Because since it's all teared down moment and still we have enough we have lots of people here interesting This is as well an interesting talk Because it's Helen Lee who's going to present us actually give us an overview Actually about what hackers you know in music Ment actually in the history. So it's a given overview I understood as well. She gives a certain examples and I think she's gonna kick this a little bit further because she's gonna talk a little bit about our current work and future objectives Also, Schneid euch an breitelt euch vor eine Großrunderplaus für her Hello Yep, so I'm Helen That's just Me on Twitter and so on to follow and get her to get up and get up and show you that there's just a lot of different Quelting and yeah, I'm going to talk to you today We're gonna give you a story To tell you the story of how a group of music hackers in the 1940s and the music technology for ever And they didn't know anything And how they were doing How they should do it or what they wanted to do And they just figured out the rules I'm going to give you a little overview of the coolest projects coming out of London and Berlin At the moment I was active in the hacking music scene in London for a while And a few cool projects I want to show you And before I start with my own story I just want to introduce myself I am a creative technologist Creative technologist People like to put you up there And I'm just curious I'm just curious I'm a nerd who does art I push each other My favorite things are electronic and hardware And with music technology And so with that in mind I make a lot of Strange musical instrument creations And this is one of my experimental instruments These are some of my experimental instruments I've taken them on restancies I've brought them to London, Shenzhen And to Copenhagen And I just really like experimenting with them And I'm looking for a way to look like an instrument I'm not sure how it sounds But for me I like my instruments to sound melodic So I just pull my edges the next time I'm doing it I also really like... This is made out of brass And I made a lot of metal And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit So I buy my own soft-circuits So I like electronic, soft-circuits And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit Incredible knowledge So these are some of my nice old musical instruments Which is just a background just kind of worked on So these are some of my very old musical instruments These are some of my new musical instruments Showlines...  And I'll tell you about that project later. And I also do books with stickers and a crafty kid guide for electronics and with paper and origami and sewing and robotics. And I also write for Hack-a-day and I also write for Double-Eyes, no matter what. Anyway, about me? I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about music technology. I'm going to start with this story of a man who I still like by John Cage. Most people know his experimental music and his experimental compositions and his many pieces of writing about what an artist should and shouldn't be. He was also a very early hardware hacker. He also created experimental instruments since his deepest team. So he just made music with it, he composed it, but he was also an experimental hardware artist. He said there is no noise, it's just music. And I write that on it to remind you that all instruments are invented. And in the 1930s the violin was so defined. With new tools different instruments were brought together. And it was an instrument as a specific thing. We are a bit wrong. We played with noise while we were humans. You might think it's similar with compositions. You can remember the old Nebisi music as the classical music, as a potential establishment figure. But back then they were modern people. They had super popular music pieces and the deli. So basically anything that sounds strange to you, or strange to you, or experimental, can be heard in a long term. So yeah, actually we are all being told a conspiracy theory. I also have a conspiracy theory. The Nebisi A, the A-tone, 440 Hz, if we were to tell you, it was not even 440 Hz. It was never 440 Hz until the 1950s when a couple of people in London sat down and all of them wrote down and said, hey, it's 440 Hz. Before that there was a flute in Italy. And then there was a flute in France. There were these little tone differences. And so it wasn't until the 1950s that there was a definition of A. And there was a series of conspiracy theories where they said, hey, they chose 440 Hz as a alternative website. Now you can actually go and check it for like a thought control. And if you're looking for a 440 Hz conspiracy theory, then there are groups that work on it to change it. That the whole modern music is being used. And that's an idea that's 143 Hz and 448 Hz. If you want to be A camped, you're in luck because someone's made a music adjuster. So you can take a track and then convert it. You can take a track and convert it. And then the whole music is in this other A-tone. And there are people who say that there's another A-tone. But that's completely ridiculous. But I live it. So if you're looking for conspiracy theories on YouTube, maybe you should do it sometime. It's exciting. You're on the Congress. You can look at that. But the point is that music is all in love and there are no rules. I'm going to take you through one of the many parts of music. We're going to take a look at a special part of Hacked Technology Jan, where people did things with a device that you didn't think of. This is the magnet band recorder. And the Nazis made it popular for propaganda. And after the World War II, the BBC used the device and developed it. So the tone band is relatively modern technology. And it was used for real-time broadcasting. They were used in music studios. They were relatively expensive back then. And then they took Hacker, this thing. So these hackers took a series of these tone-band devices. And when people get into the hands of technology, they always play around in creative ways. There was music in Paris in the 1930s. There was a single one in Egypt. But in Paris, it was all in the center of music. What you see here is a razor blade to cut the band together. And then you get the music back. You can't just turn things around. You can do it faster or slower. If you do it faster, the tone gets higher. And if you do it slower, the tone gets deeper. We all know that. It was revolutionary back then. It was like science. Let's take an example. What happens when you play a violin? And then you play it. And then there comes this vibration. Many instruments have something like this. That they have this attack and this vibration. And with this technology, you could turn things around. And then you could make the sound out of it. And then you could play it. It was crazy when you could do that. You could also record outside things. You could record the sound outside. And record sounds outside. And then you could take it back to the studio. And then you could take it back together. And then you could just do it faster. And then you could do it faster. The first people doing this were French guys in Paris. And they were doing it due to modern digital preservation. And thanks to new digital preservation methods, you can listen to it. I don't want to lie. It sounds pretty bad. I don't want to listen to it. But it wasn't just about the music they made. It was more about the technology they used. This technology was very, very simple. Today it seems normal and familiar. But back then it was a bit more revolutionary. It was built in the 1960s with the Beatles. They used it in Tomorrow Never Knows. Normally I would play it. But when I played it recently, they switched off the live stream. Because there were ten seconds of the Beatles. I don't want to risk that. But the three of them, Tomorrow Never Knows, they were just flip-signs. They were just un-turned sounds. We did it slower and faster. We did it slower and faster. There is a very high sound in this song. And that's what people laugh at. And that's all done with scalpel. You can use these in modern music. We can use these in modern tools. In Ableton and Logic. These are standard tools now. But back then it was very influential. And now I'm going to talk about you here. The most beautiful thing about haka culture for me is the way that we riff off of each other's work. So I'm just going to talk about this artist and engineer. Her name is Daphne Oren. I'm talking about these engineers. Her name is Daphne Oren. And more than ten of you know her. Daphne Oren is an artist. And that's why she was a musician. She was a physicist and musician.  Unfortunately, she was a woman. She has a pretty tragic work history. But she is one of the iconic figures. She is one of the iconic figures in the history of electronic music. She is a train musician. She is a musician. She cued up these real-to-real magnetic tapes. She found a job as a backpacker at the BBC. She went to a training course in Paris. And she flew to a training session in Paris. So a standard film training. And while she was there, I think she met the people behind the music concret. And she met the people behind the music concret. It totally blew her mind. She was like oh my god. That is cool. She said it will revolutionize everything. She took it back there and predicted real-to-real. And she came back and told it. And you said no, it will go back to your work. But after the work, deep into the night, she went to the studio. She would explore and bring the roles to her own studio. And she tried these new methods. She was also an electronics person. She could use electronics. She experimented with electronic music. And then she started using the four kinds of music. And she was doing it for maybe five, six, seven years. And she did that for five, six, seven years. She managed finally to convince somebody to get it. And then she found someone who was interested in it and who had an interest in her work. And it was a success. Also, people hated it, of course. And a lot of people wanted her to repeat it. But there were people who wanted her to do more. Until then, BBC had a studio. I had a question for someone in the 50s. For a woman in the 50s. It was something very special for women. Unfortunately, at this point, it's called the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is one of the most iconic sound design workshops in the whole history of the BBC. So she starts this workshop. But a year later, she leaves to start her work. But a year later, she leaves it to start her own studio, her own workshop. And they wanted my work, but they didn't... She said they wanted my work, but they didn't want to do my work. And she wanted my ideas, but she didn't want my name. From everything that she did, this absolutely iconic workshop. And she went off and created... So she leaves? She created her own? She created this wild synthesizer, which has been the huge synthesizer in the museum. Instead of... She loved looking at waveforms of music, so she thought she would use watercolour to draw the waveforms. And then I put the synthesizer in the watercolour. You can use it to draw everything in the synthesizer. Just a wild idea. She is becoming more and more popular now, more famous. On the one hand, because this old BBC workshop is still existing, the people are still there, but on the other hand, because she created more and more popular works there. That's Dibi Darbyshire. Have you heard of her? No, I mean, exactly the same. She was a mathematician and musician. And she came in somehow and she didn't get a job at first. And then she became the arranger and she made the music for this. Before I do, I want to try and find that. And I think that at this point every sound is physically cut and glued together. And there's no multi-track recording device. It's an enormous process to take up something, to get it together, to cut it off, to take it off and then add more sounds. There are several tapes that you have to connect to each other without multi-track technology. That means there are different devices and you stand there and you write a go and with that you get to copy it together. It's very blasé about it, it's interesting. It's completely crazy today to compose a piece of music as a toy. It seems to work. I think it's pretty charming. Why did she play it? Oh no! I'll just play it myself. Oh, she's playing! At the time there was no theory and no synthesizer. She also had her own music instrument, including my favorite music, the Vopio-Later. She used a lot of electro-engineering tools there. And now she ends up with copyright issues. I actually wanted to play one of her own songs. But she was also an electronical experimenter, an experimental electronical player. I think you kind of forget sometimes that music in the 50s and 60s was wild. This is one of her games from the 60s. I don't know what... But he recognized this track because we did sample it. So, DeAnth foot literally just wrapped over the top of it. So the lead is... DeAnth-View remixed it and just made it his own language. I think I'm speaking on an Azimov story. And this remains, but the Azimov story that it was made for has been deleted from the DVC archives, which I find to be an absolute tragedy. I would love to watch that. This is for an Azimov story that was told, but which unfortunately was deleted. And yeah, that's really tragic that the video doesn't exist anymore. And that's my story from the BBC Radio-Phonic Workshop. And I wanted to say a quote from an engineer. And I just thought this was a very deep subject. Yeah, because they were making things up. They weren't experts. They didn't know what they could do. So basically, they just mass-eranged it and ended up with something really special. And they got some of the biggest electronic music artists in the world. Electronic music artists are still taking part in the BBC Electronic Workshop. And so yeah, that's the BBC Electronic Workshop. And I think it's really important that we allow for business and technology.  The power that's in there is to allow experimentation. It's never particularly successful in the beginning. It doesn't sound particularly successful, it doesn't sound as important. And people say to me, that was the golden age of modern music. We have a new technology that enables the availability of a new function for a large number of people. And it's this great change that people have made in music. For example, as an analogue, the way we make music was changed by these experimenters. And that was a golden age for new technologies. I think we're coming in a golden age where people are playing with experimental instruments, with experimental technology in general, with experimental noises. And we have many exciting new technologies that are available. We have a great microcontroller, we can create our own plates, we can create our own synthesizer, we can have access to people. And that's very important. Definitely, it didn't learn from it. It was an idea that someone else had. And that was learning tools and learning to get tools, learning new techniques and getting inspiration from other people. It's very critical that we change something and that something happens. At the moment, we have very cool and accessible new technologies that people know and it's much simpler to get them. And then, crucially, people are more accessible. People share, especially in the music community. They share their knowledge, they're free. And you don't have to be in the same room to do that. I know you're listening to the livestream. You don't have to be here to learn about things. You don't have to be in the room to attend a workshop with somebody. There's the one thing you want to do in your workshop. You have the whole YouTube tutorials. These communities are much more accessible, available through online places, online or online. We have all these great events.  This is a mechanical room in London, and it was where the music technology was cooked and it wrote and ripped off some things and they did it around the London Hackspace, but we did a lot of Mommy D.Q holistic and that was involved with me on a lot of the events that I think were leaders like this. Like whatever is this, this kind of work. is that Hacker Spaces and Makerspaces often also have music technology. And these central places where you share things, that technology and knowledge can share, and events can have, is very important. And I know why I put the photo in there. This was a wonderful space for three years, and then the landlord raised the rent, and the rent was four times more expensive, and the large groups of artists and music hackers were removed, and at the same time, the German Hacker Space, and the London Hacker Spaces in France as well, because they were very expensive, because everything was so expensive in the centre of London. And as a direct result of that, I moved directly to Berlin, and by allowing this kind of gentrification of Hacker Spaces, as much as you can do, as much as you can do, as much as you can do, as much as you can do online, as much as you can do, as much as you can do. So this is an example of an awesome online community, that's a YouTube video from someone from the London Music Hacker Space, and it's the most famous and most popular one, and it's called Look Mum No Computer on the Internet. He's an electrical engineer and generally a funny guy, and this is one of his creations. He's built a Furbys Intracellar, that's as terrible as you can imagine, maybe even worse, and it doesn't look that way, I mean, he really looks at you, but it's just, yeah. But he doesn't just show his instruments, and he doesn't just play them, but he builds things out of each other, and I learned a lot from his videos, and I looked at how he does them, and that's something that's very exciting, like 20 years ago, he probably had no access to these bits, and he probably didn't even know that he was interested in them, he probably had no access to them, and I would have my local paprika, and he would have said, hey, who wants to play a funny Furbys instrument, and the others would be like, what? No, I don't know. And it's exciting, it's a weird interest to share with others. And this here is another example, it's me and them, we've done a bit of furbys, we've done a bit of tech hacking together, and this is actually a version of Congress, and this is another version of Congress, it's called EMF Camp, which is actually in 2020, this is a really cool, really cool, little hacker festival, and these events, I don't know, just by being here, I've learned so much here, in the last few days, and every time I'm here, we should really, we should also support people, we should make sure that we have a true country, and by supporting these big spaces, and the band is also, by supporting individual people, who are put in here. So, I'm very happy to be here, I'm really proud of this community. Okay, a few more pieces at the end here, a few cool projects, that I've worked with other people. So, the reason I've chosen them, is that I'm showing you, because they're also using some of my favorite, some of my favorite ways to show how you can hack an instrument. So, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, where I'm in London, and I'm in Berlin, and my favorite thing, is to make an instrument and then come back to work, with more people, with two or more people, because the collaboration is always better than what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, is that this is a sonic creature. It was originally a hack, a hack, that we did over the night, with Andrew Hockey and Christina from Oshkosh, and we ourselves, we worked over the night just to build this. So, it's a switcher's sculpture, you put the whole switch in the boxes, but the main parts, you see here, and they stand as art, for themselves as art. And this is, that's the Mojit creature created. And there's Jerry, who I think is in Prague, and they also build really great little things. So, my things are rather massive and not small and pretty, but it looks really interesting. I like it when you can touch this technology. Sometimes it's not too reliable, but it's just fun, also as a musician. And that led to finding a second creature. So, the utopian science fiction inspires me, and I have created a whole series of creatures that live the same world together. This is a more traditional instrument. So, in that sense, the first one was generative. This one is more like a note per lead. There is the most deep note, obviously. So, that's my base creature. And we're talking about a real musical for a real musical for a real musical and then I'm making her a stage present. A stage present based as well, but that would be more generational. Functionality is very traditional but in her form it's really strange and it makes it fun to play with that. My latest It's kind of like a structure, it's going to be human-sized and each of the men is kind of part of an arrangement. And every single leader here makes another part of a chorus. And you can modulate it by touching the individual copper bars. So this is the last version, one of the arms that comes out. And most of them seem to be just trying to make fun of it. So this can also snore.  So that's a little fact. There are lightened bars in there, capacitive interface, and you can actually transfer the touch. But again, I could not build these things if my friends would not help me. And I would not be able to get the implementation that I wanted to be able to provide. So it's really nice to kind of like sit together and make fun of each other. Now, these all use one of these. This is not one of my instruments. This is a kind of my instrument. This is a trackable, big-same PCB, and it's not finished yet. I'll show you, because these are the sensors that I use. So if anyone has ever worked with capacitive touch before, this is like an MPR121 sensor plus plus. This is an MPR sensor plus plus. It has 20 pins. It's way more sensitive than it used to be. So if someone has worked with it and has difficulties, first of all, make sure that you're earthed. I'm going to do a whole slide about Bella and one girl about them, because then I'm going to write my own slide for embedded instruments. I like embedded instruments. It's about as big as my hand. It's very, very small. It's a full Linux computer. It's a full Linux computer. It's absolutely great. It reacts very, very fast. It's very reliable. It runs this. It's pure data. There's a language for sound creation. There are a lot of artists and sound designers and music designers. A graphic programming language for the creation of sounds. But this one's open source. So that's Bella and pure data. Someone checking out and interested in instrument design. The reason the Bella is special is because it doesn't run pure data. You can't get a microcontroller that will run pure data. Otherwise there's no microcontroller that can be programmed with pure data. So if you want to do something, look at Bella for the first time. Okay, that's that one. Then the other project I wanted to talk to you briefly about. The other project I wanted to briefly present. She's 13 years old, the artist. She uses the Mew Mew gloves. It's a gesture control. She controls. She makes looping. She makes effects. It's all very often with gestures. This is what she's using here. This is what she uses. This is one of the music tech companies at Mew Mew. I saw that in a video. When I saw that in the video, I was like, oh my God, I should have asked you a 12-year-old girl. And I thought I'd make one. They were going to do that for me. So I don't think I'm going to be in the classroom. So I just messaged Imogen and asked her if I could make a children's version. She said yes. She said yes. This is a wonderful piece of technology called Microgrid. It's the first microcontroller that made the first microcontroller. It does very well and very simply. It does absolutely well and very easily. The approximation of microcontrollers. It does very well and very simply. It does absolutely well and very easily. So I was able to make an approximation of this $5,000 glove with a value of about $10. She said that's what the core of the microcontroller is. Mini Mew. I haven't got time to talk to you about that. That's my leather robot unicorn. I can't tell you about that. This is my leather-clad guest control unicorn. So basically with one bridge, one microbit, I was able to get a little bit of software software. This isn't a microbit. She was able to get a little bit of software software. This is my $10 package to do very similar things. Of course that's not stadium level. But it's a fun project for us. That is my time. By the way, all of this here and how we did it, that's all on my GitHub. The whole code is available. If you go to my GitHub, you can look at it yourself. You can also use it for about $30. And you can follow along on my electronic adventures. You can follow my electronic adventures on my Twitter, Instagram and here on my GitHub. And I'm still a little bit here. So, let's hear it from the translator, Franz T. Ellen Lee. And? If you want feedback, send it to us with Twitter at hashtag C3T. And if you have questions, you can send it to us with the hashtag Clark on Twitter or Mastodon. Or you can use the IRC channel, hashtag C3T-Hall-C. Yes, he has a line, of course. There are far more speedy than we do. So, from the internet, have you ever considered to create music without human interaction? Okay, then next one. Thank you and have a nice evening. No, so... I like to build instruments, to create that you can stretch, that you interact with, interact physically. And I create a kind of person with whom you interact. But there are a lot of people who do interesting things with generative instruments, generative things. So, this composer with whom I have a friend, who is working on an automated... an automated mobile train. If the mobile trains fall down, they make noise, they solve noise. But I make more objects that you can touch. Practically, like with a multimeter, to go around points. So, for example, in fabric stores, if I work with fabric, it's not really meant to be a fabric, but you can just go to Conrad and go to a multimeter and measure. And test if it's light-fake or not. Okay, I think we're going to start with the flea market. Sorry. A question here from number two. Have you also created instruments that you can use physical objects that you have built instead of producing sound processors? So, you mean... like the tentacle, that the noise produced by the device is strengthened and acoustic, that makes the noise louder? So, if the flea market is done, then it will have more physical feedback, it will react more. It will practically react to your personal space in its personal space. You can not just sense touch, you can sense proximity. So, it can not only touch, but also react physically to it. Not uniformly, but you can get it to react quite nicely to its environment and also to its environment. So, you can put practical things in there, like the number of touches, how often people played with it, and how much touch there was, how many different people played with it, in a generative way. That's what we're going to do next. Thank you. I'm so sad, I really have to spoil it here. We have to end this now. We really have to do it. If you are here next to the stage, you can continue to ask questions next to the stage. Thank you very much.


you're gonna see all these headlines that are like streaming is saving the music industry. The music industry is breaking out of its slump and reaching new all-time highs in terms of annual revenue. I'm sure labels are gonna use these types of figures, these types of headlines to paint a narrative. So they're gonna look to all the rising TikTok stars and say like sign with us. The music industry is going up. We can help you get your catalog sold in the future. We can help you get your streaming numbers up. This is where all the money is. That's not necessarily the case. What's up, what's up, what's up? I'm Brandon Manchin. I'm Cory. And we are back with another episode of No Labels, Necessary Podcast. You can catch us every Tuesday, every Thursday on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you stream your podcast here at the intersection of creativity and currency. This is No Labels podcast. And as you know, we love to have people who represent the No Labels necessary mindset. And boy does this guy right here represent No Labels. These are people who do it different, think different. Welcome Circa founder of Indiepreneur.  Appreciate you having, appreciate you coming on, bro. It's so good to be on guys.  Thank you so much. Stop it, stop it. It's been a long time coming, man. I've seen the comments that you made just basically, you know, guys sliding us and like, well, I ain't doing that. Hey, man, you know, we gotta establish our process. Man, I don't know if you saw the early episodes, a lot of audio issues and things like that. You know what I mean? You don't bring people on until we know what we do. Yeah, you did one episode, you did like this one sort of like, like interstitial where you were like, hey, I'm sorry for the quality. We're making some changes. And I was like, I didn't think there was any wrong with watching the whole time. Conscious y'all, y'all know how it is. Artists, they're talking about your stuff. But hey, we got a lot of dope topics that we're going to talk about with circle. One of the major ideas is the music industry is going to zero, shrinking. Also want to talk about making money today. It's something that he's done very well with music. A lot of different hacks and ways, digitally especially. And also when you should start selling to make money and what that looks like today versus yesterday. All right, but starting here, the music industry is going to zero. I'm gonna just let you rock circle. I want you to talk on it. And then I'm gonna bring up some specific points, but I want you to explain the overall idea of why you think the music industry is going to zero. For sure. Well, so one being is that like, do I think it's actually gonna go to zero? Maybe not. That's like a bit of like an incendiary headline. Why, there's an acento maybe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like the point being is that we hear so often if you read musicbusinessnews.com or whatever, you're gonna see all these headlines that are like streaming is saving the music industry. The music industry is breaking out of its slump from the Napster era and reaching new all-time highs in terms of annual revenue. And I made a video a little while back that to kind of illustrate that like, that is true if you're not that market literate, if you're not like very intensely into finance and like sort of macroeconomics. Because in 1999, the music industry had a peak of like, I think 21.6 billion or something like that. And then over the last few years, we've been climbing above that. And you would think, okay, we had this big hit with the internet where the music industry wasn't prepared and they didn't do the right things. You can read a great book called Appetite for Self Destruction, if you wanna learn more about sort of how the music industry really screwed up in the Napster era. But as a result, they went from like 21.6 billion down, down, down, down, down. And everyone thought the music industry was never gonna resuscitate. And so over the past few years with streaming and all that, we've been reaching these new all-time highs and everyone's excited about it and everyone's talking about how the music industry is back, baby. But if you look at, if you look at, so like the music industry, it's annual revenue is really a fraction. The number they're giving you is a fraction. It's the music industry's annual revenue over dollars. And so if you're not tracking the actual weakness of the dollar or you're not tracking the amount of dollars out there in the system, you might be inclined to think while we're reaching these new all-time highs. But if you look at the actual supply of dollars, that has increased by 40% over the last half a decade. And so really, you can adjust these numbers to say, okay, given that there's so many more dollars in the system, how much in 1999 dollars when you account for inflation are we actually at now? And you'll find that we're actually still at the lows of the trough.  We've actually just been staying sort of stagnant a little bit down from our lows ever since the Fed started printing like crazy amounts of money with 0% interest rates and stuff like that. So the idea that the music industry is climbing back out of its trough and it's reaching new all-time highs, it's not actually true. We're actually, when you account for inflation, we're actually at all time lows of the last 20 years. So a couple of things, just to simplify it, right? Inflation, I'm gonna use that one because everybody's pretty common with inflation, right? So partially because of inflation, right? We might be making more dollars as an industry as a whole, but technically there's lower value, right? Yeah, it's worth less cartons of milk. Exactly, exactly, right? What was the number in 1999 and then what was the number last year? I just can't remember the latest number. So the 1999 peak was right between 20 and 30 billion on this chart, so let's call it like 25 bill, right? And then currently we're at around like 28 billion for last year. But when you adjust for inflation, we're under 10 billion. In 1999 dollars. And I can actually, I'll send you guys this chart so you can use it. You can go out on the screen for sure.  Not great. Not great gains. But yeah, then you throw in adjusting for inflation and the fact that we've been losing is pretty crazy. So what does that mean for artists? Yeah, history as a whole, right? And I don't think people think about the industry as a whole, but when your industry is shrinking, what does that mean for you as an individual? Yeah, so I think that like the all the narrative that comes with these headlines, like the narrative that we believe that like, oh, streaming has counteracted the problems we faced in 1999 or 2000. Sure, it was a problem that music became a digital file type and now could be distributed at zero cost infinitely. That's a problem, but no more problem because Spotify has solved it all. You know, that's just not the case. And so I think if you were to presume that like, oh, the music industry has become once again a good field to be in, it's a growth industry. It's just going to keep going up. You know, I don't know if that's necessarily the presumption you should make as an artist. And, you know, labels are, I'm sure labels are going to use these types of figures, these types of headlines to paint a narrative when they're looking to capture value. So they're going to look to all the rising TikTok stars and say like, sign with us, you know, the music industry is going up. We can help you get your catalog sold in the future, we can help you get your streaming numbers up. This is where all the money is. That's not necessarily the case. And most people with a large audience, I think would be better thinking of themselves as influencers than musicians, because at least they'd be trying to sell some products and make some money. Right, man. Hey, that's why we're so heavy on content. We've always been heavy on content. Just understanding that. I think the way I simplify it, right, is because you got all the numbers, man. So a circuit comes with the genius, the great journal of research. The data. I go off of a few sets of data, generally speaking, when I don't have time to research and it starts like this, right? We look at Spotify. You've mentioned that Spotify is impossible to profitable. It's no secret, right? And I think they said they reported a profit in a couple of years or whatever. But like overall, we know we're not like really making money, right? So we could complain so much on the artist's end. Yo, y'all aren't paying us. But then when you look at the fact that the company that you think is robbing you also isn't making money, you have to go a little bit deeper than just thinking that we're being wronged, right? I know like if you stay in that adversarial relationship, it can blind you up the bigger picture that, yo, something's going on period. Even the person robbing me isn't making money. Then what is going on? Like what move should I make? And I think one thing that you just said was, right? Looking at yourself as an influencer and totally, and I think we can differentiate that in a second. And then the other side of that is if you are an artist, on the independent side, we've gotten all this accessibility distribution that has happened over the last 15, maybe 20 years because of social media and these independent distributors, right? I think the problem that occurs is people don't notice that the music industry is shrinking in your words because the distribution has spread out. So if I'm used to getting zero dollars, you have all these people who are used to getting nothing now making $50,000 and $30,000 and a $50,000 for the first time, you don't notice that the pie is smaller because as far as you individually are concerned, the pie is bigger. That's where the good news is, is that year over year, for the last seven years, if you take that pie and you divvy it up into independent artists and major label artists, the independent artist share is growing. Despite there being less money overall, we're getting more of that money for indie artists than ever before. And when I say the pie, I'm talking entirely about revenue from recorded music. So that's royalties that is licensing, it's full transfer and sale of rights, it's rights associated with intellectual property, musical works. It doesn't include your merch, your touring, all of that stuff. So it's important to note because when we say the music industry, we're talking entirely about the money made from intellectual property. So some artists and managers are just waiting for lucky moments when the ones who are killing it have systems to consistently take artists to another level over and over again. And if you wanna see what that looks like, we just did a collab where we not only show the system that we use, that's resulted in Billboard hit, some of the biggest viral moments on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. But also we got J.R. McKee to break down how he took an artist from zero to one of the biggest hit songs of 2022 and getting a Grammy in January of 2023. This is recent stuff, not old tactics. If you wanna check it out, go to www.brandmannetwork.com slash Grammy. Don't forget the www. Because J.R. gets into the details of looking at the data, decisions that got made, how much content got created and how they adjusted the content over time for different parts of the campaign. This is real behind the curtains type of stuff. So again, go to www.brandmannetwork.com slash Grammy. If you wanna check this out and apply it to yourself, back to the video. Which brings me to something though, but I wanna hold that to the end so not to distract this man. We got the influencer aspect of things, right? When you say an influencer, we actually literally just talked about this, maybe an episode or a clip or two ago, right? The fact that music is not all of the things that people think the music industry is, right? We literally just talked about touring. Technically it's not the music industry, right? So using the influencer umbrella, I think we can even broaden it and more clearly explain to the audience why one, artists should look beyond music, but also how some of the things that they're already thinking or I mean, are about doing actually aren't in the music industry and that'll probably help people understand the opportunity even though the industry is shrinking. So can you give us your thoughts on an artist being influencer today versus yesterday? Yeah, I think a guy who's been definitely circling the drain in your guys' world and we're all big fans, it's LaRussell. And what an absolute genius. And if you look at all of his activities, I would say that very, very small portion of LaRussell's revenue is, you could actually attribute to this number of music industry annual revenue because when he sells way above margin, the rights to a portion of his streaming totals or he sells an NFT of an album, how much of that actually gets credited back? Probably only just the royalty allocation. So if I'm selling a 20, if I get $2,500 for an album, you're still looking at the same amount going towards the music industry's annual revenue as if I had sold the $5 album. It's the royalties because the premium that he's able to charge on that is based entirely off of non-musical stuff. And so the key being that like, if you look at someone in the, we take on a lot of legacy artists who have like tens of millions of followers. And it's like, if I'm a marketer, like an e-commerce marketer, where I help new e-commerce brands, makeup, t-shirts, whatever, build up their revenue, I'm looking at your socials and I'm determining what's the captive audience here and how much should this business be making? There are e-commerce brands of 500,000 followers who are making well over $10 million annual revenue. But if you see an artist with 500,000 followers, the presumption is not that they're making $10 million. And so that's real, like our agency wouldn't exist if that weren't the case. We're entirely an arbitrage of how much the music industry expects a following to generate in terms of dollars and how much we as marketers know that that should be the case if we're doing proper extraction of that value. So really it's like the music industry is very poor, very terrible at turning attention into dollars as evidenced by the fact that this music industry annual revenue, if you look at the music industry's annual revenue, I did this with Bard the other day on Google, the new Google AI as I was like, give me a bunch of industries that are below 30 billion annual revenue but above 20 billion. And you'll find that like personal laundry services make more annual than the entire global recorded music industry. It's a joke, because you look like there's so much outsized influence, right? Like the music industry is the cultural mainstay of the whole world. Like everyone knows these people but the music industry is terrible at value extraction from that outsized attention. So I think that's the big thing that artists should really pay attention to is like, how much should you be making per 100,000 eyeballs? It's probably way more than the music industry is able to make. That goes back to our conversation about not encouraging our people to be artists. I remember I said, the probability is already so low and then the industry so bad at monetizing. Yeah. That's a whole another conversation though. Yeah, even like we talk about LaRussel being a good example of that like he said, like he's really just taking influencer community building strategies and applying it to the music world. And it's so revolutionary in music but in like all the other credit ventures are like, yeah, y'all are just now doing this. Like you just realized that he's doing community building events. It's crazy. Is the audacity to actually sell stuff? Yeah, exactly. Well, here's the thing. I won. Well, so I think the beauty of doing things well over the long term actually work out from a business standpoint, right? But you can not be thinking about it from a business sense. But you know, hey, this is good. This is good for my community. This is good for long term. And when you start breaking things down, you say, oh, snap. From a numbers basis, this actually maps out like LaRussel providing his music as something that his fans can invest in, right? Well, when I zoom out and think about it it's not just, oh wow, this is amazing. Like this is a really cool thing to build a relationship, that's cool. And I'm sure he's not thinking about it maybe to the extent that I'm about to explain but if we think about music as a loss leader, right? Which pretty much has been the approach for years even in many of the better times of music it's been looked at that way. All right, so that should tell us something and things are getting worse per se. So it's still a loss leader. Well, if I know this is my loss leader, why do I not give it to my fans, right? Have them have a stronger relationship and now it's almost like a break even product, right? Yeah. You own my music and now you want me to win but it's even better because as a business I sell you one thing and now I have your attention and your data so I can sell you something else. However, here I'm the business but then I'm selling you something that I'm already not gonna really profit that much off of in the first place and now you're a part of the business so you're gonna be encouraged to buy more stuff because it's helping yourself so I really don't even have to sell you strongly, right? So it's a really cool relationship that again I don't think it's like super thought out where I'm only doing this because I want to establish this relationship but effectively it does which is why that long-term thinking in so many ways for those who are willing to dug it out and do the unscalable things end up winning long-term. Yeah, you said loss leader, right? And for those of you out there who are like, don't know is that like at the grocery store the thing that the grocery store makes the least money on is milk and eggs. Historically up until last year eggs were very cheap but because of all the money printing they've exploded in terms of price but you know eggs and milk where are they located in the grocery store? Back. Like the back, right? You enter in the front left they're in the back right and you have to walk through all these other products in order to go get them.  And we use this to explain a lot of different things a great analogy for like a lots of different things in digital business. But ultimately to say that like if music is your loss leader it's what gets them there but most musicians stop there. They're like, we're just gonna give away milk and eggs just give it away, give it away, give it away and at some point a more capable business person will turn us into a grocery store. And it's like, no, you should be grocery store from day one. And so that's always been our argument. Now, currently I would say that like artists are very scared to sell. And I think it's important for artists to like when you guys say, you know your music is a business and you are a business as an artist. What that means is that businesses interact with people who are not the business customers through transactions, right? The point like the communication medium from business to customer is transactions. It's not like, here's some free stuff. Here's some more free stuff. Here's some more free stuff. Here's some more free stuff. Go review or like add us to a playlist like that's not it's actual dollars exchange for value. And artists are very poor at thinking of themselves in that way. So much so that like if they make any offer they feel like they're like the scum of the earth or something like that.  So like most of what you do should be communicating with customers through offers and transactions. Yeah, see, and I think we're in a time where all roles have led to this, right? So you're alluding to artists selling earlier on but even if you look at all the other messaging around this and where the industry is, that is what you're supposed to do when you think about it because one fans have been primed to wanna support artists. They're more aware of what artists are going through and they want direct access. So the marketplace is primed for that type of relationship, right? And then on the other end, we say labels don't wanna invest in an artist who doesn't have a fan base, who doesn't have who's not popping already. And then how do people summarize it? Artists wanna really invest, no, labels want to invest in small businesses instead of a startup artist that's just more of an idea and establish that.  Yeah, yeah. Like really to pull that all together is just reminding yourself that music is only a part of the revenue stream for an artist and it always has been, right? We've always seen it, known this, but when we stay in the idea and theme of music, we tend not to think about the touring, the, I mean, brand deals, the people who become actors and actresses, like there's so many different ways. You're really just a personality and the title that they put on you is just based on how you decided to monetize and brand yourself. But politician, right? A Will Smith, Dwayne de Rock Johnson, like, oh, wrestler, but then he gets into all these movies, right? Like it's just a well-known figure and you decide how you wanna monetize it. That's it. Yeah, 100%. I think like when you decide I'm in the music industry, I'm an artist and I monetize through music alone, streaming royalties for the most part. You're basically saying I wanna be institutionally impoverished. I wanna make the least amount of money per ounce of effort I put in that I possibly can't. Like there's no other industry that's like, you think of the laundry services industry had Drake followings that they'd be making as, you know, just slightly more in the music industry? No, like it's an audience problem. Music industry has the opposite problem. And so yeah, I would 100% agree that like you, the more you think of yourself as an artist that monetizes entirely through music, the more trouble you're going to have. And really I wanna make the point that like the music, like record labels as much as I despise record labels, they're not bad at this. They just exclusively choose to do it for the shiniest, prettiest, most popular artists that they can find.  When I register for a trademark, like say I register circa as a trademark, I have to list all of the industries I plan to enter with that trademark. So online, you can see all of my plans for what to do with the circa brand. You can go look up the Justin Bieber trademark registration. You'll find keychains, perfumes, you know, action figures, every possible field of monetization that they could do with the Justin Bieber brand, they registered for from day one, okay?  But they don't do that with someone who might have a million following, you know, 500,000 following. They don't see it as worth it. And maybe it's not for them.  They just sort of don't care if you flounder in obscurity and poverty as someone with a 500K following because it's just not worth it. So yeah.  They deploy their intelligence selectively. Yeah, yeah, I'd say so. I think for them, it doesn't matter because there's a thousand artists. They have a thousand artists with 500K, a million, two million, they don't care. They're the person that's gonna pay for all of those is the Justin Bieber. So they're mostly worried and exclusively focused on that. But, you know, that's of no comfort to the person who is one of those thousand, right?   They don't care. And so you're going to put outsized attention, outsized focus, outsized, you know, massive action into making you work. They won't. So keep that in mind. What do you say to artists who don't like that idea, right? Because you're alluding to something that artists have not liked for a minute. They've expressed, I just want to be an artist, right? I don't want to sell all these other things. And you basically said, and we agree that the money's gonna come from all this other stuff. It's gonna be pretty tough, at least very tough to just do music solely and live very well that way. Yeah, I mean, some of my best friends are artists who are living off of their Spotify check. And it's more than enough to pay their bills. They can reinvest some back in and they haven't yet tapped merch or anything like that or touring. So they're just an artist on Spotify with the large following. To get there, it took, I mean, this one kid I'm thinking of in particular, he innovated a model for building playlists on Spotify and populating them with Facebook. In fact, Larussell caught a tip off of his friend who caught a tip off of him, who caught a tip off of me about Facebook ads around this era. So they're very, very cool intersection of stories. But basically he took Facebook ads and was like, I can blow up Spotify playlist with this. I can put bigger artists, artists I admire, and then myself. And I can make it seem as if there's this company promoting these playlists just to grow a playlist following and sell playlist slots, but really I'm behind it and I'm putting myself in good company, so to speak. He did that. He now has like, when we started off, probably when he started doing this, he had like 200K to 300K monthly listeners. He had been doing playlist strategies before. Now he's at like a million and he's doing great. And his Spotify check pays all of his bills. I would say that's not the majority case, but I don't wanna sit here and tell you it's impossible. Like the economy is such right now that you can make an all right living off of that. If you're single, you have no kids and you work extremely hard for five years to get to a point where that Spotify checks paying your bills. I would say it's making it harder on yourself to do so and you're incredibly unlikely to do so. And there's always the risk that Spotify craters tomorrow because all the companies like Spotify in this economic environment are cratering, so. The Spotify check paying bills is nice, right? However, when it paying your bills and then you wanna continue to grow, like how do you maintain these numbers, right? There's constant effort that has to be put out and I think that's where the struggle is about paying bills, but it's like, okay, well, how do I continue to grow my business? How fast can I reinvest in my business if this is all I have, right? And all right life, like he's saying, well, do I have a wife or kids? Or like, what does my life look like? Cause some people have all version of all right is not other people's version, right? So, and I think that's the difficulty that it comes down to is just like, and I, if there are those special people where they have a certain lifestyle and they don't want more about all most musicians I run into still want more and they wanna reach a certain point, I just don't find it to be realistic. I think if I find it to be realistic to say, hey, how can I get this as high of a number as possible, of course, but even in most of those situations, unless I want to limit how fast I grow and how much I grow, I'm going to really again use this as some type of overhead loss leader and I need to flip and make most of my money somewhere else. Yeah, like the individual I'm talking about is an incredibly rare individual and is young and is okay with having roommates.  Yeah, so period of time, right? You took, you talk about a period of time when that Facebook tip, right? Was more effective than probably it is now, right? 100%. Yes, he's no longer building Spotify playlist with Facebook ads. Yeah. Right, a lot of times when we follow these figures, just like with Russ, right? Like, well, his era of SoundCloud, by the time you find out about him, a lot of those technological loopholes have, you know, gone over cultural moments, right? Like SoundCloud was a cultural moment. Yes, cultural moments, exactly. So you have to take the framework, the idea that it occurred, but usually the route to get to that point is gonna be different. Yeah, I definitely want to avoid sitting here and telling people like, you cannot make a comfortable living off of Spotify alone. Like there are people out there for whom that's gonna be true. Yes. The broad majority of people, it will not be true. And I'm exclusively worried about those people. Because yeah, it's definitely tough. And if you don't, like this kid's particularly hip in terms of musical genres and styles, right? It's not, you know, like he has the right music for it to work in the streaming era with Playlist and all that. And it's not everybody. It's a very slim minority of people, so. Well, there's another, like, yeah, because we kind of touched on community. You brought up Love Russell earlier and this is just in my mind because somebody made a comment on a video that we did in multiple comments. But this one. What's it mean?  Not you, not you. Not you, not you, not you. There was somebody alluding to the fact that he had a ceiling. I think the video was maybe about him making $150,000 and someone was like, well, yeah, he's not gonna be able to do that again or they're talking about the lack of scale of building his model, right? And here's my issue. It's like, bro, you have to do the work. The unscalable part is a part of the work. Things become more scalable as you get more resources. Everybody's starting off thinking, acting as if they're a multimillion or even billion dollar company thinking that everything has to be super scalable. Everything has to be super optimized. It's usually gonna be those actions that occur that allow you to get to the point where you can think a little bit more like that. So we take these surface level business understandings and try to apply it like we really know we're talking about. So this is the way I'm trying to rise it, right? I'll just leave it as I wanna hear your thoughts on it, especially for an artist, but those unscalable actions, community building type of actions, especially, they will scale your culture and your brand, right? Though other actions where you're trying to scale your business totally different, but the more you scale your brand, et cetera, if you're good at monetizing, the better the business will be long-term. Yeah, so first of all, not even your average marketing professional or even like CMO at a company has any idea what the hell they're talking about when they say the word scalable, okay? It's just an incredibly common. So Ryan Dice, who's the head of digital marketer, gave a keynote speech two years ago at their Trafficking Conversion Summit. He led off the thing by saying, we need to stop saying that's not scalable. He said that the quickest way to kill a great idea before it even gets started is to say that's not scalable. And he made this big point about how they did, they had all these initiatives over the last two years that produce outsized returns and they're not scalable ideas. We're gonna talk to every customer who signs up for our $95 a month product. We're going to do all of these podcast things that have no direct monetization. Like there's all these different things that the average person would say is not scalable. You cannot do it at a million units per, but it doesn't matter because, you know, how do I say this? Another good analogy is like, when you buy a stock, right? You have unlimited upside potential. The stock could go from $100 to a million dollars. When you short a stock, which is betting that it will go down, they say, yeah, but your upside potential is only 2x. It could only go to zero. You can only make 100% of your investment back. Whereas if I'm going long on a stock, it can go to a million. And it's like, yeah, but it's not gonna. And even if it did, you would sell it 2x. So this argument that like going short on it is only gonna give you 100% returns. It's like, you don't get 100% returns on any of your investments. So it doesn't matter. And so this whole scalable thing is like presuming that we're gonna go to a million units. Chances are we're not going to. So what can we do locally that's actually gonna make it a positive impact? So I'd say that like the Russell's model not being scalable, it's like, okay, he did this unscalable thing for three years straight. What can he now do because he did that? And is that scalable? Yeah, exactly. I think the part of it left out a lot of the time aspect because you said it with the streaming revenue, right? Like most artists that I know that are profitable purely through streaming, it took them at least like four or five years to do it. And then I was like, you talk about like, hey, artists are okay with doing like four or five years of music work, like releasing music, maybe doing shows and things like that. So build up is really small check in the future versus like you could spend maybe half of that time and possibly come out with a five X pin. Cause we made the point of like, no, the Russell doesn't stream as well as a lot of artists in the industry, but he makes more money than a lot of artists in the industry because of exactly what you guys just talked about. So I look at it like, where is, where's the value of the effort best spent? You know what I'm saying?  Some of you always said, right? Like if I told you, yo, you can make a million dollars tomorrow, but you can make $10 million in 10 years. Which one would you take? You know what I'm saying? And most people make the million tomorrow over the 10 million and 10, you know what I'm saying? And I see it a lot with the artist community. Like, I want the immediate check today, which is the streaming revenue. Although I could make 300,000 in two years when if I just focus on talking to everybody in my discord or whatever that community building stuff looks like. Yeah. So an anecdote is that this gentleman on our agency, Andy Hunter, he has a band called As December Falls. Over the last five years, they've sold out a different tour every year and just grown the cap and the amount of dates as they go. And they did it all with Facebook ads and like ticketing funnels. Just selling directly to people who have no idea who they are and they all come to the shows. And now they're at a point where they're getting festival billings and they're able to have those kinds of agreements cause they just have such a strong track record of selling tickets that they can get booked more impressive places. And he told me that they were on bills with people. Like he was like, we don't have the clout. We don't have like Spotify clout. We don't have press clout. And all these artists that we're playing with that we're billing with do. And he's like, we want to try to get some of that. And then he did the festival. I talked to him afterwards and he's like, we're in the green room with bands who are like the media darlings in our genre right now. And they're on benefits. In the UK benefits is like welfare. He said they get like $600 to $1,000 a month from the label and they're on benefits. And it's like, he's making money. He has a whole business. You know, like he probably makes the most per fan out of anyone on that bill. And this includes people like Green Day and some 41 are on that bill. So yeah, it's really, it is, it's outsized returns for the amount of effort. The key thing that we've been doing over the last year with artists working one-on-one, before we had this thing called the free push shipping and handling funnel. It's a concept in marketing that like everyone knows it's not ours, we didn't invent it. We just ported it over from direct response marketing to music. And it's like, we're gonna give away this loss leader item. And there's another important point about loss leaders is like the reason you ever come up with a loss leader is because you already have a product that it leads to. You're not just in the business of making loss leaders. You're just a loom, yeah.  But yeah, so the loss leader in this case is a free CD. And all the arguments come out of like people don't listen to CDs anymore.  And it's like, okay, but it works somehow. Still, I don't know how. I don't have any logical reason for why because I don't think people have CD players, but they're offering a free CD. The ad is just like a master cut of their most exciting content. And it's just like, you know, we've allocated this budget to give away these CDs. You just pay shipping and handling. And the shipping and handling in some cases will cover the cost of printing the CD, but not always. That's not necessarily the goal, but ultimately you should roughly break even plus ad costs. But the key is that it's a loss leader. So when you go to check out for the free CD, you put in your credit card information to pay for the shipping and handling. And then now we've crossed the bridge of putting in your credit card information, which like doing this is the hardest thing to do in online business, right? Getting them to, okay, I'm gonna pull it out and type in the numbers and stuff. Once you're past that, there's no friction to adding additional items to their cart. And so once they've checked out, they will offer an additional CD from their catalog or like a merch item to go along with it. So they'll choose different follow up items. And once you're there, it's a one click to add it to your cart and then it processes. So all the frictions behind them and they can just add items as much as the customer feels comfortable or wants to get. And so relatively unknown artists are taking their ad spend and for every dollar put into this ad campaign in this marketing funnel, they're getting three, four, five, six dollars back. They're making like 600% immediate return on their investment. And so- Magic, especially for an artist. Right, and it's like, it's not a new strategy. This thing's like 10 years old, right? This type of funnel, it's old and people are used to it. And it's people don't listen to CDs and all the arguments are there for why this shouldn't work. And yet for artists of the most obscure genres, you know, who don't have a big following is just working. And it's like, you could be making money now, man. Why do you want to just keep producing loss leader after loss leader for five years to then sign up with a label and be on benefits?  And I find that that works, especially for artists in more obscure genres because it's hard for people to find you. It's that the over consumed, popular trendy genres have a little bit more trouble converting like that. But for those artists who are struggling and like, man, this path doesn't, like all the stuff that you're doing, I'm not streaming as well. If you're not streaming as well outside of you having bad music, ironically, it could be an indicator if there's still like hardcore fans and you know your genre is a thing, you probably should focus even more so and just going straight to merch monetization. Not merch, but like product monetization because it's there. And they really appreciate it even more so because it's harder to find you. Yeah, yeah. And there's less out there for them. So when they see it, they're like, oh, this is me. You know, like, they're like, no way. Totally, totally agree. And what I love about, you know, like I see you guys as having been disordinately early to what was coming with TikTok. Okay, so I saw you guys like talking about TikTok when, you know, we exist in a space, there's music marketery, people all up and down TikTok right now, there's thousands now. It's way more than when we started. And they're all recommending different stuff and a lot of it is TikTok driven today but you guys like really went out there when it wasn't safe necessarily yet to do so and saying like, this is it, right? And what you guys are able to do with your content strategies is because we're, you know, within the artists we're using Facebook ads to get the traffic, the eyeballs on the offer and then people take the offer. So when people take the offer, that's conversion. The Facebook ads, that's traffic. In this case, paid traffic. And you guys are masters at generating free traffic through content. So when you couple that with the conversion part which is an offer, like, hey man, the thing about like artists I think need to realize is like an offers and you can say no to offers but if you're not making them, no one can say yes. So like, just make, what's the worst that could happen? People just don't take it, you know? So that's the conversion part, make an offer, make an offer and no harm, no foul if they don't want to take it but if they do take it, now you're making money. So if you can delineate everything to just traffic and conversion, the goal is get your traffic for less, get your conversion to be worth more. The conversion of a Spotify listener is like 40 cents max per month, right? Like, it's unlikely for you to get a whole lot of juice out of that conversion. So try to raise the average value of each conversion and typically that's done by introducing products. You can, I mean, you can go so far as to have like, I've never seen an artist do this but like you can sign up with a company and promote their product and get, you know, a ref link and make money for every sale that they make, right? So it's like, even if you don't have a product you could be making more per conversion than sending them off to Spotify, I would say. So hopefully that's the change we see where indie artists are able to make even more of a premium off of the attention they generate than they ever have. I think it'll get there because I think like to Sean's point like we're so used to seeing like the cool mainstream artists kind of control the monetization narrative and like we see so many of them struggling. I think like you said earlier that any artist market is growing so much that now there's a wider pool of artists that know the game. And, you know, there are more obscure artists today who have the chance to be successful outside of that because of everything we just said, right? Like, hey, I know that being a mainstream darling isn't for me, but I can still make 200K a year. You know what I'm saying? If I just go do these other things that those artists aren't even willing to do. You know what I'm saying? Like they're not even willing to put in the pudding. And they're that bare middle class on those more obscure genres is probably going to be better in proportion because one, like Serka said, they're excited to see you. There's like an identity aspect of it. You represent me. But then if you're a lower class popular niche artists, right?  Right? Yeah. There's a key concept in business that you guys probably heard before is that if I sell time management and productivity help, maybe I can make, you know, I have some potential to make, right? Like I can make like a thousand dollars per a thousand people I get in front of. If I sell time management and productivity services for salespeople, now I can make $2,000 because the audience is smaller, they have more specific needs. If I can sell time management and productivity help for salespeople who sell direct to business, it goes up. Direct to business in the manufacturing industry, it goes up. Direct to business in manufacturing children's toys. Okay, now I'm at the high because you know I deal exclusively with you. I don't deal with all these other types of, I deal with the exact problems you face. And so niching down tends to grow your premium that you can charge, same concept in genres, right? If there's only five of you and this person really likes that type of music, your premium goes up, you know? People are more willing to spend. 100%, 100%. Man, are there any thoughts that you wanna leave us with today, Sarka? Yeah, just to say that like we're gonna really, crazy time in the music industry right now where it's easy to get fooled. And it's easier than ever before to make a living off of being an artist. But there's lots of, there's more traps than ever before that you can fall into.  It's like, once you have a product to offer, at least you can make the offer to the people that you get in front of. And if they take it, great. Like now you're making money as a business and you can scale that up infinitely as you get cheaper sources of traffic and higher premium forms of conversion. So. We gotta remember though. Yeah. So you learn what scale means, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I mean, I think you know I started in tech. I feel like I remember when I can track the word scale and scalability became more popular. It actually, if you go like pre-2010, it really wasn't all that popular. As tech became, tech and entrepreneurship kinda got paired together and Mark Zuckerbergs, all that world started to become more sexy. Everybody else started adopting this scalability content, a scalability concept because it's so popular in that tech culture and investing. And all of that was exploitation and overdone as well, right? Like artists, there's a lot of young founders who got exploited like artists have in many ways. But like that was not a term and the world was doing just fine. Not worried about scalability. People don't think about the other side of scalability, which is like, okay, scalability is constrained by total addressable market. Yes. And it's also constrained by in any way, if this thing in any way would exclude someone from that total addressable market, it's less scalable than if it was inclusive. So the most scalable thing in the world is also by nature, the most bland, generic, unexciting thing in the world. Just because it can scale doesn't mean it's going to. It's not everything.  Otherwise you're going to be selling cartons of milk. That's why you also said, or the point that you just made about the blandness is actually why it's so hard to make something completely scalable from ground zero because it's so bland and boring, how can you even implement somebody to become a customer, right? Yeah. And the less scalable something is the higher you actually can get away with charging for it. So it's not every, the scalable concept is not everything. Don't worry about it. Yep, don't worry. All right, so appreciate you coming on, Sarka. Where is the best place for people to follow you? You can check, we're on all socials, but probably, you know, where we put out the most content is our podcast, which is also on our YouTube channel. So check us out at full stack creative on YouTube. We put out videos and podcasts, and hopefully we get to have you guys on the podcast in the very near future. Because we're such huge fans of everything you guys do over at Enterprise. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, y'all. Follow and check that out. This is yet another episode of No Label's Necessary Podcast. I am Brian Manchin. I'm Corey, and we out. Peace.


In this study, zinc oxide nanoparticles were successfully synthesized from laurus nobilicelle leaves aqueous extract and two different zinc salts, zinc acetate and zinc nitrate, as precursors. Characterization of the synth-sized nanoparticles was performed via UV vis spectroscopy, FDR spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction analysis, energy, dispersive x-ray analysis, and scanning electron microscopy. The UV vis spectrum indicated characteristic absorption peaks at 350 nm due to the large excitation binding energy at room temperature. FDII analysis confirmed chemical bond formations of zinc oxide. XRD results revealed the formation of hexagonal worksite structure, while SEM analysis showed spherical shape with the average sizes of 21.49 and 25.26 nm for the synth-sized nanoparticles by zinc acetate and zinc nitrate respectively. Finally, EDX analysis confirmed the high purity of the synth-sized nanoparticles. This article was offered by Shabnam Fakri, Nina Jamzad, and Hassan Kabiri Fad. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


الحريث التاسع حريث نبنائي أنا عايشة رضي الله تعالى عنها قالت كان رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم يعجبه ات يمّنه في تلعُله وترجُله وطهوره وفي شأن كله عايشة رضي الله تعالى عنها قالت she said عايشة said that the message صلى الله عليه وسلمة كان رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلمة عيو عجبه it used to used to amaze the message of صلى الله عليه وسلم عجبه meaning he used to give presidency and he used to like عايشة صلى الله عليه وسلم and he loved ات تيمّنه تيمّن means what تيمّن means to use your right using your right side he used to love the عايشة صلى الله عليه وسلم to start with his right before his left في ما ؟ في تلعبه ، في يدهكه في تلعبه ، وضعنه وقيله وضعه وضعه وضعه يصنع ، نحن نفعل اللعب وفي شطنه وفي كونه كل هذه الأفضل هنا الآن في كل هذه الأفضل يجب أن يجد في أصول الفق this is called عام مخصوص عام جنر أريد بها الخصوص which means it's general intended from a specification it's general that specification was meant in it what does that mean it is general without the times when he didn't do it when the processor entered the toilet what would he use so that's not part of it when he came out of the best sheet what would he use so those times are not in it and I'm going to give you a good way to know when it's good to use the right when it's not good to use the left this is very important this is what it's very important that you know this the word here that is used is كل the word كل is used and we know that the word كل is called أبلغ العمومات it is one of the most strongest generalization you could ever come across كل جميع they are the powerfulest terms you could use to use generalization are you all with me now the word كل even though it shows كل it shows this powerful generalization there are times that it could happen that this generalization some things might exit are you all with me now to exit something out of this powerful generalization are you all with me this generalization try to take something out of it because it's as I said it's very powerful the generalization here is very very powerful and there is nothing in Arabic language that could show the power and the greatness it could show like the word كل جميع are powerful okay try to say that this كل is not general and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this are not under it you would have to give us evidence pay attention you would have to find another evidence to exit it out such as now example we said that all the prophet his affairs did he used to use his right foot somebody came and said oh by the way when he went out of the when he went out of the message he would use his left I would say where's your evidence as soon as you give me an evidence you're right that exits it what else do you got when he also enters the toilet he used to use his left oh where's your evidence and I didn't say to you okay you're right take that out as well say again you say for example when he when he for example he entered his house you go in the left I'll take you as evidence for that you say I can't so I can't give you an evidence pay attention okay I didn't say to you sorry that can't happen he would go into his house with the right and then you would say where's your evidence I would say the generalization still stands you haven't taken that out with an evidence does that make sense get it something the people who say that doesn't show generalization that's what they want to do they want to say that they want to say it's a good innovation or the more like they want to say that doesn't show generalization and you ask them so they say to you like the word the word for example is an indication but this حديث what has been you're you're it needs evidence where is this evidence since you can't give us that evidence we will still stick with the which also is his generalization you can't weaken its meaning does that make sense that's something people need to read it understand and not be confused or in any way or form or shape think that you know wow what a point no the understanding has to be clear well understood the thick that we take from حديث but before I go into it before I go into it is the general meaning of this حديث I have to mention the process I said that he used to start with his right in everything he liked and loved and used to be fascinated with starting with his right he loved it and the one who informed us of this رضي الله تعالى عالها and عائشة رضي الله تعالى عالها she was one of the most knowledgeable women of the most knowledgeable women of this umma in general and one of the most knowledgeable companions رضي الله تعالى عالها she knew his affairs his guidance the way he was she knew his situation publicly and privately she knew it because she's wife and she lived with him in his house رضي الله تعالى عالها so she was the only one who could actually say that when he wore his shoes this is how we used to do it and also in his call with his hair and also in his purification and also in all of this عائشة could say this because she lived with the process I said she lived with him so she conveyed to us that private things of his life عائشة رضي الله تعالى she conveyed it what's the thickness in the hadith the thickness in the hadith the first thing is that to give presidency or method to put first you're right in all of the matters which are good matters how do you determine something is good we take it from three places three things allow us to know that something is good شرعان in the legislation of the sharia so we learn something is good first of all شرعان مرالة is from the legislation are you all with me we get this from the religion our religion is the whole thing that tells us what is good and what is bad if people were left to determine what's good and bad without any legislation from God, honestly speaking people will start to what people will start to feel few things and justify it and say this is morally good this is what? the second thing that does determine what is good and bad is the logic but that comes after legislation in the point place and the third which is something medically good something medically good it's also a way to know that it's good and it does determine it and number 2 is جعلوا الأشمالي للأشياء المستقدر to use your left side on things that are that are looked that are not good things that are seen filthy such as for example that which a prophet said a prohibitive what did he prohibit الاستجاء to purify yourself from your and call of nature with your right the prophet prohibited touching your private part the prophet also prohibited it with your right the prophet prohibited it الاستجاء باليبيد the prophet also prohibited it so your private part you touch it with your left your call of nature in front Islam is امام الناوة we put that in place he said قاعدة الشمق مستمر the continuous the continuous this the continuous the continuous استحباب البداعتي باليبيد that is recommended to start with your right في كل ما كان everything which is بما بتكريب وتزيير everything that is beautiful that is loved that is good وما كان and everything that is opposite to it استحبب التياصوري using your left is recommended anything that is not good or beautiful using your left is اوصق من الملاقين he also said the shame in his اعلاب before he had a rule something like that so for example he gave examples of things that are good such as loops with thawb wearing a garment start with your right والخوف والدخول المسجد والسيوك use your right والإمتعال والتقليم والأرافب and cut your nails والإكتحال use the eyeliner on your eyes وقص الشارب شوطل شارب start with the right side you see also combing your hair ونطفل ابت and cut your armpits something good you're doing حلق الرأس والسلام في الصلاة give it a salam in the Salah you start with your right وغسلوا الأعباء when you do the Wusul start with your right side والخلوج من الخلاقي والأكل leaving from the toilet call of nature and also eating also drinking والمصافحة shaking a person's hand start with the right side start with that the right side and the people on the right using your right as well وستلام الحجر الأسول give it a salam to the Hajar الأسول use your right side وغير داليكا and other than that is the second thing which is the second thing and the second part of what is opposite to bad he gave so the first time he gave was the good things of using your right now he's talking about the second things he said entering the toilet so entering places which are filthy you know just filthy entering it والخلوج من المسجد exiting from the messjid also your house when it's in jam call of nature taking your clothes off yeah you see and taking your leather socks off or your shoes start with the left all of this is one all of this is is how the شريعة is in terms of knowing what you should use your right with or left and this brothers what is good and what is bad is not mentioned by the شريعة after that it goes back to the عرف and the custom of the people if the شريعة hasn't mentioned anything for this thing it does go back to the custom of the people are you with me that is then determined what is good or what is bad or what place is good or what place is bad it is determined by the custom of the people if the people look down in that place they become look down and it's remember the custom is not the custom of the disbelievers even if it's not mentioned in our religion the custom that we look at is the custom of the Muslim the عرف of the Muslim not the عرف of the أقفار pay attention that's the second point the third point that we are going to move on to is which is the فق of the حريث the religion of the شريعة the شريعة has come with what the إسلام this religion has come to perfect the affairs of the people and it came to organize and work on the people's manners and etiquettes and also to remove a distance from them it is to protect them and distance them from any form of harm in any form of to protect them from harm in any way or form or shape it is four with your right in your bodies when you are doing it over your left and this is not a matter which the scholars disagree on so the class is watching your bodies that are two for example your hands you will start with the right then you do the left when you do your leg you start with the right then you do the left does that make sense anything that is so remember when I was mentioning before the food it should be at with what with the right nowadays what has spread amongst the people is eating with the left and the right such as burgers and that's against the شريعة it goes against the prophet's command because the prophet said could be a minute eat with your right so the food you have to take with one hand now you might say it's too big cut it in half another thing which people tend to do is and find excuses for themselves is coaches and people who eat with their hands coaches and people who eat with their hands tend to when they eat and they want to drink they want to they want to drink they say oh I can't grab the glass with my right hand because it's going to be dirty it's going to be dirty so he drinks with his left and he eats with his right two points are you going to wash it most likely not the second thing is that there's a lot of water the second thing is that why would you even be eat and drink it at the same time not that you can't you can if you want to but it's following the eye as much better unless you are a person who cannot digest the food like you just cannot eat the food unless you so some of you may wonder where is that from Allah says in the ayah and then Allah mentioned so you still might say well that doesn't show that it's obligatory the answer is the same when the companions came to the Prophet and they said shall we start with صفح or مروا the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he said that which Allah started with so Allah started with صفح they will say start with that which Allah started with and then but not that we say it's obligatory to do that but finish and get rid of eat it first and then you can if you feel like that's what you want if that's what you are worried about other people they find it hard when they leave they have to leave with the left and they have to put the shoe which is the right one so some people have it hard they don't know what to do they have to leave with the left but then they have to put the right shoe into the shoe well it's not tricky you put your leg on the shoe put your leg, your left leg that came out on top of the shoe and then put your right leg in and then after that put your left leg in so you've actually left correctly and you put the shoes in correctly number five which is start the fifth one which is what I mentioned is to start your right with your shoe the fifth point is to start with your right leg with the shoe basically means that you put your right leg first into the right shoe first whereas the taking off is opposite the taking off what do you take off with you take the left of first and then you take the right of first but when you're putting it on when you're putting it on when you're taking it off you take the left of first why is the case because the انتعال to cover your leg is better and put something on is better then your naked bare leg sixth لا اعادة there is no repeated a person who does use his left side and does it with his left first before he's right he doesn't have to bring back the وضو and even that though he has opposed the سنة and if now we bring اجمع on this issue he said which is that the right is given presidents in the وضو and that it says anyone who opposes that that's right first فاته فضل the virtue and the reward is what he misses out but his وضو is complete because the concerns on this issue he still got his وضو number eight and number seven كامال السنة رسول الله the complete the completeness of the message by doing what بمراعات مضافة by observing the purification by even combing your hair even in what combing your hair the completeness of this religion it hasn't left anything it's telling us how to wear things and how to take them off complete religion so Allah has not left us in darkness know his message out


Hi. Welcome to CTN member highlights. I'm Leslie McVane and today I have with me three people from LearningWorks. Sonny Waterman who's the director of Youth Building Alternatives at LearningWorks. Hi Sonny. Hi Leslie. Thank you for having us. And Derwin Soto who is a student at YBA and Ariel Bentley who's also a student. Welcome. This is great. So let's first begin with talking a little bit, a little bit about what YBA is, Youth Building Alternatives. YBA is a program for students who are no longer attending high school for various reasons, usually considered dropouts between the ages of 16 and a half and 24. And our program is to train students to be ready for a career and or college or some other training beyond that. So we offer a very comprehensive program where we have education, vocational training, jobs for main graduates training. We do leadership classes. We have community service. We're hoping to have an internship program that these two will participate in to give students as many opportunities as possible to experience various jobs and working conditions and or to go to SMCC or other training. Okay. And it's usually a program for about nine months. And the opportunities are to learn a skill are in the building trades, culinary arts. And then we also have our newest skill-based training is hospitality area where they will be earning an industry-recognized credential either in the area of maintenance, front desk receptionist or banquet server. And what better place to learn it than right here in Portland where there is so much happening in the hospitality area, whether it be the restaurants or the hotels or the cruise ship. Right. And they learn customer service skills which are so good for no matter what area that they would end up working in because they have to work with people. So it's a great skill. Now you both came to learning works in January of this year. So you have a little while longer to go through the summer, I guess. Tell me what has been the most enlightening thing about coming to learning works. Derwin, do you want to start with that, with you? Sure. Coming to learning works, I really got, I really felt like I was part of it when I came in because I saw some people who used to go to my school as well that did not have the opportunity to graduate with their class because unfortunately, just like me, I got kind of to a point where work was just too difficult at Casco Bay. I walked around my school and somebody told me about learning works. And when I went there, I applied everything. Everybody was kind to me, all the staff. And I really felt like it was going to be a great program to attend. And so far, it is. I love it. Every part of it and every activity we do is great. It's like a private school with much more individual attention than you were getting before and people really listen to you. Yes. And how about you, Ariel? Like Derwin said, it was just coming in and everybody was friendly and kind and I just felt like I was a part of something and I didn't feel kind of ostracized by everybody else. I just felt like, I don't know, I felt like I had a lot of friends coming into learning works. And if things were going too fast at learning works, you can say, wait a minute, let's slow down a little bit. Let's talk about where I am in this learning process and they'll help you with that. Yes. When we first go to learning works, they will give us, I forgot what the test is called, but that will determine on where you are and what they're going to teach you. And then, the tape? Yes, call the tape test. And it's very helpful. I've been doing very well on every assignment I'm given. I've been passing and it's just very fun and I'm really focused on all the work I need to do and that's great. That's terrific. And now you were both, part of the program is doing community service. And tell us a little bit, each of you, about what you're doing for community service in the community. All right. I'm going to talk about, let's see, wayside. On wayside, we go there. And that's a soup kitchen for people who might not know about it. Yes. On wayside, we go there once a week and we cook a variety of food. Like last time I went, we made, I forgot what the dish is called, but it was delicious. Was it shepherd's pie? It was kind of, it was similar to lasagna, but it wasn't. Oh, it was chicken parm. Yes, it was that. It had, we put chicken, potato, cheese and some corn. Then we cooked it all nice and it was delicious. And on the side, we made some treats, we made cookies. And some of the students just went all crazy and made these huge cookies. They were like the size of drums. So is that, as well as being community service, is it part of the culinary program at Learning Works? Yes. To go and do this cooking? Yes. Oh, how great. And what about you? What do you want to talk about as far as your community service? I go to one tree every Friday. It's a daycare, just a learning center. And you work with the children? Yeah, I love working with kids. And it may turn into something more permanent for you after you graduate. So what are some of the other things that the students will have to face before leaving Learning Works? You do testing for not only a GED, but also for proficiency in some of the things they're learning in the building or culinary. Correct. They have to have reach certain benchmarks or milestones in all areas in order to complete and graduate the program. We hope for them to all have a high set exam, which they study for and take the each component of the test. They have to have at least one of the vocational skills certifications. So either in construction, culinary arts or hospitality, many of them have all three. We give them training in OSHA 10, so they are safety certified. They have certifications in JMG, where they have completed applications. They have a complete portfolio that they are ready to take with them to apply for jobs. They also have leadership classes that they participate in, so they learn about individual leadership and leadership in the community. They also have to do at least 30 hours of community service. And some of that they pick and choose, but we offer it every week. Like we said, we go to Wayside every week. Ariel does the one at OneTree. Not all students go to OneTree because daycare is not an interest for them. So we try to tailor it to their personal needs. But they do have pieces that they have to complete in every area. Can they come up with their own community service opportunity? If they have that available to them, they can, but typically they use the community service opportunities that we offer. And what do you each hope to take with you when you go out and leave? Do you want to go on to college? Do you have job aspirations? I know that Derwin is working at the Civic Center here. And is that something you want to continue with, or do you have other ideas about what you want to do? Right now I do not have any other ideas on what I want to pursue for jobs. So I am going to stick along with the Civic Center just for a while longer. But in the meantime, once I graduate from learning works, I will just take a little break from school and then think about which college I would like to attend. But I am looking forward to going to SMCC if I do not find anything else. It is a great school. Do you know what you might be interested in doing, or not? Just general college stuff and see? I am very interested in looking at firemen stuff, as well as I have been looking into the military as well, because I have an interest on both of those. They are very nice. And what about you, Ariel? We are going to have to wrap up pretty soon. So what do you look forward to doing after you graduate? I look forward to going to SMCC in the fall, maybe in the winter. I would like to go major in English, and I would like to go for early childcare. That sounds wonderful. I think you are both leaders, and I am sure that is how they feel at learning works. Talking with you has been very nice. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Leslie, for inviting us. And I hope you will come back. Thank you.