TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #393: Value 4 Value Music with Sam & Michael from Wavlake

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Sam Means and Michael Rhee to discuss Wavlake, the current issues with the music industry, and how to orange pill people with cool products. Follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sammeans https://twitter.com/rheedio https://twitter.com/wavlake Check out Wavlake: https://wavlake.com/ Check out Lightning Store: https://lightning.store/ 6:14 - Technical issues right out the gate 8:04 - Artist monetization struggles 11:43 - Wavlake explained 15:02 - The publishing company model 19:48 - V4V audience interaction 21:56 - V4V artist profit 25:01 - Other models to integrate 29:17 - Building a music index 33:17 - Changing the artist mindset 38:34 - Podcasts vs music 43:50 - Orange pilling through music 46:38 - Nostr 57:41 - Artists are sick of the current model 1:03:07 - Playing the slow game 1:06:50 - Wavlake causing incentive change 1:10:56 - Using V4V to improve recommendations 1:13:16 - Future of LN 1:17:20 - V4V boosts are growing in general 1:22:54 - Lightning store 1:28:15 - Plugs and final thoughts Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

so freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce rip 393 of tftc i sat down with sam and michael from wave lake the co-founders of wave lake they're really trying to innovate in the music space they're applying the podcasting 2.0 model to music wave lake is a platform you can publish your music attach lightning address to it and have your fans send you sats it's a beautiful thing you'll learn more about it in the episode we do not have a top four boost in the intro for this episode because we just record it back to back if you listen to the episode with victor previously i recorded that and then hopped right back in the studio with sam and michael and we recorded the ads right after so the victor episode

hasn't dropped yet so there's no boost to read that's why we're not reading them but thank you if you are contributing via podcasting 2.0 app and the value for value model for contributing if you're streaming sets this episode or if you have previously episode or with previous episodes if you boosted thank you from the bottom of my heart i really appreciate it means you guys are getting value out of this i feel so compelled to send it back it lets me know that i'm on the right track i'm actually putting good content out there so thank you guys for supporting the show if you If you don't support via Podcasting 2.0, if you don't want to stream Sats,

but you do want to support the show, Lois Lift, if you can give us a rating or a review on the podcast apps, whether it be Spotify, Apple, Fountain, whatever it may be. If you just subscribe, rate, and review. It helps us go a long way to blow the show up. Write a newsletter, too.

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haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be oh we're live oh logan just ninja launched on us um cool so we're live now i'm sitting down that's the best way that's the best way to start something always is the just yeah the soft intro yeah we go the soft intro freaks i'm sitting down uh with michael and sam from the wave lake team who are doing some incredible things too i don't even want to like start with the bitcoin aspect of it we dive into it but i think you're

trying to solve some pretty massive problems in the music industry and bitcoin just so happens to play a part in that um so number one welcome to the show gentlemen it's glad to finally have you on thank you marty it's great to be on long time listening thank you first time caller well hopefully this is the first of many episodes because i think what you guys are building is going to disrupt the music industry um before we get into wave lake i i think just as a music nut myself who loves music and has recognized that artists sort of get the shit out of the stick in a lot of instances i think sam i'd like to to hear your experience in the music industry and some of the the pain points that exist for artists particularly do we lose sam already

we went live and lost sam sam if you can hear us you might just need to go out and come back in michael that was quick that was really quick yeah now he's back i i died for a second we all die for a second every once in a while you have these existential things that happen then you're reborn the way things work yeah sorry about that no it's okay did you hear my question no before you died i was asking before we jump into wave lake like just having had many conversations with you guys over the last six months i think you guys are attacking a big problem which is uh artists getting the shit end of the stick in the music industry and sam you're an artist yourself who has been working in the music industry for quite some time now and i've

seen these pain points and artists getting fucked over up close and personal uh i think your perspective on what the music industry is like and how artists are getting scammed is uh very enlightening what what are the big problems that exist this problem is pretty much everywhere um which is kind of the the main problem you know there's a lot of i always like to preface this you know shit talking ramble on the music industry with like there are a lot of good people internally you know just like with like you can have this this big empire or something there's there may be people attempting to do things better but it's just a systematically broken thing as many things are in this country and around the world so um you know it's a it's a

hundred year old issue i mean all the way back to like sheet music publishing people have been getting screwed over now the main problem that we're we're seeing is just you know the the way that the artists are having to um just the pressure to to take on these other elements that kind of hover around the music business like patreon touring super elaborate merchandise live streams you know there's just all these extra things you have to do and you have to do these things because if you want to survive as an artist you need to make money and if you're if what should be your main revenue stream your music because that's that's the main thing you're doing is not generating revenue for you then you have to branch out to other other things so um

yeah we're you know spotify itunes or not itunes what i guess itunes is still around apple music all these streaming services they're just the the rates that are going to the artists are just being watered down and watered down water down water down there was a point you know maybe when these things were first started or you saw some some other streaming services like i forget which ones maybe it was like google play or i think sony even had one where maybe at that point the artist could get over a penny i think even in the early days of spotify you could get over a penny per screen now you're seeing like fractions of a penny so um we just think there should be a outlet for artists to upload their music to have all their information and be able to

interact with their fans and provide the value that they provide which is their music and receive value from their fans which most fans do i mean that's the reason we listen to music we love it it sparks some sort of emotion in us and generally we want our favorite artists to continue working so i think this is the answer i mean once we started you know seeing things like the lightning network and streaming sats exist then uh this was just kind of like a no-brainer thing so i've been advocating the last few years to just want to see this happen and luckily i caught up with michael who was thinking the same thing and and now we have wave lake that's hopefully going to at least solve a big portion of that problem for a portion of people you know

maybe maybe everybody won't use the wave lake but at least there's going to be a large group of people that are going to find it incredibly useful and i think over time we'll see a lot more things like this come up yeah and so you guys i guess michael to make the freaks privy about what wave lake is how it operates how it leverages the lightning network for those who may be unaware, what is the whole idea behind the technical aspect of Wavelink? Yeah. So Wavelink is essentially built on two main foundational components. The first is open content. So content that's just available and openly distributed. It's not behind a paywall, much like 99% of podcasts are distributed today.

The second component is open payments. And what we basically do is integrate every single piece of content that we distribute for our artists. We integrate that content with a lightning address. More technically speaking, it's a key send instruction that allows any podcast 2.0 app or any app that understands how to interpret that key send data to be able to shoot a payment over lightning to that node.

And then using the metadata, we can apply the payment to the artist and the track. And then we can tally that up to ultimately present to our listeners how much a track has earned, not only within our platform, but also from outside of it um and it's building on a lot of what the podcasting 2.0 crowd has done um over the past few years um sam and i saw a lot of uh promise and potential in that and we're just trying to bring music into that sphere yeah i think it's great because particularly when you get into like splits i mean that's one of the not only is a problem for artists but it's a problem

for the teams behind them right it's not only the artists producing the music you have a producer you have a band you have a marketer an agent manager all that stuff all of who fall under the umbrella of people need who need to get paid by this art yeah that's what i think it's gonna it's gonna be a good thing from top to bottom i mean right we don't we haven't acted big splits yet we're going to and i think it's going to be a little bit of an easier solution than maybe we've seen in some of the podcasting splits just because uh for the time being this the account is a custodial account so you'll be able to manage the splits within the dashboard of wave lake if you're the the person who's uploading the the music or the podcast um but yeah i mean right

right away once we have splits you'll be able to just assign you know the drummer can have his split the producer can have his split and then down the road once we start getting into even bigger problems in the industry like uh publishing royalty splits copyright things like that then that's going to solve a lot of problems there too because and i and i think it's going to be something that will ultimately be embraced by these other facets of the music industry because it's going to save them a ton of time too to not have to do this accounting this quarterly annual accounting mechanical royalties uh broadcast royalties all these things so i think it's going to be really cool. Well, yeah, let's jump into that. I mean, you guys mentioned

how artists get paid from Spotify and how that's been getting diluted. You just brought up licensing and distribution on top of that. How do these business models work for these companies, for Spotify, for the people who control the licenses? How are they making money right now? How are the companies or how are the artists? The companies. Because I think that's important. Yes. I mean, yeah, it's an incredibly convoluted system. It's not even really a system. Each thing sort of has its own way of doing things, which makes it really difficult. And that's not only within like companies based in the US or artists based in the US, but it carries over into a global thing too. So if I, as an artist, had a song licensed for some product in the Netherlands, the way that those broadcast royalties and that licensing works is completely different than it works over here. So there's an example where that did actually happen for me, and I didn't even know it, but I had a semi-hit for a small European country, and I just didn't know because there's no way to connect that really back to me. It's something that I have to seek out.

So the way it works now, it's like, you need, it's a, it's a bit of a gatekeeper thing, I would say, like, in order to maximize your access to your global collections, you have to sign a publishing deal. I personally have never signed a publishing deal. I don't really believe in them. But, you know, a lot of people do, I guess, for good reason, because they, they might be able to maximize their collection. their collection so maybe i'm leaving a bunch of you know little scraps on the table that if over time those add up to a great sum but maybe i get that commercial or that song placement in a movie or something and if i control that i get 100 of that revenue i get the master site and the publisher site so that's a huge benefit for me so that's why i would never want to sell my publishing but the way people do it so yeah you would sign a public deal it would be for a term maybe for

a number of years it may be for an amount of tracks and the reason you would do that is because these publishing companies are the only ones who really have this access to they're the only ones who really have like the access to all these individual things so they they go and collect the data on your behalf and you in turn are giving up 50 or whatever your publishing site is um so you know that's not going to change to to some extent we're always going to have um we're always going to have record labels that own the masters of records we're always going to have publishing companies that own publishing rights to to songs whether that's the artists who own it or if it uh if it goes through something like through ASCAP or some other

publishing uh company but um you know it's the the main benefit there is if we can get the artists to be on this platform if we get the record labels to be on this platform we get the publishing companies on this platform at least if they're doing that collection if you are in that situation where you do have to have those deals you'll be getting that that money faster so if if we're able to do these transactions instantaneously through the lightning network that's a huge benefit because right now the way it works is when they go they spend months collecting the money then there may be like a a term of months you know typically it's quarterly sometimes it's sometimes it's annually which really sucks so i might have to wait six months before this data

is even collected and then i have to wait another three months before i even get the check and by the time that happens you know any number and the the craziest part about it is i have no there's accountability so i have no way of really knowing i just have to kind of trust it i have to trust their math i have to trust their accounting you know it's like you could do an audit on a publishing company you can do an audit on a record label but there's no way to see these transactions other than what they give you looks like michael just dropped off you can't failing us today but no that's like when you brought that up logan just be on the lookout from michael entering the chat again but again going back to transparency does and i think it does the lightning network

again since it's instantaneous but not only that auditable and you can see the flows of paid invoices yeah does it help with that that aspect of it yeah it helps a lot i mean just i think that's what's going to happen you know there's even if um i don't know it let's say it'll take a while to get a star over onto something like wave lake or value for value but um you know all it's going to take really is one medium-sized artist to give this thing a shot and to be the advocate for that and as soon as people see the other artists see like oh this is a better thing so this you know maybe we can compare it to something like patreon on i guess let's just let's just do that even though it's nothing like that but it's it's a

platform where fans can go directly to support this artist and have an interaction with this that artist so that's why maybe i would compare to something like that whereas you don't really have that interaction on spotify or streaming service um they'll see those yeah it's like they're seeing the transactions in real time you get a wave like right now you go listen to one of michael's tracks go listen one of those vertigo kid tracks i'm like and uh if you like it you know it's like you send a boost to michael and you say like this song rules and he sees it and then he can reply back like cool thanks and there's an exchange and now you it i don't know it's an inspiring thing like i can't wait for this to really i can't wait to be making new music and

be introducing it on something like wave lake because that feedback loop is really important for musicians uh typically we would get that we wouldn't really get that until you know touring like let's say you put out a record you get some emails you'd have like a you know i don't know you have a website somewhere some social media so people are are communicating with you in some way but the best connection there is just because you're you're on a stage you're playing a show and your people are singing back returning back but to have that like instant feedback as they're listening to tracks in real time is probably the closest thing you can get on the internet,

other than maybe, I guess, like a live stream or something. But we'll even be able to get into things like that, which is going to be really fun. Yeah. And then in terms of business models for the artists, I think particularly for indie artists or smaller artists, medium-sized artists, this is definitely a better way to make money.

uh like so i think diving into trying to conceptualize that or help the freaks visualize like when it comes to actually monetizing art why is this a better medium to do it through like how much more money could these artists potentially make i feel like we're talking too much michael i'll throw that to you michael all right um yeah uh so just as a quick example i mean we we're still wave lake is still a baby it's just like it's it's like learning how to it's not even learning how to crawl yet we're just like learning like how to not spit up at this point but things are moving along and and working for the most part um and some of the artists that have generated the most boosts

since we launched a week ago um they're making the equivalent in us dollars you know about five to ten us dollars equivalent in sats um in in the matter of a week um from you know a handful of different listeners pretty small scale i realize it's not like you know that much to write home about but uh at the same time they like those same artists would you theoretically need hundreds of thousands of streams on a major streaming platform to generate that kind of income or revenue um and and so i think like the the big takeaway for me is just seeing that is that there are people out there who are kind of hungry for this who are hungry for not only discovering new music but being able to support it um and promote it

and this just gives it gives like a really clear inner like a really transparent interface to be able to do that um you know because bitcoin on lightning is such a universal instant open payment rail um we're just we're just essentially leveraging that technology to enable this kind of a connection between listeners and artists um and so i think like i think it's you know we're waiting to see how this is going to play out um in terms of like bigger numbers for our artists but i think as we grow as we get a bigger listener base um the potential is there and yeah it's i think that's really exciting just to be able to even early on just see these um you know kind of independent artists getting a lot of love from

the listeners on wavelike it's just it's just great to see and i just hope it keeps growing yeah no i mean it's certainly early days we can already see with your the beta product that you launched last year and now that you're fully launched like the like sam mentioned like the interaction between the artists and the user that's boosting them is is new in the digital music space but like that that is only the tip of the iceberg of the types of interactions that you guys can design for an artist and their audience like where does this go from a simple boost and a recognition that that an audience member likes a song like what what other types of models can be built on top of this platform yeah um yeah i mean i think the the obvious one

will be i mean we'll be able to potentially really kind of everything so um we'll be at integrate merchandise i think in a really effective way i have a very strong background in uh in band merchandise and e-commerce there so um that's something that's really on my mind concert tickets like fan fan band club type tickets like there's a rule typically in every deal on a with a promoter where you get like a certain percentage the band gets a certain percentage of the door to be able to um offer their fans at it through some other avenue that isn't a ticket company so i used to do stuff like that back in the day so let's say it's like eight percent so could do like you know the first eight percent of the door these tickets could be sold

and offered through with some additional value over something like wave lake live streaming absolutely i mean i think that there's a lot of really cool integration there where again same same type of thing like you know you might see today you can have maybe you're live streaming on twitch or you're live streaming on instagram in the last few years live streaming kind of became a way for people to um generate some revenue i worked with a lot of bands that did that you know but they were typically selling tickets to these things and that model didn't really work great it worked for a minute like just because people were excited to be seeing anything you could we we would see like oh you can do like a t-shirt bundle and sell this like

live stream ticket but then at a certain point people were just like you know we'll watch this later or you know or i just don't want to pay for this experience so i think it to be able to a model we do see work in other things like on twitch like with gamers you can sort of tip as you're watching these things happen you know i've never really been a twitch person i'm not exactly sure how it works but i think it's some sort of credit system or something uh where you're giving tokens or credits or something like that so we could do something similar except it would just be sat so like as a band is playing people could be communicating um directly as they're watching and they can be boosting artists also just streaming sats in real time and we launched

this with boost but like we see with podcasting and apps like fountain some other things breeze where you can stream sats in real time i think that's something that we're going to want to be doing too also just our player that is live now is really just an example like we created a top 40 just to have a fun thing for people to use and like incentivize people to want to upload tracks for exposure you know it's not like a ton of exposure but it is kind of fun to see your track going up the chart every day when this thing resets but we're what we're really hoping is people will just build players that like are pulling for this music tag and formatting things properly for music and see a lot of different things happen you know so seeing genre specific

players you know like like people would curate a playlist we think people with an open source player we think people will just start creating random players and you may have these different music experiences like you have now on some things like indie rock underground stuff on band camp um you know mixtape hip-hop type things on soundcloud you have these like or like electronic music you have these things that sort of tend to lean into particular genres we think we'll see that happen to you down the road with with uh this music 2.0 or whatever we want to call it yeah no that that dovetails into an interesting aspect of what you guys are building yes you have the wave lake player with the top 40 and things like that but at the end of the day you guys are

really building a music index that people can leverage is what you're getting at there sam yeah exactly yeah that was the i think that was the big aha moment was like there there needs to be Um, you know, the biggest, the biggest thing in music is distribution. You used to have to be on a record label because you had to have distribution. Otherwise no one would be able to get your records. That was, that was what made the music business successful, um, aggregates to digital platforms are easy to find. You can go to, as an independent artist, you can find it, you can get access,

but then those things were then sort of gobbled up by like, um, putting pressure on streaming platforms from major industry to to highlight tracks and playlists and so like the idea of music discovery became something that was basically impossible to achieve unless you were on a major label so they always labels always find some way to get this stuff just back into this package that works for them and doesn't work for anybody else and i think that's the you know we're not like we're trying to make this an easy experience we're trying to make this something that's going to be able to scale to normal artists that maybe aren't particularly uh invested in bitcoin or maybe they don't even know about it maybe they don't they don't have

to know about it is really the idea we want to just have something that's easy and works but um yeah i mean i think uh i think this is gonna this this is at least a situation where as long as we stay true to the cause which i which i know we're gonna do because we're incredibly passionate about it uh i think we'll have a pretty cool thing here where it's going to be difficult um you know labels and publishers and and people like that will be able to participate but i don't think they'll be able to commandeer it like they have in the past at least i hope not yeah and so how does this index work from like a technical aspect sam you mentioned the music tag but what's going on on the back end michael yeah sure it's um it's a podcast 2.0 um spec rss feed so we essentially

just have an rss feed for every album that's kind of our basic unit um for a feed on wave lake so if you have 10 tracks on an album um that gets generated into a publicly available rss feed and then in that feed it's it's just like a podcast episode or sorry a podcast and each track is like an episode of that podcast it actually looks very similar for the most part to a podcast rss feed except it's just got a little bit of extra data in there that indicates the track um on wave lake and then when um when a podcasting 2.0 app uh sends a payment to that address and we just can you know we can interpret that and then uh uh apply the payment to the correct track and artist yeah so you guys are essentially building if we're analoguing this to podcasting 2.0 you're

building like the podcasting index but for for music yeah we don't have something as quite as robust as the podcast index i mean those guys have been working on that for a long time and um kudos to you know like that the whole team that's put that together and all the contributors to it um because they've got a solid index over there so i think we don't we're not quite there yet in terms of, um, you know, the inner interactivity from an application standpoint, but, um, but we do want to get there at some point, um, for music. Yeah. And this is, I mean, it's a pretty big thing, right? Like to, to apply the podcasting over RSS to music, right? Cause as we've been discussing music distribution has been pretty siloed and

obviously RSS is this open source broadcasting mechanism. And it seems like distributing music via an RSS feed is going to be pretty damn disruptive. Yeah, I think we'll have a little bit. I mean, I'm already, you know, I'm always like overly excited and think when people see this, they're just going to be like, this is the best thing ever. I'm going to use this.

I'm going to stop using everything else. This is just the way to go. But of course, that's not the case. so I think we're gonna have a little bit I know we're gonna have I mean it's come up a lot and we're already it's probably it's our biggest hurdle is like how are we going to educate people to make them to make it click in their brains that like your music is already free you know it's it's gonna be a big line to cross for a lot of people because I just don't think they don't a lot of people don't think of it like that they think my music isn't free

my music is on spotify my music is on apple music it's on wherever and i get paid for that and they know that they don't get paid a lot they know that the royalty checks might be you know twelve dollars or something but at least they it's just a mental thing where they're just like it is behind some sort of a paywall so i am protected in that way people can't just like go and listen to it for free when the reality of that is obviously we know they can i mean if you really want to go if don't have a subscription to one of these music services you can go find music anywhere so maybe that's being monetized through the record label on youtube or something where there's license agreements or royalty agreements it's where they're still able to collect money on that but

even that there's ways to get around i mean you'll just see um you can go find a song anywhere if you you want it is basically the point you know um so i think once people realize get over that and they realize like michael was mentioning with some of the artists that we're seeing the the gap the stats between the amount of plays and the value that you're getting on those plays so i might make five or seven dollars on you know 10 or 15 plays instead of like michael said you know i might make five dollars on 15 000 plays on something like spotify i don't know exactly the math is but it's somewhere around there you know so i think just having those use cases out there it's going to take us a minute to just to get some good examples and see that ramp up but

once we have some of those once we have some that are for a lack of better term in like normie land you know people are are good use cases that are maybe outside of the bitcoin ecosystem I think we'll see it grow very uh organically and I think we'll see it grow exponentially too just like almost all other things have happened in the music business in the last 30 years it's just it's immediately looked at like a you know digital music in general was immediately targeted very strictly like they were suing 16 year old kids for downloading Metallica songs you know and they're in Ohio and then within three years it's like you have streaming services and it's like it's fixed it's like problem solved cool well i guess we just fixed that we didn't

you know um so yeah i think i think that's going to be a big hurdle for sure um i'm gonna stop talking don't don't stop talking i mean it's it's interesting along that line that you know there is a pretty big movement um i don't know how big it is but there's a vocal movement of musicians and artists um who are fed up with you know the streaming industry um and just the the lack of sort of accountability and rights that they have as artists who are basically doing all the work to put all this content on these services and they're not really they don't feel like they're seeing um their fair share which i think is a totally uh justified point of view um but at the same time i've spoken to some of these folks about wave lake um and yeah there's you know

there's there's some pushback about you know like putting putting the content out openly not having a paywall um and things like that and and also just skepticism about bitcoin i mean we're in a bit of a bear market now hey we're pumping we're pumping now yeah i'm looking i'm i'm i'm talking in like the three-year time frame i'm kidding i'm kidding yeah yeah but um yeah i mean we've it's been a rough year for like the cryptocurrency space you know as you as people call it uh um and bitcoin just gets sort of lumped into that unfairly um and so yeah i think the skeptic like that skepticism piled on to sort of how different this system how different wavelength approach to music is compared to how you know traditionally it's been approached

yeah that makes it a little bit of an uphill climb but i think like yeah i'm hopeful that we're gonna get to the other side yeah well and we've talked about this in the past and again comparing it to like value for value in the podcasting world and i think it definitely works there obviously for no agenda rabbit will recap tftc we're getting a lot of boosts and all that it's working well but i think particularly for music for artists i think yes i'm a podcaster we're on a podcast right now and i love my work and um talking to gentlemen like yourselves and everybody else that's been on the show but i'm not afraid to admit that people have much more of a spiritual connection with music as a medium compared to podcasting yes there may be learning

a lot here and getting enjoyment out of it but there's something about music that really taps into our animalistic spirits and makes us feel it's just yeah it's a different it's a different kind of value i mean i love podcasts because podcasts are primarily educational you know so whether it's like some sort it could be a it could be storytelling where you're just you're getting something out of that but it's uh it's it's mostly an educational experience i think for people like they listen to podcasts to learn something um and there's a lot of value that i think that's why it does work and will continue to get better but i do agree um music is incredibly special to people it does things to people that really nothing else can um and i do think that

it will scale a lot faster i know there's been criticism even within i mean i i have a podcast i do i use uh you know it's it's cool i'm making more money through value for value than i would have ever made on anything you know what's that money it's it's just like we're seeing with music it's like small amount of plays but statistically the value for those plays is actually pretty good if you compare it to what i would maybe get in like the advertising space for a podcast that only has 300 listeners or something you know so um i but i think yeah i think we will see this scale a lot faster with music i think we'll we'll see it um i'm really excited to see too like just with publishing you know getting rid of those paywalls for publishing platforms and being able

to stream stats as you're reading articles i'm really really pumped for that i know you have some experience with that too marty with like uh the newsletter and there's some stuff on your website too that had some of that stuff going for a while right you still do that yeah yeah yesterday's letter um i'm like working with the model just to experiment with it i sort of feel dirty putting the the newsletter behind a paywall because it's been free for five years but the model i'm working with is you can become a paid subscriber where you pay monthly or annual fee and you get it for free or if you don't want to do that you don't put your email address in or pay with a credit card and you'd rather just consume um one piece of content that you

particularly want to read i'll put a 75 cent lightning network enabled paywall on that and that's how you access it so the first three bents of the week are free and then if i write five the last two are paywalled yeah i know there's things being worked on for that where you can even you know you can read in real time and you can stream paragraphs so that's i mean this idea it's just it's just so new you know it's like conceptualizing all this stuff and how it's going to work it's just these things only work once they get distributed enough that they become normal for people like people didn't understand the concept of like you know something like apple pay that probably would have been really difficult to understand 10 years ago if you're trying to

explain to somebody that you were going to have this thing in your in your pocket that you know whatever you know there's just it just has to become normal and the more things that get implemented the easier this is going to be the more uh things like cash app uh strike um breeze and these other cool i don't i'm hesitant to call them wallets because i i tend to agree with roy that they're not but um once you have these things on your phone where you can transact with uh transact easily you know like like the cash cash app right now having uh turning on lightning payments for everybody it's incredible i mean how many people out there who don't even know what bitcoin is have bitcoin capabilities in their pocket right now tens of millions

yeah and cash app works really really well with wavelake so that's going to be a really easy thing to do like once we can just start telling people like yeah just go down like cash app because everyone no one knows what value for value is in the normal space a lot of people aren't educated on bitcoin and the lightning network for sure but they know what cash app is you know so for like just go download this and you can fund your wallet through here and you can pay your favorite artists through cash app or strike or venmo or any of these other things i guess that um ultimately will and who knows maybe it'll be an apple pay too at some point in time people are talking about that i don't know if that story was real this week but somebody was

posting around some tweet somewhere that apple is has all this stuff in their code base so but whether they're doing it now or not these things will be everywhere at some point in time and it's just going to make this process incredibly easy for people so we just have to build and as long as like we're building the infrastructure as soon as the people are ready the stuff's there then then it's just going to take off. Yeah. And then on top of that, not only are you guys changing

the technical aspects of how these artists get paid with Bitcoin, Lightning Network, value for value, over RSS or syndicating the music over RSS, but we discussed this too, there's going to have to be, and this is probably a big hurdle, but I don't think it will be that hard, which is changing the interaction between the artist and the user

for the artist being like, hey, if you want to support me, go listen to my music on Wavelink over Spotify and directly boost me over the Lightning Network. There's that aspect of the value for value model that will certainly need to develop in the music industry. But again, going back to the emotional connection that individuals have with music, I think it will be a relatively low lift

for the first movers from the artist's perspective that begin to i think they'll see a ton of engagement yeah yeah i'm hoping so sorry michael man no i was just gonna say like the the one thing that sam and i also think a lot about is um just teaching people about bitcoin through wave lake um because as you mentioned you know um music is such a universal universally valued thing it's just a special thing that most you know everyone can connect with and so um yeah we just think something like wave lake is a great way not only to solve a lot of these accounting and fairness problems in the music industry but it's also a great way to introduce a lot of people to the utility of bitcoin um and you know i think we try to like play down a little bit of um

um you know you know the the common sort of um i guess vocabulary or you know signals that um we use in the bitcoin space just so that's not so intimidating for people that aren't familiar with something like stats like i had a friend who's followed what i've been doing for the last year and we finally launched last week and he asked me like so are that like the wave like token that you use and um and so and and like it's a it's a totally fair question um from someone who doesn't understand who doesn't know what a sat is who doesn't know much about bitcoin um so i think like that that's one aspect of the music i guess using music as um a way to just introduce people to this amazing technology is one thing we'd like to do as well.

Yeah, and I think we've seen an example of this in recent weeks over on Nostr. I'm not sure if you guys have been playing around with Nostr, but I've been on there, and it's actually been pretty incredible to see the amount of people who have come to the Nostr ecosystem, downloaded a client like Domus or something like that, and joined it because they saw Jack Dorsey tweeting about it Edward Snowden tweeting about it and then within a few days

like oh like Bitcoin's integrated here and like they learned Bitcoin and you can easily tip I mean Edward Snowden got on the Noster and wrote his first message there and he had to tell people to stop sending him Bitcoin yeah because they were just tipping him so much

and that's he just went on and people just started sending him sats because they really valued the whistleblower work he did in the past and it isn't hard to imagine um something similar happening to artists where they get on to wavelake and they have a bunch of rabid fans start sending them sats it's it's yeah it's uh it's a new way to monetize attention i guess you know it's like i guess the advertising model is

you are the you are the product if you're listening to a podcast with advertising your your your value to the podcaster and the advertising network is your attention to this ad um but that's the really cool thing is like yeah you can the really fun thing about is you can just engage with people because it's it's just fun and it's new and it's not like flooded with people it's like small still so it's just very exciting to be able to go on there and engage with people because even the people that normally like you wouldn't be able to have like someone like jack like maybe you wouldn't be able to have um as much engagement with with jack on twitter as you could on noster because jack is just particularly jazzed on what's happening there

and he's just like hugging everybody and and giving him the shaka symbol and everyone's just super pumped and like excited so um yeah i mean that's it's new technology is fun it's exciting and we're going to see that i mean i guess maybe that will level off as nuster gets bigger maybe like uh boosting as wave lake gets bigger maybe people won't be both boosting as many sats as they are right now because they're just like really excited like we just had to increase the the capacity for the boost because like i wanted to boost more and i was like i need to be able to boost more i want to send more stats uh it's it's cool i mean and yeah that it's just adding more to the plate but like all the fun stuff we can do with nostre i mean i had to get michael had i i

think i jumped on there first and so i just kept like sending him links and stuff like hey dude we gotta like we gotta we gotta do some stuff on this thing you gotta sign up we gotta check this out we gotta figure out how to integrate wave lake with nostre stuff because that that technology that's moving so fast i mean will got a major shout out to will with donis because yeah that's pretty incredible what he's been able to do in the last 30 to 45 days yeah i mean particularly with rss feeds like i'm uh like i want to for the newsletter like i want to like set up like an art like i want to like immediately syndicate every newsletter to yeah nostre over rss and So you can easily integrate RSS with Nostra.

Like you guys can do it with the Wavelength Index as well, or somebody posts it, goes out to Nostra. Nostra's got Lightning Network enabled tips included already. You just take the metadata of your users' Lightning addresses and you syndicate the Nostra. It's sort of like a growth hack for you guys, I can imagine. Yeah. Sam and I have been talking about...

The interoperability is nuts between all these platforms. just to be able to connect it all simply is miraculous actually right yeah we've been talking a lot about ways that we might be able to like integrate with noster potentially publish feeds through it potentially like link payments to tracks that all trace back to you know events in noster um i think the identity aspect of noster like the pub private key private key um you know way of uh proving identities has a lot of potential outside of just you know messaging um so yeah it's yeah i've only i'm pretty new to it still but i did i did um i did see the hug train uh this past week i was able to catch that which is pretty which is just great which is just great

to see um but yeah it's uh yeah the the more i learn about it the more i see a lot of opportunity there yeah um we're gonna have a tftc relay here by by the end of q2 2023 i'm putting that timeline on myself i'm not gonna rush it i can't build it i'm depending on others to build it but um yeah no it's fascinating where this can all go i think it i mean like nostril it seems like it opens up It's like a whole, like you mentioned, new world of interoperability and just really supporting and emboldening and equipping independent content producers. It would be somebody peddling a disgusting newsletter like myself

or an artist putting music out there. It's really going to be fascinating. It's crazy the technologies that we have at our fingertips right now that are being enabled by like open source data distribution and open source money it's gonna be fucking incredible yeah it's interesting to me how seriously it's really interesting to me like just to see how the whole web3 kind of hype train was like everything's gonna be on a blockchain we're gonna have a blockchain for this a blockchain for that like we have tokens and and Like, I feel like all of the really interesting stuff was actually happening outside of that.

It was, it's like the things happening in podcasting 2.0, it's the stuff happening on Nostra, it's all of this stuff that's sort of happening behind or to the side of all of that, that hype in quote unquote web three. And I think, yeah, I think for the people who are sort of paying attention to that, like we're able to see that this is this is where like i think all of the innovation and the advancement is going to happen yeah all this shit with value i mean i wrote a newsletter about that early last year when the web3 meme was really blowing up it's like these people have a completely wrong blockchains don't really make sense for any of this what you're going to do is just combine

a bunch of open source technologies and using podcasting 2.0 as the proxy like rss and bitcoin over lightning boom combine them that's web3 direct peer-to-peer monetization of podcasts wavelake boom distribute music over rss feed combine that with the lightning network boom peer-to-peer music monetization noster let's spit up a bunch of relays that communicate via web socket and then you can inject bitcoin into that boom you have a distributed uh you have distributed communications technology with that a bunch of crazy clients ui different very unique experiences can be built atop of you don't need an a16z backed uh token to do any of this right we're building a real foundation here that's the that's the difference you know just

over everyone's had a different journey with this but some have been similar you know where you've gone through like these different phases throughout the technology however long you've been a bitcoin or however long you've been paying attention i've been paying attention for a while and that's i think that's what really ends up getting the the bitcoin person in the right place is you know you there's so many distracting things over the course of that journey that you're taking but there's one true consistent thing it's like oh i see when all at the end of the cycle or at the end of the day and all these things collapse like what's still here like this foundation is still here and the foundation is just getting stronger and stronger and stronger

for every one of these cycles so it's it's impossible after a certain amount of time to not see that and i think that's that's why this is happening you know it's like why we're seeing the lightning network from the the first uh casa node that i set up down here in my basement in 2018 or whenever it was I can't remember whenever those came out so what's happening now you know like early 2020 or late 2020 early 21 seeing like what was happening with umbral you're just getting like you can't you can't even get a raspberry pi because everyone was just like flocking to amazon to buy everything to buy out all the supply to build nodes and just like the exponential growth of the lightning network that whole time period of all the businesses I mean we all know we've

all seen the just the sheer amount of like incredible businesses that have popped up in the last five years um especially lightning businesses has just been absolutely incredible so just building a very strong foundation this is not a house of cards this is something that's like going to work and uh it's very very exciting yeah no and i think wave lake particularly is very exciting because again going back to music massive market massive emotional connection for people like i think if you guys are successful in sort of tipping over the domino of artists really getting hooked into this model it can be massive for adoption and just awareness of bitcoin for sure yeah there's i'm happy to have this thing out out there because there are we were

talking about this a little bit yesterday but there's just so much potential with all of this it's hard to know where to start you know but you have to start so now we've at least done that part we've we've gone gotten over the hurdle of like just getting a product out there and now we can just get it to work so i'm hoping i'm really hoping to see i mean it's weird because in a lot of in a lot of um most companies wouldn't want to see a lot of competition pop up they'd want to control that but like we really want to see this grow we're hoping that we're just just the beginning of what we see happen with music and lightning and rss and just all these in oster and all these things like i hope there's just like a flourishing community of these things start

that start pop up in the next 12 to 18 months yeah and then particularly for you guys um in terms of like artists' adoption and syndicating their work via Wavelink and Wavelink Index. I think we've talked about this in the past, too, where particularly for artists who are either miffed at the streaming services or their labels. I mean, we've talked in the past about Taylor Swift and the Scooter Braun blow up,

and there's been this trend of some artist going back and actually re-recording some of their past albums, Taylor Swift being one of them, and then putting them out independently so they can reap the reward of that album and the label doesn't get everything. I could

see that would be an interesting sort of Trojan horse to get people in the Wavelake as they find all the artists that are pissed off at their labels or the streaming services and just get them to re-record and post it on Wavelake. yeah it's i think it's it's it's in the air with everybody it's in the air from you know people

i mean it's why band camp to work so well for a lot of years it still continues to be a successful platform for small artists because they just want to opt out of that system because they can there's a better system for them and a better community for them somewhere like that and then you're yeah you're seeing and these bigger artists that have just had it i mean i keep referencing this tlc video that i saw i was like lisa left i lopez talking about how they sold 10 million records or something and each of them walked with like 300 000 at the end of the day and they were basically broke after they you know bought a house it's like that that should not be happening and that's only gotten worse actually because they're you can't sell 10 million records anymore

So it's even, it's even worse. Like there's not even the same amount of money out there to, to be, uh, cut out of. So, yeah, I mean, I think like I was saying before, it's going to be tough to get, to get, um, artists moved over, but it's just going to take a couple key people to do it. but i even even i was talking to one sort of notable semi-notable person uh the other day and i was just like who i know is interested in bitcoin and as a musician and i just it's one of those examples where i just thought they would be like yeah this is rad i'll do it right now you know um but that skepticism is there and i think uh without use cases it's just going to be tough to pull those people over but i think we'll get those pretty soon yeah that's something are you gonna say something oh no well i was gonna say like like you were saying you're still learning how to spit up properly but i imagine for the artist too obviously distribution is a big thing

so you guys need people to build popular players on top of the index like apps that people can for sure that's that's a major that's gonna be a major milestone to actually yeah more things out yeah i mean we i think that's the disadvantage we're at right now is that um like all the ears are on these major streaming platforms um and i think the best way to um yeah the best way to kind of fight against that is not only for us to create a player but for like anyone who's interested in this to create music players on top of this content and other people to also create distribution services like ours that are interoperable with our player and our content is interoperable with their player then it's then it's truly it truly becomes a upload once

distribute everywhere situation and in that kind of environment if you're an artist and you essentially can attach a universally payable lightning address to every single song that you put out by just uploading it once to these distribution services like ours, why would you go and try and piecemeal upload tracks to each individual streaming service, either yourself or through some company that does it for you? um you know you'd have you can have massive exposure this way um as long as

the the players are out there and the audiences are going to them yeah interoperability i think it's going to be a big trend as we head toward 2030 what you guys need as a rapper to drop wave lake in a song that you have overnight success it i'll keep my fingers crossed it's gonna happen i mean that's how cash app went viral he like started in the inner cities and got and they didn't like go to rappers and say drop us in your songs it just started naturally happening i could see a phenomena like that happening uh in this area too i dropped my track we're already seeing like some small community things happen and that's going to be really fun when we just start being able to foster these just

all different types types of communities within music um it's going to be really really cool to see yeah how the um like the b2b conversation has been going like you mentioned publishers they're a big aspect of this like license dealers and stuff like that like you said it could potentially make them more money as well have you really convinced any of the players in that part the industry to to seriously consider this no i think we're like a little hesitant to even try to show wave lake too hard yet like i just want to see some more i love the slow game so i just want to see like a few more things in place before we really start working that angle um but i think we will i mean like you know i i know a few smaller labels that

I think would be interested at least in the conversation and that that's something that we'll be approaching soon but yeah I mean before the end of the year it's we have a goal to have a thousand artists on the platform I don't know if it'll happen but it's a little lofty but you never know I mean I think we have like 50 now so after the first week so it's a good start but if we could get a record label on board that would help that growth pretty substantially so So I think, I think it'd be cool. I think we just have to, uh, yeah, we need to work on the education piece. It's, that's a really, that's the missing piece here for us just because we've been so busy with the,

the design. Uh, Michael's been so busy with just building everything. I mean, the dude is like an absolute machine. It's super impressive. Um, but now that the dust has settled a little bit, we can get a couple more of these features in and then start attacking the education piece. And once we have good education in place, then i think that's what we'll be you know talking more openly to random bands and publishers and record labels yeah and then you'll undoubtedly get the big winners just annoy their favorite artists like put it on wavelake i'd like to support you directly

there you go yeah i can't wait i can't wait for that the street teamers that's what i actually you guys will have at least 51 by the end of this day i'm gonna go to my buddy who just released an album tell him to put it up there and he definitely will oh awesome rad thank you yeah there's a there's been i mean i've been surprised at like the crossover between bitcoin people and musicians like there's definitely i was surprised at how big uh that demographic was just in the last week there's just a ton of musicians who are also bitcoiners and are just like interested in a tool like this and just the bitcoin genre i mean there's that's almost like becoming a genre in itself just songs about bitcoin it's just so i

think we have like the entire bitcoin genre catalog up there now at this point which is pretty i i had no idea i knew there were a few but it's like dang man there's a ton of these yeah and then i mean i'm not sure if sean lennon's an artist obviously his dad was but he's a massive bitcoiner as well sean is a killer artist yeah he's got some he's got some great music yeah yeah i mean he's low-hanging fruit he's sean i'm sorry if you're listening i know he's listened to the podcast before um i've not found your music yet but yeah put it on Wavelake and I'll be listening to it we would love to have Sean Lennon that would be that'd be incredible yeah big big fan of Sean Lennon yeah if you haven't listened to his records go listen

to to Dead Meat it's a really good really good album hell yeah where else does this go what are your biggest hopes for for Wavelake why I mean obviously we've talked about the problems in the music industry but how do you see this changing and does it incentivize better better music does incentivize more touring does incentivize more interactions with with the end user i'll just go really quickly and then i'll let michael jump in because i'm i'm just like yeah talking way too much today but uh yeah i think just having a low pressure experience for the artist to be able to monetize without the need to think that i have to you know if you have a patreon or something like that the content that you have to

generate to keep up with that commitment for your subscribers can be a huge burden um the the burden of having to go out and tour or having to front a bunch of money for super unique merchandise items things like that it's a lot it's all that stuff's a lot to bear when you're an artist and you just want to like go make some music and do what you love so I just hope to eliminate a lot of that pressure and for people to just be able to comfortably make music and in return I want to have a very seamless experience that can be really engaging with the artist and the fan because that's in my experience as a musician i've had um i've always attempted to put that as a priority that fan connection and it works really well i've seen firsthand like how well

that could work so i want to be able to achieve what you might be able to achieve through a concert or you know signing stuff at the end of the night at a merch table things like that that are super important to have that fan engagement and that um and create that special situation for or a fan want to be able to replicate that in some way through Wavelake. Yeah. For me, I mean, one of the reasons that I started Wavelake was selfishly because I just wanted to find cool new music that I like wouldn't find through the major streaming platforms. I, I just, yeah, I think I was just kind of,

I wasn't really happy with the recommendations and the playlist they were making for me and I just felt like I could just tell it was made by a computer like the playlist that I was being recommended it just felt like you know oh you're just you're just identifying the traits of the songs that I listen to a lot and you're just matching it in some algorithm and then sending me more of that stuff it's not like you're thinking about hey if you like this here's something like completely off that track that you might like too it's like a friend saying you know just recommending some random band or artist to you like that's that's what i was sort of missing um and so i don't know i just hope i hope we're able to

foster kind of a new era of better music recommendations um powered by sats you know like using sats as that value signal that true value signal for um music that people really love and enjoy and want to promote and support um like i would love to see that really grow and flourish um and yeah just if you know people around the world are more easily able to discover music they love and um like we're i've been hearing stuff the last week that like i never would have come across um on a streaming platform and that's just been every morning i just check like who's uploaded stuff i'm going to listen to that and there's a lot of great music that people are uploading that you know it's just awesome to experience and so i just hope that

continues and like that more and more people can have that same experience and i've i thought about this on the written content side of thing so like what we're doing at tftc with our btc pay server ghost integration we're adding more payments too but like i think we can compete with substack on the creation model and you can create these really unique social graphs based off of sats flows um you can do like sats flows per listen like there's like like you can get like very strong signals like yes somebody may upload it it may only get um 10 views but if that those 10 views produce a hundred thousand sats like oh this may be a good song you want to do is you can use that signal to like populate like some curation

And then on top of that, if you do, let's say you like integrate Nostra pub keys as an identification tool, then you begin to create these social graphs of different songs that people with those pub keys are liking. And then you can have like a trusted circle, like I want to know whatever they're liking and how much they're boosting to see how much they like it. There's so many creative things that you can pull out of this from a creation perspective. yeah yeah that's another fun thing too that we're hoping to do is incentivize bands to share music um you know it's like if you if i discover a really cool song and i want to like put it out if i was say i shared an oster that'd be really cool to be able and people i mean i think similar to what you were could do at one point on sphinx i'm not i've had a little bit of

trouble with sphinx lately unfortunately so i haven't been able to use as much as i as i did when i first heard about it but i know at one point in time on sphinx you could share like a clip and if somebody listened to it or boosted from that clip you would get a percentage of the the boost to happen we want to do things like that too you know like if you're just have a whole army of kids out there like sharing cool songs and like um making sats back from that too like that's going to be really to just incentivize that circular situation for for everybody i think is going to be a huge part of it as well yeah you like mechanical turk like rap genius or something like that for like lyrics somebody's like

describing what the lyrics are and like other users can tip them for for that yeah that's awesome yeah michael in terms of the technical aspects of this um what are some of the hurdles that you're experiencing building on lightning what are what are you looking forward to in terms of things that that may be coming to the lightning network that would that would make your your product easier to use or just simply better yeah i think the big one that um sam and i talk about a lot i think about a lot is um custody so you know and and i think the the kind of the precursor to that is just user key management. Um, you know, until, until people are familiar with and comfortable with managing their own private keys, um, it's going to be really difficult to get

to a situation where, um, you know, people can custody their own lightning wallets. And so, um, yeah, that's, that's just, I think that's the biggest, um, yeah, that's one of the biggest challenges i think in the in the broader lightning space right now is the custodial question um i think for now it's i think custody is a good enough trade-off i think the trade-off is worth it in order to um you know onboard more people get them comfortable with how lightning works um but i think in the longer term i think you know some some better solutions need to, and better UX. You know, we just need better UX and solutions for key management and self custody and all that. So, you know, I would say that's like the, the, one of the things that are

priority for us is just like always being on top of sort of what products are coming out, what innovations are coming out in the space. I think Nostra is like a really good example, speaking of it again um of like another way that people are learning about private key management um and so hopefully that that helps push that that you know that envelope forward a little bit and then you know with that if we can have um more self-custody and just more sort of responsibility over uh funds i think that would be that would be great to have yeah completely agree but also agree that ux is getting better and i think over the last three years particularly like all the wallets that have come to market um i've certainly made a better experience but

agree it's got a far ways to go before it's ready for joe schmoe in the corner just wants to listen to a track being able to custody their bitcoin yeah i say that in our newsletter last night It was like, but quitting custody is not that hard. You just download an app and hit receive. But there's more. We just got to get people comfortable with private, public key. Just the whole concept. It's not that hard.

You write down some words. Keep them safe. You're good. Yeah. Yeah. That scares people. I think that, you know, I would imagine kids, like teenagers growing up today, like they're going to be very familiar with it.

like it won't be as big a deal for them as it is for us older folks that you know had to learn this along the way i think like for for people for for like key private key natives it'll be you know it'll be second nature yeah i agree it's actually stoked an interesting thought in my mind like i wonder if it'll be similar for wave lake or just younger artists or like no this makes more sense me i'm gonna publish here yeah i hope so i think so yeah i think that that will be the case yeah yeah i'm excited for you guys congrats on the launch thank you thank you we're so excited absolutely could not could not be more thrilled with with uh the way this last this last week has gone just yeah like michael said such cool music

I've discovered so many just same as him, like music that an algorithm would never feed me in a million years. I have now listened to and have, and have boosted. And I'm thoroughly enjoying all the new music that's coming on. So I encourage people, if you, if you, if you make music, you're listening, whatever it is, that's the cool thing about it too. It's like, there's no pressure. Like you're, are you working on some beat that like for the last three years that you've

been scared to release on Spotify or don't know how to, it takes like 30 seconds to upload it on wave lake and you can get some stats it's really fun it's fun to just try it out so um yeah hopefully we can we can get even just like a whole group of people using this thing that normally wouldn't even be releasing music because they just would feel too much pressure like it's a big deal and it's this this isn't it's just fun like we're just trying to build like a really new fun exciting music library and uh i think uh yeah i think people are eager to hear new things so i encourage everybody to get out their music oh yeah yeah and and if it helps at all we have a pretty rabid fan base like a listener base

that's just hungry for new music and they're hungry to support it so um yeah hopefully that encourages people to share their stuff yeah this is uh yeah i've been seeing some users do some heavy boosts and it's like oh man i gotta like my boost game like i'm not busy enough here i gotta i gotta keep up with these yeah are you a weak booster sam it's not a good look i was a week i don't know it's cool i think i think that's gonna happen for a lot of people see if you're if you that's why when we raise the limit i think this is gonna be kind of cool because we're sort of setting a new standard where like when we were testing wave lake i think we just got in the habit of like we're doing like 10 sats or something because we were

just testing random shit back and forth for for months and so then when the thing launched i just had our presets set low and then i realized like oh yeah we should definitely be sending more but i think it the more um you know if you go and you see that like this new standard if you're looking down the list and these comments and you're seeing boosts that are like 10 000 20 000 that might encourage you to do the same and so that just creates even more value so as the as the standard as the bar gets raised i think the more value we're gonna have for bands yeah there's also there's also like this i feel like there's a competitive nature among fans too where they see that like other tracks are getting boosted to the top of the chart and so they're like well i

want this chart i want this track to go up and so they'll boost it sort of the same amount or a little bit more just to just to uh get it up there yeah like your daughter didn't your daughter the other day said that she she didn't like the song that was at number one she wanted the song that was like further down the list to be number one and she's like cool just boost it up there like easy no i mean we certainly experienced this on on the podcasting side like rhr particularly um since we read the top four boost of each week on the show like we've seen week over week like the top boost is has gotten larger in sat size because uh freaks are like competing to get into the top four so we read it on air yeah nice it's the attention it's it's the engagement it's

wanting to feel connected you know to something that you really love it's just all those things that's the that's the true basis of value for value like that's it in a nutshell like you want to, I want to give you value. You want to give me value. And that exchange just keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Yeah. It's a, it's a beautiful thing. It's a fun thing to be a part of. Do you guys ever pinch yourselves? Like, Oh, I feel like I'm on the cutting edge. Oh yeah. It's no, it's, it's so it's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. I can't believe that I even have any part of this at all. What about you, Michael? How does it feel for you no yeah it's it's crazy no it's it's totally i mean being on your show right now is

like surreal you know with the with the i see the logo and the banner around here it's um but yeah it's it's been a like it's been an amazing i don't know a year and a half since you know trying to like just attempt something like this um and it's the weirdest thing is i had an interaction with sam on sphinx before we ever like knew who the other person was before i like i barely knew what value for value was or you know how lightning worked and one of the first things i ever did on sphinx was like look for music i happened to find lightning store music um which was like the only thing i could find and i think i accidentally boosted like a thousand sats or something just had no idea what i was doing yeah no problem um and now here we are so uh yeah it's been it's it's

been an amazing trip and yeah i'm so excited to see where this goes yeah well that's probably something we should have touched on the beginning of the episode is uh like sam like you're like recognizing that sphinx you saw for podcasting you're like i want to put music on here and it's sort of yeah yeah this i mean this is just proof of like perseverance works out there kids uh you want to see something happen i've been screaming on twitter you know i think the lightning story i think today actually is two years i just got like a notification on there that i i have my twitter birthday or whatever um so yeah over the course of two years i i think i heard paul on here it was like one of the most inspiring things i've had heard ever i sent it

to a ton of people i was like this is gonna this is like gonna change the world like this is this is crazy like everyone let's go listen to this like listen to the possibility of the potential there um yeah i immediately figured out how to create uh an rss feed on podcast 2.0 got my music created this like lightning music store and then from there was just like this needs to happen let's do this like how I don't know how to build anything I'm an idiot but like somebody do this somebody figure out how to like make this work for music because this is incredible technology that no one is taking advantage of no one's taking advantage of this yet so yeah it's it's we say it's kind of serendipitous like he you know he stumbles he's thinking the same thing

probably after listening to the exact same interview um stumbles upon this in his quest like just i just happened to have been there and now we own a business together that was doing exactly what we were searching for two years ago so it's really it's we've said it's serendipitous a lot i mean even the first time we met it's just kind of hilarious like he i think he thought i was a key on from stacker news like we had some panels we were watching he's like oh yeah i think maybe i had a little bit more of a beard at that point or something but uh but yeah i just think you know these things it's important I know you know in the grand scheme of where this is going to go we're playing an incredibly small part but just to be able to be a part of it at all is

absolutely it's an honor you know really truly and I'm just excited to I've been trying to find a place in this world for a long time and I'm so happy to have finally found a spot to be able to do something that's going to help yeah i mean i mean number one i'm very happy that the paul toy episode inspired you guys it's weird to think that that yeah potentially led us here no big time it's crazy to think but then number two yeah i think particularly in bitcoin like scratching your own itch is like the best way to get to like success in the industry like for me it was i had a bunch of family members and friends who were like trying to learn about bitcoin i had no resource to point him to i was like all right i'll start

fucking writing about it for you that's what dovetailed into this and then for you guys like i want to see music on like a podcasting 2.0 like system and then all right nobody's building it i'm scratch my head i should go build it like i think that your story particularly highlights the nations of this industry like if you want something it may seem daunting but you can go fucking build it like if not you then who yeah and even if you don't know how i mean i have i have no idea how to build anything but just like the the sheer motivation of just wanting to see it happen has led to this you know so it's just the drive you have to i think that's the coolest part about a part about this and why we've seen so many incredible bitcoin companies start

because it is so overwhelming and there are so many things to do but if you as an individual take what you're passionate about and what you're you know like your part like what's my role what's my role here like i'm signed up where do i you know what do you need um like in any situation everybody has their has the things that they're they're really good at so this is one of these incredibly rare experiences in in the scope of time of all time where we're able to potentially change the way kind of everything works so everyone is going to eventually be able to play a role here and use their abilities to everyone's advantage you know so whether it's music or journalism or broadcasting or banking or whatever i mean this is all everything is going to shift

into what it's going to be a better situation for earth yeah it's a beautiful thing really i'm pumped to be on this journey with you guys that's the best part about doing the show yeah everybody's just so jacked up about what they're doing so so jacked up i'm gonna say i'm gonna say i'm jazzed again that's my favorite thing to say as long as you're not doing trying to bring that back no no jazz hands i'm just trying to bring back that term jazzed it's it's pretty uh it's a good one jazz to the old timey terms are are gonna come back yeah so where can people find more about wave lake

wave lake.com and uh yeah at wave lake on twitter instagram i guess there's not much there and it's way out wave lake wave like a wave file yeah that's a good thing i waved yeah so a couple people have referred to it as wob lake um i'm here to to uh let everyone know it's wave lake wave is a music file w-a-b so that's w-a-b-l-a-k-e.com yeah go check it out if you want to listen to more music new music you want to support artists it's the best way to do it if you're an artist looking to engage in a new monetization model this is the best way to do it like what uh what should we leave the freaks with words of wisdom i know we just wax poetic for a bit but i'm sure we can get a little bit more but give us some closing words here michael

you i i don't know i i think um i'm i i don't have any fancy words to say here but it's been awesome to be on this show marty i'll just say that and i think you know what we've been saying about people being able to like get involved and build what whatever they want. Um, it's totally true. Like if you, if you see a need for something, if you want to get involved in some way, um, yeah, like people are really encouraging, supportive. Um, so yeah, definitely would, uh, say if you're even remotely thinking about doing a little something in the space go out and do it yeah and i'll just i'll reiterate it's something i said on twitter the other day but it's it's it's so true i mean it's like don't be afraid to ask stupid

questions on this journey because this is so new for everybody even people that know what what's going on you know or think they do still have a lot of questions because there's just so much to uncover still so i would say yeah if you're interested in especially lightning master right now as we've talked a lot about today like go check it out it's super fun and if you're confused or intimidated by it um ask questions everybody is here to help some great advice there are no stupid questions especially in this space exactly you'll you'll find that even some of the smartest people in the space don't have answers to the questions yeah that's what makes it interesting there's a lot there's a lot to learn there's a lot going on out there yeah well gentlemen i'm

gonna go recruit your next artist uh to the wave lake platform thank you so much martin this has been a blast and an absolute honor really appreciate it well yeah thank you the pleasure was all mine again like i said this is uh i get to talk to people that are jazzed up about what they're doing a bit of cool stuff so it's catching the pleasure is all mine all right go enjoy the rest of your friday uh and we'll wrap up peace and love freaks