Welcome to Innovate, presents Entrepreneurs in Tech.
Today we are delighted actually to have our guest, Johannes Nailer.
Johannes, thank you for joining us and for our audience and our listeners and viewers
who might not be familiar with you, is it possible you can just introduce yourself
and give us just a little bit on who you are and what do you do before we dive into
it and really get into the details.
Yeah, of course.
So it's awesome to finally be here.
Like I said, I mean, you were telling me before this is the first episode, so I'm
honored to be the first guest for it.
So yeah, I'm Johannes.
I'm the founder of Tapt .ai.
So Tapt is, I mean, we can go, we're gonna go into a lot about what Tapt is, but the
TLDRs, we make it possible for any performer to be able to create their own
world tour.
My background is, I've been in the music industry for about,
five -ish years now, but before that I have about like 10 to 15 years of
technical experience.
So starting from college, I went to grad school for machine learning and published
some papers on that.
And getting out, did a lot of data engineering work, big on ML and big data
type projects.
Got into the music industry by...
college friends and then eventually professionally by working at Audius and
now with Tapt.
I am the technical co -founder for it.
Great.
So you're more on the tech side, I understand.
And you're young when you said, hey, I only been in the music business five years
and been in the tech for 15 years.
So I would assume you started when you're like eight, nine years old being in the
tech business.
yeah.
Yeah, I mean, like, Legos are a thing.
Yeah, I went pretty hardcore down that and even starting it like in middle school and
whatnot.
I used to think I was gonna be a chemist.
And so in middle school and early high school, I was making rockets.
And I thought I wasn't, I couldn't decide on chemistry or physics.
So I eventually kind of started weeding off that when...
I mean, if I don't know if you have a question for down the line, so I won't
spoil the story yet, but I blew up my backyard and I kind of started weeding off
of, weeding off of chemistry in rockets.
you know, my next question, my next question is really, take us back to your
childhood.
Like how did the whole passion for being into the tech, being a rocket scientist, I
should say, you know, being somebody who's, you know, innovative and really
focused and obsessed with technology and how did you develop that to your later on
in life with school?
Like what pushed that kind of vision and the curiosity?
Yep, I'm from the middle of nowhere, Virginia.
I'm like really far out there.
Like the county that I live in or the county that my parents live in has been
invited to join West Virginia several times.
And that's how rural it is.
And there's not a whole lot to do out here.
And I'm a very active person.
I'm always trying to like find something to do when I get bored.
I'm very much so like, okay, I gotta do something, gotta do something, gotta do
something.
And...
being in an environment in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, I just
ended up getting into stuff, right?
Like getting into, I would help a friend mount a motor onto a bicycle so he had a
little motorcycle that he could drive around with.
Or, you know, the rockets is obviously kind of the big flashy one of making
rockets and building experiments off of that.
But even trying to do metalworking, my mom works at a hospital, so I...
got a lot of dry ice, so I would do experiments with dry ice and try to freeze
things and just do stuff like just really getting into stuff.
I was always very like hands on, I'm bored.
I need to do something right now to get some kind of stimulation to get to cut
through the the rural Virginia vibe.
Amazing.
Then you went to college and you studied data science and machine learning, ML.
And this is pretty impressive.
And you have masters in that, correct?
Yeah, it's funny.
I didn't get into, originally, like, you know, chemistry and physics, while being
an engineer, not really close to computer science at all.
The transition happened when I was in high school.
My friends would sign up for, we're trying to be college students, and we'd sign up
for, capture the flag events, cybersecurity capture the flag events,
right?
So you'd have some school, usually, because we're from the middle of nowhere,
be like Radford or something like that, would set up.
a capture the flag event, you'd have to do all these cybersecurity challenges like
cryptography, that stuff that would require a lot of math.
And we would end up breaking into those and having a lot of fun doing it.
And we would win first place and try to beat all the college students.
And we were like 15.
So that is what got me more into computer science is that I want something that I
could have a big impact with, but I don't threaten my backyard getting blown up.
or losing a finger or something like that.
In terms of engineering, computer science is pretty tame.
There isn't a whole lot to lose.
So yeah, getting into college, it started, I thought I was going to be doing
cybersecurity, but I ended up not liking the crowd and got much more into data
science.
I really liked building, just building ML models, writing scripts to try to create
something out of nothing.
Well, I like that.
I'm obsessed with technology, but I never went to school for tech.
I love it.
I love Unibart.
I love understanding.
I love seeing it evolve.
And that's a big thing for me.
And how did the transition from, you know, ML, machine learning, data science, all of
that, building a rocket science, building a rocket in the backyard, transfer all of
that to music.
So how did this, where the connection came in?
You said because of a friend, but still.
The passion, the mental has to be there.
absolutely.
I mean, if you want to get into music as a tech person, you have to really want it
because the space is everybody wants to get into music, but not a lot of people
are willing to go get through the hard part because music is like fun.
You go to go through live shows like as a tech person, it's like fun to be in tech
and music.
But the reality is it's like under the hood.
It's tough.
Like it's hard to get people to take you seriously.
It's hard to get investment of any kind.
It's hard to work with artists.
They're very tough customers.
So to get through the actual challenges, you got to win it really bad.
And for me, it's a bit easier because most of my friends in college weren't tech
people.
They were actually musicians.
A lot of them were producers or EDM DJs or something along those lines.
And while it's very fun to work on big data engineering projects, like my first
job out of college was at Capital One.
And so I had a lot of data to play with and I could build really cool ML models.
I had a lot of smart people I could interact with.
At the end of the day, all the stuff I built when I went home from work is like
nobody, nobody could see any of that stuff.
Like nobody really cared what I was building versus when I was doing
hackathons and even just building stuff for them on the side.
It was a lot more fulfilling for me to be able to see I built something and now all
of a sudden my friends can use it like day of the feedback loop is much tighter.
And so that was what started getting me more and more into music is, okay, if I'm
just around all these producers, I'm gonna bill for them.
Interesting.
So how were you able to scale from being a two things, music tech startup and as a
software engineer.
So were you focused pretty much on the other side of it, which is the tech side
of it to build it.
Say that again.
You got involved in a startup with a friend of yours.
That was the whole thing.
Yes.
And how did you manage to scale it down?
Getting involved in a music tech startup and also being an engineer or software
developer because you're the person who actually built the infrastructure for it
or a platform.
I mean, it's, it's a little wild kind of balancing all that.
Cause when I first started getting, getting into startups, I wanted it to be
like a side gig.
I really liked, that kind of romanticized image that's that people often present on
Twitter of the indie dev who's working on stuff on the side.
So originally that's what I thought I was going to have my day job.
And, I was going to have this side hustle that it was eventually just going to
overtake it and make me more money.
And I could go to Spain or Bali or something like that and hang out on the
beaches and.
and program music tech.
That was at least the original thought process for it.
But then as I mentioned earlier, music tech is not, it's very flashy at the
start, but it's a lot harder than most people consider.
Like if once you get through all the, this is fun, I get to be at live shows, it's
tough.
And so it started to make any kind of success or any kind of progress, it would
dump more and more into my time.
And so scaling it basically meant taking more away from my job, eventually leaving
my job, just to have to be able to do this, just to move the needle for this and
get some kind of progress, right?
And it's also a pretty big shock for coming from a data background where I'm
used to dealing with huge, like petabytes of data at Capital One.
There were S3 buckets that were just egregiously large.
And going from that to a startup where you quickly learn,
Like I think the big, the famous Paul Graham quote is build not to scale.
Like you want to build something that doesn't, you know, it's
counterintuitively.
You want to build something that doesn't scale first and then try to make something
happen from that.
So figure out where the demand is in the market and then scale it, but don't try to
scale before you found the demand.
and that's especially true for music.
Cause there's a lot, like I said, there's a lot of flashy stuff.
There's a lot of people who have these big brands and they're very loud and proud.
But if you take away that one person, the whole product falls apart.
So that kind of bringing a full circle, that's the TLDR, right?
Is, yeah, just ended up doing that full time and then working on building stuff
not to scale.
I mean, you being a software developer to organizing hackathon style remix
competitions, which is really, I want to hear about that.
Then creating an AI label, which is the startup.
Yeah.
Rubik's competitions before?
Which one?
No, no, remix, you know, hackathons.
Well, there's regular remix competition I heard of, yes.
But hackathon style remix competition, is it kind of tech involved in it or?
There can be, absolutely.
I mean, you know what a normal hackathon is, right?
Like you've seen the people going to...
In Virginia, I used to organize, especially for my university, I went to
college in Richmond, Virginia, and we had something called RamHacks, and it was the
biggest hackathon in Virginia.
We had nearly 500 people participate.
People from all the different schools in Virginia would drive to Richmond just to
participate in our hackathon.
So I understand, and that's where I've learned,
Most of what I know.
I love hackathons.
I didn't like, I say, I always try to put the grad school stuff on paper and that's
really flashy, but to be honest, like it's really just for paper.
Like the stuff I learned at hackathons is the stuff I really is what taught me how
to build the needle.
And at a startup, you want to build an MVP really fast and get it out to market.
And hackathons are what taught me that if anything grad school taught me the
opposite.
So leaving it, I saw that there's an opportunity in music for, for something
similar to that.
And I love remixed competitions in general.
Audius, the company that I worked at, hosted their own remix competitions and
you would put it on their website, Audius being like a web three SoundCloud.
And when you upload something to Audius, you can actually mark it as a remix.
And so you get these like remix trees, if that makes sense.
I've like, okay, here's the OG content and then here's all the remixes of it.
And the content creators could decide a winner.
And I loved that.
And I wanted to do an in -person one.
Because I love in -person hackathons over online ones, so it made sense.
And Richmond's got a lively music scene.
I was still living in Richmond at the time, and so I started organizing these
things.
I set aside a weekend where I would ask a couple of the hometown, the well -known
musicians in Richmond.
I'd get samples from them, whether it be vocal samples or just any kind of beats,
any kind of samples, any kind of stems that they'd be willing to give me for
free.
I would bring it to, I'd find some kind of space, I'm pretty crafty, and present it
to all these musicians and say, make something off of this.
Either remix it somehow, take these stems, do something cool with it, it's very open
-ended.
And at the end of the weekend, just like a hackathon, we'll present what we've
created.
And then decide winners and whatnot.
So we try to...
get as many sponsors as we could and try to give out prizes and whatnot.
But just like a hackathon, we would also have workshops.
Like one jazz musician, there was a lot of EDM producers at the first one we ran and
a jazz musician came in and taught a workshop on how to read sheet music.
And because none of the DJs or producers knew how to read sheet music.
So all in all, very, very good fun.
That's really what they were.
It's like a lot of these guys learned how to make music.
extremely fast with samples that they wouldn't be able to get on their own.
And I think everybody learned a lot.
I loved organizing those things.
Love it.
Are you still doing it?
no.
too much.
I wish I could.
I always kept saying, I would tell the organizing team like, yeah, we'll do one.
We'll do one in the next couple of months.
And then I would travel somewhere and then I'll be okay with it next couple of
months.
And then I travel somewhere.
So we did a few, but, the, for now those are tabled, unfortunately.
Well, let's talk about the big elephant in the room, the big startup that you and
your partner created and you guys push it and you're standing behind it, TAP .ai.
Now, tell us the mission behind it and how does it empower or empower its performance
and create world tours from their phone?
Like, how can you create a world tour from your iPhone or your smartphone?
Heck yeah.
So, I mean, that's one of my favorite taglines, right?
Is that be able to create a world tour from your phone.
I think it's, it, every, like, how do you know if a performer's big?
How do you know if an artist is big?
Well, they had a world tour.
Exactly.
A hundred percent.
It's everybody wants a world tour.
Like anybody small and big, they want a world tour.
Especially if, I mean,
you know, any, any kind of young guys gonna want something, gonna want something
to say like, look, I went and performed in all these different cities, even just
like, you know, even a world tour in general, just being able to say that I
performed in New York, or I've went to several states over to go perform.
Like that's a, I don't know, it's a really powerful kind of visual, but me and Aries
and I have been, Aries is my co -founder, have been hacking on stuff for over a year
at this point.
Like even when I still had a job and we were kind of just doing stuff on the side,
we knew that we wanted to build something in the music space.
I have a strong music tech background.
He's got an extremely strong music background and dealing with production,
especially in the hip hop R &B genre.
This is the space that we are meant to be in and it makes sense for us to be here.
So we had been coming up with startup ideas, products really quickly, like I
said, coming out with MVPs, just seeing where the demands at in the space.
The AI record label was one of them.
But there were several different iterations on products that we would
release.
We'd say, OK, this is going to be the customer segment we're going after.
This is going to be the value proposition for them.
Let's get an MVB product out really quickly, and let's send it out.
And we even must have had hundreds of these things.
But the ones that really stuck out were the live music ones, the ones that really
got any kind of traction.
We would build something in a weekend, and all of a sudden, we'd have 500 people
using it, which,
you know, now doesn't sound like a lot with the volume that we're getting, but
500 people for something you built really quickly, I know from hackathons, that's a
good number, like that's an actual solid number.
So we would keep kind of like survival of the fittest.
We build all these products and then take the ones that got the most kind of
traction and then keep iterating on them.
And yeah, live music was the thing that got it, like every single time.
And everybody in live music tries to build a marketplace of...
building bookings, there's like 10 different booking apps nowadays.
But the one thing that we noticed was that none of them had any kind of good data to
deal with.
Like everybody's shooting in the dark.
Like there's no Spotify for artists kind of level analytics or chart metric level
analytics.
Everybody's just shooting in the dark.
So when everybody's digging for gold, like what's the saying?
How's the saying go?
You bake the shovels.
So we started...
collecting as much data as we could, which is easy for me because that's my whole
background.
I was like, okay, this is perfect.
So we started collecting tons and tons and tons and tons of data on bookings.
I have, Ilyas had his own from his agency had his own proprietary data set.
I'm pretty good at building web crawlers.
I had to do it for some of my master's courses and also at Capone.
And then just getting data from wherever we could get it and just being very data
hungry.
And,
What we realized is we've got a goldmine here.
We've got a goldmine for all this data.
Every time we get on a call, people are feeding to get what we have.
And we have this strategy of products, potential products that we could use this
data set for.
Because we're like, Jesus, we have really good stuff.
And the first one was, well, let's start small.
And let's start with something that we know is going to be a hit from data that
we have from the previous products we've built.
Let's just.
quick MVP get out a way for performers to be able to book shows in multiple cities.
If we have data on venues across all of North America, we have data on who
generally books there.
We have all their genre data, their capacity data, everything in between.
Let's make a really quick way to say, are you a performer that makes hip hop music
and this is your previous booking history?
Well, these are the venues that we'll recommend for you based on...
this massive data set that we have in the background and we could present it to you
in a very easy to understand UI just right on a map where you can see where it goes.
excuse me for interrupting.
So for our viewers and myself and our followers, basically you kind of, you have
a predictive AI analytic system that forecasts where should they, where the
best for them based on their followers, based on the size of network or social
media presence that they have.
Based on that, your AI tab.
dot AI technology platform kind of tell them where and which venues will host them
based on all the information you have on them.
Yeah, which ones would be, which ones should they, you know, keeping it kind of
like broad, which one should they perform at?
Like, if you're trying to perform in New York, which venues should you perform at?
And here's a really easy and intuitive way to reach out to them.
Like, based on who they've booked in the past.
Yeah.
New York.
Somebody, I'm an artist, I'm in New York.
Let's say, Virginia, where you are.
I'm an artist in Virginia.
And I don't have the funds to travel, to bring the whole band.
If I have a band with me or I'm a solo artist, I can't, I have a job,
responsibility, whatever it is, school.
So I would find me venues that would host me locally.
It's only a drive, you know.
I can drive or take the bus or public transportation to get there.
Absolutely.
And there's a lot of people don't tour as much as they normally would because it's
too much of a risk.
Like if you're, you said you're like, okay, I'm a musician from New York.
I don't want to leave New York.
Cause if I leave New York and the show bombs, what am I going to do?
I'm at, that's like, I'm out of a bunch of money.
That's an awful tour.
or I'm not going to drive all the way.
Let's say, you know, I, I hear that you could probably book a show, you know,
Austin, Texas is the, the.
live music capital of the U .S.
But then as an artist in Virginia, I'm not just going to fly or drive to Austin just
because I might be able to get a show.
With what we're building, you know you're going to get a show.
You know you're going to get a show and you know it's going to pay well.
So you're not taking a risk.
It's a much more calculated science of where am I going to go to do a show.
So even if I have 500 followers, if I can prove that I can make a sufficient amount
of money in Texas, then why not fly to Texas?
If...
You know, if it makes sense to me, right?
it get booked?
Does it get booked also?
It doesn't just tell you where you should perform or which venue will take you.
Would it book it for you?
no, it doesn't.
You would have to make the call yourself, or make the call, or send an email, or
whatever.
the intro right now because I think I mentioned this earlier is we made a very
strategic decision that we didn't want to be a marketplace.
Marketplaces are very tough to build.
It's tough to get started.
To get to liquidity for a marketplace is extremely hard.
If you can get it, you got it.
If you can make a marketplace work, those things are unstoppable.
Like Airbnb is unstoppable.
eBay is unstoppable.
All these places.
But getting it started is tough.
So we made...
the decision early on that we were going to not build one, or at least for now, not
building a marketplace.
So that just inherently means that however the venue wants to book them, they're free
to do so.
And however well they want to pay them, I'm sure you know payment methods for
musicians are...
all over the place.
There's some of the due percentage of ticket sales.
Some of them are 50 -50, some of it's 100 % at the start, some of it's 100 % at the
end, some of it's like percentage of bar sales.
Like they have all these different ways of paying you.
So rather than trying to build out a solution for each one of those, we let
them take care of it.
We make the intro.
But at least you make the intro, which is great.
That even, that's a big icebreaker.
Interesting.
Very, very interesting.
And you know...
line, we'd love to partner with somebody that does do this kind of stuff and does
do the contracting and whatnot.
Cause we also don't do ticket.
Cause again, we didn't want to build a marketplace.
We didn't want to have, have two sides that we needed to deal with.
And if you build, if we wanted a ticketing, then now there's three sides,
cause there's fans, there's artists, there's venues, and then maybe even a
fourth for promoters.
And like, how do you make all of those guys happy?
It sucks.
It's not fun.
So.
.ai technology that you guys built, you know, there is potential impact on the
booking industry and ticket sales.
You know, I could see where this going.
I mean, this is not just where can you perform an introductory level.
This is going to probably expand.
That's what I see.
Where is it going?
As you mentioned earlier, how Uber impacted and disrupted the cab industry,
how Airbnb without owning one hotel, disrupted the hotel industry.
you know, and so forth and others and others.
And I see this technology going that direction.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
You're the developer, you're the engineer and you know.
No, I mean, you know what you're talking about.
You've obviously heard of Red Ocean, Blue Ocean, and we are operating in a blue
ocean, whereas the people building out a lot of places in the music industry,
everybody seems to go for the Red Ocean, which is, in my head, recorded music.
It's either recorded music or artist -to -fan experiences.
Those are very competitive Red Oceans.
I've seen 15 different artist engagement startups, and they all do the same thing,
and they're all pretty bad.
I'm friends with some of them, so I'd say that, hey, they do really good, they're
very talented people, but I don't feel like that, in my opinion, I don't think,
to be brutally honest, I just don't think they're hitting the mark.
And there's really a different ticketing startups right now.
There's in recording music, there's a million different recording music startups
that are trying to make some kind of, take some kind of sliver out of that.
We're not operating in this competitive red ocean.
We're in the nice blue ocean.
There's nothing really stopping us.
It's...
It's big, they're on a lot of competitors and we're creating our own demand.
The people who join, I think my favorite metric for Tapped is that we don't get a
whole lot of churn because the people who join the app stay with it and after the
app's gone, they don't know what they were doing beforehand.
Their life's completely different.
And I think that's my favorite metric is if we took this app away from people, they
wouldn't know what to do.
They'd beg us for it back.
Because there's nothing like it.
There's nothing like it right now.
Yes, you're right.
There is a lot of new startup tech platforms that focuses on artists or fans,
they call it now, you know, artists, fan engagement or super fans and all of that.
Everybody coming up with their own thing.
It's and everybody try to say, OK, this is what I have is the is what's going to the
new the new mark in the music business, the new thing, you know, the new
innovative thing that's going to.
you know, take them take this kind of level to the front.
Which is, I don't know yet.
I mean, you know, everybody has something, as you said, but nobody has headed on the
market that something kind of blew up because I think the whole emphasis.
Well, because the whole infrastructure of the music business still there didn't
change, you know, we went from physical to digital.
So we are still in the digital world and I what's happening right now.
I don't like to use the word disruptive because I think any technology is not the
word destructive, it's advancement.
You know, we advance it, we're progressing, we're going forward.
You know, that's what technology does.
It takes us forward.
It makes things easier, empowers us to do things.
It makes what we're doing reach every point of this planet that we live on, like
before it wasn't.
Then digital came in and everybody, there's iPhones and smartphones, whether
Android or Apple, but it made you reach the world through your technology.
So technology, I'm a big fan of technology, you know, and it's, I think
technology is a great tool for human advancement in any industry, whether it's
in music and in education and travel, anything, anything in medical, all of
that.
So in your opinion, as a, you know, as an engineer and data science and all of that,
and a developer, what do you see the most innovative advancement happening in the
music industry today?
I think the big, the elephant in the room in terms of music tech is generative
audio, like stuff that's, you know, AIs do it.
You've heard of Suno?
Yeah, Suno came to our event mixer.
It's like, you know, generate songs you could put in a prompt that says, you know,
make me a song about a cat in blue grass or something like that and it'll make it.
And it's like, really, it's pretty good.
It's not bad.
Those kinds of things are the big elephant in the room in terms of music tech.
Everybody talks about them of, okay, what is royalty is going to look like?
How they trained it?
I think that's what's got everybody distracted.
Everybody outside of music tech, that's what's got them distracted.
And I think that is going to fundamentally change things, especially with stuff like
sync licensing.
With regenerative audio, you don't need sync licensing anymore.
You just...
somebody who wants audio for a movie or for a commercial is just going to generate
with Suno.
They're not going to pay an artist like tens of thousands, like 30 grand to make
something for a commercial anymore.
They're just going to make it.
now is how this music been trained on and which music and that's the only, yes,
that's the issue right there.
But the problem is, as we said before, and you asked me, what's my point?
How do you see it?
The problem is, as I mentioned, there's physical and digital technologies over
here and the music business here.
It's always way ahead.
So now this whole AI thing, it's way ahead of the music business.
And the music business trying to catch up,
Some wants it to some don't want it to to catch up but eventually it will and all of
these new things that Coming up with all these startups all these great text music
startups that with all different ideas and all different approach I think the music
itself the infrastructure has to change a little bit advance itself Then you'll see
new ways of consuming music music and all of that, but still based on the old ways,
you know
DSPs and digital streaming platforms and distributors and aggregators still a lot
of the old ways is still run the business.
But now it's kind of a little bit of a shake like, okay, the music has to move,
the business itself has to move forward to catch up with technology in order for all
of these new startups, a lot of these AI driven startups, whether it's tools or
whatever they are, in order for this to happen, the music business has to kind of
push.
So there should be, there will be changes happening.
There will be, and I cannot put any of these new startups down because we don't
know yet until things move forward, you know, as the whole infrastructure move
forward, yes.
It's tough.
Yeah.
I mean, it really, the music industry, I'm thinking about it.
I like the way, I like your analogy for it too.
Cause the way I've always thought about it is if you think of it like this ball
technology so far has really just affected the outside of the ball.
I guess, especially the artist of fan.
Artist of fan has always been the thing that's optimized.
It's the one thing like Spotify did extremely well as artist of fan is now
like so optimized to the point where artists don't even make money.
It's not even like, it's just too optimized.
Like there's no money in it anymore.
But at its core, I don't think tech has really affected the music industry as much
as it ought to have.
I think that's changing.
I think that there's finally the cracks in the music industry.
Tech is starting to flow through and it's exciting.
But it's also a little wild at the same time because one of the main reasons
investors don't like to get into music tech is because of licensing.
The legislation for music tech fundamentally is...
For moving is awful.
It's so bad in its the history going all the way back to like 1718 hundreds of
the old ways, it's still the old ways, it's still the old ways.
A lot of it, as I said, they don't want it to change because that's how they make
money, you know, and that's how it's set up.
And that's how they control it because technology, you think it can make the old
ways, they're gonna lose their grip on it.
Yeah, you can track different kinds of licensing deals to...
I think the most telling example is in the 1800s, somebody made a self -playing
piano.
It was a piano, you didn't actually have to have a player, you could put it in a
bar.
Think of it like a jukebox.
And it would play itself.
But if it plays somebody's song, who gets the music for that song?
And there was this whole thing and...
One artist in particular freaked out about it and so Congress very quickly made
legislation for it really hastily.
And now you have this terrible law that sits there and what are you gonna do about
it?
I mean, Congress isn't gonna move particularly fast.
Like the people in the tech community hate when you have to wait for Congress to have
to do something.
So a lot of fundamentally what's messed up is there's so many bad laws and so much
like hastily made legislation of, shoot, shoot, shoot, we gotta, like.
And I think it's going to happen with generative AI too.
It's going to go shoot.
of the benefit of certain people in control of the business, yes.
But you know what, this takes me back to what you guys developed, Tapped AI, where
you mentioned it, you just said, right now there's no money in streaming, artists not
making money.
Don't forget about major artists, talk about independent artists.
So where independent artists gonna turn?
Okay, the music, not every independent artist's music's being played in
commercials and movies and in anything, not everybody.
You know, some are, but not everybody.
There's a lot more not.
So how can they get themselves out there beside, you know, short content, beside
TikTok or beside, you know, somebody's social media platform that's really
helping a lot of independent artists come forward.
I would say Tapped AI is actually a key, is the main key that really gonna help.
A lot of independent artists perform performance performance before a live
That's what it's all about about being engaged with your audience being engaged
with your fans and you guys are the key definitely tap the eye technology
definitely a great great tool and enhancement for independent artists To
perform and to generate revenue and get their name out there.
Yes
Yeah, because, you know, with there being no music, where else are you supposed to
make money?
You either, as an independent guy, you're either making it, playing shows or selling
merch.
And where do you sell the most merch?
At live shows.
So you're really going to incentivize to get as many live shows as you can get.
And even bringing it full circle, I'm very, it's very fortunate that TAPT is not
in a field that has all these different licensing issues and all these different,
like, there's not a whole lot of legislation around live music.
I mean, there is, and there's some state stuff, but it doesn't affect us.
Like,
When I say we're in a blue ocean, we're really in the, like, we're in the part of
the music industry that's just, like, really nice to be in.
And so, yeah, we're moving fast.
Like, we have the opportunity to move fast whereas all these other startups, and even
startups like I mentioned, like the fan to artist engagement ones or the ticketing
ones, all these other guys, they pay for our data because they, there's so many,
you know, they start their startup and all of a sudden there's, like, just
inherently, like,
all these obstacles ahead of them and they want whatever they can get to get ahead of
these obstacles and there's legislative ones, there's like old money guys getting
in, old music heads, it's just all these obstacles for us, we don't have any of
these obstacles and we have the data to support those guys.
So we're having, we're in calls right now with tons of different, from ticking
companies to artists to foreign companies to all these people that we mentioned who
are trying to get access like to our API.
They were like, what will it cost?
Cause the only other option is to pay somebody like Polestar, the other other.
database that's very similar to ours is Polestar and that's Ticketmaster data and
they charge 40 grand a year for a license for data that's not that good in the first
place.
So we're really like, we're at a full sprint.
There's nothing stopping us.
And the art of seeing that, that's why we get so many people onboard is the only way
for them to make music is to play live and we help them play live.
So it's like, and...
Even for somebody saying, wait, we still have a pretty generous free tier.
We're a startup.
Like we want people to, we want to encourage people to get on.
We're not really in the business of like, let's get it as much as we can.
We have some things gated, but we really want to facilitate people getting on the
app and trying things out.
And so I can get the feedback to build a better product.
And so even the guys who are getting on and staying on the free tier, they don't
leave.
They stay with us and they're constantly looking for new shows, looking for new
gigs.
I have somebody and,
I know he's got the money, but he likes to be cheap and he doesn't want to pay for
the subscription to that we have.
But on the app, he just wants to know whenever he wants to play in the city, he
does the research himself.
He goes in our app and finds where all the venues are in the city and calls them
himself.
I was like, you could just pay 10 bucks and we'll do it for you.
Like, you could send out the intros.
Like that's the whole point is we send out intros for you.
And he's like,
He doesn't want to pay the $10, but whatever, but it still finds value on the
fruit here.
He's he's honored like all the time playing around, like looking on the map,
looking for venues, looking up all the stats on them and stuff like that.
Like we were fundamentally changing how things are getting done.
Wow, amazing, amazing.
What are some of the challenges you faced revolutionizing the live performance space
with technology?
And how did you overcome them?
Without a doubt, it's data.
That's how we're solving the problem, right?
There's no easy way to get a lot of data, to scale it.
You can get small stuff.
You can have one artist's booking history, or you can have one venue's booking
history, or you might find a calendar here or there, but nobody knows who's playing
where, except for maybe Ticketmaster knows it for...
The people that work with them.
I mean, some of these other ticketing companies like Dice, for example, has a
decent amount of data.
And I know the team at Dice.
I've met them from New York and they have an office in Barcelona where I lived.
And they got some good stuff, but at the end of the day, that's also not public.
There's just a severe lack of data of what's going on and what things look like.
And that's, we're starting it by creating TAPT.
We are fundamentally under the hood.
We see ourselves as a data analytics company.
We take in tons, terabytes, right now it's still in the gigabytes, but we're taking
it out to scale.
We are gonna be taking in terabytes all the way up to petabytes of data of what's
going on in the music industry.
Who's playing where, at what frequency are they playing?
What are the best times of year to play?
All these other different factors.
But right now it still sucks.
I'm lucky that I've done this stuff before, because the code is disgusting and
it's messy and it's...
super hacky, but it gets the job done and gets us a lot of data.
We take in, every day we probably add like 50 ,000 new performers that we track and
around a thousand new venues that we track of who's playing at these places.
We take in a lot of data, but it's hard work.
It keeps you, I spent a lot of hours working on it, right?
But that's the biggest challenge in live music without a doubt.
Which thank God there's somebody like Tap The Eye solving that.
You
could see somebody knocking on your door soon.
A big exit.
Let me ask you, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead.
that would just be nervous you go crazy you go crazy
Where do you see the intersection of technology and live music heading in the
next decade?
And what role hope you're going to play in shaping that future?
Yeah, do you know, have you heard of media research?
Media research.
I'm not gonna say I did.
Maybe, maybe.
Are they in Jersey?
No.
technically based out of London.
They do all kinds of...
I mean, you know what Bloomberg is, but they basically do like Bloomberg reports
for the music industry.
They're awesome.
They have very comprehensive music industry reports.
on what does recorded music look like, what does live music look like.
It's the kind of stuff that you would put on a pitch deck.
I know because I made the pitch deck and I had to use MIDI reports to find the kind
of data that we needed.
And the team is also, they come out to Barcelona a lot, so I got to meet up with
the team.
And one of them lives out, one of the team members lives out in New York.
So, MIDI research, amazing stuff.
And what they have been putting, one of the reports was talking about,
who the kind of shows that are getting played.
And I think it's no secret that rock is still very dominant in the live music
space.
Like rock is what you go to see.
Even though in recorded music, it's probably hip hop still, I would imagine.
Like hip hop's still what most people listen to.
If you were to decide between a rapper that you didn't know or a band you didn't
know, you're gonna pick the band.
You're not gonna go to, like you'll go to the rap show if you know the rapper,
you're not gonna go to some random rapper.
Cause there's too much.
it's way more likely they're going to flop.
At least for the band, you know that, okay, they're all going to know how to
play all the instruments.
Like, it's going to sound...
The worst thing a band is going to do, if a band sounds bad, it probably just sounds
generic.
Like, it might sound generic, but that's fine.
You're going to live shows to drink beers and listen to generic rock music.
Versus a rapper, if the rapper bombs, the rapper bombs.
And especially if you don't know them and you don't feel that kind of connection.
Like, rock is still the dominant genre.
But...
Got it.
it's looking like and we've seen this out in Europe already and I think it's it's
bleeding into the US and especially looking at these media reports of seeing
how landscapes are shifting.
I think EDM is going to be the thing that overtakes rock.
Rock has been dominant since the since the 80s and I think EDM is finally going to
unseat it as the as the live music like the biggest thing to play in live music
right now is going to be these EDM shows.
Yeah.
Now what it would...
were at their.
eating could be different, but.
Wow, I thought they were at their peak some years ago and now it kind of went
down.
But hey, I mean, you in that business, so you'll understand them way better.
You have the data, so.
going off of what we see from our database and I'm going off of a lot of what media,
the kind of research that media puts out as well.
And yeah, they, and the flavor of it could be different because I'm sure in Chicago,
it's probably going to be more house.
In Detroit, it's going to be more techno.
In New York, it seems house is still like, every single show in New York seems to be
a house show nowadays.
Like you play house music and something like that.
Mm -hmm.
But it seems to me to get down into Virginia.
Richmond, I still go down to Richmond, Virginia pretty frequently.
And while there's still a lot of rock music played, the majority of people my
age go to the EDM shows that are in the city.
And the thing I hear the most is I'm complaining about how they wish there were
more EDM venues and that the current venues would book more EDM artists.
So I'm seeing that stuff firsthand.
I'm also seeing it in the data that EDM is still got a ways to go.
Yes, yes.
In your experience, what is the most common misconceptions people have about
the tech industry?
And how do you believe these misconceptions impact innovation and
entrepreneurship within the field?
Well, for one, startups, I mean, you look at like the original, like when startups
really started to become a thing and venture capital really started to become a
thing, it was these rebels, it was these rogues, it was these guys going against
the curve, like just doing things a little bit different and being a little wonky.
And those were the innovators, the guys moving the needles.
And like most things, as that stuff kind of matures, the rebels start to get weeded
out and you start getting stuff
people who are optimizing themselves for a metric.
Like they try to see what VCs are looking for and they optimize for that metric
versus the OG startup heads who weren't optimizing for any metric except I'm gonna
build the best thing ever and it's gonna be mine and that kind of championship.
And even the startups were always building like rebels, they were building against
the status quo.
Like the original Google was.
It was definitely building against the status quo.
And what I see now is the industry has started to mature enough that VCs are
looking for, are you an NYU, MIT, Stanford, or Harvard grad rather than are
you this rebel who's going to try to like, who's going to change the game?
Like they want you to look good on paper versus look good in action.
And I mean,
I'm also extremely biased saying that, but I've seen that a lot is I've seen
companies, music companies with these NYU grads, they get all this money and they
have no idea what they're doing.
They have no idea what they're doing, but you get Ilias and I in there and I went to
Virginia Commonwealth University, who goes to Virginia Commonwealth University.
There's no Ivy league behind that.
There's no special about Virginia Commonwealth University, but Ilias and I
break things and we move fast and we,
We're not the type of guys that say, okay, we'll work with our current market.
AlienStyle and I fundamentally believe we're in the blue ocean and the demand is,
we're gonna create the demand.
We're gonna create the market.
We're gonna rebuild the industry.
We're not trying to work in whatever guardrails have been predefined for us.
We are open to do whatever we want.
And...
I've been championing that from doing cybersecurity back in the day to doing
hackathons, to always trying to break things and figure out very clever
solutions to problems.
You've met Ilias, so you know that he champions that quite a bit of I'm gonna
break things and I'm gonna go as fast as I can and nobody can stop me.
But I've seen a lot of other startups not championing that, but get loads and loads
and loads of funding, which is very upsetting.
But time is the biggest teller.
So I could be completely wrong.
And you fast forward 10 years.
We'll see who's around in 10 years from now and who's not.
Well, I tell you one thing, you guys have something, if you don't have the funding,
you have the mindset and you have the drive and the hunger.
And that, trust me, that surpass many, many, many fundings and many things
because in the end of the day, who's going to stand there?
And if you guys still standing, and that's what I see and that's what you guys got.
That will take me to the next question.
the last thing I think about Google is too, I mentioned Google back in the day
was they were, they were the guys breaking things.
They were guys moving the needle forward.
Like one of the things I loved about Google and I, I want to, you know, this
is, this is me showing that I have a grad degree is I really loved like the paper on
MapReduce and the story behind how they invented MapReduce is all these other big
companies like IBM and these guys had these big mainframes.
And rather than building horizontally, everything was to build vertically.
We need a bigger computer, bigger computer, bigger computer.
And Google didn't have a lot of money.
They were still relatively strapped for cash at the time.
So they had a lot of servers.
They had a lot of computers, but they didn't have any powerful ones.
And they created this framework to do massive data wrangling and manipulation
jobs with all these computers.
commodity computers, commodity servers that they had at the time, rather than
having to buy the biggest mainframe ever.
And they championed this.
Look, we humans evolved for scarcity, not surplus.
We live in a scarce environment and we're going to work around it.
Versus now, you see like Google Fiber.
Google Fiber had the chance to be its own thing, to really unseat AT &T and Verizon
and change the game.
But now Google Fiber works with AT &T and Verizon.
And there's more of this.
let's work in the existing ecosystem, let's partner, let's do this, rather than,
no screw AT &T and Verizon, we're building our own thing and you can't stop us.
They don't do that anymore.
Google's kind of lost its sauce.
And looking at it as AI now, who are the biggest AI companies?
They're the ones who can get their hands on that Nvidia chip, that $40 ,000 like
those big Nvidia chips.
And that brings, you know, thinking of the analogy of the mainframe.
You were the only a big tech company if you could get a mainframe.
Who's going to be the scrappy engineer that's going to create MapReduce but for
commodity GPUs?
That'll be the thing to see.
Exactly.
Humans evolve for scarcity, not surplus.
If you put yourself in a situation like Google where you have all this cash and
you don't know what to do with it, you're not going to innovate as fast as you want.
It's me and Ilius strapped for cash that are going to be the ones who are going to
do something clever that you didn't expect.
We're fundamentally these hacker guys, right?
Yes.
And you know, that would lead me to my next question is, you know, for our
listeners and our viewers who's going to be inspired by you, by your drive, by your
energy, by your motivation, by your story, and say, hey, you know, if he did it, how
can I do it?
I could do it.
What I need.
So what's your advice to some of these people going to be inspired by your story
and your vision and your motivation and drive?
Yeah, well one thing, one of the saddest metrics I've heard, and I hate that the
Nvidia CEO even said this, is there's no point in learning how to program anymore.
Because I think Ilias has learned this because he's, I'm not some programmer that
Ilias contracted $30 ,000 to go build him an app.
Like I'm a technical co -founder, we're co -founders in this.
And I've learned a lot more to the table than just I know how to program.
Like there's more to being a technical co -founder than just I can actually build
the thing.
I mean, that's nice, but there's a lot more that goes into it.
So you, and you, you wouldn't know that unless you've got your hands dirty and
started building something.
Like if you look at Ilias versus some of the guys who, you know, I'm biased, but I,
I, they're not as scrappy as Ilias.
They're not as good at marketing as Ilias, but you know, they're kind of like
analogous to him to any sense.
Like they, they work in the music industry.
They have all this, all these connections, all this knowledge.
they end up contracting somebody to make an app, but they won't learn the things
that Ilias has learned by working with me.
Ilias knows how to build an app better than them, even if he can't actually
program the code.
And again, you're not going to know that unless you get your hands dirty and you do
it.
So my advice is get your hands dirty and do it.
The most stuff I learned was hackathons.
I got into hackathons, I built stuff, my GitHub looks crazy.
I have over 100 repos on GitHub of me just building something and trying to solve it
and doing it fast.
just to try and make something happen.
And I think Ilias has done similar stuff with the music industry of take these
risks and try it.
And especially for young people, what I tell them, I mean, what I tell them, I'm
still a young person, is it doesn't matter if you don't have cash or anything, as a
young guy, you have a very large reserve for risk and you have a bigger reserve for
risk than most people.
And you should use that risk to your advantage.
Like somebody,
A startup has less cash than Google, but I can take a lot more risk than Google can
do.
And I think that's more powerful.
So take the risk, do the things, build stuff and lose as much as you can and fail
as fast as you can.
But you're not going to learn anything by, I hate the people who say like, I have
this startup idea, but you know, I'll wait until the time is right.
Cause the time is never going to be right.
You just have to do it.
You have to always jump off that cliff.
it.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, you heard it first
Entrepreneurs in Tech.
You heard it first right here.
Anything that you want to tell the audience or listeners or viewers that you
coming up with on Tap The Eye that to look forward to next month or something, a new
function or new thing that you want to advertise or mention or plug in?
we announced a couple weeks ago that we have a model in beta right now, an ML
model for generating an entire tour for a performer.
So with a click of a button, it'll tell you what cities you should go to.
It'll give you an estimate on the number of revenue you make from the tour, the
amount of fans you'll reach, how long the tour will take, so on and so forth.
It's very much in beta, so we are looking for engineers right now.
We're looking for people who...
are really good in data science, pros if you have a machine learning background,
just people who are willing to get their hands dirty and work with very ugly, messy
data because we're a startup and we have a lot, but I'm the only guy that cleans it
right now.
So, you know, you do your best.
So somebody who's scrappy, but likes working with tons of data and likes to try
to make something out of nothing.
Amazing.
Well, thank you for joining us today on Innovate Presents Entrepreneurs in Tech.
And we hope you found today's insight inspiring and insightful.
Be sure to connect with us on social and stay informed about our upcoming episodes
on this new Innovate Presents Entrepreneurs in Tech.
Thank you again.
Till next time.
And we appreciate your time.
And thank you very much.
Thank you.
This is great.
pleasure.
Absolutely.