraud. We can say, don't pay this out. ⁓ You know, and then they lose money. I mean, that's, and ideally they find another place to wash their money or even just steal money. Some of these farms aren't just watching, washing money. They're actually just trying to steal money also. So, ⁓ you know, they'll build their own infrastructure or they'll run their own bot farms. There's the guy in North Carolina who got caught. He made $10 million between 2018 and 2020.

But that was kindergarten fraud. Like that was so easy to spot. ⁓ a child could have spotted that. That was not hard to discover. So the stuff that we find is way more sophisticated than that. think that's just like a really easy case for people to understand where they're like, this guy used AI, you know, 206,000 AI tracks and generated a bunch of, you know, free money for himself.

Andrew Southworth (17:01)
Yeah, actually the clarifying that specific case, a lot of people I've seen in my comments and stuff have been saying like, the reason why he got in trouble was for the mass uploading of AI music to the platform. But it was the case that he really got in trouble, not for the AI music at scale, but for the falsified streams that he was extracting money from. Is that correct?

Andrew Batey (17:24)
The similarities are very similar to when Google got sued in Europe for, you know, like the self-driving cars that would take pictures of people's houses and map everything. Theoretically, any public photo is public. Like you should be able to use that. problem. The courts actually came back and said within the limits of a person and the fact that you've systematized the scale inherently makes it commercial and you do not have commercial license for that. And so Google actually got in trouble.

Not because, like on the face, you can take public photos, but because they systematically did it for scale, which presented a different case than if a human took the picture. And so what the similarity is for this guy is how they're going to end up, think, trying this case is they're going to prove that he systematically tried to steal from everybody. And it wasn't just one person getting his friends to download and play a song or running his own, his own streams.

He went as far as hiding and obfuscating who owned what bots and what their names were because he knew what he was doing would not have been allowed and was against the terms and services and at scale presented a problem. And what I think is interesting is there's not really a case where streaming farms have been in trouble and it's been criminal. I think we all agree it shouldn't be paid. It's against terms and services. But I would say that it hasn't been in the courts decided that it's criminal yet.

So when this becomes a criminal case and he is guilty, ⁓ it opens the door to RICO charges. It opens the door to all the other stuff that I think the DOJ wants to go after, but you can't go after them until there's a crime. You can't have organized crime without a crime. So I think what happens is they prove that this is a crime and then you see a flood of litigation and cases against.

you know, maybe even executives at companies who are, ⁓ who've made money. If you're at a distribution company and you've quietly turned your head for the last five years and realize that you're making money off some artists, that's not real, but you're taking your cut as you pass the money through and you've enjoyed tens of millions of dollars benefiting, ⁓ and done nothing to stop it. Like you might be liable. And so I think there's a really interesting set of avalanche.

cases that are going to come off the back of this. And this is just a, this poor guy, he's so dumb. He used his real name. He didn't even, I think he really thought he was in like the infinite money loop and probably just thought this was a gray area. And unfortunately, you know, fortunately for the industry, but unfortunately for him, he'll be the guy that has the, you know, that gets made an example of.

Andrew Southworth (20:09)
Now for like the indie distributors that don't take commissions, Cause like companies like the Orchard or AWOL or downtown music and et cetera, right? They take splits, cuts off the artists royalties, but something like a district in tune core, you know, et cetera, where the artists keep a hundred percent of the royalties.

Andrew Batey (20:27)
Yeah, but they still charge per track uploaded. So they still make money. These guys need to put up like millions of songs to do volume and they'll do it through different entities. So again, it's not, it's definitely, you're better incentivized if it's a flat rate, if you're a distro, but that doesn't mean you're immune. Like there's massive amounts of fraud on these flat rate services. ⁓ Almost more so because they, fraudsters get more money at the end of the day from this.

Andrew Southworth (20:31)
Thank you

Remember when you were giving your talk, you explaining some of the metrics that you guys use to figure out if something is fraudulent or not. And obviously, I'm sure there's some element of that that's proprietary or closed off because if they know everything you're doing, can mask what you're doing. For sure. But what are some examples that are more surface level that kind of like how do you identify what information from like obviously a user's phone, like there's IP address.

Andrew Batey (21:21)
Yeah,

really easy ones like dumb fraud, for example, is like, ⁓ we saw them, the really obvious ones are when they use Linux, like, yeah, because there's millions of users using a Linux operating system to stream music, like that's not real. And they only listen on web or on the, you know, there's something called foreground and background. So one of the analytics we get is whether or not you're active in the app at the moment, or whether it's the background noise, like you're doing something else. So if a hundred percent of your plays are all foreground, meaning they're in the app nonstop,

using Linux on web. It means they're literally just sitting there for 12 hours a day clicking around, you know, the streaming service inside the app itself. Like that, that doesn't make sense. No one does. No one behaves that way. That's really obvious fraud. Another case will be that they might decide that they're going to try and trick it and they're going to use iOS machines, you know, but if you upload 8,000 iOS 12s, we know that that's also not real because they'll like try to find a low budget way to get through.

Fronsters are typically the path of least resistance. The really good ones are the ones that invest in massive amounts of infrastructure way ahead of when they need to. And those are the ones that are hard to catch because they're using really expensive, sophisticated setups. And now it's just as easy to steal accounts. there's probably, there's tens of millions of accounts on the dark web right now. I can literally log in as you, pretend I'm you, stream a song three times and leave. And so.

There's so many compromised accounts, like why even own the devices now? I can just log in as you take over your device in place.

Andrew Southworth (22:55)
I've seen that happen on my Spotify account. I've been like, I come back to my computer and I'm listening to some major pop song that I've

Andrew Batey (23:07)
We had an executive from one of our one of our customers say hey I think I might have a fraud someone might be on my account But our team can't find it I'm gonna get because we don't take any personal information so he's like I'm gonna give you my anonymized user ID and I need you to tell me if this if I'm connected to fraud and we came back we're like sure enough you're actually connected to like 47 devices in 18 countries and Here is all the songs that you're streaming that are not legitimate

Andrew Southworth (23:35)
So on Spotify side, like I think there's a button in there when you change your password, like log me out of all other sessions. And obviously there's two factor authentication now for United phone or authentic.

Andrew Batey (23:45)
Yeah, but 2FA and even ⁓ reCAPTCHAs are like minor speed bumps. There's actually plug-edge you can buy if you're a hacker that does all of that for you and completely ⁓ bypasses those things. like they've literally systematized it. it's hard to even say it's a speed bump. It's a minor blip for most of these guys. The other thing is that outside of your credentials, there's tens of millions of accounts where your actual

entire device is compromised. So even if you change your username and password, they're literally waiting for your device to fall asleep and then using it without you knowing. So because they're not just taking it for Spotify or YouTube or Amazon or any of the services, they're using your entire computer for access to your banking, for having you click on Click Farm ads that they need run, they need ads run to ⁓ for installs of different ⁓

applications that they're getting paid for, you know, a cost per install on. So they're just using your device for anything they want. And once they have control, it doesn't matter how many times you change your password, they still have control of your device. So what they're doing is they sell off. Think of it like, uh, like your computer becomes an Amazon instance and they're selling off time to different fraudsters. So someone might pay for the time to run a streaming fraud scan. Some might pay to use your PayPal accounts. Some might pay to log in as banks.

Some might pay to have you upvote shit on ⁓ Reddit. Like whatever it is, they're having you do things you don't realize you're doing and they have full control over your computer. And there's millions and millions and millions of accounts like

Andrew Southworth (25:25)
How does someone prevent that from happening? Either on the Spotify side, keeping their account as safe as possible, or I guess on their device side, other than just the obvious.

Andrew Batey (25:36)
There's millions of things you could do, or not millions, but there's lots of things you could do. The problem is the friction becomes so great, it becomes unusable. So there's this like weird juxtaposition where you want people to have some safety, but you don't want to make it so difficult that it's like they're logging into Fort Knox every time that they want to try and listen to music or they weren't going to listen to music. So, and no one cares about their Spotify being ripped off. The general consumer probably doesn't care if someone's using their account anyway.

They pay a flat rate. So who really affects is the artist and the rights owners of that catalog. So, and a lot of people have argued for user centric, but that doesn't solve the problem either because it's actually easier for me as a hacker. If I could come right hack into your account, I can see how many times you stream a song. The average user stream something between a hundred and 200 streams a week. So in order to make a dollar, I might need to stream 3000 tracks, let's say. ⁓

or get 3000 streams or something. ⁓ To do that in user-centric, I only got to do 10 to 20 streams. So you've made it infinitely harder for me to catch you because there's less of a pattern for me to catch by you not having to stream as much. And then you'll target users that are more dormant. So you might target users first that only have 40 streams a week or 30 streams a week. Now I only got to do four streams.

So start with the lowest hanging fruit and work your way up and be able to steal way more money. So user centric does not actually solve fraud detection or solve fraud. It actually makes it easier for them to perpetrate the fraud. They'll just do it in a different way. so that, you know, every one of these economic models has some sort of incentive that prevents it from being the winner. It's whack-a-mole. Like, why do people still rob banks today? It just happens, you know, like it does.

So it's like just one of those things that we're never really going to get rid of it. I think what we end up doing is making it so difficult that all the easy fraudsters just move on and they go after, they go back to PayPal or Venmo or something like, you know, cash app. get, they get out of music as a whole because it's too safeguarded.

Andrew Southworth (27:50)
Yeah, yeah. then like, guess the, you know, the whole user centric argument, um, there's a lot of benefits to that from real listeners and real streams. Uh, there's also downsides to it too, but it does make sense that, uh, in terms of solving fraud, uh, it does make life a lot easier.

Andrew Batey (28:10)
Yeah,

I'm not looking at it from an economic model in terms of like what's fair to pay an artist for their art. You know, I think most people would agree that if your fans listening exclusively to you or mainly you, you should probably get paid more. ⁓ I guess my argument is that from the lens of fraud detection, it is not a cure-all pill that it solves all these things. does not. None of the economic models solve those things. ⁓

Whether it's lean in, lean back, artist centric, user centric, ⁓ pro rata, all of the models are inherently flawed no matter what when it comes to fraud. So don't pick a model based on fraud detection. Let's solve fraud and then you pick the model that matches the artists or the market's desire anyway. So whatever the market wants, the market will bear and that's the model that moves forward. So I'm not here to say what economic model is more fair.

I'm saying none of them work for fraud detection. So it doesn't matter what you do. They're still going to be here unless you put it in safeguards, which is what we do.

Andrew Southworth (29:16)
So in terms of ⁓ where most of the fraud comes from, ⁓ you said most of it is coming from terrorist organizations, organized crime, mafia groups, whatever. What percentage of of fraudulent streams actually comes down to just indie artists?

Andrew Batey (29:38)
Yeah, so less than 20%. I would say majors make up less than 1%. Indie artists probably are the other 18 to 19%. And then 80 % straight up financial fraud.

Andrew Southworth (29:52)
you went number four on country charts.

Andrew Batey (29:54)
Yeah,

number four U.S. music country single.

Andrew Southworth (29:57)
which is like.

Andrew Batey (29:59)
Epic. mean, it's pretty cool, but it's also like, you know, they were like, Hey, do you want to perform? Like, you don't want to hear me sing. Like I am absolute trash. Like this was a co and it was a collective for a reason. Like Kurt Stevens did, he actually did the top line because I originally thought I was going to sing it. And I went in there and heard my voice back for the first time. It was like, there's no chance that this can go out there. This is horrible. I had to be objective about the fact that I sucked. Like it was not good. We had to rerecord like seven times. It was a mess.

And at the end of it, even sent it to one of my friends who's a big producer. did all the Nickelback stuff and they were all working together. And I said like, ⁓ you know, I said trash or not trash. And I think he sent back like a trash emoji and was like, he was like, I'm going to try and fix it for you. Just give me till Tuesday. And so when he sent it back, he'd rearrange the song, cut the bridge, ⁓ had another band, which he asked me not to mention who's a really famous band, do the Dobros and the guitars.

They redid some of the guitar licks on the other side, and then they sent it to their guy to mix and master who does all their radio edits. And when it came back, I was like, dude, this is a million times better than I would have ever made in the next seven attempts, so thank you. And I put it out there and all the money went to music carers. Like even the label waived their cut. Everyone just gave all of the money to music carers. And for me, the goal was to understand what an artist goes through making the song, releasing the song, collecting their payments.

so that we could see if our technology could be used anywhere in the pipeline. Because I wanted to know where could we be helpful. When I started, I started to help artists. Like we started to make sure artists got paid correctly and somehow I ended up in fraud detection and B2B format between basically large labels and streaming services and distros. And I said, how do we get back to helping artists? So I didn't need my name attached to it. I used all NFT art. We had a completely different collective name. ⁓ You know, I tried to just...

go through the journey and figure out like how hard is this? Where can we be helpful? How do we help other artists? Because I think at least for me, I learned by doing and I wanted to see like if I could figure out something that could be helpful. ⁓ And so it's sort of like coming back to our roots a little bit. anyway, that's a tangent. But I guess my point is I also learned that I had no idea what I was doing. And I just, you know, I haven't broken artists or done anything in over a decade.

the whole game had changed. Like I was like, do I do TikTok promotions? I remember I did a TikTok promotion and, ⁓ and I, and I thought, this will be great. Like I'll have people posting with my videos for whatever reason, moms, lactating moms, like gravitated to my song, drinking drinks, hundreds of videos of moms breastfeeding their babies. And I was like, this is not what I was going for at all. Like, this is the wrong video. I was like, stop the promotion. This is not it. Like I was.

Andrew Southworth (32:42)
It's called

Andrew Batey (32:54)
I had no control. It went out in the wild and turned into some shit that I did not want. And I'm like, I don't know how to control this thing. It was an epic experiment, man. And I just learned a lot. But the thing I learned the most was without a real audience, without a real framework for taking these new fans and turning them into some sort of customer or some sort of relationship, other than them just listening, you can't just blip your way to start them.

You know, they asked us to do shows. Well, I didn't have any shows lined up. I'm not good at singing. So I'm like, I should have thought about who would perform this track. Where could we put them in stagecoach? Can we put them in stampede? Can we put them, you know, in all these different places? Who, like, how do we turn these fans into something that we could continue to engage with? I didn't think about all that. So where I failed was actually weeks two through 10. Week one was great. Week two through 10, I didn't really know what to do. And so in hindsight, I learned that

even if things seem digital, it's all the other stuff that really sets you apart. And that's how you create a career. So I learned a lot from the experience overall, but ⁓ I also learned I'm a horrible artist.

Andrew Southworth (34:06)
Is there anything that artists can do to actually just protect their music currently? For example, being careful who you hire, making sure they have a good reputation.

Andrew Batey (34:21)
This

is going to sound counterintuitive, but I would pick distribution services that are small, even if they take a higher percentage. Everyone's so worried about the percentage ownership. If they take 20%, but they're going to handhold you and you know exactly who you're working with and you have a point of contact that you can call, that's way more important than paying 10 % and just being like number 8,000 on their priority list. Like it's about the team you create if you want to be successful, not about

your ownership point, not at this stage in the game. If you're worried about that right now, then you have no leverage. If you have no leverage, you shouldn't worry about that anyway.

Andrew Southworth (34:56)
Yeah, man. Well, where can people go to learn more about you, hit you up? I'm going to put all links down below to whatever you say.

Andrew Batey (35:03)
LinkedIn's my favorite. Feel free to hit me up. Backslash, I think it's I-N slash Andrew Beatty. Just look me up, Andrew Beatty, B as in boy, A-T-E-Y. And then Instagram, Andrew Beatty, know, at Andrew Beatty. So ⁓ I have a Twitter, but I deleted like 100,000 people off of it because Twitter is a little bit of a cesspool sometimes. ⁓ I tweet occasionally, but I much prefer Instagram or LinkedIn. So hit me up. I'm always pretty available for people.

especially founders and artists who have questions, I try to make myself useful.

Andrew Southworth (35:38)
Well, thanks for coming on the show,

Andrew Batey (35:39)
Thanks for having me, man, it's been fun.