So today I'm gonna do something I almost never do. I'm gonna interview a music marketer and web developer named Lee Martin. And the reason I never do this is there aren't a lot of people whose work I respect and I would be excited to talk to about that I haven't. But Lee, to me, is the big one. A thing I say all the time is when I need to get inspired to do something cool in music marketing, I head to Lee's website, which is leamarton.com and look at what he's done because I always get inspired by the creative ideas that he's come up with. It's like listening to the classics to get inspired to write a song, but it's one person's body of work because he's the go-to person in this field. So this video, we're gonna talk a little bit about his past. Then we're gonna talk about specific campaigns with artists like Water Parks, Eddie Vedder, Kim Petrus, Jack White, Pop Smoke, Ghost, and the Jonas Brothers about how he made marketing experiences that excite fans, drive more streams, and get people talking about records so that they actually get listened to. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Here it is. So Lee, you have a past working for Silva Artist Management, who over the years worked with Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Beck, Jimmy, World, and the Beastie Boys, and you worked on two apps. Most musicians probably use every day SoundCloud and Soundkick. I'm curious, how do you describe what you do and what your thought process has been navigating your career to go through all that diverse work? That's a great question. I mean, in general, I'm a designer and a developer that works in music. My first job being at Silva, which was a management company, which is probably the closest I ever got to the system at work, right? There's nothing closer than working for a management company. So I was quite young, my early 20s doing that, and this is right when the real Web 2.0 internet started to happen. So there was just a need necessarily to kind of take us from MySpace to Facebook, in general, to the social web. So I started basically building a new tool set. And through that, I realized I wanted to become a better programmer, right? I wanted to build interesting experiences for artists and their fans. So I actually left Silva to work at SoundCloud with the purpose of basically getting an education and programming. My thought process was maybe if I surrounded myself by a bunch of Swedes and Germans, I would come out of this as a programmer, right? Yeah, but again, like I am so passionate about music and artists and fans that while there are many music tech startups, and at that time, so many. The ones that catch my attention are the ones that seem to have their heart in the game. So that original SoundCloud very much, like artists first, artists focus, we were just trying to basically liberate sound on the web and try to put it into artists' hands and allow them to market it as they see fit. That was very appealing to me as a developer. And then similarly later with Songkick, it was basically trying to liberate the ticket, right? Yeah, both apps were magic when they started. Exactly. I love the people who founded it. I love the teams that surrounded it. So I was very lucky to have an opportunity basically just to be in the room with those people and bring my particular skillset. So three kind of different companies, but all with this core kind of artist-fan relationship thing, but usually I'm freelancing. So those are kind of... Yeah, so why don't you talk about the transition to that? How did that happen? So it happened twice. Basically, I'm just very fortunate to be a freelancer, music marketer, SoundCloud. It's what I knew I wanted to do. I wasn't sure if there was necessarily a market for it, because at that point I hadn't really been on my own with the exception of a small period of time in my true youth when I was doing a little bit of this stuff before getting the job at Silver. But basically working at management is a little bit complicated because I wouldn't say complicated, but you're stuck to one roster, right? And there's a certain blocker that comes with that. I mean, I love working for certain artists and kind of sticking to them, but freelancing offered me the opportunity to basically work with whatever came through the pipe. Many different labels, many different genres, many different fans, many different problems. So that was kind of the appeal of it. Being my own boss, trying out new marketing concepts, I also kind of have this urge as a product designer, building applications. So being a freelancer kind of offers me this ability to test many different concepts and see if maybe they should be built into more scalable applications. It's not something I accomplish very often, but it is something I think about a lot. So the freelancing is kind of this perfect little world. Of course, it has its ups and downs almost on the daily, but I've slowly, through two decades doing this, have sort of shaped it into something that doesn't bum me out. Often, but it's hard, it's work, it's freelance work. It's just me, so it can feel a little bit overwhelming sometimes. I totally get it as a lifelong freelancer. One of the things I think is really incredible about what you do is that you have really great diverse ideas. And as you're talking about as a freelancer, you get to see things, you get to get a lot of different problems. You're not just doing the same thing every day. What a compliment I was paying you before we started taping is I've said to artists in the past before is like, when they're thinking about how to engage their fans, I often just look at your website or your email list and look at what you've been doing and get very inspired. Can you talk to me about how you develop the ideas you do because we're gonna go through some of your projects and talk about them, but I'm curious about how you get to what you build. For me, it's always been an awareness problem. What are you doing as an artist to differentiate yourselves online to just temporarily get above the fold? There are mechanics that can do that. Sometimes even the simplest things accomplish the most. It certainly isn't a complicated application because I try not to build any of those. Try to build something simple. I would say fundamentally, try not to do the same thing twice, right? Because some ideas do rage a sort of critical mass and you could imagine when one record label sees what you did for another one, they think that you might be in the business for cloning. That idea. But I've written about this. It's something that I fundamentally try not to do. Hold myself accountable to original ideas for every project. Having said that, I kind of exist in the world of mechanics, little mechanisms connected to technology that I will experiment on sort of constantly and kind of build up a tool set of little techniques, little tools with the hope that later on I'll have a conversation with an artist or a management or someone that works at digital at a label and I'll hear something in the conversation that's connected to something I had been basically exploring and we can pull those things together. So there are mechanics that do show up in multiple projects, but I kind of attempt to shape it conceptually and narratively as close to what the artist is trying to achieve thematically each time. So if you can keep the pieces quite simple, so they sort of fit into different places, I think it gives you more control over keeping the idea fresh, right? Where the fundamentals are somewhat known, though I do a little bit of this as self-education also, if I built the same app over and over again, I would basically learn nothing and since all I do is work, I need to learn stuff. I'm trying to be at the cutting edge of digital marketing, which means I have to constantly be consuming what is possible with digital marketing. So it helps to have clients that are curious about doing something new within reason and I think that's what leads to the new ideas, the fact that it's a fresh idea, it's like the mechanics are there, I'm not gonna clone something and honestly I've cultivated really strong relationships with the labels, with the digital managers that work there where we can spitball, discuss, explore these types of concepts very freely to kind of get to these fun places. Certainly similar to you have been on a quest of education about what is possible and I think by sort of increasing the knowledge of what is possible, more of the ideas are just falling in my plate from these people because they now know what the web is capable of in my case. So that's it, I mean, it's certainly a group effort. Some ideas come from my own experiments, some ideas are straight from the label, straight from a digital manager there. I'm not opposed to building anybody's idea. In fact, I hope it's their idea because a business sense tells me that's easy to get approved, right? Not my own, like, oh, you know what we should do, like that's harder and it's like, I'm putting my heart on the line more, it's harder to get that sell, but it's their idea, if it's an idea we've collaborated on, much better, you know, much better for many reasons to get that sort of buy-in right from the beginning. So if somebody doesn't have an idea, is there any questions you're asking that help you get to a good idea from the artist? Is there like a development process that you go through each time, or is it more just you vibe? Yes, I mean, I would hope, I would hope in one phone call conversation we will have something, right, or a series of things. What I ask for is basically an understanding of, I say the thematic surrounding record. A lot of the artists I work for have sort of have the cheat code, right? These are bigger artists with really strong design languages, really strong songs and themes that I can start to wrap my head around. So I'm kind of asking for the big picture. What are all these things that you're talking about? What is the themes of the records to hopefully hear keywords or things that, again, relate to those mechanics? So, but this is also business, so I'm always gonna ask people what their goals are as well. You know, are we doing this for your hardcore fans? Because if so, there's a certain set of ideas for that. Well, we don't really have to hold ourselves accountable to moving specific numbers, maybe just super serving the fan base in a thematic way, or maybe it's like a small artist that's just trying to get more people into the funnel, and we're looking for a concept that is more accessible than a hardcore fan concept that might be. I kind of talk about those like their commercial usages, right? A commercial with a really good song usage. Like, we're trying to build an application that invites more people in due to the concept that then subliminally educates people in the fact that this is your music, right? It's all over the place, so it's good to know, like, okay, who's the audience going to be? What is this core goal? Are we just gonna super serve your DSP fan relationship or something? And then, yeah, for me personally, it's like thematically where are we at? Like, what is this? What's the visuals gonna look like? What's the song called? What's the design language look like? Cause I'm gonna need some of that stuff. I do a lot of designing, graphic designing, cause I have to turn whatever was the album packaging into responsive applications. However, I don't do a lot of original design work necessarily as another way to limit the approval time of the work that I do, also the emotional baggage that comes with design work. It's much easier for me to get approvals on the things that I'm building if it's design that you and the artists and the managers have already approved, you know? So all of that stuff kind of allows me to process what could be, and I will bring up past work and conversations if I hear them say something that might be related to something that was in the past. So at least we can discuss past projects if they were what we ended up building, that kind of stuff. But I'm really looking for that Eureka moment, right?  It's just exciting to me. And again, like I have to shout out to the digital managers that I work with. We've been working on this for a long time. I like working with people I've worked with before because we kind of know what we've done. We know what we're at, we know what we're aiming for. It's easier to get to those things. I like that a lot. So let's talk about some projects you've worked on. One of the things you touched on is that you keep a great website where you share a lot of the knowledge of how you do things and really are open about it and you can see all of your work. Like I said, I look at it all the time and get inspired. I thought one of the ones you did for the band Water Parks, who I think is always a group who's doing interesting things and you really took them to a really great level. But you did one where you controlled, where it was controlled by fans drumming up support for them. I thought that was particularly cool. Could you talk about the ideas that went into that and what you did there? Yeah, so I'm thinking you're talking about the tweet powered player. That's exactly it. Yeah, this is fun. Again, like a really great conversation with band and management. They told me one thing that stuck out in that conversation. This band is big on Twitter, which we know. X or whatever. And I had at least today while we're taping. Who knows? I have a long history like building things on Twitter. So when I heard it, I was like, oh, cool, it's built Twitter app. But I also heard that the band was pretty mischievous. So those were the two variables I needed to. Also, we had a new single. Oh, we had some unreleased audio. We were trying to drive attention to the fact that the new album was coming out. So I conceptualized this concept that was an audio player that lived on a website playing on loop, the volume set to zero. And the only way to increase the volume was to tweet the hashtag. Hashtag greatest hits. So collectively people tweeted the hashtag and they actually appeared on the website like little rising balloons, their little Twitter avatars. The volume increased for each tweet. So you could start to hear the music. But of course, the mischievous came in and we programmed the website so it fought back. So the volume constantly lowered itself. And of course, within 10 minutes we were the number one trend on Twitter simply because the fans showed up to do this thing. But it was just kind of a funny gag. I think we marketed the pre-save around it. Naturally, we were doing it right before the record came out. It was just a perfect marriage of the variables and the thematics, basically. I wouldn't say it was very strong visually thematic. Oh, I thought it was great. I remember looking at it when it came out. I thought it was awesome. All right, then I won't hold myself to any higher standard on that stuff. I just remember those visual assorts were a little trickier to work with. I was like, what am I doing? I have to make balloons out of people or something. But that was it. It was very straightforward, very simple. We ended up revisiting that on the last cycle and did kind of a more advanced 3D visualization. They had these tree frogs hopping around the website, a tree frog appearing every time someone tweeted, but a similar sort of sonic concept just to kind of get people participating in the conversation before the record came out. And so that was to both drive existing fans, obviously, when you trend on Twitter, some new people are going to discover use of kind of suits all the things of getting fan engagement and getting new people to potentially discover the band. It kind of wins every box. Yeah, I mean, it was exactly what it was. It didn't have any sort of secret agendas. It was just like, let's build a hashtag campaign that fuels this thing. This is definitely something, a mechanic I used in the past, like on old Jimmy World websites. It's kind of sad to talk about now that Elon took over. Like, if you hear me talking about Twitter, it would only be as a developer. He's made it a lot harder for developers to build fun stuff like that. That was basically the last gasp, the last water parks campaign. There's still ways to do it. It just has a much more expensive setup now for developers. I think it would cost almost $5,000 as a ground floor developer to do something like that in the future. So I've had to start educating my artists on that as well. Doesn't seem to be as viable as a concept these days, depending on the scale of the artist, of course. So the next one I really, really liked that you did was Kim Petrus. Because it felt so aligned with her fan's culture. They would share a result they got. It would also encourage streams. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I believe you're talking about the Confess Your Streams app. Yes, this is the, I forgot, you did two with her as well. So yeah, some of these artists, we do a couple of campaigns together again, because my relationship with the digital managers. I've been investigating Spotify fan affinity type concepts, basically looking at a user's recently stream tracks via the public Spotify API to decide if they're a big fan, if they've been streaming particular songs recently to the degree that the free Spotify API allows us, which is basically like developing experiences with your hands tied behind your back. But there are fun things you can do. So this was thematically the ability for fans to confess their streams. Basically, you logged in with Spotify and it checked your top 50 recently stream tracks. And I believed it looked for Kim Petrus tracks that not only were in your top 50, but the positioning of them in your top 50 to kind of drill down on a percentage. I believe this was some sort of devotion percentage. It had some sort of funny name. And because it had kind of this religious thematic, we, well, first of all, we gave you an image to share, to kind of boast about how big of a fan you were. But we also gave you a penance, like you'd get at confession that told you what you needed to do if you didn't meet the expectations of Kim. So, you know, you've only streamed my track 10%, or your, my coverage is only 10% in your tracks. Go and stream my new single. I think it was called If Jesus Was a Rockstar, X amount of times. Now I did have a mechanic that we didn't actually use because I didn't want to like put a snag in the Spotify app approval process, quick aside, all applications built on Spotify now have to actually be approved by Spotify. And they've been great for a lot of the things we've built. It takes a little while. So anything you put in the process that might break the terms of service or come close to at least making them think about it, not worth it in most cases. But I had this mechanical concept where we can build a Spotify powered player in the experience that did the penance process. So actually build a player where you had to stream it four times in order to complete your penance. And it would basically just loop the song four times in a row. I kind of think it's not against the terms of service. It's basically like building a four track playlist and having the user play it. As long as you aren't directly incentivizing anything, that's pretty clear. That's been clear since the Facebook graph API. You couldn't incentivize the like. Don't build anything that's like... And we should say for the listeners that was like the like gating tunes that you had to like to in order to listen to a track that used to be on Facebook and was very, very popular. Exactly. Or like to enter a contest. Like to do all sorts of stuff. Same thing with Spotify. They have a pretty blanket statement in their terms. The developer portal that says, don't incentivize any of the authenticated touchpoints of Spotify following, playing, following the playlist, pre-saving, which is sort of a gray mechanic with pre-saving. Don't do it to get to something. So we, I think in our compatriots campaign, we could have sort of thematically said, meet your penance and met the expectations of the terms of service. Because we, at no point were we saying, you're going to get something. I kind of flagged that in conversations. Cause as you can imagine, it's a pretty simple place to go to for a lot of managers and artists and record labels. Like, why wouldn't we do X to Y? Don't like this. But I'm always like, well, now like, it's not the Wild West. Like we can't do that kind of stuff. Like what we want to do is sort of elevate the experience thematically with these mechanics that encourages people to go do the work themselves on the platform itself, go stream competitors, come back daily, check where you are, share your devotion, do your penance. That's it. Not come here and check your percentage. And if you're high enough, you're entered to win tickets to go to the tour, like that kind of stuff. You kind of got to throw it out the window. From what I understand about the Spotify API, and again, since you got to get your app approved, it's basically don't even do it because it's gonna shut you down in the approval process. Some might call it a bummer, but they basically are like, it's the small end of the extreme problem which is paying for streams, right? It's the same essential problem except we're doing it in this innocent side with contests and stuff. Other people are doing it in a way to basically abuse the platform. So they have to sort of put a blanket statement. I understand. Yeah, that makes sense. So one of the other, or two of the other ones, I thought you did that were really, really interesting that were somewhat related but still pretty different. Where Pop Smoke and Jack White both had this geography element. Can you talk about that? Yeah, celestial stuff. Oh. Yes, there we go. As a developer, I really like variables, users of the Earth share that are different for everyone. Things like weather, time, location. These are things we all share, but we all have a slightly different personalization to them and data that is easily accessible, where you are, what time is it, that kind of stuff. So for Jack White, it was kind of like two campaigns in one, but the campaign that I really enjoyed was Fear of the Dawn. Basically we built an application that premiered new music from his new album only during the hours of Dawn. So you had to wake up, basically the application existed as almost a Dawn forecasting app to tell you when the sun was gonna meet the Dawn level, both time and in the sky.  If it's Dawn, if it's not Dawn yet, you hear radio static, but as the sun starts to rise, the sound starts tuning in to the actual audio. And when it's actually in the Dawn zone, that's when you get that crystal clear, kind of perfect audio, like an FM radio, like tuning into a frequency. And then as the sun goes out, the static comes back in, but we actually built it as sort of a little, kind of like an AR light application where the sun's position in the sky also decided sonically where you were gonna hear the sound. So if the sun was behind me and I was wearing headphones, it sounded like the sound was behind me. As if the sun was the thing emitting the sound, right? These are mechanics that do come up. Again, different thematics, similar mechanics. It's fun to do stuff like that, do stuff with the camera, camera being one of the most known user experiences when it comes to applications. Yeah, even a senior citizen Jack White fan could figure out how to use their camera. Exactly. This is another huge principle in my work, accessibility, like being able to explain a concept in two sentences or less and always having one big button that people press from the front page that sort of gets them into the experience. Make a promise, lead people through the experience, have some sort of outro screen where they can then share the experience they had. So for Jack, there was like a built-in camera, video camera function where you could record your experience in the hours of dawn or take a photo and then share it after. So we kind of like make a promise, right? If you're willing to wake up during the hours of dawn, you get to hear new music and you get to boast about the fact that you did it. That's basically the full picture. A lot of complicated technology that hopefully comes together in a way that's so simple, anyone can do it. That's certainly what we hold ourselves accountable to. And I think Pop Smoke was a similar kind of light AR mechanic where you would point your phone at the sky, except that case we did a trackless reveal. Of course, one of the most important touch points in hip hop, trackless slash feature reveal. We just did stars in the sky that you could point to and sort of unlock that stuff. Even barely has a space element connected to it. I'm like in there, I'm like, let's go get it because I love that stuff. It's so interesting to plot things in the sky to use the lightweight AR stuff and like really fun artists thematics. I did another one for Eddie Vedder where we allowed users to record messages for other earthlings to hear and actually shoot it into space as a virtual satellite that then began orbiting the earth. And you could go outside with an AR companion app and basically point your phone at the sky and see the satellite messages that were currently orbiting over your position. Mal, I know you know that Eddie's fan base, the age of Eddie's fan base tells us, this is a terrible idea, it's complicated thematically this idea of recording a satellite, sending it up into space, all this stuff. But if you really lean into the fundamentals of known user experiences, known interfaces, where the buttons go and what the general experience is like, you can really get people to go through it. And within one day, I mean, we had over 6,000 recordings floating around the earth for Eddie Vedder fans and a lot of really positive content, which was awesome. So again, I'll hold myself accountable to the accessibility thing because for me, I don't want people talking about the thing I did. I don't want an article written about the thing we did. I want people, I want numbers, I want people flowing through it and them sharing the fact that it happened. So you won't see me do too much VR stuff. Anything that has a pretty big blocker in terms of accessibility, like a piece of hardware, I'll kind of stay out of it for now because for me, I'm a web developer first and foremost. I like sending a link. I like people clicking that link and then clicking a button and then they're on to the experience we're trying to build for them basically. So there are a lot of incredible things happening in the world of marketing. Really advanced stuff, AI, VRs, ARs, all that stuff. A lot of that takes the form of articles written after the fact about the thing that happened because very few people could actually do the thing. Yeah, but your idea behind this also then tracks to what fans actually experience and what's way more powerful than articles. As somebody who works in media but also sees marketing results is the fact is like I can see who clicks through articles because I work at two of the biggest media companies. The fact is if people are sharing, it's way more effective than any article written. So you getting people to have an experience that they think about for years and then talk to people about that does the word of mouth and builds the relationship that grows fans. So it's very smart. Well good, you're the expert. So I needed that.  I had an artist reply to an email chain for an experience we built 11 years ago that they want to bring back as kind of like an anniversary thing. And I had started doing some of this stuff like my early work for Foo Fighters, rebuilding some of the applications and open sourcing them basically as another tip on education. Also just fun for me to revisit some of these older projects on my campaign. So I do have something coming and I do remember how impactful that particular concept was at the time it was for Ghost and we had put a clock on a website ahead of their new album and ahead of their new single Secular Haze and the clock was ticking backwards. But the ticking sound was actually a metronome from the new song and every day a new black candle showed up on the site and one new stem of the song started playing. Oh, that's a great idea. And by the end of the week, we had like six black candles and you could hear the full track but then you could hover over each of the candles to isolate any of the stems, right? It's funny like some of the things that we were capable of doing on the web at the end like auto-playing audio you couldn't do anymore. So I had to basically rebuild it.  I'd like to build this like simultaneously stem playing experience. It was really funny to revisit it and we're gonna offer it back to the fans pretty soon which should be pretty fun to see them react to while Greta Van Fleet is off at a band that gave me the ick as the kids say. I have to say what you built for them was like one of the coolest things I've seen. Can you talk about that? So this was a couple of cycles ago but we wanted again to sort of premiere some audio before the album came out and we wanted to use the user's geo location to do it. Basically we were trying to get people to go outside, experience some of the real world and use the artist's content as a means to get them there. A lot of artists, I've talked to a lot of labels that have these kind of geo campaign type concepts but in some cases they aren't very accessible if it's related to let's say places in major markets like things that can only activate in LA or New York. In order to create a geo location campaign that's accessible you have to come up with a technical concept that's a little bit more accessible or things in the real world that we all share or we can all get to. So for Greta we just encourage people to go to their closest park. We're all close to some sort of park and as long as they entered the geo fence of that particular park they were able to consume the content. Huh. So I think we use a Foursquare API for that to figure out which park was closest to you and the aesthetic was kind of like national park maps or at least that's what I started building around. So you actually could get a little map that showed you how to get from where you were to the park like a little trail map and you followed it and when you got there you got to consume some content and take a photo that said that you actually did it. I think it was called the White Rose March. Yeah, a bit of a classic there. You're definitely pulling some hits from the past and I really have to think about it. The one I really liked too was Journey to Gardens Gate. Yeah, again this is another kind of like Spotify affinity type concept, a log with your Spotify and we check to see how much Greta Van Fleet content you've been streaming. Again, different thematics, similar mechanics. I quite like that one for Greta and for any band with a deep back catalog. It makes a lot of sense before your record comes out to do these types of concepts if you can to kind of encourage the back catalog listening and then encourage the new music listening. I haven't executed on it perfectly yet but it's just right there for you. Everyone's excited when new music is coming so why not really build an engine that encourages them to visit the old stuff? With these little affinity apps it's just an easy way to kind of encourage that. Like I built one for Jonas Brothers that was a Waffle House themed receipt generator based around the album receipt generators that have existed for years now as sort of design projects but basically you logged in with your Spotify account and it gave you what looked like a diner receipt of basically albums as list items, itemized items on the receipt and the totals as durations of how often or how much of that album you've been streaming to tracks, six minutes, which was then totaled as your sort of overall cost or total how much you've been streaming your devotion. It's basically a nice little proof that you are a hardcore fan but I liked it even more because it was sort of a variety of also what you consumed if you lean towards one particular album. Again, kind of encouraging this back catalog. This was before they put out their song. Waffle House of course. So yeah, it was a lot of fun to build that thing but again, this mechanic of just looking at a user's top 50 recently stream tracks is one of the few things we can actually do with that API to get user data and just attempting to try to see the edges of it thematically and figure out where we can fit this in. It's the best we can get from Spotify to kind of get a DNA of a user what kind of stuff they listen to how often and attempt to like bring it back to some sort of mechanic thematic that is shareable. And that's really interesting the concept of doing this right before the album comes out because like what you'll see especially YouTube's algorithm is incredible that if like you're re-engaging with the band's back catalog you're gonna get right in your browse function their latest thing when that comes out if you've been engaged with them recently whereas if it's been three years since you engaged with them, you may never know that they put out something new when you go to your browse. Totally, you need to have that sort of reoccurring relationship, reoccurring communication. It's also just low hanging fruit, right? Like fans want to revisit all things. All artists should know the anniversary of all things and have content ready for all of those moments to constantly be telling people about it. I have like this application that has come and gone many times called Rewind and it's basically just give me your historical data and this application will constantly spend out social media content for you to share around those events, shows, albums, songs just so you're constantly reminding people that these things happened and sort of encouraging the consumption of them over and over again, set list, like things that feel unique to particular fans are all worth revisiting. So before we wrap up, one of the other things I want to discuss is some of the tools you've made that are not just you making bespoke tools for artists. I think I actually first heard of you through your app Turn, which I've used a hundred times. In fact, if I looked at my old Instagram grid for my recording studio, I think every time a song came out for a song I produced, if I was like, that's a terrible visual from a bed, I would just go and make a turn for it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, a lot of this, again, like people don't realize how 50-50 I am split on all of this stuff. I wish I spent more time building products.  It's just, there's nothing better. Same goes for product development. While I love building fun things for artists and their fans very one-to-one, I do have a huge passion for building scalable apps. Turn is basically the latest iteration of a very simple artist problem. And that is there's no way to share audio on any of the major social networks. There's no share MP3 function. I'll say that. It kind of needs to be a video first, right? These are video first platforms. So there's a general core problem there of just getting an audio into visual form. And I know there are many apps, countless apps that do this. I created Turn as sort of a very simple version of it, which was what is the visual that is the simplest to make? That means audio to me when it's muted. That was my, that was my design goal, right? That's a great way of putting it. Yeah. So for me, like, of course the waveform, I worked at SoundCloud, I've generated a thousand waveforms in my life, but the waveform is complicated and it's a little bit audiophile-centric. I'll say, I'll see some waveforms right behind you. Yes. But I was like, maybe it should just be a circle that spins. I had spun circles and design interfaces before and I had seen other Instagram that were spinning circles. So basically I was like, I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to generating video content from the client work. I would say I'm almost a professional at one particular open source library called FFMPEG that basically can generate video. It's this incredible open source library that I was like, I think I have the capabilities to build an application that generates these things. I think the first version was free. You basically just chose the artwork that would be on the circle and chose the background color of the rest of the frame. In this case, it was 1080 by 1080 pixel images. Again, we were thinking about the Instagram timeline when this came together, not Instagram stories that didn't even exist yet and your audio. And I think I cut it to 60 seconds because that was the timeline limit at the time. And all that happens is the audio plays and the disc turns at a slow rotation. That's it. When it comes to this stuff, like I have to build it very quickly to get it done. So I did and I put it out to see if it had, you know, sort of a market fit and it did and lots of people started using it. I haven't maintained it as well as I can, but since we're talking about it, I have revisited it quite a bit in the past month. And I'm looking at some of the major feature requests and also the overall infrastructure and some other features I had been thinking about for a while to basically build a V2 of that product, which will be super exciting. I'm happy to talk about that at a later date as well. But it's different, you know, like not a lot of the artists I work for use turn. It's a whole different, you know, user base. And while I can't do one to one conceptual digital marketing for every artist in the world, what I can do is build products that at least bring some of my best practices and some of my design thoughts into an application that more artists can use. And you know, it's very SaaS based. So most of these applications are a freemium model. You can use it for free. And there are like certain features that cost me that I didn't put back on you to cover. So like the number one request of turn that I never was able to meet was increasing the duration past 60 seconds. And I finally traversed that as a developer and I'll make that available in the next version.  Like, should it spin faster? Someone asked me, like, could it not spin? I was like, that's the first time in like five years. That's a little weird.   Probably do like a 78 style background and like make it the center that like a different thematic, it looks a vinyl on a record player. There is a feature now that allows you to do a record. This is again for pro users, but it's like a one click. It just puts your artwork in the middle where the label would be and then puts the record around it totally. There's so many things there. It's just a fun playground to be in. I wish I spent more time on it. I'm starting to hold myself accountable to more of that stuff. But I do have other products that I'm like curious about as well. Yeah, I mean, I've always had it in the 60 day plan I put out for people. I'm like, this is a great grid post put in your carousel and it's a great way for people to hear your song and do it if you want to do something fast. The other one I really loved the concept of that you did was a listening party. Can you talk to people about that? Yeah, listening parties have been on development for probably too long right now, but I can talk a little bit about what's like holding it from really going out. But if anyone's curious about using it, just hit me up directly and we can set up a party. I had did a campaign for the band Future Islands. It was a listening event party. We did a very thematic listening event that was like the album would unlock for you to listen based on the location you were in, if enough people showed up. So I think it was state by state or city by city. If a certain number of people showed up in New York, then you could all listen to the record together. So the idea was to encourage people to like gather people into this listening experience. But at the core of that party was an audio player and a chat room and all the links that were most important to the artist. So after that concept, I was like, yeah, like fuck, like I've been grinding on this for so long. I forgot the power of audio next to social feature next to points of interest. So I was like, there should be an application that does just this. And I became obsessed with the idea of sort of the listening party. So basically just a listening room type application that's one part synced audio stream, one part chat room and one part buttons that link to the things that are most important to an artist. Just as a means to encourage fans to listen to things together, it can be event-based, it doesn't have to be. But again, if we talk about like different moments of time for artists, two weeks before the new album comes out, you would throw a listening event around back catalog stuff just to get people hype. When the album comes out, of course, we're listening to the new album together.  And then later in the future, we're celebrating the anniversaries of things that have occurred. There's many, many moments where you could bring the fans together with or without artist participation. The artist doesn't have to be there, right? I mean, that guy who does the Twitter listening party, whose name is it? Tim, yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that thing is massive. Exactly, yes. Similar sort of like thing. We just want to get people together listening.  He just says press play at this time, which makes total sense. We all have different music services. Maybe we have record player, CD players, eight track players, I don't know. As long as we all hit play at the same time, we're all generally having the same experience. There's a beauty in that hack to get people to do it. I built a little bit of technology to help us get there. What I learned in the Future Islands campaign is basically smoke and mirrors, audio syncing. If I know the point in time that a party started and a user comes in later, I should be able to understand exactly what point of the album they should be at, even if it just keeps repeating. So that is the general mechanic of listening party. It's basically a fall sync mechanic by simply knowing what point in time you should be at. So we can take that for Future Islands in the first version of listening party. It was for an MP3-based audio stream. We can bring that to a DSP solution with the same sort of mechanic. You log in with your Spotify, it puts you on the right track in the right position and you're in the party with everyone else. And that's generally it. There are some other issues like inside of it, lagging, just typical stuff. Even if we were all looking at the same live YouTube video, we would all be slightly in different places. I think that's okay. And I like find a lot of peace in sort of the simpler issues of technology that I'm okay, I can move past that kind of stuff. But in general, we're all there. We're all in the same song together. We can chat with each other. Maybe the artist is there in some points of interest. What have held me back on releasing this? It's basically just the commercial mechanics of it. This application, unlike the other ones, is a little bit more expensive to maintain, particularly with the scale of the artist that might wanna use it. I can tell you, I turned down a BTS usage because I was like, this is gonna bankrupt me, right? I'm ready for a Lord Huron right now. I don't need a BTS. Give me small artists with like 100 fans who wanna test this thing, right? I was just like, this is just gonna be a headache and it's gonna be a huge mistake for me, basically. Yeah, well, that is very intelligent of you to say that. Cause a lot of people would see the shiny object as like one of the most engaged fan bases that's ever existed in the free world. This product is not meant for artists of that size, right? Like Tim is better.  It makes so much more sense than trying to funnel tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of fans into a chat room that's just gonna blaze by at the speed of light. Like there's no point to it. This is more like, it could even be like a small thing, like a couple of friends who get together and who all wanna listen to music together. Thinking back to the turntables, station heads. There's a lot of applications that do this kind of stuff. But what's holding it back from a development point of view was just commercial stuff, basically. One of the reasons I do a lot of this stuff, one of the reasons I do my client work is I'm putting things to test. I'm trying to find knowledge where it is in my head. One of the things I've always been curious about is what kind of applications can I build off of Spotify's platform, but then make them available to other users, artists for a rate, for a price. Turn doesn't have that problem.  But this, where you wanna, from a commercial standpoint, you wanna say I built an application that allows you to throw listening parties for Spotify users, right? That's what I wanna be able to say. But I also wanna be able to charge artists a fair price for that service that covers the technical costs. This is something I'm just starting to begin the conversation with Spotify about. I've basically been on a quest to build a stronger relationship with Spotify, to have a proper conversation with them about this application. Even though for me, it's all very casual. I wanna build this thing. I wanna make this available to people. So that's basically where it stands. I'm trying to understand if I can charge for this and what all that means when it comes from Spotify's perspective. I've basically already received a light okay from Apple Music to do it. But Spotify is of course what really matters. Well, the stuff you've built is amazingly cool and inspiring. I'm gonna suggest to everyone who viewed this that you head to leemartin.com and read through his blog and click on the links so you can actually see some of this work which I will have in the video. But really take a look around because it's super, super inspiring. Lee, I wanna thank you so much for coming on. This was super, super awesome. Cheers, Jesse. I mean, yeah, we really, we only scratch the surface here. And I mean, I would love to talk to more artists and talk to you more about different ways of accomplishing that. I know I've gotten a


ربما one of the most important books that have been written is the introduction to history and really the treatment of history of Ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldun had the book title كتاب العبار و ديوان المتدئ والخبر it's the long title it's the history of Ibn Khaldun which is still as a book is read and engaged with so many different specialization it is seen as to be the book that has founded the field of anthropology the field of sociology even his area of division of labor on economics theories of state formation and rise and decline of states and some of your major thinkers today will always in the list of 10 important books to read Ibn Khaldun is often offered as a book to read so his work is really monumental and I think that as we continue to deal with the complexities of what Muslims are facing I wanted for us to maybe to elevate our discussions and our understanding to at least see what Ibn Khaldun was engaging with at the time importantly that Ibn Khaldun is actually also is credited of beginning of the scientific method and he put the scientific method not only in relations to science but also scientific method in relations to the field of social sciences so in one of his books specifically in one of the chapters he says that history as a field or as an understanding it's an art that is subject to being examined of having veracity or a falsehood and he says some people will accept the opinion of people because it matches their group which what we call today is like my group right or wrong and as we know Muslims we tend to be almost falling into this field where our opinion because of our group we accept the opinion without any examination and he says that this is a faulty understanding right he says فمن هت تشيعاته للأراء والمداهب from it is taking the opinions of individuals and particular groups and I know in that history we always say oh masha Allah the Sunnis are together at certain points حنفه is Malik is شافع is would not pray behind each other right in such a way that we actually reach a level of what you call missing the forest for the tree not recognizing that the ultimate goal is for us how to worship Allah rather than trying to prove that أبو حنيفه شافعي مامالك حمد بن حمبل and also other scholars we tried to do defense of them rather than defense of the dean overall so there is this aspect of how we begin to actually undertake this aspect relative to taking the opinions or of sectarian opinions and so on ساكن هي point out to us that sometimes because we value someone highly we begin to actually leave our intellectual capacities and reasonableness to actually ask the question because we assume that the person is of a higher status or magnitude and he says more so also when we have a relationship with somebody of religious status so in essence we begin to almost dispense with our intellect الله سبحانه وتعالى always ask us أفلا يتفكرون don't you contemplate in Allah's creation but also every matter that is introduced to you to reflect this is not a lack of adab it's just a lack of using Allah give you responsibility to yourself we did not ask you to follow my opinion and I don't want you to follow me I want you to examine my opinion أبو باكر رضي الله عنه as soon as he was nominated and took the khilafa he said if I do something right obey me and follow me but if I do something wrong correct me this is أبو باكر رضي الله عنه today in almost the smallest affairs we say we can't as if we are doing putting a pedestal on individuals and that's again leads to misunderstandings both on matters of religion and matters of the world so for example if somebody asks me about issues can you resolve issues of marriage divorce I say I have not done any work on this so I can't help you that's not my field but we assume that just because I'm giving a khutba I'm going to give you what you call from A to Z I'm a specialist in that field I would be practicing psychology, anthropology, sociology, child rearing and so on that's just a completely wrong in our history there is specialization and you go to specialist that's why we know Imam Al-Bukhari he had many different fields but he's understood to be a specialist in hadith and same other ska so we need to make sure that we ask the person appropriate question to their appropriate specialization you don't go to somebody let's say who's a dentist to say can you work on my toe if you're confused about which one is which that's your problem not the dentist's problem or the person who's going to work on your toe so in matters of specialization to understand this third ابن خلدون says that it is the nature of human being to begin to take on fantastical news and begin to convey it fantastical news because again we have in our mind sometimes again in relations to the unseen world that we get into this fantastical world and Allah سبحانه وتعالى differentiate between Islam which is something you practice prayer you see me pray fasting again unless you go in the assumption is that you're fasting hajj its performance you go and see people performing hajj the Shahada chain likewise and zakat all are visible article of faith are unseen right and right so all these are matters of faith so sometimes we accept fantastical narration because it actually gets us into the realm of you know almost a dream world so we need to be very careful that we don't use our faculty that seeks the fantastical news and then we begin to convey it I'd say this because today in the matter of social media the more fantastical than news the more you share it which often again it becomes that not only that you're conveying something that is falsehood but you also you're in matters of religion you are a person that should be the measure of what is truth and what is falsehood الله سبحانه وتعالى gave that وجعلناكم أمة وصطة a middle nation تكونوا شهداء so you'll be witnesses what is the witnesses don't think witnesses is only going in court to be a balance people that actually decipher for the society in these affairs so fantastical stories issues that are there is also for us to recognize now interestingly enough a French scholar who dealt with issues of at the moment of crisis and societies some elements of learned helplessness as well as imposing on oneself a type of incapacity as a citizen he says in moments of difficulties people will be occupied with three things getting their sustenance trying to go and get work and to eat second entertainment in the context of France he said soccer and third that they will be preoccupied with religion in a fantastical way so religion rather being the measure of justice and balance of the society becomes a way to actually escape from what is being asked again الله سبحانه وتعالى says الله سبحانه وتعالى says الله يأمر بالعادل والإحسان والإتائذ القربا God commanded to justice and therefore religion is to actually go around to manifest justice both individually and collectively but because of the crisis we begin to have religion as an escape and he says in particular during that period people begin to be preoccupied with the actions of religions rather than the meaning of religion they will be preoccupied with making sure that the particulars of structures carpet again beautiful carpet they look at the Mabani and Laysa Almaani they can preoccupied with the structures and the forms rather than the meanings and again we see this in general as part of where we are at in relations to our engagement and you could see in the Muslim world two countries went to war over a soccer game again a soccer game people went to war and called their ambassador between Egypt and Algeria over a soccer game there is a person also in Jordan just recently killed as a result of a soccer game and we are not talking about what is happening in England and other places but you could see in here people are taking in here entertainment one but the second is in terms of preoccupation with these aspects relative to the forms rather than the content now Ibn Khaldun also speaks about عصبية and he is one of the early people to speak about what's عصبية as a form of nationalism some of the scholars again look at his writing on عصبية as the early formation of the idea of having nationalism as a foundation he says that in the rise of governance and power عصبية is needed but it has to be remedied or always being balanced with religion that is looking for the best interest of the society now عصبية he argues have won the day over Islam because as the early Muslims were trying to be universal everybody is included it became عصبية a form of Arab Protonationalism early on and that became the foundation and now we have ما شاء الله 55 Muslim countries with a nationalism without cooperation in such a way that we have the organization of Islamic cooperation I call it the organization of an Islamic cooperation because there is no cooperation to the extent that we don't trade with each other Muslim states they don't trade with each other like 90% of their trade is outside their area and anyone that knows business like if you go down to Silicon Valley everything talk about synergy right how we could be synergetic with each other our company, our company we could have mutual relations Muslim worlds don't have synergy with each other they would rather go all the way up to Alaska and possibly Siberia to get a product rather than to go next door which would be there right there with their next door neighbor and in sometimes two villages that actually just there's a line between them that's it they will not actually they will not talk to them they would not sell or buy they would not even have marriage relationship between them and I had a number of cases can you advise us because my daughter or my son are going to marry from across the street right Syria to a Palestinian or Egyptian to a Libyan or a Bangladeshi to a Pakistani is like crisis well 70 years ago you're all part of the same nation 200 years ago you're all part of the same society you could go from China all the way to Spain and you're just a Muslim that's the only thing that you were about today you're just like well you need to be 5-4 you need to be this major and so on and you have to be from the particular village if you're not from the particular it's haram now we have to go to Dr. Phil to resolve the conflict so Asabiyah has been reduced to such an extent that it's just like it's a calamity we don't trade with each other we don't engage with each other we don't correspond with each other and that results in learned failure learned failure again we don't have synergy in business relations we don't have synergy in any other element we don't have synergy in terms of marriage relations especially in this country if your daughter or son are marrying someone from the Muslim you should just do تكبير from here to judgment day usually just like learn how to do تكبير الحمد لله especially in the crisis but they say no no I want somebody from the same village and if it will be from the same yellow house like our house then this is what I want like the insanity is just compounded so this Asabiyah has been really our calamity I do believe Muslims are powerful but they don't understand their power center we just don't we think that is just like if we just got get somebody maybe from whatever consulting company to tell us what it is no you just need to understand what you have there is no lack of resources Muslim lands have plenty of resources every ingredient is there Muslim world is centered on trade routes all across the world you cannot move right, left, north, south, east, west up and down even if you are going to go to Mars you have to pass through Muslim territories waterways and so on talent wise again if you just think about the Muslims in this country but look at it we have a wealth of human capacity I know they say Mashallah there is 1.4 billion people if there is 1.4 billion I am not cooperating then they are zero they are zero because at the basis of it cooperation is what makes strength يدو الله مع الجماعة that's what Allah said what the Prophet SAW said يدو الله مع الجماعة didn't say يدو الله مع المصم الجماعة مع الجماعة people cooperate and there were 4 1.4 billion not cooperating is net effect zero وكمن فئة خليلة غلبت فئة تبيره بإذن الله a small group can outtake a larger group why because they know how to cooperate and therefore there is a net energy value that adds to them again I am a Palestinian I work in Palestine the Jewish Zionist population around the world is less than one-twentieth or one-hundredth of the Muslim population they cooperate they work together again as a person whose work and I need to understand my opposition to see where they are coming into strength versus us lack of cooperation is the cause of our weakness and for that we have where everybody wants to be a leader there is no body follower so we put four of us in one room or three of us in one room we come up with four organizations each one of us has to be a president of their organization and then a fourth organization will pretend that we work together and we say masha'Allah there is a lot of Muslim organizations but again it is four of us who are not cooperating so again I think visiting and considering Ibn Khaldun because he focused on how the society manages how the society benefits what are the bases of rising and power relations not in a bombastic way but how to actually develop a society that at a certain point was the envy of the world and now we are not even on the rank they had a service last week what are the most miserable populations in the world nine out of ten are Muslim countries and then people say well we need to do a hijrah to the Muslim world I said Muslim world are leaving 95 million immigrants and refugees are on the move 65% of them are Muslims and then somebody says I need to do a hijrah I'm just like what are the bases because again you're praying here nobody's actually this person who just did a tweet is 14 years in jail in a Muslim country another person who was invited because he prayed in his own country he's in jail for 12 years you're able to do all your five obligations so I'm really asking the question hijrah to where I can understand Elon Musk wants to go to Mars that's his point but for us what is the question there being asked so really we need to think in the questions both for us in here and the Muslim world and to begin to resolve some of these contradictions that we have within ourselves how we view our religion how we view our work how we view other Muslims and the relations in order to have a collective strength I think we have the ingredients of things is just we have to find ways and compel ourselves to cooperate and ourselves again so don't say I see it this way can you compel yourself because sometimes if it's not my idea he's from the other village I'm not going to take their idea because if I take their idea their village is going to be ahead of us masha'Allah both your village and his village are occupations so what are you both thinking about right so again I'd like to come up with materials for you that makes you think and engage in a higher level because I think for me the Friday خطب is for us to share in materials and information that can get us to think and come out after جمع and hopefully for us to change and alter our perspective so my challenge for you is to find ways for us to cooperate to cooperate in every area يضو الله مع الجمع we celebrate the صحابة right we look at مدينة الأنصار والمهاجرين what happened they cooperated they made brotherhood and sisterhood in a way that transformed history the only place the only time in history where a group that comes destitute from مكة again مهاجرين and the people who receive them give them half of their wealth there is not a single instance in history that you could pointed that's our example they cooperated and through that cooperation they transformed the world that's our point of strength that's what transformed the world don't worry about risk your risk is coming from Allah from the time that your conception in your mother womb your risk is guaranteed to you by Allah when you're in your mother womb and no soul is going to exhaust this life until it gets its risk now distinguish between risk and collecting somebody else's risk many of us work for 20, 30, 40, 50 years your risk but actually all what you work is to give the risk for your inheritors who are going to go and do with it as you want you will be asked about it and also they're not they're just receiving so distinguish between risk and your work for somebody else's risk so let's make Insha'Allah make it a commitment for us to cooperate to transform ourselves both in here and across the world I do feel that this is within our capacity and Allah SWT put us in this world to fulfill his objective for us which is to elevate us above the angels but it is based on cooperation