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Episode 11 (ft. Wyatt Jenkins): Why music isn't a top-two category on Patreon (yet)
Patreon's SVP Product Wyatt Jenkins joins this episode to dive into the opportunities and challenges around growing membership models in the music industry. We unpack the financial and ideological roadblocks to making music a top-two category on Patreon, why it's so difficult to bake both discovery and membership mechanisms into the same product and how Patreon might compete with music distribution platforms and other music-oriented software services in the long run, with respect to providing alternative sources of capital to independent artists. At the end, we discuss whether paywalled podcast apps and the Jonas Brothers' vinyl "club" are overrated or underrated. NOTE: This episode was recorded in late June 2019, around a month before Patreon announced their $60 million Series D round, so we don't mention that funding here — but there's still lots to dig into around their future roadmap.
Episode 10 (ft. Alex Mitchell): How artificial intelligence will do to music creation what Instagram did to photography
Boomy founder/CEO Alex Mitchell joins this episode — recorded just an hour after Boomy launched out of beta! — to talk about the disruptive impact that artificial intelligence will have on music creation and distribution. We unpack why there's arguably no such thing as "A.I.-generated music," the importance of optimizing for creativity rather than for accuracy in music-composition algorithms, what the "win condition" would be for A.I. and music and why tools like Boomy could do to the music industry what Instagram did to photography. At the end, we discuss whether Splice's new research on extracting stems from musical recordings and Apple's reported investment in original podcasts are overrated or underrated.