The New Music Business

Emily Kinney is an actress, musician, and podcast host. Most people know her as an actress who starred in The Walking Dead from 2011-2015, Masters of Sex, The Flash, Arrow, Law & Order: SVU, and many others. She was also in Spring Awakening on Broadway.

In this episode I discuss the controversy surrounding the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek’s comment: "You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough." I also go into how Spotify’s payment model actually works and if it’s fair or not.

Allie X is a Canadian singer-songwriter and artist who's been living in LA for the last few years. She is an incredibly talented artist and has over 100 million streams and 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

John Fung is the CEO and co-founder of The Music Fund, a startup company that issues advances to artists for their streaming revenue. They're not a record label even though labels are typically the ones offering advances to artists. They are innovating and disrupting in the music industry, and John goes over their business model.

Jonathan Azu is an artist manager for artists like Cory Henry, Luke James, Emily King, and Michelle Williams among others. He used to be the executive vice president and general manager of Red Light Management. He is also a two-time Billboard magazine 40 Under 40 power player. Over a year ago, he launched his own management company called Culture Collective.

Laura Escudé is a fantastic violinist, producer, and Ableton's first ever official certified trainer. She was hired by Ableton to teach people how to use Ableton Live. She then went on to tour with artists like Kanye West and Herbie Hancock.

Nick Bearden has played thousands of shows with Jamestown Revival, but we go heavy on the business side of managers, where he shares a story on one of the shadiest managers I've ever heard of. We also discuss how freelancers operate.

Seth Kallen is an artist manager for JP Saxe, X Ambassadors, Jukebox The Ghost, and many others. He talks about how to get opening slots on tours and how he was relentless early on. We discussed creating during quarantine, sync licensing, and touring.

We talk about what it's like running our careers and writing music during COVID-19 and quarantine. We hear from all of the Ari's Take Academy instructors, including Lucidious (Streaming & Instagram Growth), Vo Williams (Advanced Sync Strategies for Film, TV and Video Games), Kristen Mathe (Cracking Colleges), Andrew Spalter (Breaking China), and Allyson Toy (Breaking China).

Ari Herstand's thoughts on what this moment and movement surrounding Black Lives Matter, #DefundThePolice and the death of George Floyd requires of white people. Namely musicians.