Adam Torres and Tatiana DeMaria discuss the music economy.
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Show Notes:
In this episode, Adam Torres and Tatiana DeMaria, Founder of Supafanatix, explore the new music economy and how musicians can participate.
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About Tatiana DeMaria
Tatiana DeMaria is a seasoned Web3 entrepreneur & musician using Web3 to disrupt creative industries and help artists thrive. As a career musician and with several years in Web3 consulting for companies, brands and artists on adopting blockchain tech, Tatiana found herself at the intersection of music, business and emerging technologies. In this extremely unique position and intimately aware of the pain points artists face, Tatiana founded Supafantix: a Web3 platform for musicians and their ecosystems. She is currently heading up the Web3 division at nacci developing AI-powered tech and Web3 capabilities for artists, businesses and brands, as she focuses on disrupting the creator economy and adding new value streams to this rapidly changing landscape through Supafanatix and other platforms. As a Web3 KOL Tatiana aka TDMCrypto has developed a large social media following educating on Crypto and all things Web3. As a musician and Warped Tour fan favourite, Tatiana wrote and released 2 charting singles by age 18, played 1,000 live shows globally, and has worked with brands like Pepsi, Marvel and Universal Studios. Owning her own masters, she has built successful independent businesses around her music and is looking forward to expanding her impact while helping others do the same with the power of web3. Her upcoming album release is scheduled for 2023. Founder of Supafanatix Head of Web3 at Nacci Web3 KOL @TDMCrypto Fun fact: Tatiana Minted and sold the first ever guitar solo NFT on the Blockchain.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and today I am live in Santa Monica, California at AI Vibes. This is an amazing event. Tal Navarro and her team put on a spectacular event. And I caught up with Tatiana DeMaria, who was on one of the panels earlier.
And I was like, I gotta have her, gotta have her on the show. So first off, Tatiana, how are you doing today? I’m doing well. Thank you. It’s a, it’s an enjoyable event. Some great speakers. So it’s been great so far. Thanks for Tal, to Tal for putting it on. Oh, amazing. Amazing. And what, what was your panel about?
It was about AI and creativity, but specifically in music. So AI and music in general. Hmm. But what’d you get out of it? Like for the, for the audience that couldn’t make it and that are watching this at home next year come, but what, what’d you get out of it? Well, I think what, what anyone from the public could, could get out of it is a variety of things, because right now, today, people are very, very focused on generative AI.
So for example, open AI came out with this with well, large language model, kind of a, an infrastructure that a lot of companies could then say, ah, we can generate a lot of assets in any kind of industry based on this particular model. Right? So we can generate thousands of images. We can generate movies, we can generate music, we can generate.
Content from existing content out in the world. And so that’s been such a large focus and thousands of AI companies came out based on this one model saying, we can now do this. We can now do this. And so it’s very, very fragmented. Our company takes a very different approach. I founded a company called super fanatics.
And what we do is we use AI, we use generative AI, but we use predictive AI not to generate. Content of ready existing content because that’s, it’s great. Yes, we do do some of that on the backend, but a lot of the generative AI is an enhancement, so it can make things easier to source. It can make, if you’re, if you’re a movie or you have.
Videos on YouTube where you’re creating content and you want library music and you want it to match the emotion you want it to follow visuals. Great. That can help you source it. So there’s a lot of great uses for it. But at the same time, we have a music industry that has massive fucking problems.
And so our focus is less sort of on this enhancement and more on the problem solving, which to us is, is much more needed just in terms of our passion and where we like to focus. So what a lot of people don’t realize is that. Artists, music artists are the most engaged with celebrities on planet earth.
They have a lot of viable assets to sell and they have fans wanting to connect with them, wanting to buy, wanting to come to their shows yet 99. 8 percent of professional musicians are. Earn less than $50,000 a year. Mm. And so most of your favorite musicians are broke and people don’t realize this.
Mm-Hmm. They’re like, you have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram or a million followers. Yeah. And the reason is because right now, these musicians Mm-hmm. Have to become full time entrepreneurs, full time content creators, fight algorithms every day, manage 15 different apps to reach their audience.
And so yes, social media has made everything more accessible, but now what you have is musicians. Who every musician that might be professional is on the exact same platform and exact same playing field as anyone in their bedroom who wants to sing on camera, which is fine. That’s great. I love that there’s that exposure, but when you’re actually trying to monetize and live and you have an audience, you have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram, you have real followers.
You have people that love your music, but you can’t connect to them because the algorithm on Instagram is only showing you to 1 percent of your audience. Hmm. How do you actually monetize? And you’re like, but I have all these things to sell and I know my fans want them, but I’ll put out a new single and 99 percent of my fans will have no idea I’ve released it.
They won’t know I’m playing in their city. And so I have to constantly, constantly be posting. And even then I might reach 10 percent of my audience. So musicians today. Become full time entrepreneurs, full time content creators. They have no more time left to write. They’re very stressed about, I have to go viral because I have to reach billions of plays, sorry, billions of people just to get billions.
I have to reach billions of people to get millions of streams. To make thousands of dollars. And so that’s a huge undertaking, trying to have everyone on earth, see your stuff just to generate thousands of dollars. And that’s because for example, we know that Spotify, this is a gross approximation, but for a million plays, we’ll play, we’ll pay approximately 3, 000.
And so if you’re an artist that is splitting that with co writers, producers, your management gets thin real quick and you, it might take you three months to generate a million plays. Yeah. So you’re like in three months. Cause people will say, why don’t you hire a team then to manage you do all of this?
And I’m like, well, a manager doesn’t necessarily want to work full time for three months, but wait for you to get to a million plays. To generate 150. So there’s, there’s a very, very broken system that doesn’t actually need to be that broken. And so I’ve been an artist and a professional musician my whole life.
So I was very lucky. Some background, I guess when I was 15, I wrote my first album, 15, 16, and I had two charting singles in the UK, but I was independent. So I owned my music and I owned my rights. And so, I went on tour and I was managing the business and I, I had a manager, very young, I learned a lot and then.
He retired from management and as a teenager, I kept managing and kept building. And so I did the warp tour in the us, which I love. It was a fun tour. It was the first time I did it. And I’m like, I just made a hundred thousand dollars in two months on the warp tour. Yet this label is offering me a hundred thousand dollars to own my music and my rights in perpetuity.
And I was like, hang on a second. What if I just built this as my business? And owned my rights and had that freedom. So I wasn’t beholden to to a label structure or, you know, very common is you’ll record an album, but we won’t release it unless as Halsey was saying today, very publicly or a year ago, I’ve sold whatever it was.
A hundred million albums are, I can’t remember it. So don’t quote me on that. She sold a lot of records, millions of albums, but her label is saying, We’re not going to release your new single unless you have a viral or you fake a viral moment on TikTok. And so even the labels, even the big institutions are beholden to social media attention because again, everyone is in this archaic model of you need to make, reach billions of people to generate any income.
So what we do is we flip it. You don’t need to reach billions of people to generate income. You could. Take the thousand true fans model, have a thousand fans spending a hundred dollars on you in a year and make a hundred thousand dollars and musicians. Or not making that. So what we do is we basically, we’ve built predictive AI and AI tech over the last six years, but we have an extensive background with my co founder on data analytics and behavior.
And so we combine that with my experience in web three. So I’ve been in web three and blockchain for over a decade now. And we’ve basically built a platform that essentially allows musicians to wake up in the Mm hmm. Be who they are, create their music and we help them 10x their income by empowering and optimizing their business with our tech and our expertise over the years.
And we do that leveraging predictive and generative AI and also blockchain. And we do that. Because we also have a fundamental belief that music helps heal. It is so important for people. It’s important for the creators and being very passionate about music and also being a musician myself, we musicians are in pain.
Yeah, they’re stressed, they’re struggling to survive and the music we’re hearing is changing to music designed to go viral out of desperation to make money instead of artists feeling like they can create what they want to create. Because if they do that today, there is a very high risk of them just not making any income and they feel that stress.
So if we can help fix that 10 X your art, your income. Across your, your whole business as a musician, not just the music. We focus on every aspect of your business as a musician. If we can help make that simple for you then that’s our way of having impact in the world for the better. Again, everybody has their own way.
That’s that’s us. Now you had that early influence of your manager. It might even been before this. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to superimpose this, but did you consider yourself like entrepreneurial pretty young on, even outside of just being a musician, I’m just curious, were you. And then did that interest you like business just in general?
Yeah, cause your platform and I’ll tell you why I asked you by your platform is amazing and not everybody has that drive or not. And I don’t mean drive cause it’s, it’s not a trade off. It doesn’t, I’m not trying to pass a judgment one way or the other, but some people just don’t have that part of it.
They don’t want to do it for whatever reason does not judging, but your platform solves that. So I’m just curious, like, did you have that early on? Like the business side, like you just were interested or curious or. Yeah. I mean, I, I think. As a young age, for me, my, my core driver is freedom. And I, when I was very young, I was under age, I was 15, 16, and I was promoting nightclubs in England.
And I would have, you know, the highest. And nightclubs at the time. And so I would get, you know, 10 for anyone I brought to the nightclub. So I would bring 80 people. So you were hustling. That’s amazing. Okay, let’s go. And so what was really cool was I never thought of it as entrepreneurial. I think I just had a desire to have financial freedom at a young age and I would just do what seemed logical.
And so. I think that’s always kind of just been my approach, whether it’s a bit dogmatic or not, it’s just, I want that, that seems to make sense. Let’s go for it. And then I was very lucky to meet that manager and meet various people that I learned from along the way. And I think that I’ve then spent 17 years in the music industry.
Frustrated. So I was very lucky to have my dreams come true. Touch wood and tour and have the charting singles and have audience and, and keep my freedom and actually have completely creative control over my career. But the more things move to online, my space shuts down. So you lose your audience and then you’re now online and you’re going, okay, Facebook managing, and you realize that your entire day to day is filled with Managing online apps.
And I’m like, I haven’t fucking made music in two months. And I know that I’m more used to doing that than a lot of my musician friends. So imagine. Imagine like, yeah, you have this new thing here. It’s like learning TikTok. I’m not going to compare it to an instrument, but you have a new type of instrument like that.
You have to learn that. Well, actually, I love that you bring that up because I think a huge misconception today that people have. So I accidentally went viral making crypto content in the pandemic. I just, I was. Killing hangouts, explaining blockchain to my friends, it became really boring, really fast. So I was like, I’ll put this online and people can watch.
And it went viral and I became a content creator in crypto and the life doing that is vastly different to being a musician online. So there’s a lot of businesses going, we’re creating tools for the content creator and they lump musicians in with that. And I’m like, it is vastly different. Not the same.
And so, so we look at it and we go, that’s a very broken model. So yes, there are things that musicians can benefit from, but actually it can also stifle the musician more. And what tech has a tendency of doing is tech that solves one problem can exacerbate another problem in another part of that industry.
And so you have a lot of tech companies doing one thing. We’re generating images. We’re generating music. We’re generating this. We’re helping you with that. Patreon will help you monetize your 8 a month. So you now have 50, 000 apps to get through your day, 50, 000 different ways of using it. And these are ways for businesses to launch and get an exit.
And that’s great. Except I think my focus is because I was immersed in having to do all of these things every day, I manually set up structures that I could get through my day. And before I was using tech automate these things myself so I could run the entire business like I would want a fully fledged label, generate marketing income.
And at the same time, be a musician. And it was tremendous pressure, but by building those. Processes. We then started building tech around those processes and we co founded with my co founder Deanna McPhatter, who’s brilliant. We started building tech and building AI tech and building blockchain tech to go.
How can I wake up in the morning and all this entire business that I’ve built? How can I automate that? How can I have it be authenticated and secure? Mm-Hmm. Using blockchain. Yeah. So simply put, a musician can come to our platform and we’re not live yet, but we have some Mm-Hmm. Clients and we’re rolling out soon.
Our priority wasn’t to rush to market now in 20, this is, since this will be out there forever, it’s evergreen. And in 2024 we sang just so that yes. In a few months we are rolling out. Yeah. Yeah. So, so when you listen to this, go check it out. Either way, go check it out. Either way, . Yeah. So we. So we’re excited to put that out there and I’ve completely spaced on the point I was trying to make.
I hope it didn’t suck. I know what I was going to say. So essentially an artist can come to our platform and tell us what they want to achieve. And so if, for example, pick a goal, I want to generate a hundred thousand dollars at me as an artist. I want to make a hundred thousand dollars. That’s my goal.
Hmm. What our platform will be able to do is tell you exactly what you need to do to achieve that exactly how you need to, to achieve that and then help you automate that so musicians can achieve their outcome. And so we use AI to, to help people, to help musicians get through the stuff. Again, when people say just hire a team, it’s very hard to find.
So musicians can feel stuck. Okay. We’ll help you there. So it’s almost like a business in a box in a way where we, where we’ve been doing this for a long, long time and have really tailored this. A lot of our tech has been validated with us doing this kind of thing with brands like Colgate and Samsung and in different industries and Pandora jewelry.
And so we’ve brought all our tech to the music industry and we’ve built extensively to cover an artist’s business in its entirety. So that’s, you know, like everyone, I think the best we can do is, is build. And everything comes down to execution. Everything comes down to, you know, what you’ve really built.
And so I, I’m really proud of our models. I’m really excited as a musician. And I just, I’m excited that it was built by a musician because I’ve looked at, no, I, I mean, I’ve never been a musician myself, but when I, when I moved to LA, I’m from Michigan originally, but when I moved to LA, a lot of my friends are musicians and I would say.
I’ve always been the suit and tie guy. And I’ve always been, if I was involved in something creatively, it’s usually like as a producer, something, the business part of it. Right. They dragged me into stuff. Right. But when I think about it, like I wasn’t the right person nor did I, I wanted to help them, so I would help them, but I don’t, I won’t say I didn’t want to do it, but, but in all reality, like I didn’t have any experience.
I just know business. So if we had something like Super Fanatics back then, then it’s like they wouldn’t have had to, like, stretch their skill set, and I saw the genuine pain, and that’s why, like, not imposing this on you, but it’s genuine pain that I saw them going through when they had to start it.
Figuring out these other things and I’ll, I’ll speak for them, not you, but they were, it took away from their creativity. It took away from their music. It took away from like every minute they had to start thinking about how to use a phone to stream was a minute that they weren’t writing a song or they weren’t like pouring out their heart or getting into whatever.
Process they had to get into actually in order to do you don’t because you can’t switch back and forth It’s not like oh, let me let me do a post real quick Okay, and now I’m gonna write or let me do this like you as a mood is advised So you’re pouring out your soul like so you don’t get to jump back and forth from that technology can be a barrier It is, it actually is a barrier in the sense that, you know, we can say you need the vibe, it’s actually a lot more than that.
Our brains do not work to shift from analytical to creative like that. And so when you say every minute lost is vital, it’s also every ounce of energy lost because the, and on top of that, it’s something artists don’t necessarily do natively. You’re in a creative mindset and this is why. So many businesses advertising, you have the creative team and you have the team managing the creative process.
That doesn’t mean the managers can’t jump over and be very creative. It’s just in that moment. It’s different when you think about do not edit while you’re creating create then come and edit So I think that a lot of the time people underestimate how much energy and the stress you Also, your brain does not function well and cannot get into a creative flow when you’re stressed So what we’re doing is creating very stressful states for musicians and then saying now create.
And what’s happening is they’re feeling even more stifled because then they, they’re like, it’s hard enough to, to create music and create something people want to listen to in the first place. Like that’s a miracle in itself to start at a blank slate and create something. that people actually want to hear and that strikes a chord for whatever or whatever they’re aiming for.
That’s hard enough. Like I, I would, if I had to like be behind this mic right now and create something like a, no, I can have a conversation that’s different, very, very different as a creator. If I had to like now create an idea and or some music or a piece that somebody that I’m going to put the pressure on myself, if that’s my process, that I want that song to last to be remembered or to move somebody emotionally or physically, if they want to dance or anything, that’s pressure.
It’s as soon as you include the commercial, I’m sweating. Just thinking of it right now, Tatiana. No, I mean, I think everyone’s creative and I think that whenever someone finds their comfort to express it, I’m not a musician. I’m like, Hey, there’s, we all have, our brains work with the senses. People who, who have this affinity for taste might end up in the restaurant business, people who have an affinity for sound might end up in music.
I have friends that were so visually driven. I’m not, I’m more auditory. So. Essentially, we have that as an outlet, but as soon as you put the commercial piece in and it’s survival, we talk about this all day. When you’re in fight or flight, you can’t then relax and actually channel things in the same way.
But I would also say, you know, so as much as everybody’s creative, actually as humans, I think that’s such an important part of our existence and our wellness. When a banker is at a job being a banker, I’m like, do you want to go into his working hours and be like, I want you to make my music. He’s in a completely different headspace.
And I’m like, stop asking musicians to be the full time suit and then say, now make my music. Cause you’re going to get this botched identity. And actually. Yeah. You’re going to have musicians creating cerebrally. And so I think that generative AI is very important. It’s showing where the tech can go. And there’s a lot of use cases we can have.
So there’s great things there too, but creating from a prompt is not as healing as playing an instrument. And so just for the creator’s wellbeing, that process of creating cerebrally, I want to hear this kind of thing. I can generate it and you can feel it, but it is very, very different and creates a very different fabric in society when people are cerebrally creating versus emotionally creating.
So all the AI, I think AI is going to help us tremendously with survival with just survival as a species, but at the same time. AI is the jump to AI is much greater in my opinion than the jump from Neanderthal to homo sapien. We have an entire. Re imagination, re imagination of our species. And so the future, in my opinion, will be survival of the fittest and we will not be the fittest unless at this point with combining humans with AI, we are able to kind of.
Envision that and create another path for ourselves. And so anyway, all of this to say that there’s tremendous pros in AI, but it really is what we’re going to feed it, how we’re going to train it and the use cases. And I just think that there’s a lot of problems that can be solved. That’s where we like to focus.
And I think currently there’s a lot of AI that is just, is looking to sort of be a company that has one lane. We can do this sell and move on. And I think we have to be mindful. That there’s short term AI, which is very useful, and long term AI, which we, we need to have a longer vision on. Hmm. Amazing. I think that’s a great way to end it.
This has been absolutely amazing. Tatiana, I want you to look into the camera, tell everybody where they can follow you. You’re listening to your music, super fanatics. How do they get updates for that? Like, like how do people connect? Yeah. So super fanatics S U P A F A N A T I X. We are actually having a bit of a rebrand coming.
So it’s super fanatics. com for now. But to keep up with any of that, you can follow me on any socials at Tatiana De Maria. And for anyone who’s interested in blockchain, well, no, let’s just keep it to Tatiana Dimory. Easiest place I respond to messages online, but thanks for having me. Appreciate the conversation.
I appreciate your insight on your musician friends. I think a lot of people out there have musician friends that struggle. It’s really nice to hear that. And thank you for sharing. Thank you. And for everybody that’s listening, Hey if you haven’t done it yet, this is your invitation, hit that subscribe button.
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