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What's up, what's up, what's up?
Freedom Tech.
Welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend.
My name is Marks, and I am your host every week.
We're here every Friday.
And right now it is 1600 UTC.
Try to go live by 1530, but sometimes a bit late.
Welcome and join us this week as we talk about a new, another Freedom Tech tool,
Another thing that you can try out this weekend to make yourself a bit more
open in your technology usage.
We are live on TFTC. We're live on my own X.
We're live on YouTube's also live on ZapStream. Well,
hopefully let's go check it real quick.
ZapStream has been having some problems lately. Let's go take a look.
Still not live there yet, but let's keep looking today.
we're doing a great show. I'm really excited for this one because it's something that's near and
dear to my heart and that is music. We're going to be talking about music. I've got my 311 shirt on.
Let's see. Oh man. Yeah, there we go. 311. Throwing it up. Looks like we're live on ZapStream.
Make sure we're live on the other channels. Let's go hit up something here.
Got my notification that I'm live on X.
Boom.
Okay.
We're looking good there.
Right on.
I'm just going to trust.
Trust that we're live elsewhere.
Let's get to YouTube.
How's everybody feeling today?
How's your Friday?
How's your week been?
Mine has been lots of ups and downs.
Mostly ups, though.
Feeling pretty good.
If you don't know, I co-founded a startup called Maple AI.
We also go by the name Open Secret.
We used to be Mutiny Wallet.
Lots of different names, lots of different things we've been working on.
But feeling pretty good this week.
We've had some good traction going.
We got a big retweet this morning, which was awesome.
Feels good.
So things are flying.
All right.
Well, we got some people come into the stream now.
So let's go ahead and really kick it off.
my outline for the show today. I usually use, use maple to help me come up with my outline.
But today I'm actually going to like follow up pretty closely, mostly because this is a topic
that I could go on for hours and hours and hours. And I want to stay focused. I want to, I want to
make sure that I'm not just meandering and wandering all the time because we're talking
about music. We're talking about independent music. I'm someone who listens to music every
single day. So many of my like best memories growing up as a kid, as a teenager, in my young
adult life, so many memories are tied to music. And when you listen to a song, it can take you
right back into the way that you were feeling. And so music has this really powerful connection.
It can take us out of a spot, put us into a spot, help us have the type of energy that we
want to have in that moment, whether it's high level, low level. Music just has this real power.
And it's also a social thing.
It can bring us together with others, something to bond over, which we really need this day
and age because there's so many things out there that we don't bond over anymore.
So many different streaming shows out there.
I remember when we used to only have a few shows that were on TV and everybody kind of
watched the same ones.
And so we always had stuff to talk about.
Now it seems like there's so many things that we don't even know what to talk about anymore.
So let's go ahead and jump in.
I'm going to share my screen and we're going to start talking about independent music,
talking about freedom music, and specifically we're going to discuss Wavlake today.
So got my screen sharing there. There it is. You can see my outline as well.
And then one more thing here.
There we go. Okay. Make myself a bit smaller. Sweet. This is Wavelike. This is Maple on the
left. My plug. This is Maple AI. Maple is a private encrypted AI. It's ChachiBT, but with
privacy. I can't make it any more obvious. Name that song. That's really it. And so if you want
to get it, you can get it for free, just like a lot of people use ChatGPT for free. And instead
of giving your life away, giving away all your secrets, all your innermost thoughts to some big
company that is trying to harvest all your data, train on that data, and then sell it to companies
and governments, why not use the same experience, but keep all the data to yourself? So that's
Maple. Go to try maple.ai. Okay, so first we're going to talk about independent music. Now,
Independent music has been around forever since the beginning of time.
That's how music got started.
But then obviously it got overtaken by large record companies,
large producers, distribution channels,
especially back when music was more physical and you had to get it distributed.
You had only a few radio stations,
and then you had to start getting your vinyl records and then cassettes, CDs,
get these into stores, get them into Tower Records.
Any Tower Record fans out there?
Let me open up the chat.
What's up chat? Let me get that going so I can see all right sweet. Yeah, how about in the chat today?
Once you post some of your favorite musicians
They can be big named musicians like I've got 311 shirt on or if you have independent music musicians that you like
Go ahead and drop them in here. Let's let's get some let's get some signal going. We've got a few hundred
viewers welcome everybody
Yeah, I want to discover some new music today.
So drop me some deep cuts or drop me even just some mainstream artists that maybe I haven't listened to in a while.
But anyways, yeah.
So back when you had to get your music into Tower Records or The Warehouse or some of these music stores, Sam Goody.
Man, I'm forgetting all the names now.
But we used to go to music stores.
And there were all tons of local ones, right?
In town, we have Waterloo Records here in Austin.
Um, so yeah, we, we used to go to music stores actually like really miss that.
It's something that I would love to try and recreate as I think about businesses to start
and things that I would love to build right now.
I'm building a confidential AI and I'm building a software tool that tries to help bring people
more freedom in their personal life and in their work life.
But eventually I'd love to do something in the physical space.
And I still have this romantic idea kicking around in my head that I want to somehow reinvent the music store in the modern era.
Some way that we can bring people back together to enjoy music together, even though we're all just streaming it, right?
Like there's nothing physical that you buy anymore.
The only time people buy physical music now is to get like the special, you know, orange glittery vinyl record or the pink one or the purple one.
I'm just looking at colors on the screen in front of me right now.
Some kind of collectible that they can hang on their wall and never actually listen to.
Really, they're just going to stream it in some app on their phone when they're at the gym.
So I would love to try and bring that back.
I think that'd be cool.
Haven't quite cracked how that would work yet.
It probably has to have some element of coffee or boba involved so people come together and
enjoying something along with the music.
I don't know.
I think there's something there.
Same with book reading.
right let's make reading books cool again okay so what is Wavlake well Wavlake is trying to be
a streaming service but for everybody else so if you don't have a big name contract if you
want to actually connect directly with your fans Wavlake is for you now there used to be
something called band camp it probably still is around band camp is away in like the in the 2000s
and the aughts, if you will, in the 2000s and maybe the teens, you could upload your music there
and have somewhat of a direct connection, but it was really just mostly for like downloading the
songs, and people could maybe, I think you could get payments, like people could pay you with their
credit card if they wanted to, but it was okay, and I'm speaking not as a musician myself, but I
I've got a pretty strong connection to an independent band that has tried to go this route
and we're actually going to log in I've I'm able to log in as them here on Wavelength so I can show
you what the experience is like for them but it's been really difficult to have a go as an
independent musician you don't get you don't get played on the streaming services and even if you
do, you make fractions of a penny. And so you can't survive off of that. And then if you want
to do a show and you want to get booked at any of the meaningful venues, well, you have to go
through Live Nation and you have to go through Ticketmaster. That's just the way it is. They've
bought up all the venues. They even bought up all the merch companies, or I shouldn't say bought up,
but they have a strong connection to basically they are collecting on the venue fee. They're
on the merch they take like i've heard upwards of 30 maybe even more of the merch sales as well so
it used to be that musicians musicians would make money off their music but then napster came about
and people started sharing music online and so the musicians had to find other ways to make
music and so they make money so they did it by through concerts and they made a lot of money
off their concerts but then companies came in and started taking all that from them so then they're
they're like, well, we'll make money off our merch. But then now the merch booth is also
siphoning, Live Nation is siphoning money away from the merch booth. So
it's become really difficult. Some of this, some of this I learned at earlier this year,
we had an independent music summit here in Austin at Bitcoin Park. And they talked a lot about this.
They had local musicians. They had people from, from venues that talk about just how difficult it
is. So, Wavlake and others, Fountain is another one, businesses that are trying to help solve this
problem and really give the power back to the musicians. So now, with something like Wavlake,
musicians can post the music on there, and then fans can listen to it, and fans can pay money
directly to the musician. And we'll talk about that, but they're able to, if they like a song,
they can boost a song or zap a song and immediately send money using Bitcoin, but they can send money
from them as a fan in the app to the musician and uh there's not really anybody in between
Wavlake takes a small amount i think it's 10 let's look let's look at the faq real quick
but yeah i think it's 10 how much does it cost to use Wavlake charges a flat 10 fee on all
earnings this helps cover the cost of development hosting and payment management that's it if you
are trying to stream on Spotify or Apple Music, they're taking way more than 10% and they're
not really giving you much. You're barely getting anything. They're giving you a ton of
potential exposure, right? Obviously you're on major platforms, but so many artists that I have
talked to and that I've listened to in interviews have said that they've made more money on
platforms like Wavlake and Fountain in just a few months than they have in years on all the
the streaming platforms combined. So cool platform here. Let's see. All right. So you can play any
track instantly. There's no DRM. That's a big part of this too, is you can download the songs
yourself. So you can come on here, you can stream it. They've got apps on iPhone and Google. So you
can stream it just like you would any other, um, any other streaming service, but you can also just
download the songs and have them on your laptop, on your phone, totally free from DRM. You can
remix them if you want to. You can publish your own music podcast. You can use them in a music
podcast or sorry, in your own podcast. So if you just have a regular interview podcast and you want
some cool music to play, like as intro music or outro music, it's available for download. You
always, you need to check the license. I would, if I were you, I would just check the license and
make sure that it's okay. But most of the music I've come across on Wavlake just has an independent
license. The cool thing though, is if you are doing it in your podcast, you can say during this
moment when the song is playing, I want you to share any proceeds coming in to my podcast with
this musician. You can share a hundred percent, you can share 90%, you can share 20, whatever you
want to do, it's called a split. So you can do a split. So if you have a podcast 2.0 podcast,
podcasting 2.0 podcast, then as people are boosting your show or streaming Bitcoin,
streaming sats into your show during those few minutes or those seconds, I think it has to be
like at least a minute, but during that time that that song is playing, divert the funds directly
to the artist. It's pretty cool. You can't do that. You can't do that on Spotify. You can't
do that on Apple podcasts. It's just not possible. And it would be super cool if more musicians,
bigger musicians started posting stuff here too, and allowed you to do that, right? But there's so
many, there's so many lawyers in between like a major artist and the music getting to you.
And so many distribution deals that have been signed that it's, it's even a wonder that music
is actually available for streaming on any of these platforms. Sometimes I can't believe that
they've actually made it happen. So what can you do here? So first off, you can upload music of
your musician. They have Wavlake Radio where you can just listen to random stuff. Party mode,
I'm not sure what that is, but let's look. So they've got their own like top 40s. What kind
of music is on here? There's a lot of AI stuff, right? People are making AI music.
And it's not exactly my thing. I prefer a real musician who maybe is using AI to help them out.
I can't believe I just said real musician because people are going to say, well, AI musicians could be real too.
But, you know, I still want that human experience.
So here's one of my favorites is Ollie.
Let me play it.
I've got my speaker here, so I'm going to hold it up to the microphone so you can hear it.
But we'll start streaming it.
How'd you hear that? All right. He said, I never knew the AI lyrics to compete.
Right on cue. So that one's cool. Here's another one. Ainsley Costello. She's probably one of the
most famous and popular people here on, on Wavlake. So she's got more of a poppy type feel.
This one's called X-Less.
okay just got a taylor swift kind of vibe going on right so very poppy it's fun fun stuff and
And then another one of my favorites is Man Like Quex.
Man Like Quex is dope, hails out of Tanzania, and sends some sats over his way too.
And that song is actually way more rocking.
Usually Man Like Quex has got like dope beats with hip hop going on, but he's very versatile.
So yeah, they've got lots of songs on here you can check out.
Then what do we have? We have the new charts. So these are new songs just coming straight off the presses. And then you have music shows. So these are, these are basically podcasts, right? But they're totally focused on music. So people can can do their own. A big one is called Phantom Power Music Review. So every week they go over some of the top songs. There's another one that's called Boostagram Ball. Where'd that one go? Is that one done?
Let's see here.
Well, they've got music shows and podcasts.
Sometimes I don't really know the difference between the two, but those are there.
So you can get those here on Wavlake, but you can also get them on Fountain.
So Fountain is an app we've talked about before, Fountain FM.
They also have the ability to do music podcasts, and it integrates really tightly with Wavlake.
I can't show you the Fountain studio.
Can I?
Yeah, it would be difficult right now.
But if I showed you the fountain studio where you can create your RSS feed and do your episodes
on there, they have really nice tight integration with Wavlake where you can search for songs
and then tag those songs and stick them in there and you can set your value block, your
split to automatically send money over to them.
All right.
What does this look like as a user?
Dang it, I wanted to share my app screen, but I don't think I'll be able to.
I forgot to set that up before the stream.
So the app honestly looks very much, let's see if I can just bring up a video.
So Wavlake iOS app.
All right, fine, start page.
I want to show you what the app looks like.
very normal
we'll go to the app store listing
I don't want to open up the page
whatever okay
no I just want the website
dang it
not going to give me it
so frustrating
oh well okay let's do they are open source by the way another great freedom tech thing
maybe they got a screenshot on here nope no screenshot but you can build the app yourself
if you want to get that freedom tech joy going on in your music um maybe the android app will
show me some screenshots here we go all right let's look at these
okay so
as you can tell this
very normal, very similar to something like Spotify. And then it's cool because you can
start to favorite things. So as I go through, I can build out a library of music. So
rather than, well, rather than like going to the store and buying music, I can go on here.
And when I like a song, let's see. So let's say that we've got, here's Angelic Costello again.
So let's see, I've got this one up on the screen. I can hit this little heart button
and that favorites it and adds it to my library on Wavlake. And then I can build up my own
playlist. I can also, another thing I love to do is if I favorite a song, then I will click over
here on this little boost thing. And that allows me to send some money. So if I hit boost, now I
can send some Bitcoin over to Ainsley and I can set the amount that I want. Shows me how much it
is in US dollars, just so I have a frame of reference. And then I hit zap and that sends
money directly from me to her. Nobody in between. Wavlake takes a 10% cut, but they're offering
such an awesome platform. I'm cool with that. But most of it goes directly to her and that's
awesome. And then she might have her own split set up. So as an artist, she has her Wavlake
studio and she can set up how she wants to split things. So if she has a music producer,
if she has a studio musicians that recorded with her, she could set up some kind of split. So as
music comes in, maybe half goes to her as the songwriter, and then certain percentages filter
down to everybody else. And they all have their Bitcoin wallets and they automatically get paid.
And it isn't this thing where she has to settle up later and say, all right, how much came in?
Let's look at the royalty fees coming in from radio terrestrial broadcasts and, you know,
do an audit and stuff. No, you don't have to audit. It just happens real time. And it's immediate.
and it's just automatic. It's pretty cool. So the Wavelike app is awesome. These screenshots
actually feel like are slightly out of date. I think it looks a little bit newer than this
in some of the features that I've used, but they've got top tracks. You have top 40s things.
You can search. They have all the different genres on here. You can find pretty much anything
you want to on here. Yes, you are not going to find big mainstream musicians. You're not going
to find Taylor Swift on here. That's just how it is. But it would be awesome if eventually you did,
right? That'd be cool. Now, next up, let's talk about from a musician standpoint. So I am logged
in. Let me pull up a different window here. Okay. So I'm logged in as one of the artists. This
band is called Arson Car. And in the last 30 days, they haven't earned any money. That's actually my
bad because Wavlake a couple months ago switched over how they handle their wallets and so I didn't
have a wallet attached to it for accepting money but now I do so man everybody just start start
streaming Arsene Carr I I kind of have run this for them and so this is not me this isn't my my
band but I've helped run get them on here on Wavlake and I forgot to put an address in but
now we've got one. So in the lifetime, they have made 44,000 sats, 44,000 Bitcoins, right? And that
right now that equates to about 45, $50 US dollars, given the current Bitcoin price,
which is more than they've ever made on streaming platforms combined in the many years that they've
been on there. So that's pretty awesome. I can upload what type of audio you're releasing,
I can upload music, right?
Let's say that I'm doing it as Arsene Karr.
I can put in the title of my album.
I can pick the genre that I'm doing.
I can pick a sub-genre.
Is this a single or not?
Then type in all my normal credits and description stuff.
Upload a thing, album artwork.
I'm not going to go much further, but you get the idea.
It's pretty simple and basic to be able to do that.
Now they do have a podcast thing. What's the name of your podcast? That's kind of cool.
So it looks like they're getting into the podcasting game.
So Fountain, they're coming for you. Whereas Fountain's been coming for Wavelength too.
They're like working together, but also doing the same thing as each other. But hey, that's cool.
It's a lot of these things are published on RSS feeds and they're open and available for everybody
on open protocols, RSS, podcasting 2.0, using Bitcoin, Lightning Network, that kind of stuff.
It's awesome. Okay. So that's, if you are an artist and you want to put your stuff
on Wavlake, it's so easy. You just sign up for a free account. I don't have to pay for this.
You upload your music, you fill it out, and then boom, you're online. You'll get listed in the new
music section. You can start to promote yourself and you can start having people send you money
directly. So let's look at the analytics here. I don't think it's going to have very much activity
because again, the whole wallet thing, I didn't have a wallet, correct wallet attached. But in
the last 30 days, Arsene Carr has had a few downloads and they've come from different
countries. Shows you where, so apparently big in Ireland in the last 30 days. January was the top
track. This is not the month, but the actual name of a song that they have called January
that got downloaded seven times.
OP3 stats.
Let's see that real quick.
This is like an open source analytics platform.
I didn't know that they were doing this.
That's cool.
I can see my releases.
So there are two albums as an artist.
And then this is the band.
Let's see what happens here.
If I click on that, alternative rock band from the aughts.
Hey, look, I use the same phrase.
Cool.
So that is what it looks like as an artist.
Pretty simple and basic, but very powerful.
'Cause now when you publish here,
you're available on all the platforms
that integrate with this open protocol
of RSS feeds and Wavlake independent music.
So here's some music coming, some money coming in.
So people sent 50 sats, 50 little denominations of Bitcoin.
And let's see if I can get more information about it.
Came in 50 sats.
Wavelet took its five sat fee.
This looks like it was somebody who was streaming.
So probably what happened on May 21st,
my guess is that these songs were on one of the music shows.
And so as people were listening to that music show,
were streaming sats every minute to the show and so money came in per minute being streamed which
is really cool 50 sats per minute it's pretty awesome that's a lot and 10 sats this looked
like another stream i wish i could see a boost but i don't see one right now but but if people
like a track which i often do like i said if i favorite a track then i'll boost it and send like
two or three dollars worth of bitcoin to that artist for that song. I try to think of it as if
I were buying it back on iTunes in the day or buying a record at the store. Then if I'm going
to add it to my library then I might as well send the artist just a little bit of money to say thanks
for the song that I like and then I'm going to hang out or hang on to in my library.
Now there let's let's go down I think this is the next thing.
Yeah, ticket sales.
So I want to talk about that.
So we have ticket sales here.
Just want to make sure this is still streaming.
Sorry, one moment.
Just making sure.
Let me pull up ZapStream.
Okay, we're still good on ZapStream.
Sweet.
Man, glitching out.
Okay, let's back out of that.
Last thing is ticket sales.
I was talking about Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
So obviously with this ban, they don't have any ticket sales
because they haven't put on a show through here.
But I did see, I don't know if it's going to be listed on the website,
but when I opened up the app recently,
there was a show going on that you could buy tickets for.
I want to see if they have a link to it.
Music shows now.
Okay, well, they don't have it on the website.
If you are watching this right now, Wavlake, put the concert tickets on the website so we can see it and buy them there.
But what it is is there's that Oli, the musician, that Oli that I played is having a show in London.
And so he published, he posted his ticket sales on Wavlake.
So Ticketmaster and Live Nation are not getting a cut,
but he had to find a venue that is not being operated
or has a strong partnership with Live Nation in order to do this.
But now he's able to sell tickets to a show.
He collects way more of the money, the take from the door, if you will.
And Wavlake takes a little bit for being the platform that sells those.
I have purchased tickets through Wavlake before to different events. One of them was a comedy show,
a live podcast slash comedy show, and then I also bought tickets to a music show one time
through Wavlake. So it's an easy experience. These were small venues so it wasn't like assigned
seating. I wasn't picking picking seats on the chart or it wasn't like some big waiting room
where I'm trying to get tickets for everybody else before they sell out. They obviously would
need to build that system if they're going to bring on bigger artists. But to start, it's great.
They're trying to topple some really huge incumbents in the space for ticket sales,
but then also with streaming, they're trying to give independent musicians a comparable streaming
experience to what they get on the other platforms, but they get to bring home much more of the money.
So, all right. I think this is where we're going to end for today because we've been going
for a half hour. I try to keep these shows to a half hour. Where are we at? Yeah, we're like right
at 30 minutes. Look at that. So pretty awesome. Go check out Wavlake. Download the app for iOS
on Google Play for your Android. You can stream on the website, but it's not as great of an
experience as if you're doing it through the app because the app is just easy to use and you can
take it with you anywhere. Let's go ahead and screen share. There we go. So thanks everybody
for joining us today on Freedom Tech Weekend. Again, Freedom Tech Weekend is one freedom tech
tool you can play with this weekend to bring more independence and use some more open technology in
your life and start to peel yourself away from closed technology. So my name is Marks. Go check
out Freedom Tech Weekend. We have it on YouTube. We've got it on. We published it as a podcast
later on an audio format. And if you're listening on there, hello. And then go check out trimample.ai.
Get yourself some encrypted, private, confidential AI. Stop using ChatGPT for everything and giving
away all of your information. Use a freedom-oriented AI that is open source that you can verify what's
happening with your data and that you're not being tracked. All right. We will chat with you all later.
Have a good weekend.