November 23rd, 2021, 12:00 pm PT / Category: Interviews
After years of decline, how can music be made valuable again?
Obie Fernandez is best known as a serial entrepreneur and author of the bible of Ruby on Rails development. Prior to founding RCRDSHP he was the founding team CTO of Andela, the most successful venture-backed startup in Africa, now operating in 14 countries and while training 100 thousand young Africans to be world-class software developers.
Obie is also a successful DJ and electronic music producer, with dozens of releases on well-known record labels and gigs at huge festivals such as EDC and A State of Trance.
Podcast
Transcript
Tullio Siragusa:
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of dojo.live. Today is Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021. This is Tullio Siragusa broadcasting from Southern California. Today I’m joined by Kim Lantis in Hermosillo, Mexico. Hi, Kim. Welcome back. And Carlos Ponce in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Welcome to the show, guys. All right. We have two shows this week. It’s Thanksgiving week, so it’s a bit of a shorter week. The first one is today. We have Obie Fernandez, who is the CEO and Founder at rcrdshp.com. Welcome to the show, Obie. It’s good to have you.
Obie Fernandez:
Thank you, Tullio.
Tullio Siragusa:
So today we’re going to talk about music and creators and specifically electronic music. A little secret, I listened to BPM pretty regularly on Series FM. So I do love electronic music. But before we go into the topic today, let’s get to know our guest and see what we can learn. Obie, if you could be so kind, just to give us an introduction. Tell us a little bit about you and then we’ll dig into RCRDSHP. Let’s get to know you a little bit. Thank you again for being with us.
Obie Fernandez:
Uh, sure. Thanks. Thank you guys. It’s a pleasure to be on the show. Where do I start? I’m Cuban American. I noticed some of you guys are Latin, so that might be interesting. I was born and raised in New Jersey, Cuban exile parents. I’m a child of the eighties. I’m in my late forties now. I’ve been a DJ almost ever since I could remember. My mom’s cousin was a disco DJ in Newark, New Jersey and he had a huge record collection. We used to go over my great aunt’s house a lot. And I would play with his records and he would teach me to mix and stuff like that. So deejaying has been a constant in my life. And I’ve been a club resident at times and things like that. And I’m also a musician.
I took piano lessons when I was a kid, thanks to my parents. And I became what they call a bedroom producer. It means someone that is doing it for fun or as a hobby. Probably around 2001 is when I first bought my first synth. About five years ago I started taking my music career a lot more seriously. I moved to Mexico City and my cost of living dropped and my income stayed the same. So I was able to do a lot less consulting hours than I used to. And a friend of mine suggested that I was an idiot for not chasing my dreams, and he was right. So I started buying studio equipment and learning a lot more about how to finish tracks, which is a very difficult proposition. And, yeah, I started releasing music with some major labels and got some traction.
I’ve been a party promoter at different times of my life. I started doing parties here in Mexico City, kind of using the resources at my disposal to bring international artists. I got songs on the radio here, in Mexico City, on the FM radio. It’s a huge, huge audience. That’s here, so I’m somewhat of a, you know, not a big time celebrity by any means. I don’t want to say something inaccurate, but known by certain people in the community here, the music community. That’s the music side of my life. And then I also have a pretty successful technology career. Do you want me to tell you about that as well?
Tullio Siragusa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Obie Fernandez:
Great. So, when we get into RCRDSHP, you’ll realize why this project is like a holy grail project for me. But essentially, along with all the music background that I’ve had and the success in music – for well over 25 years at this point – I’d been involved professionally in making software.
I’m talking about since like 1995, some of the first Java projects ever done. So I was definitely in the right place at the right time. And in the 2000s I got involved with a programming language called Ruby and a web framework called Ruby on Rails, which some of your listeners are probably familiar with. And I was in a position in my career, and also just given my personality and the blogging that I was doing for many years at that point, I became an evangelist for Ruby on Rails. That turned into a book deal, which turned into a series editorship. And I’ve actually published quite a few books about Ruby on Rails, including the Bible of Ruby on Rails development called “The Rails Way”. So that led to opportunities to start my own consulting firm.
I grew it to about 50 people and sold it in 2011 and I have been doing entrepreneur kind of activities since, including being CTO of, arguably, the largest venture backed startup in the whole continent of Africa. I was CTO and part of the founding team of Andela, which was working on training a hundred thousand young Africans to be world-class software developers. Kind of in my image, in a way. So that was super, super cool. I was there in 2014, 2015, and that company is now operating in 14 countries and expanding to be a worldwide player in world-class consulting. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from very prestigious investors such as Mark Zuckerberg, Al Gore, Serena Williams, and like very, very tough VCs. So I was there during the beginning of the madness there. I still have some connections, still advise and am still very proud of my involvement there. I’m used to working on big, big ideas, right? So, earlier this year I kind of put that all together and said, “There’s an opportunity here to disrupt music in favor of the artists,” and went for it.
Tullio Siragusa:
Nice. Well, thank you for being with us. We were just talking about Ruby on Rails. Discovered all of them are in Colima Mexico. That’s where all the Ruby on Rails are.
Obie Fernandez:
Oh, that’s really funny. You may have come across the name Magma Labs in Colima. I am actually part owner of Magma Labs.
Tullio Siragusa:
Oh, interesting!
Obie Fernandez:
I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not.
Tullio Siragusa:
That’s so funny. Small world.
Obie Fernandez:
I have a house in Colima, it’s a beautiful place.
Tullio Siragusa:
Little hot, but definitely beautiful. So let’s talk about rcrdshp.com. Tell us about what the company is about, what do you guys do?
Obie Fernandez:
Yeah, happy to. So, I started the project in April of this year. I got my co-founder, Paula, involved who was probably one of the first serious industry people I spoke to about it. She’s got 20 years in the industry, including 15 as an artist manager. But before I go into the nitty gritty details, I mean, rcrdshp.com is a music platform for digital collectibles. It’s a way for artists to market and distribute their music to their fans in a way that really hasn’t been possible before. The reason is that, NFTs, non-fungible tokens on the blockchain, provide a guarantee of a limited edition status. So imagine you had a box set from your favorite artists and it had a serial number on it. Just like if you bought a nice print, it would have a serial number, right?
Like, five out of a thousand or something like that. You know that that limited edition status, the guarantee that you have that that’s accurate, is what gives that print value. And if you had a number one of a thousand, that would be a very valuable print. It would actually go for more money than a higher number, right? That’s the nature of collectibles with serial numbers. So what we do is we create digital collectibles for our artists and we sell them for them on the RCRDSHP platform. So if you’re a fan and you’re into collecting, you can buy your favorite artists’ collectibles on our platform. You can either buy them directly from us, in which case we sell them in sealed packs that visually look a little bit like a Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering pack, or Panini or Topps baseball cards, depending on your generation, you know. And the surprise element, you open it up and you don’t know what’s going to be inside.
Sometimes you get a little serial number, sometimes you get an artist that you really like. And if you don’t like what you get inside of it, you can sell it in a marketplace on a peer-to-peer basis. And there’s a thriving community. We have over $2 million in sales since launching at the end of August and thousands and thousands of people participating. We have over 4,000 people in our Discord and there’s 24/7 chat going on in the community, a lot of active community engagement. And they’re kind of, it’s all part of the game. You know, we talked about these new age platforms as being gamified, but not in like the 10 years ago gamification sense. This is a whole new beast, you know, where everyone is interacting.
Tullio Siragusa:
Very cool. So Gary D, if you’re watching, he’s always giving away NFTs on Twitter. If you’re watching, this is a place to go get some cool NFTs. So, all right, let’s go right into the topic today and see what we can learn. See what we can unpack. Kim, please.
Kim Lantis:
Sure. Thank you, Tullio, Carlos, and Obie especially, for joining us today. The topic of today’s show as chosen by you is “Electronic Music Fans and Creators Rising Together.” More specifically, after years of decline, how can music be made valuable again? My question, I guess, as we get started off is what decline are you specifically referring to as far as the value goes? And I know we’ve already touched on the NFTs, but how are we making music valuable again?
Obie Fernandez:
I’m so glad you asked. The decline we’re talking about is that, about 21 years ago, a product hit the market, which, the repercussions are still being felt. That product was called Napster.
Kim Lantis:
Oh, yeah. I was totally using Napster in my college dorm room.
Obie Fernandez:
A lot of us were, and it really changed the world, right? Since that time, the music industry has not recovered to the levels that they were at before, because the music industry used to sell merchandise that was quite expensive. In fact, they were criticized for making things like CDs so expensive, right? But that merchandise value, globally, plummeted over the course of the following decades to get to where we are now. There was a little blip of a recovery when Apple iTunes popularized buying MP3s, right. It made it easier to buy the MP3 than to pirate it. And for a little while, that was okay. But then with the advent of YouTube and Spotify and the other so-called digital streaming platforms, these big companies have shifted consumer behavior away from wanting to pay for music.
And they’ve turned it into a passive activity where the only revenue going to the creators is coming from ads. In the case of YouTube or subscriptions, in the case of some of the other services, but those subscriptions are very, very low, so. If you remember that a CD used to cost about $15, let’s say, for a new release, that’s what a consumer is paying now, you know, per month for unlimited music, right? The other really screwed up thing is that, due to the nature of the licensing deals that those platforms have with the industry, most of the music they collect goes to the top pop artists. So, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, you know, like those kinds of names, they’re making almost all of the money that is generated across the world. So what many listeners don’t realize is that even if, let’s say, you only listened to Banda all day, day in, day out, those banda artists are probably still getting one penny out of your $15 and the rest of the money is going to the world’s biggest pop stars.
So, you know, for niche artists, for regional artists, for genre based artists, and, you know, especially in electronic music, which is very fragmented across many different styles and things like that, it’s very, very difficult to make a living just based on royalties. You know, it is an absolute must to tour and then this little thing called COVID hit and no one was able to tour anymore. So a lot of those working artists got hit really, really hard. They weren’t able to make a living. They had to switch careers or drive an Uber. They had to sell assets. I have friends that were selling studio equipment, and these are not little artists, either. These are artists that have multi-decade spanning careers. In some cases, millions of fans. They didn’t do anything wrong, you know? It wasn’t that they made bad financial decisions. It’s just that the business model for working musicians is broken and it is broken severely. And this is not something that only us are talking about. Like, this is an industry wide discussion.
Carlos Ponce:
I got a question for you, Obie. You, just touched on finding new business models for creators and for musicians, specifically, an artist. I have a kid, and my kid he’s into video games and he plays one called Fortnite. And one of the things that I’ve noticed about Fortnite is that it’s interesting how they, Fortnite, host live events. And I’ve seen in these live events that they have, they feature musicians and pop artists and what have you. So that’s an, that’s sort of, to me, the way I see it at least, it’s a new venue for artists and for creators. That’s just one. Like Fortnite. One. Okay. So are there any more out there that you can think of that could be like in the front burner for musicians, creators, taking the Fortnite example?
Kim Lantis:
RCRDSHP, perhaps?
Carlos Ponce:
Why not?
Obie Fernandez:
Some of these platforms, like if you go look at what has succeeded on Fortnite, with these very big pop artists that are leveraging those platforms – great. Pop artists making more money. But that doesn’t solve anything for the 99% of the musicians and creators and brands that are struggling.
Tullio Siragusa:
That doesn’t help Banda at all.
Obie Fernandez:
It doesn’t help banda, it doesn’t help trance music, you know. It doesn’t help the niches that people really care about. And I sometimes go as far to say that the current business model is leading to wholesale cultural destruction, which sounds like very, very severe. But if we look at what I mean by that, you know, what I’m talking about is that if you’re trying to be creative and have your artistic career focus on something, that’s not commercially viable in the current model, you’re not going to be very long for that.
Like, you know, the emotional bandwidth and energy that you have to put into your day job, which you have to have otherwise you’re going to starve, means that you don’t get to actually produce that music. So that’s what I mean by wholesale cultural destruction. But what Fortnite has done is to provide evidence that consumers are willing to spend money on what seems like, to our generation, very silly things, right? Like your kid has spent money on skins for his gun in Fortnite, which doesn’t actually change the operation of the gun, right? And we’re talking about billions of dollars spent on these digital goods, which are just in a way prestige items. They don’t serve a functional utility even in their video game platforms. So that is part of the foundation of what we’re doing at RCRDSHP, which is to say, okay, we have generations coming up that are used to spending money on digital goods.
In some cases, they actually prefer the digital goods because they shun physical items. Physical items take up space. They have to be shipped. They collect dust. They can get lost, they can get broken, they can get stolen, right? I often talk about how, when I used to promote parties in Atlanta, my friend Rich Solarstone came down. I was one of the promoters, and one of the things we would do is to create posters for the fans. Well, I’m a very big Solarstone fan. So I grabbed one of those posters even though really, you know, as the promoter I shouldn’t have. But I got one of those, I snuck it into my coat. And when I walked outside it fell out of my coat into a puddle and it was ruined. So with the digital collectible that wouldn’t happen, you know?
Kim Lantis:
That’s what you get for breaking the rules, Obie!
Obie Fernandez:
That kind of tragedy wouldn’t happen. The kids know that, right? Like they appreciate that. And I think as we move into the future this going to become more and more intuitive for people to participate in supporting their fans in this way, you know with this digital merchandise.
Kim Lantis:
So I think that’s really smart. It’s all making sense to me now, this really amazing solution you’ve found to a lot of different problems, right? Just the shift in the business nature of the music industry itself, combating what one might call minimalism or this other cultural shift of not wanting or needing to have physical, and then just this attraction to digital assets. So let’s talk a little bit more about RCRDSHP, the type of digital assets that you have available. What does this look like? Even though if I might not actually be able to touch it, feel it, and how does tech play a role in that?
Obie Fernandez:
Well, the model for what our digital collectibles look like is really like a trading card or collectible trading card game. So on the surface, like if you’re looking at our marketplace, what you see is a series of card designs, and you can see the front and the back. Now, since it’s digital, the cool thing we can do is that if you buy that collectible, it actually has contents inside of it. The contents are only visible and accessible to the owner, which is really important. It’s like seeing a CD in the store, it’s sealed. You can look at the front, you can look at the back, but can’t get access to what’s inside.
Kim Lantis:
That was the best. Do you remember the emotion of like opening the CDs and looking to see what the disc looked like?
Obie Fernandez:
You know, people chatted us and they say that’s what it feels like. It feels like when they were kids and they would open CDs. I remember every CD, maybe you remember, every CD you had at a certain age? I remember almost every CD I had when I was a teenager, right? One of the reasons is that it cost a serious amount of money. I don’t come from money. So I had to, you know, work really hard to be able to afford to buy music.
Kim Lantis:
I cheated, I got Columbia House or whatever it was called. And I’d only utilize the, you know, the buy – I know it’s as bad as Napster!
Obie Fernandez:
No, I remember what you’re talking about. The thing where they would send you a CD.
Kim Lantis:
Buy ten, 15 CDs for $2 or something. And then you had to make a commitment to buy X number of CDs over X number of time.
Obie Fernandez:
But the ones that I bought, uh, you know, like I was really big into grunge at the time. So, Pearl Jam’s Ten, you know. I was also really into electronica. So like, you know, the Moby CD from back then. Anyway, but the point is now, you know, nowadays the problem for musicians is that music has become disposable. And if you think about what music was to us as consumers, back in the day, it wasn’t disposable – to most of us anyway, that cared about collecting music. And in fact, the music that we collected was part of our identity. It was part of our public identity to our friends and almost everyone of our age. You know, I’m kind of assuming here, but I’m 47 years old. Everyone in my generation can remember that in our rooms or living room or whatever, you would permanently show your CD collection or your record collection, right?
Tullio Siragusa:
Or your mixtape that you created.
Obie Fernandez:
It’s part of how you identify –
Tullio Siragusa:
That’s what you would give like a girlfriend, a mixtape that was like, “I love you.” You made a mixtape for them because you have to wait for the music to come on the radio and play. I mean, it was like a lot of work to create a mixtape!
Obie Fernandez:
I’m so glad you said that because it was an active experience, right? It wasn’t a passive experience. You had, you know, you had to be working that boom box with the two tapes and like you would dub the thing all together. You know what I’m talking about!
Kim Lantis:
And hope to God that you weren’t recording over something that you wanted to keep!
Tullio Siragusa:
Happened all the time.
Obie Fernandez:
You know, the problem, maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but the fact that that’s gone away is a problem, right? Because now that music has become a passive consumption, if you think about, if I say, “Alexa, play dinner music,” or “Alexa, I want, you know, uh, play music to go to sleep” or, you know, “play party music” or something like that, it is now a passive activity. I don’t even know what it’s going to play. I don’t know who the artists are. In some of the most egregious abuses in the industry, companies like Spotify are actually paying ghosts producers to make music. They don’t distinguish it from real artists. They put band names and things on it. This is fake music. These are fake bands. This is music that’s created by those platforms in order to dilute the royalties that they have to pay out, because if they own it, those royalties belong to them.
So they sneak that music into their playlists so that people listen to that instead of the music made by working artists. So that passiveness of how we consume music nowadays is a problem. It’s not going to go away. This is a genie that’s out of the bottle. It’s not going to come back. And even I admit that I use Spotify. You know, sometimes I listen to stuff through playlists. I’m not even sure what I’m listening to. We all do. And that’s okay. But some of us, and we’re talking about millions of people worldwide, are active music fans. We’d like to know what we’re listening to. We’d like to support our favorite artists. We spend money on their merchandise, on their CDs, on their vinyls, on going to their concerts. And it is that active fan base that we’re looking for, right? It’s a huge, critical mass of people worldwide. And we think that the future of their activity, their active fandom, that patronage is going to be done through platforms like RDRDSHP. Like without a doubt, in my mind, this has already happened. It’s so clear. You know, it’s like, we’re just in very early stages. It’s kind of like being in the nineties, you know?
Tullio Siragusa:
Obie, you made an interesting statement. I’m curious, you know, back in the day you had high fidelity fans invested in equipment, and very costly equipment, Nakamichi tape decks worth thousands of dollars, you know? Great vinyl players, thousands of dollars, amazing speakers to have the most immersive experience you possibly could at the time. I mean, I feel like that’s like a lost generation. Are you saying there’s still some that are actively involved in a similar way, investing in the, trying to create a more immersive experience and the merchandising is now enhancing that experience. Is that what you’re saying? There’s still those, even the younger generation, that are going down that path? What’s your thoughts?
Obie Fernandez:
I think what we’re doing is creating something that is reminiscent of that in a certain way, and yet thoroughly modern. Because of the way that you engage in and you create merchandise value for the musicians now, given that we’re in the 21st century, it doesn’t have to do with a fancy, you know, big speaker cabinet or listening room or something like that. It has to do with engaging online experiences.
Kim Lantis:
Giving them what they want, what they’re used to, what they’re already doing anyway, the sense of uniqueness, right? Which I think today’s generation is really hungry for.
Obie Fernandez:
RCRDSHP has engaging, fun features. There’s different, it kind of defies a 30 second elevator pitch, which is good and also bad sometimes. But in a good way, if you look at RCRDSHP from a certain angle, it is clearly a music platform. It is a place you can go to get music and support your favorite music artists. If you look at it from a different angle, you’re looking at the same thing, but from a different frame of reference, it’s a gamified engagement platform because our digital collectibles are not just music files. They are also pieces in different kinds of games that the people in the community play with each other with the platform. So there’s the collecting game. That’s like finding all of the different pieces of a set and putting it together. And that indicates to the artist that made that set, “Hey, you have a fan here. Someone that likes your stuff.”
So then that artist can have an interplay. They can talk to those fans, they can airdrop them special gifts. They can give them tickets to concerts. They can invite them out to dinner. You know, they can give them a special club online, like a special secret chat room. These are like affinity programs, that’s the formal name for this sort of thing, on a micro and very targeted scale. They don’t have to be micro per se, but they end up being like very, very specifically catered to a dynamic segment of fans. And in contrast to typical affinity programs, you know, like right now, I’m a million miler on Delta and I have very good status. I have miles associated with my account. I can’t take my frequent flyer, you know, card or whatever, my representation of that membership and sell it in a liquid market. But that’s essentially what we have on RCRDSHP, right? You have these affinity programs, you have these tokens of fan engagement and patronage, and if you don’t want it anymore, or if you need or want to sell it, you can. And someone will buy it from you. They’ll either buy from you because they’re a fan and they want the benefits or they’ll buy it from you in a speculative capacity.
Kim Lantis:
Right. It sounds sort of like a virtual, like a gacha game or like this, I don’t know – I know there’s probably some positive and negative connotations to that – but sort of tapping into this addictive nature of just the excitement, the, “What’s it going to be?” The surprise factor and kind of living off of this high of what’s coming next. Am I kind of on or off base here?
Obie Fernandez:
That’s kind of the whole NFT space. We consider ourselves kind of just outside the NFT space because we don’t put the focus on NFT. Like if you go to rcrdshp.com you won’t see NFT anywhere. There’s no emphasis on crypto or blockchain or whatever. The vast majority of our players are just using their credit card to buy digital collectibles. The reason we do that is that we don’t know how sustainable the current NFT craze is. And at best it’s going to go like this because, you know, peaks and valleys, because that is the nature of crypto and NFTs are crypto products. It’s boom-bust cycles and the predominant business model, no matter what anyone tells you for NFTs, is Ponzi scheme. And I say that without a shred of irony or comedy or whatever. Like basically a lot of these NFT projects only exist to pump up the net worth of the original people that were in there.
And we’re trying to do something very different. We’re trying to envision “What does the next five to 10 years of the music industry and fan engagement look like?” and then move towards that. NFT just happens to be a very useful technology, just like HTML, SQL, HTTP, you know, DDL, D decks. Like there’s all these fundamental technologies that come together into a product to enable a certain solution, certain technology. Right now we’re in the nineties with the internet. Once again. Like if you think back to that time, it was crazy. There were grandmothers buying “HTML in 21 Days” and making a website. Why were they making a website? Because it was fun. And it was a new thing, it was interesting. It was a way to show off something, right? And there’s a lot of that going on in the NFT space.
But the value, as far as we’re concerned, the value is in what that technology enables, the solution that you get from that, right? Nowadays, why doesn’t anyone talk about HTML? Unless you’re a front end designer or engineer or whatever, but like, unless it’s your job to know what HTML is you don’t know what HTML is because it’s utterly irrelevant, right? Like even though it’s the foundation of every single webpage that you look at in the world, every single one, it is that ubiquitous, no one knows what it is. No one cares about. I think that that’s a future that we’re heading to with NFT. It’s interesting now to early adopters, it’s interesting because there’s a bubble and a zeitgeist of people doing art as NFTs. What we’re doing is not NFTs. What we’re doing is a whole new product category of digital collectibles. We call it the next format. It’s like the thing that comes after the digital download.
Carlos Ponce:
Obie, we’re about to wrap up. Before we go, I’d like to ask you specifically about the culture that defines the company RCRDSHP. We might have people out there who could be watching, who might want to come work for you. What would you do? What would you tell them to make sure you reel in only the best of the best in talent? What’s great about the company?
Obie Fernandez:
Well, what’s great about the company, I mean, this is multiple things. One, it’s a rocket ship startup. I mean, we’re hiring about a person a day where I’m currently at about 85 people. I mean, we’re growing incredibly fast. We’re hiring across the board for almost every significant position. Two, we’re well-funded, very well-funded. So there is, you know, in contrast to some typical startups, there’s a degree of longevity and stability, despite the fact that we’re growing this fast. So that translates into a great opportunity. Like our worst case scenarios are still very good. Three, in terms of what we’re looking for, over 80% of us are DJs, producers, trained musicians, you know, people from the music industry. We love music. So what we look for, even for the HR director we’re currently looking to hire, we want someone who’s a fan, who’s a musician, who comes from the music industry, so that we remain authentic to our primary goal, which is to serve the interests of working musicians.
That’s what we’re all about, right? We think this new paradigm with fans engaging more closely with musicians, has legs. And we don’t want to lose the plot, right? It’s going to be, we’re moving into, like I said before, the next five to 10 years of the music industry. Our goal is to eventually be bigger than Spotify, bigger than all the digital streaming platforms put together, because the merchandise value of those digital streaming platforms is so poor. You know, everything repeats itself historically. We do think we can get back to a future where the audience does give value to quality. Right now it’s totally a quantity over quality kind of situation. We think that we’ll have an adverse reaction to that and a return to quality. And when that happens, we’ll be very well positioned. So we’re looking for people that share that vision.
That’s a huge plus. That love music that, that love, you know, we’re moving beyond electronic music. You know, not immediately, not next week, but the company, as we talked about before the show, is called Let the Music Pay. And we are moving beyond electronic music. The main reason we’re working on electronic music right now is because we’re all DJs, those of us that started the company are working on it. This is where our people are. This is the people we know how to talk to. But as we grow and expand, we are expanding into other genres, into hip hop, into rock, other areas, so that eventually we can cover the whole spectrum of music fans.
Tullio Siragusa:
Well Obie, it’s been really great to have you as our guest. We’re over time. A lot to take in and to look forward to. We’ll definitely have to stay in touch to see how this progresses along. Seems as though the future of music could be bright with a solution like RCRDSHP. So congratulations! And I’m sure those watching in the industries are, have a lot to be thankful for, knowing that there’s people like you looking out for their future. So stay with us as we go off the air just a minute. Carlos, we got one more show this week, right? Tomorrow? What do we got coming up?
Carlos Ponce:
That is correct, Tullio. Tomorrow we have a conversation with Benji Koltai, the Co-Founder and CEO of Galley. The topic is going to be “Recipes: The Center of the Food System.” Why food data is the key to unlocking efficiency and sustainability in the food system. So we’re looking forward to this conversation. Join us tomorrow, right here on dojo.live at 12:00 PM Pacific, everyone. Don’t miss it. Have fun, be safe.
