My name is Elaine Gallant and I'm your host of Books, Books, Books. It's a live streaming series through Think Tech Hawaii. And in this segment, we're going to discuss everything about reading books, writing books and everything in between. Today is no exception. I have a special guest with us today and he has written two books in particular that we're interested in and that is Molokai and daughter of Molokai and our author is Alan Berent. The title of our show today is Stories of Heartbreak and Triumph of Kalal Papa. Alan, welcome to Books, Books, Books. How are you? Hi. Good, good. Nice to be here. Aloha. Aloha. One of the biggest things that when I was talking to people about your two books, which have been successes for quite some time, is what is your interest in Hawaii that makes you, that has you feeling so connected to these islands? And secondly, in particular, to Molokai and the stories that are held there. Well, I've been visiting Hawaii ever since, for the first time in 1980. And I fell in love with it on first sight. I walked off the stairway onto the tarmac at the old Maui airport and I smelled the scent of Plumeria carried in on the trade winds and I was in love. And I came back at least once a year. I live in California, so it's easy to come back fairly often. And at the same time that I was coming here for vacations, I was also buying books about Hawaii, about its culture, so history, sociology, mysticism. Because I was fascinated by the people, by the culture, by the music. But I didn't actually ever think about writing anything set in Hawaii until 1997 when I wrote a pilot for NBC, which was for a supernatural series that was going to be set in Hawaii. They didn't pick it up, but it got me started thinking about writing another novel, a writing a novel rather instead of a TV script that probably would never see the light of day. So I had in mind a contemporary novel set on Molokai, which my wife and I had visited about five years before. And I found it a remarkably beautiful island and unique even for Hawaii in that the residents cared passionately about keeping it undeveloped. The saying goes that you can drive from one part of one tip of Molokai to the other without ever encountering a stoplight, and it's true. And I learned just how passionate they are about that and really why. And so I started to think about this novel, which would be sort of about the bonds of community in this some exotic locale. The more though that I researched Molokai, the more I learned about Kalapapa. And the more I learned about Kalapapa, the more I realized, well, this is the ultimate story about the bonds of sacrifice, the bonds of community in a community. And it just became a passion. The more I read about it, the more I thought, my God, this is this is so unjust. And it's so at that time, at least it was so little heard of on the mainland. A lot of the stuff surprised me and I'd been coming to California from California for 20 years. And I thought, well, if it surprised me, it'll surprise readers too. So I just started off going to the Hawaii State Archives in Honolulu and asked to see their their research on Kalapapa. And that started is the wheeled in a library cart with four shelves stacked on both sides and said, here, here's the first folder. You finish with this, we'll give you the next one. And that ended about two years later. Oh, my goodness. Well, I empathize with you on the mysticism and the beauty of Molokai, because I can look right at my window and stare at it all day if I want to. And it is a beautiful island and it does beckon you to come and or at least to come and understand what happened. A lot of people do know about Father Damien and Sister Marion Cope, but they don't know the heartbreak that the people had who were abandoned there. And I used the word abandoned. You don't use it in your novel, I don't recall, but they're alienated and there's left there to survive on their own with what the church will provide them. How did that affect you when you when you were there? When you when you went and visited and you were doing your research and you were talking to people, I assume there were some survivors still?  At the time that I went there were probably about 100 patients still residents still alive. I think today that figure is down to below 10. There is there's more staff than there are residents now. But it came home for me when I opened up that first older of stuff at call from the Hawaii file state archives files. And the very first letter that I found was a letter from one of the very first patients sent to call papa or call a while actually in those days to the board of health in 1866. And it just read, please take pity on your humble, you know, servants, the lepers, we have need of a water cask. Please send us a water cask so that we may be able to gather water more and more, you know, better. And I thought, oh, my God, they really were just dropped here without any kind of of thing to try to survive with. And I sometimes even pushed right off the boat. Am I correct? Pardon me. Sometimes even pushed right off the boat. No, that's an old man. That that would be the cattle or something. The cattle were pushed off of that way. The all of the the patients were taken in by robots. But the the cattle, unfortunately, did have to you'd have to swim to shore. And at least one of them turned around and was headed to water. Honolulu. Last time anybody saw. Tell me about Rachel, your main your main character in Mullikai. Tell me about Rachel and her story. Well, Rachel, we first meet her when she's five, six year old girl, a native Hawaiian living in Honolulu. Her father is a merchant seaman. And she is one one day discovers a rash on her on her arm. And her mother knows what it is because she's heard this before and she does her best to use goes to the local Kahuna to try to get him to make it go away. And it works for a little while and then it comes back. And and ultimately, she's diagnosed with leprosy. Now, what would later become Hansen's disease? And she is taken from her family brought to the Kalihi receiving station where she is imprisoned and hooked up and prodded at by scientists for for a year or so before she is taken to Mullikai. And without her parents, without anyone, except an uncle who she knows is at at Kalapapa. And to me, this was just the most terrifying thing that I could imagine happened to me as a child. And the fact that it did happen to children be ripped away from their families and taken to some strange new place like this. It was mind-boggling. And then when I had read about how the children of the patients were often taken away from them or to try to to prevent them from coming down with leprosy because it's not a genetic disease. It's it's it's one from close contact. I thought, well, that's it. This has to be the story of a young girl taken away from her family as a child who grows up, finds someone to love, marries, has a child. And then has her family taken away from her. And the other story repeated itself with daughters of the daughter of Mullikai, right, because Ruth is taken away. That's right. That's right. And I didn't actually plan that before I started writing Mullikai. I I wasn't that smart. But as I started my research and I realized, well, I wanted Ruth to go someplace farther outside of the island. So it would be harder for Rachel to track her down. And I knew that a lot of Japanese farmers went to California in the early 20th century. And the more I worked out the math, I realized, oh, my God, she would have been interned. And it just it was serendipity. It just it just clicked into place that they would like to point out that in Daughter of Mullikai, you're very good about, you know, listing the names of the camps, what happened in those camps, the struggle that they had, the Utagawa's, not the yeah, no, Watanabe's had when they went there to try and start farming and growing strawberries and the things that went on land wise between the Californian landowners and the Japanese that came over. And not only that, another heartache was the fact that the Japanese family that adopted Ruth suffered some consequence as well. They were they could have been shunned as well, right? Yes, they they could have been shunned and and ultimately where they were shunned just for the fact of their their their their simple Japaneseness. And all of the all of the things that happened, I mean, the two books have, you know, are kind of companion tales to each other. They they're complementary. They together they form one big overarching story. And the thing that they both have in common is that the characters of Rachel, everything that happens to her in that book as a Hansen's disease patient is something that really happened to somebody somewhere. And the same is true of Ruth as someone who is in turn everything that she experiences is something that happened to somebody during that time. So I don't I have an armature of truth that the character is based on and then I just superimpose a fictional character on top of that. Yes, well, I believe your readership is probably very happy that you did write Daughter of Molokai because you do end up wondering at the end of Molokai what happened to Ruth? What was Ruth's fate in all of this, right? Here she is the daughter of a leper father and mother. Charles Kenji. What was his last name? Carlson Kenji. That's where the Utagawa comes in. And he had leprosy, too. What a good man he was, by the way. But also, Rachel was a lovely, lovely person, loving, loving, loving people. And their daughters taken away from them. So Ruth has that stigma about her. And then the Japanese family, the Watanabe's adopt her. And they are then stigmatized for having adopted a child of leprosy, a child that is the union of a leprous family couple. Not so much for that. Although there is a subplot there about why they chose to adopt somebody from Kala Papa, but they find that that she experiences, Ruth experiences prejudice because she is part Hawaiian. She's not pure Japanese. And so a boy is that she is interested in. Their parents say, no, I'm sorry, you can't you can't be involved with her. She's a she's a you know, I have for you. So so there are levels. The point I think I was trying to make was how far reaching leprosy was into the healthier society and how frightened by it, everybody truly was. Right. You dedicate your book to Edgar and Charlotte Whitmar, then you call them your ohana. And you also dedicated it to the people of Kala Papa. So I assume they are well represented here. Oh, you know, my my Edward and Charlotte Whitmar were my grandparents and and I a great great pair of grandparents, too. And Uncle Uncle Eddie was somebody who I was frequently in touch with when I was writing my my book, Palisades Park, which was set in in New Jersey. But I had previously I had dedicated my book previous to Molokai to my parents and it seemed right that I should dedicate this to Eddie and Charlotte, because at that time they were the only real family that I had left. And that was what Kala Papa was all about, family ohana. Yes, well, I thought I stumbled onto something really not known before.  But the people of Molokai, I'm sure were very, very helpful and were with you all the way. One of the little heartbreaks in talking about the far reaching side of leprosy is is Henry, I mean, Rachel's father. He was a mariner. He loved the high seas and he wrote to her and I have the quote right here. It says, if I had one wish that God could grant me, it would be to come to Molokai to live out the rest of my life, my days with my little girl. But since that won't happen, I might as well sail the globe as I always and I'm thinking, oh, another heartbreak for Rachel, right? That's her father. Yeah, it's a heartbreak for him, too. But at that at that point in the history of the settlement, they were no longer allowing relatives to to come as a kakua, the helpers. It used to be that that a mother could accompany a child, a parent could accompany a child, some relative or a friend, but they slowly did away with that because they realized they rediscovered that inevitably those people also came down with the disease. So so the unfortunately, Henry would love to a move there, but he simply wasn't allowed by the authorities. Let's talk about some of the triumphs because there really were some triumphs and a lot of love that was on the island for each other in this colony. One of the funniest or no, well, not funny, but one of the most wonderful nights in the book is when the girls steal out of the of the of the of the where they're staying and they go to a dance in. Oh, let's see, where was it? I have to find. Yes, thank you. Kakakuna. I still didn't say it right. Got it. But I'm not high. Thank you.  How precious is that? Is that something that happened? Is that in the records that you found? You know, the record of it that I found was one that I found at the the little museum and gift shop at Kala Papa that they've established. I did not see this in a book in a newspaper article in a biography at the museum. They had a picture of the poly and under it was a caption that read many worthy Saturday nights when local residents would climb over the poly to attend a party at Kanaka. I looked at that and I thought, oh, I can use that. And in fact, I got a whole chapter out of it. And as you say, it's it's one of the more exhilarating chapters in the book. I agree. I agree. But it brings a smile to your face. It's like, wow, relief for these people, right? There's there there are being kids. They get to be children. And you used to keep the dog too, just quite fun. I don't think they need to be away, but, you know, there's there's a lot of wonderful things in here. Some of the people were cured and they had a choice to leave. Tell us about that. Well, the disease ultimately took a 180 degree turn when the Salfa drugs were discovered in 1940s. And very quickly, after administrating these these these drugs, within about six weeks, it reduced the levels of the bacillus that causes leprosy to non contagious levels. Now, it didn't do anything for the physical effects that occurred. Like when you have lepromatis, leprosy, which were the tubercles that are on people's faces or the the contracture of their hands into claws because the bones were resorbed. It couldn't fix that. So a lot of people were in their mind, they felt disfigured and they didn't want to go out into the world again and have people stare at them. Some of them did and they were stared at. And so and they came back ultimately. But a few, a few actually had the desire to know I want to go back out there.  And if there is one person that Rachel is based on, you know, to some extent, it's a woman in Margaret Zamora, who was written about in a book called Margaret of Molokai by Mel White. And she was a Portuguese woman who was sent there as a teenager, was ultimately cured, went back to Honolulu and she did experience some prejudice because she was physically disfigured by leprosy. But she didn't let that stop her. She made friends. She became part of an information campaign where she would talk to audiences, to children, to schools about leprosy, about the effects of it, how anybody could get it. There was nothing, you know, particularly different about the people who had it. There was nothing to fear about them. And she just struck me as having the most courageous and outgoing spirit that I thought that I'm going to give that to Rachel when the time comes for her to leave. And wonderful because these were real people. They were real people, right, with real lives. We have some questions in the chat room, too. But before I ask the first one, I wanted to mention that there was also some good things that happened in Daughter of Molokai in these internment camps, how the people came together and looked out after each other. And you want to talk about that for a minute? Yeah, it was it was a very similar experience. I mean, if the people in Molokai, Colopapa, rather, were drawn together by a shared sense of of Ohana, the Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals at Banzanar were brought together by a common Japanese culture and by a common American culture. The most of these people thought of themselves as Americans and they didn't understand what they were doing there, but they they made the best of it. You know, they they had sports teams, softball teams. They they loved baseball. They did make dances. They had shows, whatever they could to give themselves a sense of normalcy. And and and to me, that's really the triumph of both Colopapa and men's that are in the other internment camps is that they were these people were dealt a cruel injustice and and imprisoned against their will and against all reason, and yet they came out of it if not stronger than no worse than they had before, because they had the they had the inner strength and they had the community to to keep them going. I think that's what makes the book so beautiful, you know, to read that they overcome such adversity. So let's go to the first question from the chat room from Bonnie McChrystal. Why write Moloka'i from a woman's perspective and how did you do it with such authority? That's to the second part of the question. First, I have no idea. I write people and and some people are men and some people are women. And I start from the ground up and I I think about, OK, where are they born? What are the influences? What are their parents like?  And and and if I'm if I'm true to that, I I find the the gender works itself out. And as for why I chose one, it was exactly for what I alluded to earlier. It seemed to me when I found out that the children were taken away from them. I knew I had to write a story of a mother daughter story. Doing it as a father son story just didn't seem like it had quite the pathos that that a mother daughter story would. So that's what I wrote. Very good. R.H. I don't know who that is. Is the found marriage license that what started you thinking about writing the story? That was actually towards the end of the novel in Moloka'i. You found a marriage license is. Oh, you're going to have to refresh me because it's it's been so long since I've read every I think it was when I think it was regarding Dorothy, the marriage license of Dorothy and her husband, maybe. Oh, yeah, since I remember the novel. Yes, that's right. She uses it as a way of tracking down tracking down her sister. Yeah, that that came later. It didn't it didn't start out my research. It was just as I was researching the beats of the story that came up as, you know, the most logical way for Rachel to be able to track her down. Right. Right. Big records. Helen Weiss asks, what did it feel like to be at Cal Al Papa and see everything, especially the burial grounds in the church to actually feel it? It's it just feels like a very sacred like sacred ground. When you go there, you are, you know, I was part of a tour and it's a very sported tour. They don't like you get too close to the valley. I'm not sure why, but there are places you can go and places that you don't go. But you you go there. I came in from the the airport and I came in on the bus into town. And on one side, I saw the left side of the bus. I saw a beautiful little town like any town in Hawaii. And on the other side of the town, I saw acre after acre of tombstones and nothing said hello, Papa, more vividly than that. Yeah, yeah, it did take a toll that that is for certain. There's a couple of things that I want to mention that I actually little tidbits that I really like that you give the recipe for point kind of sort of kind of sort of you mentioned loves bakery. Oh, my goodness. Love. How do you do something except during that? I'm not mentioned loves bakery. I don't know. I don't know. I love the details that you give of the Japanese camps, particularly at Tool Lake. Very important. The mention of Kaha Huluwa, home of Maui's best banana bread and cream pies. You sold over 600,000. Well, there's more than 600,000 copies in print of Molokai. And we don't know the number on on the daughter of Molokai. But I'm sure it's six digits as well. How does it make you feel as an author? Well, it's very gratifying. It the sales on Molokai took took place over a period of about 20 years. So I never landed on the New York Times bestseller list because I never sold enough copies in one week. But it was something actually more remarkable than that. It was people discovering the book through word of map, starting with book clubs, especially in Northern California, who said, hey, this is a great book and let's read this. And one book club tested on to another and another and another. And it sort of took off spontaneously. And that's that's kind of rare because in this in this era of books that are fueled by, you know, million dollar publicity budgets. You know, I had no publicity budget for for for Molokai when it was first published. I had to go out there and hustle on my own and to have it discovered by readers and kept alive by readers 20 years later is is really quite remarkable. And I'm very humbled by it. Well, we're very happy that you wrote these books. I should mention your screenwriter, playwright and Emmy Award winner. And also Nebula Award winner. Congratulations. I'd like to thank you for joining us today, Alan. I so appreciated talking with you. I'd like to thank the staff at Think Tech Hawaii, Jay Fidel, who keeps us all straight, the patrons who support us, the the viewers that watch us and partake in our show and the people who send in questions. It's been a pleasure, Alan. Thank you so very much. Mahalo for having me. Mahalo and Aloha.


Okay, we're back at day two of Node Summit. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv, and we're proud to be at Node Summit. For day two of live interviews, wall-to-wall coverage yesterday, day one, we interviewed. We've got about 20, 25 interviews of great entrepreneurs, developers, executives, really the thought leaders, and the folks really building this new community. And they're all geeks, but they're all in business to make money and do some good for the world in the development world and build great apps. Day two is a little bit different here at Node Summit. This is what they call the Node Jam. And Node Jam is where all the startups who are really playing with Node and really commercializing some of their ideas and visions into product. And so we've got great teams of people, great product opportunities, and the social community, if you will, is all here. And it's really exciting, and I'm proud to be here with theCUBE. theCUBE is siliconangle.tv's flagship telecast. We go out to the events and we set up our HD studio. We talk to the most important, smartest people we can find. And we don't care if they're entrepreneurs, developers, executives, if they got knowledge, we want to extract that and share that with you. And we're proud to be here. And it's going to be exciting. So today's going to be pretty much a laid back, pretty much a chill environment. We're going to talk candidly with the entrepreneurs. What are they working on? And some of the hot trends and products we're seeing. So our first guest is Matt Rainey, who is the co-founder, founder of Voxer. And I'm joined with Clint Finley, who's managing editor of our new devopsangle.com, our section on siliconangle. Going into the node world and understanding the operational and engineering side of it. Clint, welcome back. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. First time in, good to have you.  So let's just jump right in. You have the company Voxer. It's been very popular. As they say, you know, Neval from AngelList is here. He talks about social proof. You have some social proof. You have people using your app. So tell us about Voxer for the folks out there. What are some of the product features? And then share with us just some highlights of the success that you've had just recently. Sure, sure. So Voxer is, you know, it's, we call it a walkie-talkie. And it's sort of, we're trying to make a modern, like more useful way to do like walkie-talkie kind of behaviors. Like the issue that we're coming up against now that we have these mobile phones everywhere, like everybody's got a mobile phone. It's like, you can have a phone call anytime you like, but do you actually want that? Like, increasingly no. People find phone calls are, you know, they interrupt them. It's kind of a pain when you get a phone call. And so what we're trying to do is get sort of the etiquette of text messaging, but let you use your voice to do that. So it doesn't interrupt, but if you still want to be live, you can still be live. And it sounds complicated, but I mean, it's just like a walkie-talkie that works better. Before we get into some of the technical coolness of what you guys are doing with Node and everything else, which we're going to go deep dive in. Clint and I were playing with your app on Monday night and it's really cool. And for folks out there who want to try to understand this product, it's basically a text message with voice. And for the older folks out there like me, who know about Nextel, and you see people push to talk and then you can just chat with a talk like at a construction site or when you had people in the service business, that that was a really great product. Nextel pioneer, that kind of push to talk concept. Here it's a little bit different. You're doing essentially a voice message. That's a text message kind of thing to oversimplify it. That's correct.  Like it's not transcription. It's not converting your voice into text, but it's letting you use your voice with the social etiquette of text. Like it's not interrupting you, but like voice is really nice. It conveys nuance and subtlety and just character and emotion that you just can't get with text. And so people do want to use their voice, we think. And not just always type everything. Voice is a useful way to talk to people and it just doesn't fit in the sort of modern, kind of with the etiquette of modern mobile telephony. I mean, we know we have the cube and we have obviously audio and video, but I get taken out of context a lot of my blog posts when I do a lot of tongue-in-cheek and people are like, what are you saying? Get offended. So voice gives you that natural feeling of that. And the other thing that Clint and I were talking about when we were talking to some of the developers on that Monday night meetup, Thirsty Bear, was a lot of the times we get hyped up in products in Silicon Valley and Draloprision, it's like an echo chamber of hype and fun sometimes. But really when you hear average people say, oh, I love this app, it's amazing. So Clint, share your story about your friend who kind of showed you and said you got to get on this. Oh yeah, yeah, I have a friend who, well, I've been hearing about Boxer over a year now because you guys are using Node.js and RIOC and so the stuff that I've been following. But then I started hearing about it from my friends who are- From your non-technical people. Yeah, from non-technical people and yeah, they're fanatical about it. Because I had known about the app but I had never actually even downloaded it and so now suddenly I'm hearing not from Node.js of Angelus but from print reporters and from airline travel workers of like, oh this is great, I love to use this app while I'm driving because I don't have to look at it, I don't have to touch it. So yeah, it's definitely gaining a lot of traction outside of the tech community. And I understand you've hit some milestone numbers recently.  So it's super great. So I just- While you're happy now, just tell us you've worked with the numbers. It's definitely, well, here's what you can see. You can look in the, you can go to the iOS app store and you can look in the social networking category and you can see which has the usual suspects. And you can see which position we are in and which position we've been in for almost a month, which is to say above Facebook. And I'm not to say, I mean, everybody's on Facebook, like no surprise there, but the surprise is we have been above Facebook for a long time. And like lots and lots of people are downloading this app in this country and around the world. It's very cool, congratulations. I think you got lightning in a bottle. And I think when we look back on this CUBE interview, we'll be like, wow, somebody really went on a rocket ship. Remember us small guys when you're famous. But let's talk about the team. Let's talk about you guys up there and you guys did your right code. You're really happy about seeing the results manifest itself. Talk about the team that you guys have up within Voxer and talk about some of the talent you have. Sure, so I mean, we have, you know, we're primarily engineering focused. You know, we have, we have a lot of people working on Node. We have some sort of Node celebrities. We have Danny Coates who did Node Inspector. We have Daniel Shaw who's done various things with MongoDB and just well-known in the community. We're looking to recruit more, you know, more people to work on Node, be they Node celebrities or not. But yeah, we've got, and then we've got some people working on iOS and some people working on Android and you know, we're always looking for more. Cool, well let's talk about Node. We're at the Node Summit. You guys have a lot of challenges. We were talking last night with David Floyer, our chief IO researcher at wikibon.org and we were talking about IO and it's a challenge and we were talking about latency and it's a constant chase, the latency problem. So before we get into the latency deep conversation, let's talk about the challenges with your application and then where Node really came in to help you. I mean, because you were talking about the old ways of doing things.  So talk about some of the latency issues around and what Node does for you. Yeah, so we have kind of a, we have a funny sort of architecture in that we're trying to be as low latency as possible. Like we're trying to be absolutely live as you know, absolutely as fast as we can get data through our system. We want to do that. But we also need to make a copy of it in case you want to come in later if you have another device or you're offline at the time or whatever. And so that has been basically like the big win with Node is that we can shuffle data through our system incredibly quickly. We can hold open lots and lots of connections. Either be they very short lived, very low latency connections or we can keep much longer lived ones open to a database or processes writing to disk drives somehow. Being able to hold open all of those connections and has been crucial to us being able to kind of scale this up and keep delivering low latency that we need to do. So it's been a big win. Klan, what's your take on this? I mean, I saw you were following Node and you've been following these guys. What's your take on all this? Well, actually I would rather answer that with another question. I wonder what role has Node and the rest of your stack because there's other interesting things in the stack besides Node. How has that helped you scale? Because you've been growing so fast and I can't help but think that some of your success has been your own scalability. If people started downloading the app and it wasn't working, the adoption, I imagine probably wouldn't really be there. But some people have criticized Node as a sort of premature optimization. I'm wondering about your, you have what seems like a really scalable stack and how has that helped you? So, well, I mean, as you say, if we couldn't have scaled it up, obviously it wouldn't work and then people wouldn't be able to use it. And so we were able to. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people say, oh, Node doesn't scale. Like, you know, you need something that can scale. I mean, it does. Like nothing scales by itself. Like you have to do some work.  And so the work that we put into our application logic made it so that it scales with Node. The sort of, the real reason, like to the first part of your question is like that, the thing that wins for us is HTTP. Like using HTTP for everything and Node in HTTP is a first class citizen and it's effortless to do HTTP and it's effortless to do JSON. And so that's what we use as a protocol and that's worked out really well. And because Node does so well at this, we are able to build up several kind of service tiers, you know, several layers of our application staff in the back end that all talk to each other with JSON over HTTP. And likewise with RIOC, that has been a big win because we can talk to RIOC with HTTP and Node does that really, really well. And that's been a big reason that we were able to scale this up. We're good. So what's next for you guys now? Give us a status of the company. Where are you guys at in terms of employees, funding and all that good stuff? So we're in the process of raising some more money. We obviously know that we have a lot more users. It's a lot more expensive.  You're not in the cloud? Or are you on Amazon? In the cloud. I mean, yeah. What does that mean? Exactly. You're not using Amazon, are you? We're not using Amazon. We started using Amazon because you're supposed to and we could not get the latency numbers that we needed. It was too unpredictable and too crazy. And so we went to SoftLayer and we got bare metal machines there. And that was fine. It was really good value for your money, for our money. But the problem was at the end of the day, Linux, we have these weird IO mysteries, these weird latency mysteries and we couldn't figure out what they were. So we are actually moving our whole deal to joint right now. And so we've already, in the parts of our operation that are on joint, we've already been able to find some just crazy, crazy, just impossible performance problems that we were able to kind of suss out with the magic of detrace. Cool. So in terms of funding, have you taken funding so far? Self-funded? It has been self-funded. So you're looking for round of financing? Yeah, yeah. We're in the process right now. And sure you're going to get a lot of term sheets. I definitely invest in you guys. I really love what you guys are doing. I think it's exciting. I think you're pushing the envelope. And I think the app is just dead simple, great. So, and I think it's got a lot of headroom. Possibly video, maybe. Oh yeah, video, absolutely. I mean, the infrastructure supports video. We just haven't put it into the clients yet. Great.  Like there'll be a browser version of Voxer. It's going to be awesome. And it will sort of sync up with all of your content.  It works the same with our mobile phones. It's just usually mobile phones more personal. You don't usually share your mobile phone, but all you can have multiple devices and it all syncs already. And so we're going to add a browser version and probably some kind of a follower model. So right now we're symmetric like Facebook. What about like integration with Skype or something like that? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I mean, the thing that Skype does is they do really good phone calls over IP networks. And our thing isn't really phone calls. It's kind of somewhere in between like phone calls and text messaging. And maybe something, I mean Skype has really good audio. I just think about it because I live in Skype a lot for me. Me too, honestly. So I was just thinking it might be nice to be able to get my Voxer messages in Skype. So not calls, but just get the notifications and be able to play them right in Skype. Yeah, I mean, so soon we'll probably also, I mean, I'm not sure when it's going to happen in the long-term vision, but we want to expose an API, you know. And so then maybe we would do that. Maybe somebody will mash up Skype and Voxer and get you what you're looking for there. But yeah, I hope to open up an API so that people can build all kinds of interesting voice apps using our backend. What are you guys thinking in terms of like, you know, in terms of infrastructure side of it, in terms of we talked to the CEO of Blacko and Rich Screnta and they've told me that everything's in SSD for them. They're running a pretty cool search engine and they're really doing a great job over there. You're looking at the Flash and it's your architecture. Do you have any purpose-built kind of hardware? Are you going to go off the shelf and get like HP Dell boxes or, you know, that kind of thing? So right now we use what, I don't even really know what kind of computer is there. Commodity gear. Yeah, I mean, we asked our hosting provider to give us computers and then they do. But no special architecture in terms of IO on the hardware side.  Like, because we don't ever throw away messages. We let you keep your messages forever and so that's a lot of storage. It doesn't quite make sense to keep all that on SSD.  You guys are good prospect for the EMCs of the world out there, HP EMC. So great. Except maybe not because we're using RIOC to scale out our storage and we're not using a big sand. Like we're just using individual computers. To add more storage, we just get another computer with more storage and RIOC spreads it out. Yeah, cool. Well, Matt, congratulations on the great AppVoxer. Go to the App Store, download it, check it out. I'm sure it's going to be a big hit with everyone from kids up to adults, travelers. But no further. The whole world, I mean, it's a global web, right? I mean, you add in social capabilities like following. You can really create, I mean, GroupMe's been a great app with look at the shared text messaging. It's just a matter of time before voice becomes that. I mean, come back to voicemail again. I mean, Matt. Yeah, yeah, cool, thanks. Thanks so much. We're here inside theCUBE with Matt, the co-founder or co-founder of Voxer. Check it out, voxer.com and check out the app. It's growing faster than Facebook and Twitter in terms of the iStore. I made that up, implied that from the conversation. I think you could actually conclude that, but the algorithm is secret for the App Store rankings. We'll dig into it. We'll be following that. We'll do some investigative reporting. Congratulations, thanks so much. I'll watch that. I'll watch that. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Hey, Matt Rainey with Voxer, with Clint Finley, and we'll be right back in five minutes with more interviews.


My name is Nick DiLorenzo and I am the Building Construction Technology Teacher here at Suncoast Technical College. The specifics of this class is exploration of building construction. Students come in with basic or very limited knowledge of what building construction is about and we go on an exploration of all the different career choices. We introduce them to the different trades. There's a lot of excitement right now in the construction industry. We actually are partners with Habitat for Humanity and this year we actually built our own house that we're dedicating in March to a family here in Sarasota. So from start to finish we were able to get hands on real life practical experience building a house to see how that affects others.


It's the mat work. Hey everybody it's Bram and Sean and welcome to music news that matters. We're on the first of each month. We help you sift through the noise to bring you the most important industry news. Hey it's Josh here. We know there's so much information out there but we're going to do our best to bring you the most important news and bring you our perspective as well. Today we're discussing Spotify's new ad service and why it's bad for indie ables and artists. We're also discussing bike dancers new streaming platform and we're also going to debate about whether music streaming can really do the Disney plus. And as always before we get started since these videos are only once a month make sure you sign up to our music news that matters newsletter to get notified of the latest news and why it matters to you between episodes. So let's go ahead and get into this Joshua. What is the first category that we're recovering today? We're going to start on some pretty negative news unfortunately and that's about yeah it's about Spotify's new advertising tool. This is called Marquis. We discussed it before a couple of episodes back you know we're on about oh Spotify's got the new advertising service can be really good. They're going to open up a two-sided marketplace. Artists will be able to pay to get advertising music on there but it's very very expensive it turns out. They've been rolling out the sort of information to like major labels like as part of like you know given the information pack and it's going to cost 55 cents per click. So every time a user clicks on this brand new music for you pop up alert that's 55 cents and they're recommending a minimum buy-in of like five thousand dollars. So if you work if you do the math they're recommending or do you have to do five thousand dollars they're recommending a minimum of five thousand dollars. Okay so I guess there probably is there probably is an actual like you know cap that so you probably can spend a little bit less than that but I don't think I think they're not going to let you spend like you know five hundred dollars probably. Right because their last their primary advertising service last I remember I think they took it down to two hundred dollars two hundred fifty dollars at one point but it might be something higher they definitely have a minimum which is different than Facebook and Instagram advertising and things of that nature. Exactly so they're recommending a minimum of five thousand dollars I can't imagine the minimum is that low. Yeah I saw you did the math what did that add up to again so people can get an idea of what that actually looks like. So it's 55 cents per click if you've got five thousand dollars is your budget you're spending that means nine thousand people will stream a new track or album so they stream one song of yours with the current rate at 0.036 dollars per stream that means you'll get thirty two dollars forty in return in terms of royalties and they stream a whole album instead of one song it'd be three hundred and twenty four dollars but that's nowhere near the five thousand dollars you spend on the campaign. All right so five thousand dollars I get three hundred forty two dollars back. I only listen to a whole album. Yeah if they listen to that one song I get 34 dollars back because it only got shown to nine thousand people that's just such a crazy digital marketing ad spend for considering that reach that potential reach really right not even guaranteed in terms of people who actually click through it seems just based on what I read and then yes you stream a whole album based off of that those calculations which were 10 songs so 10 each person streamed 10 songs obviously that would be 342 multiplying that 34 times 10 that right there is uh I know discouraging for artists again to hear something like that but we have to also remember again again that music is looked at as a loss leader right um I think I even saw a quote that Wendy Day posted by Troy Carter that um the other day where essentially it was saying that music is makes a lot of money for everything except for music itself it was something makes sense to the nature of that right so people are expecting to spend this money and then make money off of the attention that they gained through music music is essentially marketing at this point but the most interesting aspect for this that I think I want to talk about is I saw a professor kind of stated how this was just new age payola yeah and you know in the same way you would be paying for a radio spot now instead we're for one putting this pay rate as something that only a certain level can even afford to do that's almost so that's like exclusivity without stating it all right exclusivity through pricing and then of course you're going to see people always do top down and most of these things because you have to test it in a control group before you release it to the masses even if that happens but at the end of the day because of the finite space people get or the lack of recognition of the finite space people actually get twisted yes there's this democratization of of experience and information that happens because of the internet and this ability for the chance and get placed because the internet is perceivably limitless when we think about sterile storage right however attention is still finite and that's the part that people have to remember so when you have this display because essentially they're saying hey music we're recommending for you it's going to be a pop-up ad that's that's all it is it's really a pop-up at the end of the day yeah it's spam as we would like to say at like especially if you think about the beginning of the web days when pop-up was pop-ups were crazy right um and so but only but for one Spotify is going to try to maintain the user experience because if there's too many pop-ups that's just going to kill user experience so that makes it even more finite right the even the ability to do it and then on an auction based system that's also going to drive up prices because at the end of the day we have to we have to think about the fact that record labels are going to have these budgets and they're going to they're going to want to do it so even if you as an indie artist want to get involved in something like this and end up with a budget like this you're you're competing with these prices so even on a free auction system i can see the price is driving to be pretty pretty pretty much not worth it considering what i see in Spotify but that's where Spotify kind of is in the nature of their company which we'll talk about a little bit later we talked about it earlier but we'll talk about a little bit later in this episode i want to know if you have any other thoughts when it comes to this Spotify pay-all situation of course we'll continue to update on it but if oh actually i probably shouldn't have said it like that but this Spotify what are they calling the system again uh marquee marquee yeah marquee tool yeah yeah but what what i did see that just before we hopped on the call was that um they're only going to show up pop-up ads on your account like one per day maximum i know two per week maximum so you're not even going to see you're only going to see two per week and you can turn off as well as your premium subscriber so again you know obviously i think it's quite they seem to think it's quite valuable like i just found like a few stats so they reckon that um there's the statistics now i'm trying to think they said that you know like 21 plus 21.7 percent increase in engagement that people would click through you know if they always have that so they seem to put a lot of they put a lot of like backing behind it which is interesting doesn't seem like a big deal i'd like to so of course i i need to i do want to express this angle of things because sometimes speaking so much with any artists i can even get convinced into thinking this way where hey the only thing that matters is how low can your click through and how much do your views um getting how many like all those people focusing on those surface level numbers but what i can say in the full marketing stack it does have value all right so this might not be your leading thing this might not be the thing you put the first money in but especially as you build and you have a certain audience and you already have a certain infrastructure in place i do see value for a platform like this for an established artist or artist that's still on on their way up but they already have a certain level of buzz so you're recapturing attention you already have a certain level of brand recognition i wouldn't use it as much for ground level um discovery i use other methods play listing ads all that kind of stuff for ground level discovery that's right because the just investment will be too high but you know continued brand awareness new track is out where people are already aware of you especially a lot of times the way the way they run your their ads if it's anywhere anything like their other platform and the way they run those ads is you can only do it on very limited amount of profiles i believe you can do it with your users right um i don't know if you are able to completely target in a way where it will make sense to be for a super discovery um engine as well so there is value to it i don't want to completely poo poo spotify um there's there is value somewhere in the marketing stack but most artists most particularly indie artists should not be looking at this as something that's going to be one of their primary tools in their chamber or anything anything current or even potential in the near future in terms of building up their career but that's what concerns me the most is obviously a couple months ago we were saying oh it's just the first of many they're going to roll out always other features but because they want to increase their bottom line and uh i'm just worried that all the features are going to be out of the indies like price range that's what concerns me the most is that all these tools are going to come in now on spotify and i'm not going to have to use any they are evolving into radio right and in so many ways and they're just at that part in their growth curve so look i think we should go ahead and get into tiktok because that's that's right um a huge part of it right the the fact that tiktok is posing a competition have they named their their streaming platform that they're dropping yet yes called rezzo i think that's how you pronounce it re so yeah okay so there were there's a few primary things that has really positioned tiktok to be true competition to spotify you've always seen me talk about it a lot lately how spotify true i mean tiktok truly is a music discovery platform and people are sleeping on that part a lot of artists are finding issue with that they don't understand that part but you have to think about it when we look at innovation specifically the music right tiktok doesn't position itself as a music platform originally all right and they and i wouldn't even say that was their primary attempt because there were other like dubbing of movies and things like that but they have strategically focused in on music especially as they acquire musically but the the fact that you have this engaging video platform they say on on um one of the heads of music development at facebook said that music right is i mean no video interactive video are the is the next level of media that's going to really break through tiktok is essentially doing that right it's video and it's interaction and when we think about what responds best and adds a lot of video we think about engagement it's always going to be interactive right that's just the way things have kind of always been and spotify has done that so cleanly but when you add music on top of that they've made it so music being promoted on tiktok doesn't feel like music being promoted because music is so integral that every single post has music in it so you're not thinking oh this and this video has a picture of a cover and and i'm just playing music as someone would do us on instagram it's just another video i could be an artist and be promoting my song in one video and then i could do another artist video without even necessarily ruining my brand because this is just how i engage on the platform where it's on instagram you're not even gonna find a lot artist it would be weird for them to be posting other artist music all the time you know i mean yeah i mean look at all the spot fly playlist like called tiktok playlist like tiktok songs and discovered on tiktok and all the tweets and posts like you know i discovered these songs on tiktok you don't see that about instagram or or spotify our music yes people thought that people think that it's a a ace thing and the people that i've gotten to be on tiktok that are older like i know one guy he i don't know how old he is but i know he has to be like over 25 for sure he had a song that we were talking about and he was like oh yeah man that song is dope i like that song and i was like wait what what song is well um you heard without because we're on a phone i didn't even know he heard the song because i was actually watching a video on his page and he was like yeah man i heard that song i saw i saw a few tiktoks and i was trying to create videos for him he was looking for inspiration for himself but he liked the song he went on spotify saved it and then created a video to it himself so where on earth right can you get someone to hear your stuff actually go save it listen to the music right that's what everybody wants at the end of the day not oh i engage and i become an influencer and now how do i flip it no it's like i hear the music and immediately i go become a fan of the music but then not only that i decide to engage in the highest level of creating a video and now promoting for you immediately that's the marketing funnel on crack i'm aware i can sit i engage and then i actually um become indoctrinated indoctrinated and spray at the word all in one loop and it can happen within like an hour on tiktok at once like that's crazy to me now as you've said many times this is how Lil Nas X blew up he didn't make his own tiktok account and go out you know pumping it out people were making videos around the song themselves his account has not got that many followers compared to other accounts on there like it's all the word of mouth was spread through other videos not his own exactly i i try i try to get people to understand that so when you look at the positioning of spotify right we were just talking about it i was saying spotify we got the competition of apple and title right and or diesel all these other amazon now i guess the biggest one amazon as well all of these platforms essentially are not competition they are competition because you know let's not have a monopoly where we're providing competition in in the landscape but none of them have the opportunity because of that first mover advantage that spotify has had in the continued growth in that space it makes it hard why do i want to have multiple platforms to listen to music if i if i can't don't i need to right like those people have actually become that sort of competition and if anything i don't even know i can't even say there's any kind of incremental improvements maybe some preferences it's features not core right yeah the core a better core product is just features and features are never going to be the thing that that gets you up there all right so tiktok from their standpoint they have truly innovated like they are coming from a standpoint skip all this video and streaming stuff they're the best engaged which is which means for an artist i want to be here and the most interactive which means from a consumer i want to be here all right and so they're putting people in that space it's so much incentive to be in that space you're drawing all the intention and now they're going from there and flipping it realizing that oh we have this music discoverability and we can recommend people people are already going i'm i'm hearing some stuff on tiktok now i'm literally going to google search it and find it oh let's make it easier to get on these platforms they're doing it with apple one of these other well yeah i mean apple is the main one more recently they released that feature where you can kind of click directly over and the streams actually count while you're on tiktok yeah but um but understanding that and seeing that leverage i could only imagine when they get their platform to a certain standpoint that they're going to kind of have that whole vertical because they're seeing we go from discoverability Spotify talks about discoverability they aren't great with discoverability to me i think i even still think pandora is better for discoverability still a lot of times to me so since they covered that now we the rest of it is organization that's really what Spotify is it's more about organization playlist that's organization yeah so if we cover the standpoint hey do you get discovered here and now we go through the organization process we handle that as we just send you over to our organization engine i'll call it that for now then like they're taking over from that that point of leverage and then the fact that tiktok brand recognition wise and the data that they have is already in a lot of these emerging markets we know Spotify hasn't been really heavy in a lot of emerging markets and when they do there's these free accounts which has a whole different implication so they as from a from a business have been one of the first to truly have a let's not even just say competitive advantage they are the first ones i've seen since Spotify has truly taken over to be a true competitor and possibly overtake what Spotify has built let alone the fact that Spotify isn't an innovation mode anymore they are in capitalization mode which you kind of just alluded to right we're trying to figure out how to monetize all this stuff because we really haven't been profitably yet we've been banking on just getting market share now they're focused on capitalization and squeezing everything out more than actually innovating so that in itself can always be a vulnerable position position to be because in the past there's a longer stretch before somebody's able to try to topple you over because but the the internet can move so fast and people's attention the way that is it's interesting for Spotify truly has an opportunity to capitalize it's there they're where that capitalization period might kill them before they really even get a chance to become as profitable as they would like to there's a good analogy to be fair about comparing you know Apple, Spotify, Amazon the likes of that it's like everyone owns a Lexus but you just choose the color you want whereas everyone's got the same car yeah whereas with TikTok it's a different animal and obviously just moving into the conversation slightly more towards Rezo the new streaming platform i'm just gonna bring up some stats which i think are interesting yeah i'm interested to see these so this is just like this is a bit of a projection obviously so this is how many downloads are out for TikTok versus Spotify now imagine if a fraction of these downloaded and became subscribers to Rezo by Dancers new streaming platform it would instantly be bigger than Spotify they've got big they're gonna have to be worried yeah i i remember and this stat is probably well i know for a fact this stat has to be outdated because i really took hold in this like about two months ago but when TikTok surpassed 1.2 billion downloads at that point they were at 800 million active engaged daily users i think it's 1.5 billion now isn't it in terms of like total downloads probably see yeah exactly because that that growth rate i know it's more but let's just stick with the old stat 800 million actively engaged daily users versus the fact that Spotify as a whole actively engaged not engaged free pre like all that as a whole they have 248 million users yeah like that's that's ridiculous right so you're already dealing with a a far greater number at that point and how are they going to compete because that means more people are discovering music and interacting with music on Spotify whether it's you want to position it that way or not as a music app or not it's just a reality of the interaction and obviously they've been quite clever they've started in India and Indonesia just starting out in emerging territories and they're already bigger than Spotify there as you can you know of course so it's a good place to start obviously i imagine it'll come roll out in the US within the next six to nine months as well i don't think it'll be too long before we start seeing it in you know in the u.s and europe and i i just think that yeah even if like you know a quarter of 25 percent of users moved over to rezzo versus like Spotify app music you know it's already a massive market share and i like the social aspects as well the elements of this stream platform versus the rest is much more focused on you know you generated content and social sharing let's uh talk more on that speak more on the the social aspect of that yeah so i'm just going to bring these off the screen just so i can see just give you a proper detail right now of what we're looking at so the main focus right now is going to be on um focusing on like user generated contents you'll be able to you know create gifts based on the songs and you'll also be able to comment on the track so when you're listening to a track you'll be able to see loads of different users comments about what the song means to them and also share their their gifts and videos that have gone to create it as well so you'll be able to see a whole a big collection of you know stuff you see on tiktok will appear while you're listening to tracks so i'll actually encourage you to stay on the app and actually you know lock your phone holy shit that's if that's like if soundcloud did it right yeah yeah right and on a minor scale of that spot soundcloud allows you to see those comments as it streamed through and that is something that's still unique to soundcloud and i actually you know it's cool to see and watch at times so and that is that which is yeah that's that's ridiculous i think it's interesting how they really take those learnings from the tiktok and they're applying it and because they're so ahead of the curve from an innovation point i think Spotify they really have trouble and they've taken over those emerging markets from when it doesn't hurt because Spotify is a platform that have been trying to capitalize and make money at the point well tiktok will have to they've been kind of ducking some of the regulation but as opposed to having the answer and having that expectation of money that people have like people artists expect to make money off of Spotify we need to make money y'all are playing our stuff y'all are taking our stuff tiktok yes the record labels look at it like this but artists aren't thinking like that about tiktok right the general public you're not expecting it's just social media right from that standpoint the front facing you're looking at it like a instagram twitter facebook is like man this is just where we interact this is where we engage they're not injecting that expect so because of that it being free and positioned that way allows it to expand in emerging markets for one um a lot faster but understanding that we can get our first mover advantage and take market share here before Spotify has something meaningful and then we're going to move into the places that you that you um you know are already powerful like the us because that's also another thing when it comes to it's just a weird game amazon apple um they do it with multiple companies them two are the most prevalent and amazon apple and google they'll oftentimes get into markets that they know that they aren't going to be the hugest and and kill but it's more about hedging your bets and playing defense it's like we're going to come take some of your market share over here our main business is this we don't truly care about our our streaming platform like that like that when it comes to apple amazon google but we have to have presence for one we can take the learnings and invest it somewhere else and two we're just we're showing you a you know don't come on my block i'm gonna come on your block too and and and kind of slows things down and and they all they they do that with multiple industry because there's they just have the ability to do it but Spotify is number one in america now when i try to explain to people when it comes to tiktok it's still so new in america and people don't realize it it's still so new in uk like there's still a lot of stigmas attached to it that don't exist but not realizing one there's already millions of people in their thirties and forties on tiktok already all right and i'm like this isn't me like selling tiktok this is just what's happening and i've been truly baffled by the shit that i've seen and the experiences that i've had being wanted running campaigns being wanted just observing reading the papers sit papers i don't i don't read a newspaper i don't know why i said papers but reading articles and things like that like and seeing even the government the geopolitics of you know related to it it's it's very interesting and it makes the it's one of the most it's one of the best at globalization i've seen even dual media experiences and largely because of how they their rhythm so tiktok is it has a lot of things that are worth watching if even if you aren't engaged even if you don't believe in it from a music standpoint what they're doing and the the things around it the business implications and industry implications alone are extremely interesting and entertainment for somebody like me who can kind of nerd out on business and and marketing and then obviously for for artists but for rezzo when this launches you know you know worldwide it's a whole new stream platform to market yourself on and obviously with tiktok you know focusing on like e-commerce and stuff i imagine that will flow into you know to rezzo before spotify sorts their end out with you know with tipping artists and stuff so i imagine they'll be the first to do that as well and what when you say that spotify is is thinking about tipping artists they are they are looking into it yeah they've publicly said they are looking into it but i imagine that tiktok would probably and bite down to be first but with rezzo when from what i've seen from the images and visuals that you go on your stream of track you'll see like the you know spotify camera the visual looping you'll see something similar to that to go over track then you're also you're going to see like lyrics floating around comments from users floating around gifts floating around on the screen so just a different listening experience to any of the stream platform it is and it changes why you engage and why you stream so what i would say coming from something like that right understanding how there's always been these parody songs that can blow up and but a lot of times those parody songs don't necessarily make money you have the ones that become that make money and then you have a lot of parody songs that just become like a big youtube video or something like that but now that it's associated and it can be on a streaming platform you'll have music that truly makes money at least from a streaming standpoint not because it's good right and not that whole subjective thing that people talk about and whether it's good or not no i mean where everybody acknowledges this isn't good and it is a joke but because you're on this platform and you're seeing not only you're hearing this music that might not be that great but you're engaging with people and seeing comments that might be funny is going to keep you on that track and listening at the same time rather than going to twitter instagram see what people are saying about it you exactly on the platform and you're still listening to music at the same time so you're getting you know royalties anyway exactly it's like if you were listening to blueface and they had that whole thing about him being off beat and you were getting the commentary about him being off beat there and the jokes him him being off beat kind of like a youtube video except it's actually playing and looping and the money's been paid out and like there's this entire truly engaging social space at the same time i think if they do that like i'm imagining it i think that's going to be really interesting yeah it'd be the go to place for memes and gifts and then stuff like if they get it right right that's the potential exactly nobody has done gifts well yet to me on social i think twitter is the best when it comes to how they've leveraged gifts yeah because you know they're basically a video on instagram i mean things like gifts are so powerful and and they're you truly underutilized it's truly underutilized it's funny as well because obviously we've mentioned this before but spotify was very social when it first came along and it's gradually become more and more like reserved on that front but they are looking at a um it's going to find the ask of a look they're looking at this feature called taste buds we're trying to bring back you know the friends and social sharing back into the platform a little bit but it feels like a bit bit too late really doesn't it but um too little too late so this is the let's just put up this was the article quietly testing its taste buds and they pulled down the website they had for it as well but it's interesting that also this is this obviously has come about from a direct result of tiktok was no it's no coincidence that they're looking into this now because they had these features before but yep that fork in the road man yeah it's when those type of apps are you going to build it for the people or are you going to build it for business and investors and those corporates that be right and so we just last time yeah yeah they made the decision too early or haven't figured out how to do both like i guess you say and they were you know they were pioneers in what some of the things that they did so i you know i think they i guess they had to take some of the arrows and dealing and i'm probably allowing the licensing and record labels to take a little bit too much of a strong hold over them and that's affected the actual user interaction and innovation and the things of course this moves us on a little bit to what we were going to discuss as well was a debate about uh there's an article written by mark mulligan which debates whether music industry and music streaming could do with something like disney plus having multiple different sort of streaming platforms offering different music castles and different services and it's also a huge debate and i think the music industry has got it right from this front that we have we don't have always multiple different places because it would just be so much subscriptions to have to pay for and so much like rivalry about where you're going to put your music and things and i think we've sort of got that right i don't know what your opinion is on that so you're saying you believe in the monopolization of of industry when it comes to content consumption yeah from a consumer standpoint i definitely think we've got it right in the music industry with where we can really stream music obviously from the business perspective that's also a different ball game but i think from a personal perspective i like being subscribed to one platform be able to access all the music i want to i mean you know history shows a lot of times is a where user behavior consumer behavior goes the winner follows right and or if the winner happens to be there that's who we should look at um as the and i agree from that standpoint because even when disney plus dropped there's so many people that got disney plus for a weekend and binged it and then it's like all right back to netflix yeah exactly yeah like and and then netflix and hulu i remember i used to watch hulu and it and it's it's that exception and i was following that it was owned by actual started by actual uh industry heads i forgot the companies that partnered to make it but it was actual industry whereas netflix was more of a let's say a tiktok or something or you know in spite of my wasn't industry was tech more so ish um and at that time it was free it started off the premium thing and but eventually as they started to become a paywall i stopped looking at it and then it became how am i going to do them or netflix right and yeah then you start to add these other people into the pot there's still a market share for from a business standpoint but i think that's incredibly difficult in terms of expectation for consumers because a lot of these websites as well these websites you can go to bravo or bt or whatever channel you can go subscribe and watch through i mean you can go watch directly through some of their websites vt just drop vt plus um yeah and yet another thing you're you're late to the game and when people are so locked in it's kind of hard to switch them over to essentially having multiple cable subscriptions so if anything it might be like having at this point netflix might be cable right and vt plus disney plus might be hbo that extra channel and of course there's a small market share that's going to go that extra step to get that on the flip side i'm not i'm not saying i'm happy with spotfire and we stick to i'm looking i we i'd welcome an alternative you know if there was another stream platform i would that i felt was good enough i'll definitely move over to it so i don't think spotfire is perfect in the field and all well the issue is right the you said consumer experience on one end is you want to be best where they can do everything that they need to do in one space and having to and like that's it's the weird part about monopoly right especially if you look at tech because of a certain network effect right for one certain amount of people to be on there for utility even happened even to happen if i only have five artists on this streaming platform and 100 000 users there's only but so much value to that particular platform so there's that but then even past that if the company doesn't have a level of monopoly it can make them it can make innovation very expensive or just less of an incentive to innovate and create the best user experience all right so i i thought about it i wanted to argue for the fragmented space where let's just say on a lazy way hey here's the platform for all your hip hop music here's the platform for all your pop music and yeah all your people in this geography in that country you know it's i don't i couldn't really grasp the ideal in why he was saying i was trying to figure out maybe if he's speaking more to industry but i'm not sure because you're basically saying that maybe sony that's probably a better a easier way to look at it right yeah sony should drop have their own streaming platform and one or should have their own streaming platform unless you can get people to galvanize around the brand of sony or whatever in all the other respective houses or their subset of brands then it's not going to be i can only i can't imagine that happening they don't have to do it if one if one went and the devils would have to follow if not with it you know they wouldn't work out right to do that it's tradition though that's the way people evolve from and obviously the biggest umbrellas they never marketed out front facing but you know def jam and you know whatever label particularly a hip hop how that became a pedestal and being associated with it actually meant something it stood for something in the culture right motel if they were if those labels had that it would make sense to to market and have a platform and they'll or at least the possibility would be there but now consumers are becoming every distant from label so it's hard to really imagine then to even have the let's say clout right i think we've got it right that's why though they stayed in their lane they didn't try and get in that you know they don't know they stick to a record label didn't try and go in distribution i think that's worked out obviously you know for consumers standpoint anyway but what i'm saying is as well that going back to rezzo like you know rezzo comes in he gets all the major catalogs he gets all it gets all the rights it's 999 a month but they also offer the feature to tip artists then i'm going to switch to that one over spotify if they also do what you'll switch if they let you tip artists as well you know in interact with artists more if it's offering everything that spotify does and more then i'm going to switch with that feature alone i think so yeah i like i like the idea of being you know being more involved in you know in helping out the artists which you can't do on spotify it spotifies such a poor royalty rate as well that it's you know it's the lowest of them all so so this is when we get into education for one you as an artist would want more of your consumers over there so you'll be more active because you're making more money over there all right um i mean that that alludes to uh loom as well of course exactly yeah right um you want to read off that so we can kind of just talk about them all at once yeah so we've we've talked about not on here before but on the newsletter before when loom launched in july it's a social media well not sleeping a music streaming platform slash social media platform where it's only for independent artists it's not there's no major label catalogs on there no no independent labels on there it's purely just for independent artists marketing their music and it's only in the u.s right now but it's a good way to discover local acts and smaller artists and support them and they're now launching their own sort of like virtual gifting currency in jan you know in this month coming so you'll be able to actually tip out to using this currency called notes where you know you can pay to help them support launch their next EP or you know get this demo made to a proper track not just just a great way to engage with artists and support them in their careers and what i love about this one is obviously the money that the artist stands to make because if we look at the revenue sharing model of a Spotify those types of distribution platforms now not only do you have to make that go through that entire split situation but a lot of artists don't even realize that it's not directly based on your streams right you do you're still in this pool and of course that's that if you're comparing your streams to Drake streams and the collective stream right and you're dividing by that so ever more you're going to be a smaller number stand a chance to get your your maximum value on that platform because you're being juxtaposed with people you shouldn't even be juxtaposed with as a matter of fact the collection of them so that's one point but then also all streams aren't even created equal they the what you get see get promoted is the average right a payout but free Spotify listeners their streams aren't the same as paid Spotify listeners it's not equal or worth the same and there's all these other nuances which i'm not completely privy privy to of how they determine what a user's particularly stream my stream might not be worth your stream right so i don't you don't get paid so your fan base might not even be the most profitable fan base yeah i mean i encourage i see plenty of artists who talk about their numbers and they even probe up their their actual streams in terms of of not their streams the payout that they got from Spotify as a matter of fact i know a few i'm gonna hit them up and ask them to do this i want them to calculate their payout based on the average of what the payout is promoted as and see how close they are all right and and that'll be where we start to get artists to understand what the payout is but i know i kind of went to that was more of an aside but that's why the tipping feature is so valuable because if you look at tiktok right that's the beauty of tiktok we're now seeing china's influence because tipping badges in-app purchases like that was that's so native and so profitable over there when we look at uh look at just all of these platforms in china like so many of their social platforms we chat yeah killing it that's not ingrained in american culture as of now and tiktok is bringing that in a in a very real way um where that's a norm and that makes it so much easier though for a social media platform because we always looked at a standpoint as the only way we're going to monetize for the most part has been through advertisement this allows you to scale far bigger and to become profitable faster without even having to worry about the whole advertisement thing any which brings in more corporate influence which is why most of our apps get like up they're big and then okay now you start to see this monetization thing that starts to kill these you're able to have a better user experience longer at least right it maybe extends the lifespan of a good koali experience because of different ways to monetize so that's going to be interesting to see good thing about loom as well as it's at the moment it's free to use if you're an eyesore you're a user and also unlimited uploads as well to the platform so you put as much music on there as you want and obviously only launched in july i remember we talked about when it first came along we thought is it going to be another one of those platforms you know flashing the pan gets a bit of funding but it doesn't really do anything but right a few of your artists have used on the network have a name as well so i think we have some we've had some you know very decent results people on twitter i've seen a lot been following the accounts for loom and and the feedback it seems very positive in overall so i think you might be sticking around for a while yeah i mean they're still early on right there's a lot of market share to grab but every artist in brand man network that's really got a chance to use it they're only on ios as a reminder to people everyone that's got a chance to use it so far has had a pretty positive experience and they actually go back to some of the things that we've talked about earlier not only are they doing the tipping feature that they they um just released but they're a social interactive of space all right so you have that chance to engage with fans where Spotify started and they shifted away from and now they created a space where these people can capitalize right and they were supposed to be music discovery and they kind of and they didn't do well enough so tick tock is kind of fulfilling that void and loom it seems they're they're building into a space where we can truly handle this social interaction but of course uh rezzo is kind of trying to do the same thing but there's at least a joint acknowledgement that social is an aspect of music and they're so closely ingrained is they they shouldn't have to be separate at the very least between what uh loom and rezzo you might see this whole idea if loom stays within its philosophy where loom becomes this place and i um i spoke to people at loom um andrey i believe that was the one who said that loom is kind of positioning themselves as they care about artists who are just starting out right those indie artists and truly sticking to that where they don't even necessarily need you to be on there forever they don't necessarily want Drake to be on the platform right so but you can become like be a part of becoming Drake on the platform and you might go really start to do a bit of dealings and things like that in another way some of that you know you watch and see as as more people get on the platform what they continue to see to read and how they involve but the fact that they're staying within that particular philosophy which is so different than we want to have the big music and deal with the labels in that particular aspect will will force them to innovate in a way that other other companies don't so i'm really rooting rooting for loom and interested to watch what they create and if for no reason at all but a business experience yeah if you're in the us and you've got an iphone definitely download it and start using it like 100 um because obviously only launched in july it's already got 30 000 artists on there and over 50 000 tracks and they have said they're going to launch you know more worldwide in the coming in this coming year and also hopefully you know i launched an android as well so it shouldn't be a matter of time before they continue to grow just slowly rolling things out but definitely check it out yep definitely another thing for indie artists out there as well to take note of is that many of you might use camber the graphic design software and it looks it's free to use to an extent as well they're launching their own video editing software this year for free as well which can be similar to the photo editing graphic design software which is really cool because obviously most video editing software you've got to pay for things like a daily premiere and i'm moving and things like that so this is going to be a good opportunity to help you create your social media videos so you're saying they're going to be doing the video editing for free love for now well that there was also there was already a pro plan for camber but some of the stuff you can get for free so you'll be able to do some of the tools on the video to top it for free i'm not sure how much it will be free but i hope you'll be able to put like your own music on some pre pre made visuals or something similar to that also give you templates as well so you make one straight away for facebook or for an instagram story the template is already there for you it's a lot less time consuming and not going to make everything from scratch which is very useful and also if you pay for the pro if you pay for the pro plan it's only $9.95 a month that gives you everything in one so i give you like photoshop premiere and in design equivalents all in one space for a much cheaper is that in the cloud yeah only in the cloud okay got it but yeah so it's both there's also apps as you know it's you can do it on the go as well so but for $9.95 a month having all those programs in one sort of space in all in one tool it's very useful and i love it's free to use anyway without paying any money so do you know if they have a app like that's very like with a good user experience i'm not sure but i haven't used the app myself i use the app design software on the computer they do have an app and they have they have avatars that you'll be able to do video editing on the go as well on your phone that's what i wanted to know um because the biggest value in that to me is that video editing on the go so much of the stuff that happens on the phone if they look at that space versus trying to replace premiere but that handling that on the go it's in there it's in their promo video about doing it on the go yeah it's all in it's all in there yeah yeah because i um i didn't realize how many people do a lot of editing on their phones at this point a lot not just the basic instagram filter and like a few basic things i even have done some formatting and did that for a lot of social media videos more recently but i'm talking about serious cuts and transitions that is becoming a very real thing and i even had um an intern who he was trying to figure out like yo man yeah i could use premiere and all these things but process to upload on my phone and then put it on the computer and then happen to go the reverse just to get it back is it's killing me do they just have a in-app version for me to upload with so i mean um yeah a mobile version to do the entire thing on yeah and so same for so many kids who are on tiktok they look at their videos on tiktok yeah the editing on that is pretty slick sometimes yeah a lot of them are doing that on some of them are doing the tiktok capabilities tiktok's never gonna be a full or bust thing just because that's not their core business but there's some apps apparently i can't remember the names of the ones they mentioned that a few people have been using and it's like man this is crazy so already know like might be i'm a little i'm not old i don't consider myself by any means old but i'm definitely past a certain generation of not recognizing oh like this is the way i come in editing like this on the phone i i remember windows music my movie maker and things like yeah exactly yeah so so it's it's it's interesting mom they definitely have an opportunity there and i think really cool um for for artists so i might at some point they might capture me i'll probably be what not a not an early adopter i'll maybe i'll be on that long tail somewhere yeah the reason why i bring it up is obviously because i know a lot of these programs are a bit more fiddly to use in there obviously a bit more expensive but this a lot of this will be free you can do it on the phone it's very simple to use just like the photo of the in-gap design is as well so it's just it's something definitely to consider hey man i might consider it myself truly i'm literally in a battle last night i ordered a computer on amazon and then i canceled it because i was i'll start looking on craigslist and i was like man this computer it might be older but it comes with photoshop and premiere and i wouldn't have to pay for it right like this one yeah i'm literally in one of those types of battles right now so i i i get it man something like that for free especially this great you know experience as a user uh well yeah i have to we should probably i'll mention it as an update if i get a chance to try it out how i feel about it well also like as well as it's a template it's already being preset because i hate going through you know photoshop and premiere having to make you know the different aspect ratios for like i've got to do this from a story now i've got to load in the one for twitter now i'm the one for facebook like all the different aspect ratios so it's just nice to be able to drag and drop the template you need straight in and get one r you've been i'll have from premier you can do that um you can't but it's not how to do it yeah exactly this is gonna be so easy like you just type in facebook and you click it uh instagram story click it done it's there like it's just a bit more streamlined in the process i obviously i do it's not too hard but it's just a lot more streamlined and you can do it on the phone because you can't do that with premiere you know that's though because they're building with that in mind from the beginning premiere like that stuff didn't even exist when premier started so like we got to add these capabilities oh yeah i get it yeah i stick to premiere for bigger projects like longer movies or documentaries but yeah everything else try and do on the phone now makes sense i don't even blame the man i'm trying to get rid of away from having a personally video edited as much as possible yeah but yeah that's pretty much a wrap on the news from december obviously it was a bit of a slow month so we decided to focus more on some interesting like bigger macro stories but 2020 is going to be you know very very busy and you know this time next year we could be saying rezos taken over as the biggest dream platform you know it could be that that'll be interesting it's going to be an interesting 2020 when it comes to music platforms specifically i'm not going to say for artists in their experience just the platforms themselves it will be a very interesting year 100 percent


Hello everybody, welcome back to another iPad tutorial. This one, I'm gonna show you how to have two apps open at the same time on the screen. So you'll have one app on the left side, one app on the right side, for example. And why would you do that? Simple, it allows you to multitask and you don't have to go in and use the app switcher to keep going from app to app to app. Very simple to do, let's get going. The first app I'm going to open is the Safari. I'm just gonna go ahead and click on Safari there in the bottom left in my toolbar and Presto. We've got Safari open. Now, I'm gonna go down to the bottom of the screen right to the left of advert.  So let's go ahead. All right, come on Curtis, lift up. There we go. Let's go do it the right way this time. I was a little too high there. Now, we've got the toolbar back open. And what are we gonna do? We're gonna open up the music app. But what we do is we're gonna hold down on the music app and then we're gonna drag it out. And in particular, we're gonna drag it right side of the screen, although you can do it to the left side as well. And you'll see here that it looks like it's separating into two apps. It in fact is. Now, on the left side, we have Google and we've got Safari open and we can do some searching or whatever we're doing there. And then on the right side, I can go ahead and flip through all these different albums. I don't even know what these things are. And Presto, now we're multitasking split screen apps. That's all there is to this tutorial guys. Thanks for watching. There's more stuff coming up. Stay tuned.