Gaming, Music, & Tipping: A New Era for Creator Payments

[Music] welcome to the novic gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and AD advisory services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu to maximize their impact and build momentum that lasts well into the new year Q5 offers unique marketing efficiencies with up to 28% cost reductions in Top Market making it ideal

for engaging audiences and optimizing ad spend powered by Automation and precision Tik tok's Advanced product Solutions work seamlessly with its newest creative tools making content creation easy effective and scalable to drive installs and boost ingame Revenue learn more about making the most of Q5 with TiK ToK by visiting the link in the show notes make sure to check it out and with that let's dive into the episode hello everyone I'm your host Devon Becker and today I'm delighted to be joined by Ben Cousins Chief strategy officer at zbd and Sam means founder of wave Lake although it's spelled wav Lake I guess so just make sure for people typing that in uh that you know it's like that uh zbd as you may have heard previously is a API for rewarding players with Bitcoin using the lightning Network and wave lake is an open music distribution system today we're going to be exploring the integration of music artists crypto payments and games and uh just to just to start with and get this out of the way real quick uh Ben was on

here on a previous episode and uh it was pretty good pretty good background on zbd so we're not going to get too much into the details of zbd but uh both wav Lake and zbd work together on uh Payment Processing to make sure that they're able to handle the uh Bitcoin lightning Network stuff so I'm just gonna have Ben introduce himself real quick uh and then we'll go ahead and get into Sam thanks Devin uh yeah I wouldn't spend too long given folks may have already heard my intro so I work with zbd uh we P we provide Payment Solutions to the entertainment world uh in the context of this podcast I'm a massive music fan um and so it's a real pleasure to be working with wav Lake and supporting Sam and his vision cool Sam why don't you just go quickly over your background the origin of wav Lake and what you guys do today yeah for sure so uh I am a musician myself uh I used to travel quite a bit in a touring band uh signed a major labels did the whole thing kind of started playing music when I was a teenager and and made a career out of it um then that band took a break and about

17 years ago I started a a merchandise company um that works in the music industry work with about 400 artists um I started getting into you know that I guess some other Technologies in e-commerce space Bitcoin popped up you know being someone who was in e-commerce and kind of the early days of that I've been through many you know jumped through a lot of Hoops and been through a lot over a lot of hurtles in that in that area so I started getting into uh other forms of of payment started paying attention to bitcoin um started seeing how that could potentially um uh benefit the music industry when I heard about this thing called lightning Network which is a second layer on top of it um that that wav lake is now using as its payment technology so uh really you know about three years ago started looking really really closely into how that could potentially um I guess rebuild the music industry um with this technology

that maybe wasn't there 15 years ago when when streaming music Started really taking off and um in 2023 started wav lake with my co-founder Michael and uh wav Lake just to put it simply is just a an open music distribution platform so artists go there they upload music and it can be uh pushed out and lived and and be monetized in a number of different places so I guess the the key question here you know especially since we have been on as well is uh how does Bitcoin offer benefits to music distribution artist payments like why have that involved as opposed to traditional payment methods uh traditional payment me methods are just bulky and expensive and slow you know it's like if you're if you're trying to send money to someone you're either going to you're you're almost always going to play pay some sort of fee you know like even just buying a $10 t-shirt or something you're going to pay the the um the vendor is going to pay you know 30 cents and 3% transaction fee or something like that and it's going to be a lot more if it's

if it's cross borders um if I wanted to just send you money through PayPal and you lived in a different country that's obviously going to come with some Hefty fees if I did it over traditional banking rails it's going to be it's going to take a long time and a lot of people are going to have to talk talk to make sure that that can actually happen um Bitcoin and the lightning network is just fast I mean hence hence the name it's fast and it's it's free and it's like virtually free um the fees are so microscopic it's just not something that you have to worry about when you're sending small amounts of money so that's that was the main appeal for me is you know if you could send right now you're kind of limited on streaming services when you're listening to a track you're you're paying you know a percentage of a penny to an artist for every time you listen to it um wouldn't it be cool if you could you could do that or you could do more and you could do that as frequently as you wanted to um over this second layer Network um and so you know we just started looking into that and built it out and it's it's working really well so I mean you're talking about the the streaming services and you

ones like Spotify Apple music things like that that when people listen to the music then that you know some of these subscription fee gets distributed out through uh you know licensing companies things like that to the artists but that's not at all what you guys are doing right this is a system where you guys are optionally providing Payment Systems uh for be you know the fans of the music to be able to listen to but they don't have to pay to listen they don't have to subscribe they're not paying to download it just describe how it works in terms of the the financial aspect yeah I mean most people don't think about it like this but it works basically the same as as everything else I mean if you're listen you're not really paying to listen to a song on Spotify either you know you have to listen to the track has to be played so many times in order for you to make any kind of um you know noticeable amount of amount of money so let's just start there it's like you're real most people aren't making money off off traditional streaming if they are they're they're making money everywhere else and so it's it's not really a problem for them so we're mainly Focus on the 95% of artists

that are on Spotify that are making almost nothing um I think it's about 3% of the artists on Spotify are making 95% of the money so um you know we're just trying to have a place that's that's for them and there have been other things before us like SoundCloud or band camp both of which allow you to listen to the music for free that was the business model you could stream that music on those platforms themselves those could be embedded to live on websites in various other places but they were still sort of siloed into those those places and you know SoundCloud maybe was more focused on exposure like I'll you know I'll make my mixtape here and someone's going to discover me and I'll get signed where band camp was more of an indie music Community where you could just discover cool new music and that's really what they they focused on but those things really hit a wall because they could only really live on Soundcloud on band camp they could they could be embedded in other places but you couldn't interact with them really in a different way so we're trying to take a little piece of you know from The Playbook from each of these services and be able to really do all of those things

um and on top of that be able to monetize these tracks everywhere so you can monetize them somewhere like like this Library can live could live theoretically on band camp it could live on Spotify it can live within podcasts it can live within YouTube videos um and it can be the the money will get directed um straight to the artist instead of having to go through these other intermediaries which they have to go through now so like for example if you if my song is on YouTube and someone uses it um a li some licensing company is going to collect that on my behalf then they're going to pay that to me and at some point in time nine months down the road I'm going to get N9 cents whereas theoretically with this model you could have that direct connection so if somebody if there's some sort of monation monetization that happens within a video it'll just go essentially straight to your wallet so um right now we're working mostly with just directly to artists but we also see a world where labels will want to be on this as well because it sort of

cuts out the you know bigger picture without rambling too far and getting too ahead of myself it cuts out the the accounting um is a big part of it that's a huge issue in the music industry is the accounting you know royalty accounting can be very daunting and there really is no auditing that there's no way for most people to be able to to check on that and so to be able to have a system that's in that has instant settlement is also a really big part of why we're using Bitcoin in the lightning Network well it all makes sense definitely like an efficient way to do at least in terms of the the current state of things right where there's like you said like the no transaction fees things like that uh a question for Ben then so I know previously when we talked we were talking about situation where it was basically players spending money in a game and then that was going potentially straight to the game developer although more often than not it was the game developer going straight to the player this is a bit of a different situation right where it's like more the consumer spending the money but then it's not going directly to wav Lake necessarily it's going to all these different artists but Al like

a small cut to wave like how is that all handled on your end then in terms of you know Distributing all that and handling all that and the wallets and all that sort of thing yeah that that's right this this model is like uh direct to fan monetization for the for the artists and uh can't underline uh my agreement with Sam enough that you know you if you give if you take out so much of the headache of actually claiming your royalties or payments as an artist uh and you go direct to fan and you can monetize your relationships uh with your fans directly those artists tend to make a lot more money uh than they otherwise would so and this is how you Foster you know independent music uh in an in an era where like AI is just destroying uh so much as well so um what you know in what we provide for for wave lake is is wallet infrastructure where um the way Sam and and Michael and the wave Lake team don't have to worry about the tax implications the compliance implications

uh a lot of the kind of regulatory stuff that comes with uh achieving this vision and it it's it's you know stopped a lot of folks in music at that that's been like the blocker for so many people in music is as soon as you want to pay an artist directly you walk into a wall of Regulation about how and why you cannot do this um so we we uh are basically our foundation our wallet infrastructure and our licensing enables uh Sam to do this and build his business without having to uh spend exorbitant amounts on trying to solve all of this payment industry stuff uh by himself so I think the the clear the clear parallel I see here uh outside of just music is also in games with um user generated content where for example right now in Roblox if you wanted to support a Creator you just have to try and depending on what they've implemented their game spend Roo in their game right and they eventually get a portion of that not a not a great portion but a portion and then in fortnite it's even more indirect where it's like oh I go buy random stuff from

the shop for v-bucks that like while I was playing your game and they kind of like sort of C casually link those two things together or I just play your game a lot or in the music you know with Spotify things like that I just listen to it a lot where it's like you you you try and consume as a way to sort of pay out but this is like a more direct thing is there some like these systems that you're building to help out this sort of payment infrastructure and spread these things out is that something that would apply very easily to a UCC platform if let's say a Roblox type of platform were to implement something similar to be like hey I'm having fun in this game I'm just going to send money to this uh to the creator of this mod that would indeed yeah that would indeed line up with our vision um and we could do it uh in real time uh with instant settlement uh you know using using the lightning Network um and I think because this system is all so interoperable and uh and open uh you know there's there's the opportunity for all this content to intermingle and you know people talk about big uh sort of overly used terms

like metaverse but this this is one where it truly uh is already here um in terms of you know we someone playing Roblox could want to add uh music to their experience and it would be very easy for them to uh pull some songs from the wav Lake open library and all participants in that ecosystem would be uh receiving their fair share and it would be monetized properly uh because it's so it's so trivial to actually do the payments in this ecosystem where in incumbent ecosystems payments is the hardest part this here is the easy part it's it's kind of like the creativity and experience is the uh is like the real challenge here is how do you how you know where do you take this because it's brand new yeah it sounds like it could work with both the creator of the content for the game as well as the creator of music for the game so in in uh on that topic Sam uh when it comes to integrating theic music from the platform into different areas like games

uh is there I mean you talk about this as a platform or like a library is there like technology to be able to integrate this easily into games there's I believe you mentioned open source how would people go about utilizing this music from this platform in games making sure that that the artists are able to get payments uh if people like the music let's say they're driving around in a drive-in game listening to it on the the virtual radio or you know what even even maybe a rhythm game that actually uses the music in it I mean it's really just I mean yeah to to comment I guess on what Ben was saying a little bit too um expand on it we s we saw how fast everything sort of moved into a subscription model and that was just one way of thinking that just seemed to work really well after people you know it started with like you know buying stuff on iTunes but then eventually Spotify came along and really showed that a subscription model is a better way to do it um and then everybody just moved towards that and this is really similar it's just a different way of thinking you know so it's it it is incredibly easy for people to put this into really

virtually anywhere uh we have an open API people can um not only use it but they're incentivized to use it we pay them half of our half of our half of our royalties if if um payments happen when something that someone built you know so we're we we're actually encouraging people to build music players and put find unique ways to throw this into really anywhere as long as they sort of agree that there's going to be a way for them a way for this music to be monetized that's kind of the catch for them and I think really all it's going to take is a couple people to do this in a successful way and the more people start to think about it that way because not only will you know everyone's sort of part of this exchange and so not only will the artist make a cut of this but also um the developers will make a cut of this the the games you know also will so like everyone's kind of a part of this split I mean we do a really basic version of this that we have is you know

we're a thing that we did earlier this year is um we added the ability to create a music broadcast within wav lake so if I wanted to just play DJ for an hour and on my podcast I could drop these songs into my podcast and I can be like hey this is music I've discovered on wav Lake it's really cool I want to talk about it and then I can throw what's called a value block into my feed and when people pay me while they're listening to this on the podcast 2.0 spec um while that track is playing portion of that money is going directly to the artist and so artists are being discovered in in podcasts and then they're looking at their accounting feed their activity feed in wav L and going like oh this is crazy where's this money coming from so now it's coming from a different place or you know there's a client called fountain that that actually also works with um zbd and they're really cool and they started out as a podcasting app and now they're a podcasting and a music app because they were one of the first people to pull in our library and now they have uh you know thing that they're doing

they did one today it's called an artist takeover where they're essentially doing um you know very similarly to like a like a Reddit AMA they have an artist come in and just play music that they like that's living on Fountain that was uploaded through wav Lake and we're seeing right now sort of what's unfolding is people are starting to discover all these really cool things you can do with an open music library and you know kind of circling back around my original point is I think it's just going to take a couple of those things to really take off and then other people will start following along and I think eventually it will become just second nature where we we move away from the subscription model and we go into this this um kind of open exchange model where you can pay for things as you consume as you consume them and if you're getting a lot of value out of them you can you can pay more which is very typical for a lot of things that's really sort of how the music economy Works in almost every other aspect with fans to artists is if I like this artist I'm going to go by their album I'm G to buy their vinyl record I'm going to go

buy a t-shirt I'm going to go see them on tour I'm going to do as much as I can to support them unfortunately you're just really Limited in how you can how you can support them on the music itself and so it's LED artists to have to do all these other things to try to to try to hustle and order to be able to monetize their existence and it's just kind of a a bummer so that's that's something that I think is really you the artists are going to come first and as soon as they go there as long as they have these platforms and these these places for their fans to go to I think you'll see people flock to them because ultimately um the fans are going to want to are going to want to support the artist and the in the place that the artist is essentially asking them to go to you know if I if if I'm a musician myself and if I discovered wake for the first time I would certainly say hey I made $100 last week this is clearly working better than anything else um you should come over here and listen to my music here and I would expect a a pretty decent portion of my fans to go there as well so with wav Lake we're trying to make that really easy for them to be able to do that and that's been our main

goal this year the first step was to get the artists on board and now we're working on onboarding fans easily so uh in this case you know talking about different people using the music you know podcast things like that different ways of sort of sharing and treating like an open music library but what does that mean in terms of uh rights licenses what can or can't people do with these this library of of music you know if I want to throw it in the game can I just throw it in the game without asking asking or can I just stream random songs what does that look like in terms of how those rights work yeah so I mean it's a little loose in just that like you can use this Library as long as there's a monation a monetization source there you know so you can use it on your live stream if there's a QR code where you can pay the artist and we've um you know sort of made that pretty explicit um you can throw it in a podcast as long as they've included this value Block in order for them to be able to get paid so there just has to be availability for the artist to get paid otherwise you're just

using it um illegally like you're using everything else you know so it's it as far as everything else is concerned it works virtually just like all other copyright um infringement would work like you couldn't just put this music just because it's on an open Library it's an open Library that's meant to be used in a certain way and if you're if you're not using it in that way then you're basically breaking the rules you know and that's kind of how everything else is as well with all that being said we do want to make that more explicit we are working on and and there are a few other people in the space that have been sort of you know theorizing what the best method is because it is a little tricky because there are different ways places that it can live it like what's the what does the license look like if it lives in a music player what does the license look like if it lives in a podcast episode what does the license look like if it lives in a game you know those might those are all very different so um there is some of that ahead of us where we will have to probably as the scale scales up um expedite the idea of of a new music

license but that's really all it is you know this we'll be scrambling the same way they were scrambling for streaming licenses and now it's just been condensed into a single letter I get them every week there's some new streaming service or something where it's like hey they want to use your music library you have 60 days to say no otherwise it's just going to show up here and that's virtually what what this will be too down the road we'll just have to um cross that bridge when we get there but we're less less concerned about it today because as of right now there's really only a couple clients pulling this in but once it starts going more mainstream we'll definitely have to consider that um also the the level of artists that are on we have thousand artists on wav Lake right now but we're just starting to see some people come in that have more significant reach on on other streaming services so um just the caliber of artists we've been working with their their music quality is incredibly uh awesome you know I've discovered some I I now have become a fan of music I otherwise would have never heard because of way like but uh unfortunately those people are very

underserved uh by the other platforms and so they're not worrying as much about licenses but we will have to do that soon so you mentioned that you know this idea of okay well as long as there's sort of a monetization path for people to be able to to to give money and donate or tip or however you want to phrase it uh to the artist then that kind of makes it okay because that's what you're sort of doing is you're not just giving them exposure giving them exposure and bringing along that tip jar uh so to speak and and so I guess the question I have for you then Ben is if I'm say a game developer and I want to be able to integrate something like this how hard is it for me to also set up okay I want to set up a split to me as the game developer I want to set up split to uh ugc content developer for this so that it's like if maybe they're spending in the game then like oh a small cut goes to the musician but if they're spending like hey I really like the song then I get a small cut and that the artist gets large those kinds of things obviously like that's sort of the you know sort of think you guys are facilitating how difficult or easy it is

it to sort of set up these more custom splits or different payment methods that are not very easy to do to say the least with traditional payment methods and usually involve ASAP and all these other things sort of as middlemen maybe unnecessarily yeah that's um that's a good question so that without sounding overly uh trite it's it really is very simple um one of you know one of the core innovations that is uh part of the lightning network is something called the lightning address uh it was actually created by zbd CTO Andre uh it looks like an email but it's for money so you can pay me at Ben at zbd Dogg but you can pay Sam at Sam at wav Lake uh the money will go to both of those wallets easily so if I'm a if I'm a developer like a game developer and I want to I've got music in my game and I want to make sure that there's a split going to the artist but maybe in certain conditions there's a split that goes to me um you are essentially adding

lightning addresses to the payment request or or payment uh demand and that will that will automatically using our API split that payment and pay all the relevant participants uh it's it's it's very very trivial to do think of it like adding CC's on an email it's it's super super simple well it definitely sounds like a a nice value ad in terms of Le people trying to find different ways to monetize because this is overall does sound a little bit like free toplay in a way where you're not charging for admission but you're also making it so that hopefully those with the means can helpfully spend a bit more and sort of compensate for those that are just listening for free or you know through that exposure bring in other people that might be able to spend uh here and thereit a bit more since I I imagine there are a number of people who aren't actively spending at least initially maybe sort of feeling things out first um but one question I definitely have is I think is kind of maybe important these days uh especially with what Spotify has been going through even through sort of

different licensing things and and fake labels and things like that which is around AI policies and things like copyright enforcement meaning like uh you know if I'm if I'm generating AI versions of of stuff is that going to be acceptable or people do people have to do disclaimers sort of what's the policies around that but also like if I sample music or I have any form of copyright infringement what is the you know the platform's responsibilities around that are you just like hey we'll just get dmca I know those are kind of two questions but they are a little related especially around AI yeah I mean so as far as AI goes I mean we definitely have ai music being uploaded to wave Lake I mean when I say that I just mean sort of people have made prompts and created what are essentially meme tracks you know kind of for various um around various things I mean we we do see a lot of um Bitcoin themed music in in wav Lake which is fine you know and we've have mixed mixed reviews and we've discussed the AI music um at length on our podcast

waveform where we're you know we're not like huge fans of it because we're musicians ourselves so we like to see people creating music and anyway I won't go off on that tangent but yeah that stuff is there I mean if something is like explo as far as everything else goes and copyright guidelines we have we have just basic copyright guidelines that are essentially what you would expect to see on something like SoundCloud or or bankamp or anywhere really which is yes if you upload music that's not yours we're going to take it down um people have been doing that on um for years on all the platforms um especially like you know back back in the day when Taylor Swift wasn't on Spotify there was a huge problem with people uploading fake Taylor Swift music and um you know there's just takedown requests and so we just monitor that right now it's very very manual we don't have music being uploaded at such a rapid Pace that we don't see it so we're just really tracking that stuff um we do a pretty good job at verifying artists are who they say they are are uh we get really excited I mean we listen

everything that comes through so we get really excited when we see someone who seems to be sort of um maybe a little bit larger artist out there checking out socials or whatever so we'll go and do some very manual verification be like hey we saw you're on wav lake is this actually you you know couple times it hasn't been and but it usually is and that's really exciting because then we get to communicate with them and walk them through the process if there's any confusion on it so um yeah we're just really careful about that um you know soon enough we will be automating that in the same ways that all the other distribution platforms do which is essentially just works like you know Shazam would work or something and things things will get white labeled by artists who um you know the same way major labels have to do that on YouTube and stuff it'll happen in the same way so we're not super worried about that luckily so many of these problems that we will face down the road as we scale have already been solved by other streaming services so we can just follow suit and and from what I understand looking at the platform as well like uh you guys aren't just hting music and just having music in podcast you also

have podcasts on the platform as well since it's just an audio platform and it there are like a number of tools now uh like notebook LM and I believe there you know there's more coming out around being able to sort of create podcasts using AI on different topics and things like that this does seem like potentially an interesting way to maybe monetize those in in a different way then obviously you're not going to probably get those on Spotify very easily and if you do you're probably not going to monetize well off those um and you know the podcast typically monetize off of sponsors which is obviously different than music right music is going to monetize usually off of either streaming or trying to sell or performing in some way whereas podcasts generally have to do it through okay we're going to have to have sponsors in injecting in there things like that maybe this is an alternative whether it be AI generated or not but I just mean like that general idea of being able to some monetize in some alternative ways have you seen people using this you know pretty broadly for podcasts or alternative monetization out that podcast are so popular um yeah so we

didn't start out with with podcasts but people just started uploading them and they was getting kind of mixed in with the music which so we just we literally just created the podcast section just to filter that out of the music stuff um and so yeah we don't we don't really have a lot of tools there for podcasters outside of the music podcasters so that's something that we are pushing for so when we created that section um we we we sort of did that in tandem with like hey you know you can upload a podcast if you want to you're not going to this won't be optimal I don't know why any I really truly don't know why anybody would because that we just have such little to offer them as far as you know other podcasting hosts um comparably comparatively um but we do have a lot to offer for the music stuff so you can very simply pull music into your podcast and and and upload a music podcast a music broadcast if you think of it as almost like a you know a a music broadcast a DJ show I want a DJ I want

to I want to put these songs in here so you you sort of have to do that in the in like the post- production you know maybe put that together in a very old school way we do see we do have some ideas in being able to do this more in more of a live environment but um we do incentivize people to put music in their podcast and if they do that we have um some very simple tools for doing that you know it's like I included this I can search the library drop it in uh put the timestamp on it and then that way if music or if if money comes in to that podcast while the track is playing we make sure it goes to the artist and by the way and um we also offer splits to the artist themselves so that's another we sort of talked about like how you could split out um you know give money to the the in gaming and you know various other things too but when when an artist uploads a track to wave L they also have the opportunity to create splits there on the spot so you could you know throw in the drummer throw in the record label throw in the publishing company and so if someone sends a dollar that gets split instant ously as well so um

between anyone who's involved in that track so we offer that today now too so that's that's something that will be very easy to implement because the technolog is already there you basically just have to sort of implement it for the other the other elements that makes a lot of sense definitely uh something I imagine people will play around with I I am kind of curious too like uh whether or not there's been any sort of reaction to drive people to this sort of platform after the the whole thing that got revealed with uh the licensing policy for DJs on Twitch it's like been part of some controversy and then a sort of like long battle to try and figure something out there because that's typically music that you're going to find going through licensing things where they have to deal with all those issues and you have all of your you know things being muted or like on YouTube where you're getting copyright strikes and potentially losing your channel like all those sorts of things are sort of fraught with Peril in terms of trying to just DJ with but I mean in the topic of DJ I'm kind of curious uh is there any particular music genres or types of things that you're

seeing more prevalent on the platform that sort of either just make sense for it or just happen to have been where people outside of like Bitcoin related stuff and that sort of crypto thing outside of that no I mean it's a very wide variety we're seeing a lot of I mean I guess if anything I would say International music because they don't really have access um and the money goes a lot further so we have a lot of artists in Africa um you know if they're making 50 bucks a month on wav Lake that that goes really far for them um so you see you're we're seeing people kind of flock to this in ways or you know it's not that they don't have access to other music distribution plat platforms they do but they don't have the ability to get that money quickly so it's really cool an artist called man like qux who's very prolific on Wave Lake and has uploaded a lot of music um you know he pays his electric bill on on Wave Lake every month with wave Lake money every month which is really cool to to see that happen you know this is this is very real for a lot of people I mean I think when a lot of people think about

about Bitcoin they think of like Crypt Bros and and gains and you know just whatever you know Elon Musk or something I don't know what people think about um but they don't think about people who like don't have banks in other countries and don't have access to money for their art um and certainly not in any kind of expedited way so that's something that we see a lot of and it's really incredible to see that I mean and I mean there are artists that have single-handedly onboarded dozens of other artists in these other countries and these communities because of that reason they're like hey nephew you know like I'm making money and you're you're 16 and you're an incredible rapper you should upload some music and and I'll I'll sort of help I'll use my platform now to to tell people that you're here and so people discover music through through these other communities as well so we're seeing a lot of really cool things on that front like in like literally like in villages and stuff people are doing onboarding lessons to wave like in order like this is how you can make money this is a Creator economy

for us now um so you know it's starting there if you're if we're starting there that's pretty incredible and obviously when Once people figure out um and stop being scared of the word Bitcoin um and we're not even really I mean honestly outside of you wouldn't even know it was really was a Bitcoin thing outside of all the Bitcoin music on wav Lake if it weren't for that we really do a pretty good job at at masking it we're not really super um into being uh evangelists about Bitcoin itself we don't want to have to explain uh 15 years of technology to every single person that uses the app so we're just trying to use it as technology and not and kind of strip away the cult elements of it because it's an incredibly useful tool um and so that's what we're that's what we're primar primarily using for So eventually people I think will come around because you know if we if we believe in the technology we think this will sort of exist in a lot of places much like all other technology exists people don't have to really know about it it just one day it's on your phone and you

see your friend do it and now you're doing it you know so uh we think it's going to get to that point and we're trying to just make it incredibly easy without having to need the onboarding if people can do it in other countries and pay their electric bills with it I guess we're off to a great start definitely assuming they could of course cash it out to an actual bank at some point and deal with all that but that's that's a whole another it's I it's amazing yeah it's like man like qux does it through a text message on a on a on a normal phone you know like a not a smartphone there's like these really there's there's crazy networks for stuff like that if there is a will there is a way people figure it out you know if someone if you have a way to generate Revenue um across continents um they'll figure out a way to get that off of get that off of wave like well excellent I mean speaking of the technology you've mentioned uh you know like nonfinancial side of things interaction with the artists and and some of that a few times what kinds of things can they do and how does that work when it comes to interacting outside of just payment like I hear the music now I want to do

something besides just send the money uh what are the the things that look like for that uh how does the technology platform enable some of that that sort of thing yeah well we're using another another open source protocol called Noster which is what we're primarily using for the social layer and that that's an interoperable thing so if you know you create an account an account I'm using air quotes for those who aren't on video If you create an account on wav Lake you're essentially given an encrypted identity a universal identity that you can take anywhere theoretically if other places start to enable the option for you to do so so you know if you're using a client like Fountain which is a podcasting app um you could go log in with the same account that you created over at wav Lake and all the people that you follow will be over there and all the stuff everything will just sort of exist and and play along really nicely um and there's a lot of really cool stuff that comes with that because it's Universal if you discover a track on Fountain you and you and you comment that on that platform it'll show

up on wav Lake as well and so you you start to see this like interoperable um Community element that's going to come out of this where these comments are sort of tracked by this open source protocol and can and can exist on multiple platform so your social gra your social layer is no longer siloed in your application it can be um pulled in from various places so you know Fountain when they activated when they activated Noster all of a sudden there was a lot more activity on their tracks when previously it was only the activity that was that was um that had been established on Fountain itself now it's what's what when people are commenting on these social clients when people are commenting on wav Lake and whatever so that's a really cool thing um that's happening uh and you know there's just so many different ways that this can be expanded I mean we've done concerts we've done live concerts we did one in Nashville um zbd actually sponsored it we did one in Nashville and over the summer and we had few artists play and there was a live stream and so

people were were watching this concert from all over the country and and giving money to the artists that were performing live as were people just walking around and scanning QR codes and and paying for them there and discovering music um you know there's a GNA keep pumping Fountain but fountain's really cool they're doing some cool stuff they're doing these things called artist takeovers and you know that's another way to just have this connection with artists artists are going on Fountain and playing music that is being uploaded through wav Lake but they're playing music in a in sort of like a a live playlist um and then they're communicating on a chat with fans of that music you know so long there's an artist called longy who's on there today and he was just playing his music and so people were discovering his music while he's in there like DJing his own set you know of his own tracks and communicating with him real time and then going over to wave Lake and creating a library now with his with his music so that's you know I I can't stress enough how cool it is that this stuff is just how inter I mean I hate using the word interoperable it sounds like such a buzzword but it just

it truly is like it just these music can Thrive again because it can exist in so many different places without permission really um Fountain did that I mean we're friends with the guys of Fountain but they really sort of did that without needing to talk to us at all you know we just had this library and they just tapped into it and now all of a sudden they're a music app you know so we're hoping to see a lot more of that and we're hoping to see a lot of social a lot more social um applic s do that as well I mean there's there's Twitter like Noster clients that have really cool implementations with the wave Lake Library as well where you can there's embeddable players within the so your social media feed um yeah there's there's I mean there's really so much you can do that's kind of the future is wide open with that stuff I mean it can when I say it can live anywhere it truly can live anywhere well that's perfect I mean that leads into to my last question here well because you're talking about a lot of futurist stuff you could do a lot of the things that you could try and work towards with this technology as a

platform and things like that and obviously it's it's funny to have all this technology around what is a very old medium of Music uh and these different ways to sort of propel It Forward despite the fact that the music itself has only changed somewhat over all these years but I the question and and I'll ask both of you but I'll start with Sam uh which is you know looking ahead what do you see in the future for music distribution artist income music and games these different ways that sort of all this technology can flourish uh I mean I know you spoke on some of it already Sam but just what do you see kind of looking forward to this I just see putting the power back in the hands of the artists you know that's just somewhere where it hasn't existed I mean there's like an actual glimmer of hope now for that um not just having to tap into your super fans um not having to hustle super hard in order to squeeze every last penny out of your 10,000 fans that are supporting you but be able to um just create music and and put it out

in a place that's able to be monetized in a very normal way um without having to worry about um someone else getting in the middle of it and determining what that rate should be and how quickly it should come to you um so the future looks really bright I mean I think literally every single artist that I've had the pleasure to talk to that has just been excited about wav lake has has told me that's like the number one thing that they say is I just I I didn't think that there was any way that this was going to happen you know I just didn't think I this is mind-blowing to me that I mean that I can make a $100 in a week I mean to a lot of people that doesn't seem like a lot of money but it's very difficult to make a $100 streaming music it's almost impossible um statistically so for someone who's literally never made a penny on streaming service to be a on a streaming service to be able to come on and upload a track from a different country and instantaneously you know through through the community

discover that they're all of a sudden able to generate revenue and they're finding a community um that's really powerful and so that's only going to get stronger and you know we have 10,000 songs and a th000 artists on there right now and that's nothing it's absolutely nothing I mean we're very proud of it but in the grand scheme of um of what's out there it's it's nothing you know so we have a long way to go so I'm very hopeful for how much better that's going to get and um I think we're going to see a lot of artists making some cool music again because they're going to be supported finally well cool sounds like just the beginning for you guys uh Ben same question to you yeah I do I mean Sam mentioned Noster and I think that is it might be something new for your listeners um but I'd highly encourage folks to look at it it's it's heavily backed by Jack dorsy um having left Twitter he has devoted tens of millions to it and said that it's the protocol he wished he had built uh when he when he founded Twitter um you know that ability

to have an ecosystem where your content and your followers come with you no matter what platform you log into is really really powerful it means when someone rage quits YouTube and moves to Twitch or vice versa all the videos all the followers everything come like you don't actually care because it's all distributed openly um this is this sounds futuristic but it exists today uh nosta the protocol itself has has hundreds of thousands of users act like active users it's a little bit behind blue sky but uh it's a you know they're very different propositions nosto is multi content it's not a Twitter clone it supports music it supports video it supports whatever and payment rails are built right into it um so I think what you're seeing is in in a world where uh it you know the cost of living is getting increasingly tough and users are expecting to monetize themselves or people who use the internet like humans not users uh are beginning to think about like wanting to make something of

the things they put online and you look at the growth of patreon you look at the growth of only fans you look at you know ugc and fortnite you look at ROBLOX payouts all of these industries are focused on actually giving people money because earning money now is harder than ever uh and these rails and everything Sam is building are that future realized today and on a really surprisingly strong Foundation that is not going to go away um you know we I thought Sam expressed it really well when he said uh you know people are a bit afraid of the word Bitcoin um maybe that changes over the next five years maybe it doesn't but what one thing has stayed true which is since Inception Bitcoin hasn't failed or gone anywhere and it continues to really upend how we move value and express you know like our um support and ability to transact economically over the Internet it's it's really revolutionizing that continues to to do so and uh we want to at zbd support everything that empowers

individuals by enabling them to actually become like free economic agents on the internet well cool it sounds like a lot of good stuff obviously like I think there's definitely possibility that then for you know this maybe even asra to work with with game mods or ugc content outside of just simple you know music things like that so definitely I mean kind of makes me wish uh we we had uh the the whole thing hooked up here for this podcast right so we could just send over some Bitcoin right now while listening so definitely definitely food for thought there especially when we're looking at how do you monetize a lot of the user generated content in the future that will be very tricky I think so there's a lot of possibility here a lot of like demonstrating use case which I think is great especially when you're talking about people in you know other countries things like that we we you know when it come to web three games that was always a big thing of you know suddenly people in the Philippines can make money and things like that and what Sam's saying sounds like a lot of this sort of being enabled for artists and things like that so I think there's

there's great potential there but I want to thank both of you for coming on Ben again especially for coming on second time always great to hear from you you guys are doing really cool stuff Sam as well sounds like you guys are doing fantastic stuff definitely have to check out wave Lake if you haven't already we'll of course Link in the show notes uh to the website as well as to the previous episode with Ben and Paul for those who didn't catch that and manage to stick all the way through this without listening to that yet you'll get the prequel when you get to check that out for for a bit more detail on CBD and how that works so I want to thank you all for listening to the end of this year a great discussion I think a lot of cool stuff happening in the future as always for music games technology crypto here all kinds of crazy stuff happening in the world so definitely check all this stuff out including nostr sounds very interesting as well so definitely link to that in the show notes also if you want to check that out but thanks for everyone for tuning in and I will catch you guys in the next interview and have a great one if you enjoyed today's episode on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or

give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]