00:00:00.000So, what's going on with the music business? And I call it that because, yeah, it's music, but it's a business, and it has been one that flourished and has faded to some degree.
00:00:10.440Well, certainly it's changed. What's going on with music artists these days? How are they getting by? What's the music industry all about, and what does AI mean to it?
00:00:19.760Ooh, I've heard some good AI tracks. Sorry, but it's true, I have. We're going to find out all of that. It's sort of a state-of-the-industry chat with Ben Rispin.
00:01:11.320I guess, well, you know what? And we'll get into more of that because it's not a single-role industry at all anymore, and so we'll talk about that.
00:01:19.780You also created something that's really caught on, and artists love it. Fanta Tickets.
00:01:25.280Yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah, it's kind of a DIY ticket service that tries to help independent bands out, like help promote the shows and try to earn their fees and stuff like that.
00:01:37.340Yeah, it's been really, it's been a wild ride. It's a hard thing to do, to do honestly, to be honest.
00:01:42.460If you're in the music industry in Canada, you know Ben, if you're meeting him for the first time, you're going to want to check out his band Rules.
00:01:49.420What I think is Canada's best punk band, Reunited.
00:01:52.640Yeah, we just got back, yeah, it was, we, yeah, yeah, we just reunited on Halloween, actually.
00:01:57.600My other band that reunited called The Video Dead, my hardcore band from like the early 2000s, which is also a band I love playing in.
00:02:03.860Had to back out of a Halloween show, and then I kind of needed something quick, and I called the boys, and I guess we were feuding, and I guess the feud's over, so it was actually really good for us.
00:02:14.440No way, so you guys had a little bit of a feud going on, but when it came down, okay.
00:02:18.680We all love each other, we're always family, but yeah, like we were pretty, we were, I can be difficult, and some of those guys can be too, you know?
00:02:26.440So what happened was you ended up at a live gig, and Necessity was a mother of reinvention.
00:02:34.020You guys needed to play, and so everything got put aside for the moment?
00:02:37.520Yeah, well, yeah, it was kind of like, we were sort of, I guess I said this publicly, so it doesn't really, you know, I'm not going too deep,
00:02:44.800but yeah, like Adam Michael, our guitarist, he's brilliant, he's been in a ton of, you know, everything you've probably ever heard of out of our area at one point,
00:02:51.840or just filled in on a studio album or something.
00:02:53.800He's probably the greatest, one of the greatest players I've ever met in my life, and I'm not trying to be hyperbolic about that at all.
00:02:59.260He kind of said, we aren't doing this again until we're all friends, and it took some time.
00:03:05.700It took some, we were like, things, like a lot of shit happens, you know what I mean?
00:03:21.320But that is fascinating, and honestly, it almost feels, it feels like a symptom of where the industry is at.
00:03:30.980You have to be looking out for yourself now.
00:03:33.440The record labels have faded into something different by the looks of things, and you can tell me.
00:03:38.200Artists are responsible for so much on their own, from actually making the music, to creating their own tours, to doing social media, to being interactive and accessible.
00:03:48.700Yeah, well, for us and me and my friends, it's been a DIY thing the whole time.
00:03:54.840I started throwing punk shows or just indie shows or metal shows or whatever when I was 13 in rural Ontario.
00:04:02.740And so that, in my mindset, just kind of just set me down the path where then I became, we started recording.
00:04:08.820Later on, we started recording with Pro Tools, but then putting out our own records and making our own videos, and then that turned into festivals and films and all sorts of stuff like that.
00:04:16.660So the DIY mindset's always been sort of my way or approach, maybe just because it's like financial reasons that it's like, I'm just going to do it myself.
00:04:25.900But it's never been more useful than now, to further your point.
00:04:31.480To know how to, like, I always tell people, like, learn how to do the door.
00:04:35.200If you're doing, like, know all the jobs, know everything you can as much as you, like, as much as you can.
00:04:39.800And then, A, when people start, hopefully, you know, if you do well with it, when people start working for you, you have respect for the job.
00:04:44.640You have respect for the person that's helping you out, you know.
00:04:58.500You know, there's a lot of ways to do it.
00:04:59.600You've got to pick the one that's right for you, though.
00:05:02.140You know what's interesting to me is that this was a machine that was easily run on television and radio by, you know, really large industries.
00:05:44.360But I still think, like, there's guys like my friend Chris Martin at a post office sound in Toronto.
00:05:48.760He developed, like, Ren for Short and Talk.
00:05:50.860I'm not sure if, like, those are both two artists that have gotten really big deals stateside.
00:05:54.000I think they kind of turn to guys like that now.
00:05:56.480Like, I think, and I don't know this for sure, but I think, so a big interrupt or disrupt, sorry, I should say, in the music industry was that when Spotify, like, they're not in the user acquisition phase anymore.
00:06:31.140So, like, I never used it just because I find the sound quality poor.
00:06:34.100And so when you make your own stuff and you're like, you want to hear it as good as possible.
00:06:36.600But when they got out of user acquisition phase, like, it just disrupted a whole, like, there wasn't a lot of places for, say, somebody like Sony to grow.
00:06:44.960I'm speaking specifically about Sony because I had friends there who had friends there who had to, you know, move on.
00:06:49.260There just wasn't, you know, like, they can't keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding because, yeah, like, everybody on the planet apparently uses Spotify.
00:07:06.500Like, I don't, like, I think you can make money off it, but it's so few and far between.
00:07:13.680The turnaround's not going to be anything like, you know, still, like, packaging up your own vinyls and going out and selling them.
00:07:18.280It just shows that, you know, it's really that.
00:07:20.440Merch is where you, like, I mean, you know, there's, I guess it depends what level of band you're talking about.
00:07:24.600I'm going to say something that sells anywhere from, like, 100 to 500 to 1,000 tickets, let's say, like, that region of, you know, something that plays at Danforth.
00:07:31.460It's still going to be, merch is going to be your T-shirts and things like that.
00:07:36.800And then people are also getting on the, you know, they have the, what do they call it, the Patreons and all those kind of different programs.
00:07:41.780Yeah, that's a lot of stuff like that.
00:07:44.560Like, even podcasting has become a big part of being an artist now to get them into the Patreon and a little bit more access to the process.
00:07:51.580Yeah, and it's, like, it's just, it's a different, it's different, like, because you're making a lot of, like, content.
00:07:58.920Obviously, TikTok is huge for a ton of artists.
00:08:00.860I have, like, our friends at Harmony's, they did really well.
00:08:04.500I guess one song popped off, my buddy's in Finger Eleven, you know, Canadian rock band, great band.
00:08:08.920And, you know, they're a few years older than me.
00:08:27.380That's so funny, because that does open up.
00:08:29.440I mean, if you do have a built-in audience, and a TikTok or a Spotify can help amplify that for you, it's pretty amazing what's happened with 80s music.
00:08:40.620Big 80s tours, just because TikTok is eating up the songs.
00:08:44.680Yeah, and also, like, I think Spotify, and I was like, forgive me if my numbers are a bit off, but I'm going to say, I think the last time I heard, like, it's 80% legacy music.
00:08:55.220So that means 20% of all new music, including, like, the Post Malone's, Taylor Swift's, Rules, whatever, we're all fighting over that same 20%.
00:09:01.920So it's tough for bands to break through on Spotify.
00:09:04.220It's a, you know, we're working on Danny's record right now, not to plug it, but, like, ahead of time, but, like, talking with the label people about the, you know, the playlists and all that kind of stuff and, like, what kind of genre.
00:09:17.680It really takes, for me, it takes the fun out of it.
00:09:21.020Like, I understand that it's necessary, but it's, I'm glad we get people to do that for us, because I find it miserable, to be honest.
00:09:29.560Ben, what you're telling me is, like, you've got to get your music into an algorithm, a filter, as it will.
00:09:37.260Yeah, like, and it's, and it's, they change it.
00:09:40.640It's, it's hard, it's a hard game to play.
00:09:42.300It's, like, and the people, some people can master it, and I really admire that, and it's, um, I'm glad my job, my mostly these days with music is either, like, it's, like, promoting shows or selling tickets or helping to write songs.
00:09:52.420Like, that's, that's what I love about it.
00:09:53.840So, a guy like yourself enters this world, and then I, I can see a bunch of the tools around social media and stuff like that.
00:10:01.120Suddenly, you're, like, whoa, I needed that.
00:10:04.040And I wonder if you retrofit sort of a younger audience with, okay, here's how you actually do a show, because you're not going to make money on Spotify.
00:10:12.560You're not going to make money on Apple.
00:10:14.340You're likely not getting a label deal, because they are few and far between, and they don't really mean that much, and so you're going to need to know how to do this stuff.
00:10:23.720It's, it's, it's, we were just, like, that's so funny that you brought that up.
00:10:27.120We were just, like, we just came out of a meeting with some people that were working on a Juno sort of podcast, Hamilton Tourism, because the Junos are going to Hamilton this year, and we were talking about exactly that.
00:10:37.480Like, post, like, during the, like, the pandemic, there was, like, you know, four years, like, of, of, of, of, a lack of, like, transfer knowledge, like, or knowledge transfer.
00:11:02.660I looked, you know, a skateboarding guy.
00:11:04.460No, but, like, they, we saw them at a thing where they were, anyway, an event, like a music conference, sort of, small, local thing.
00:11:14.780And they were asking one of the ladies from the Junos, like, how did they get their, like, how did they get the Spotify algorithms?
00:11:18.660All these questions, and they just, like, you realize that they don't know who to ask.
00:11:21.720So one of the things that we were talking about today, it's funny, is that, like, fortunately, like, you know, we've been in this long enough.
00:11:29.600You know, like, I've been in this, literally, I'm 47, so 13 is when I got in.
00:11:46.580And my friend John, who is actually kind of the example from Sony, I was just talking about fielding.
00:11:50.200Now he's over at Network, but he's, he is the guy that people talk to about, like, you know, these kind of algorithms, sort of thing.
00:11:55.960Like, the digital world, getting these kids in front of these kind of experts that they can really learn from is, like, I think it's really important.
00:12:06.660And also, I've never been one of those gatekeeper guys.
00:12:09.320Like, I can, like, I don't, like, I think that's useless.
00:12:12.200So, like, it's really important for this thing to keep feeding younger people, get younger people into it, you know, and just keeping it going, you know.
00:12:19.200That you're not a gatekeeper is really interesting because I think that is also fading.
00:12:24.340And that you've always kind of been a leader in that.
00:12:27.240I've watched you over the years be a guy who's like, no, no, I'll share my knowledge with you.
00:12:32.380I'll see you on another day is specifically why you're here.
00:12:36.340Because I know, okay, well, listen, I can, I can have a reasonable conversation with Ben.
00:13:29.440You know, like there's, uh, you know, somebody who can have 100,000 plays on, on, on their Spotify or 100,000, you know, monthly or something like that.
00:14:19.680Like, like, if you want to be a working musician and make your own stuff and, like, you know, you're not interested in being a cover band or stuff like that.