Michael Walker: Yeah. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Mark Meharry. Mark—gosh—you know, I made the cardinal mistake, Mark. Before we get started, I just want to double-check and make sure—am I pronouncing your name correctly? Is it Mark Meharry?

Tom Rogers: Yes, that's absolutely correct.

Michael: Got it. Okay, good. Usually I remember to check beforehand, but I'll do that one more time. 3, 2, 1.

Yeah. Alright, I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Mark Meharry. Mark is the founder and CEO of Music Glue, which is the go-to direct-to-fan platform used by artists like Metallica and LA to sell merch, music, and tickets worldwide.

He is an advocate for artist autonomy and ownership, and that's why they've created this tool that allows artists to actually retain control over their brand, data, and revenue.

Over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tech and music, he helps guide artists through the shift from the traditional legacy model of the music industry to fan-first strategies.

So man, that is just awesome. I mean, this is where my world and my heart is at right now. So it's so awesome to see what you've built to help artists connect with their fans. So excited to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit about owning the connection and how to, as an artist, build a stronger relationship with your fans directly.

So Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Tom: Cool.

Michael: Absolutely. So maybe to kick things off, could you share just a little bit about your story and how you came to build this software tool and work with artists like Metallica and Love?

Tom: Yeah, sure. So I'm actually from New Zealand originally, so I'm not from the UK.

I studied architecture—of all things—and through architecture school in Auckland, I formed a band with a group of other musicians that were also doing architecture and fine arts.

We used to play and make our money in order to get through university doing that. I eventually left New Zealand and came to the UK in 1999. That band continued on, and they actually ended up getting signed to Universal. They asked me if I would like to be their manager—their international manager.

In America, you wouldn't have heard of the band, but in New Zealand they were multi-platinum. They were huge. So everyone over there knows them. They're world-famous in New Zealand.

They didn't even replace me. I was the bass player, and the keyboard player just started playing all my basslines with his left hand. That's how important I was to the band.

So definitely failed musician.

Came to the UK, was working on Y2K projects. If you remember, back in the pre-2000 days, all the planes were going to fall out of the sky as soon as the year 2000 hit. So I was working on those sorts of projects. I won't go into detail, but I ended up working at PWC of all places, working on SAP. So I became a finance systems implementation manager, which I absolutely hated. I hated my day job. That was not me at all. I was still playing in bands, managing this band from New Zealand, and I ended up quitting my job. Especially going out, spending all night in Camden—which in those days was sort of the center of the European live music industry—spending all night drinking with Amy Winehouse and then going to work at 8:00 in the morning, when you're dealing with people that have been at the gym since 6:00, it just wasn't it.

So I quit my job and ended up working for a company that was building the Robbie Williams online store. This was 2003–2004, which was the early days of the idea of selling directly—a brand new concept. Robbie Williams, a big pop artist in the UK, needed an international store. I worked for the company that was building that out and thought, what if we made this available for everybody? Every artist on the planet should be able to do this. There were a few companies doing similar things, but I put a business plan together. In 2006, I founded the company. In 2007, we got funding and off we went.

The idea from the start was, an artist should be able to sell everything—not just your digital music, but your merchandise, your physical music, and your tickets. So absolutely every single thing that you possibly have to sell, you should be able to sell directly to your fans.

Because at the end of the day, the world was changing to where artists were beginning to do marketing themselves.

You've got to remember a world where music was distributed by CDs. If you wanted to find out about a new artist, you basically read about them in magazines, or you heard them on the radio, or you saw them on MTV.

Very controlled channels to market, which were all being blown apart. Napster had just launched. So the music industry was in a mess. This is pre-Facebook. This is when MySpace was just starting to take off. The whole concept of an artist recording music in their bedroom and releasing it via social media—direct-to-fan—was a completely brand new concept.

We were very early in, and got on board with that concept and drove a democratization of the music industry. That’s where we were coming from. Now, and obviously, as mentioned earlier, yeah, we do e-commerce for Metallica outside of North America, and Pearl Jam outside of North America, AC/DC worldwide, Led Zeppelin worldwide, Iron Maiden worldwide.

So there are some really big names.

Our business model has shifted slightly as we've moved along, but that was never the intention. The intention was making tools available and affordable. The argument we had was, if we had to have a conversation with Metallica, what would the price be that we would offer Metallica?

What would be the price that we could then offer Metallica—and that's the price we're going to offer to everybody.

Because it's not fair that a band like Metallica gets a better price than any other artist.

We've always stuck with that.

We don't have any tiered pricing based on the size of the artist.

It's just—that is the price. Whether you're an emerging artist or whether you're an established artist, you get exactly the same price.

So that's the very brief version from me.

Michael: Cool man. Rock on. I mean, especially everything that I've heard about Metallica—we have a client who loves Metallica and is also connected with them—and from everything I've heard, they're really smart with their marketing. They’re great with connecting with their fans.

So that makes a lot of sense that they have this relationship with a platform like yours that helps them actually connect directly with their community and own the audience.

I'm curious to hear your perspective on—this is amazing—to me, it sounds like you're so ahead of the curve.

Even now, like a decade or more later, it still feels like there's a huge gap between many artists and their fans with platforms like Spotify where you can't actually see who your fans are, you can't connect with them or message them or own the list.

Many of the ticketing platforms—you can’t see, you can’t run ads to it, because you can't see who purchased. You have no idea.

To me, it feels so backwards. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on the greater movement of the music industry right now and how a platform like what you've built connects with some of these massive players that are still kind of gatekeeping a lot of the actual access to fan data from the artists?

Tom: Yeah. I mean, it is—it's a huge problem, and it's a problem that's actually getting worse. I think through the pandemic was one of the first times artists really started to understand how important that direct access is and having the ability to contact their fans directly.

Those that had built up a database over the years were the ones that actually benefited massively during that period.

But coming out of the pandemic, there's a lot of nervousness in the market. Certainly in Europe, things have changed massively.What we are seeing now is that artists are relying on social media to develop a fan base, to develop what they think is a direct relationship with their fans.

However, it's not a direct relationship with their fans because they do not own the data. If you want to even communicate with your fanbase, it's going to cost you a lot of money.

Because if you want your post sitting at the top of any of your fans' feeds, then you have to pay for that—because you're competing with other marketers.

So it is not your data. It is not a way to truly reach your audience. Even as we've seen recently, companies are being blocked in certain countries. Certainly in America, depending on whatever political movement is happening at the time, a particular social media site could be blocked. If you have built your entire fan base using that particular site, then you’re stuck.

And I know that having an email database—a CRM database based on email addresses—is very old school. It's sort of seen as last decade's technology. However, it does actually work.

We see this time and again—artists that have built up a database where they're contacting their fans directly. Smaller artists that even in the U.S., I don't think you've heard of them.

One particular artist I can talk about—because their manager is a friend of mine—we've known these guys for a long time—is a band called Enter Shikari. For the listeners, if you've not heard of this band, check them out. They play arenas in the U.K. When they go on sale with tickets, they typically do about 20 to 30% of the house through their Music Glue store.

So they've got control over their ticketing, and they were one of the biggest-selling artists during the pandemic because they've got a direct relationship with their fanbase. They make fantastic merchandise, they make fantastic music, and yet people have not necessarily heard of them.

They've got this hardcore set of fans that will buy everything they release. They connect with them directly, and they make money from this.

These guys—four guys in the band—in their mid-thirties, married with children, have their houses paid for and are playing rock music. They don't care about being on the radio. In fact, they haven't been on the radio. They don't care at all about the media side of things.

They've got a long-term, sustainable career with a fan base that supports them financially and will continue to do so for a very long time.

That sort of artist is who we’ve always sat with. One of the important points there is ticketing. To build up a database—if you stick a "Join my mailing list" on any social media site—no one's going to join your mailing list.

You can stick a "Join my mailing list" on your website—no one's going to join your mailing list.

The way you build up a database is you've got to sell stuff to people. And when you sell stuff to people, then you get their address, and you get their information, and then you can contact them. That also means it's somebody who's really engaged with what you're doing.

There's a certain amount you can get from selling merchandise and physical music.
 Very difficult to sell digital content these days because it's all available for free.

But there's a massive delta when you get up to ticketing. If you put a tour on sale where you are doing the advance tickets—and you're doing, even if you're an emerging artist, and you're doing 10 to 20% of the house—that is a lot more data than you're ever going to get from selling merchandise or vinyl.

The tickets—the companies that they're working with, the promoters—they understand that that's actually important for the artist. But you have to ask.

This is very, very important: If you want to get tickets to sell directly to your fanbase—even if it's a 48-hour window before anyone else goes on sale, however you want to structure it—you have to ask upfront.

There might be a bit of push and shove. Promoters don’t want to give those tickets over. And you’ve got to ask, “Why don’t they want to hand over tickets?”

It's because they're making a kickback. Typically, things are happening in the background with all this money that's being added onto the top of the ticket price. That all gets shuffled to the venues, to the promoters—everyone gets a piece of that.

In the early days, we worked with Mumford & Sons. We worked with them from the very, very beginning.

When we first started the company, we used to put on a little night in North London—a little showcase night for the bands we worked with. One night, we had Mumford & Sons headlining. Then it was Laura Marling supporting them. And then a guy called JJ—who's now Jay, the lead singer of The Xcerts.

They played in front of 30 people at a little venue where I had my own PA system. I was the sound engineer and put this thing on.

Mumford & Sons got what we were doing. They totally understood the model.

To the point where they were booked to play a festival in London called Wireless Festival—this is back in 2013, a 60,000-capacity show. They insisted they did all the tickets.

This is a Live Nation event. And they said, “We’re doing 100% of the tickets, or you’re not booking us.”

They had the muscle to do it. So it just requires the push and shove.

But it is really, really fundamentally important for all artists that are playing live shows—and have the ability to sell advance tickets—to insist they get an allocation of tickets.

Because then they will find out who their hardcore fans are. They’ll find out the location of the fan, they’ll have the email address. And next time you go back and play, you can contact them and you can do the marketing directly to them.

That’s exactly how these bands that we’ve worked with have done it over the years—build the database.

Everyone has an email address that their granny can contact them by. Everyone who signs up to social media platforms has an email address. They might not check it every day, but they will check it. And you’ll be able to contact them. At least you have that relationship if you have their email address.

I’ll bang on all day about the email address—email address, email address—but that is still the best way to contact people directly.

Michael: That is super helpful. No, I appreciate it. Feel free to bang on about it because it’s true. It’s a fundamental thing.

And it does seem so weird how little attention it gets when—comparatively—there’s so much more upside to the email.

I guess it kind of makes sense because it's more underground. It's not as flashy—people can't see it on the surface. It's not like people are walking around with a sign on their social media profile saying, “I have this many email subscribers.” But everyone has that kind of sign with their social media following. It kind of makes them feel better.

It sounds like what you're saying is that these social media platforms are a powerful way to get in front of an audience, but you don’t necessarily own that audience.

Like MySpace—where the platform is huge—but if the platform dies, you lose access and your whole business could die.

What you found through connecting with artists like Mumford & Sons from the ground up is that they understood, at a deep level, the importance of connecting with their fans and owning that actual relationship.

And really inspiring to hear the stories of—you have to ask. You have to ask for access. When you're booking these shows, if you don't ask, then you won’t have access to that audience.

Okay. So in terms of—one of the final things you mentioned that I thought was interesting—was how you build your email list.

It sounded like what you were recommending was one of the best ways to build your email list is to actually sell things to those people. And therefore, when you sell something, you’ll get their contact info.

And not just that, but you know that it's a high-quality contact to have because they actually bought something from you.

I'm curious—coming from the digital marketing world—there’s the concept of lead magnets and having free gifts and things you give away in exchange for someone joining.

And I 100% agree—at least like “Just join my mailing list.” Why? That’s not valuable to me at all.

But I'm curious—do you think there’s a place for free gifts or unlocking things? Or what do you recommend, just from experience? Do you think you can do that, but it’s actually better leverage to focus on offering something for sale because you’re going to get a better-quality lead from it?

Tom: When we first started out, even the reason we came up with this was because our original model was to give away digital content—because it's available anyway—but give it away in return for an email address. So we'd have the "Get my MP3 album, you can have it for free, but I want the email address."

And with that email address, then you can contact that fan and say, "Hey, well if you like that, then you might be interested in buying something. Hey, I'm a struggling musician."

That was all well and good in the days when people wanted to download MP3s. That is not the case anymore. No one's going to do that.

So digital content becomes very difficult. Even giving it away in return for data is a very, very difficult thing to do.

So then you're getting into physical content, which becomes expensive. You don't want to be giving that away because delivery services are so expensive. Even if you've got something that's very cheap—just a badge or a pin or something you can put in an envelope—it’s still going to cost you some money.

What we tend to suggest to people is—it depends on which level of artist you're dealing with—when you're first starting out, it's very, very tough.

Once you get to a certain level, we do a fan club system. We built this originally for Iron Maiden. So we essentially run the Iron Maiden fan club, which is 15 pounds a year.

You get online magazines, exclusive content, you can join the forum, and you get 48-hour access to tickets when they go on sale for all of their shows—which is the big draw card, by the way, for a band of that size.

Various bits and pieces of digital things that are exclusive to members of the fan club.

We find that works well. Even the band I mentioned earlier, Enter Shikari, they have a fan club.

They have a locked area on their website, which you can only access—it has specific content, photos when they’re playing shows, that sort of thing. Interesting content that might be of interest.

If you price it correctly—so when I say 15 pounds, $20 a year—to join a fan club for a band like Iron Maiden, it is actually pretty good value. For what you get from it, and it's still not a big hassle for the band to prepare the content and make the things available.

But they're also not posting things out, so they're saving money on that side. Enter Shikari do post out a magazine once a year to all of the fans as part of their fan club, so that’s palatable.

There's a lot of debate—we’ve been involved in this debate over the years—as to whether it's a good look for an artist to be putting their hand out and saying, "Join my fan club and pay some money."

You've really got to message it in a very specific way, and then it does work.
 If it’s the, “Hey, we really need some money,” that’s not a good look. Don’t go down that road.

"I'm going to give you something. I'm going to give you exclusive stuff that no one else can have, but you just have to pay a small amount of money in order to get that exclusive content."

Then that becomes actually interesting for fans, and they will engage with that.

If you can throw in something—if you can afford to be posting them something—they absolutely love that. As I say, for Enter Shikari, they send a magazine once a year—The Enter Shikari Magazine—which looks absolutely fantastic, and fans really love it.

Iron Maiden used to have a T-shirt. When you signed up for the fan club, they would send you a T-shirt, which is a fan club-exclusive T-shirt. When you enter the Iron Maiden gig, if you've never been to an Iron Maiden show, you may not believe what I'm about to say, but it is 100% true: Everybody at an Iron Maiden show—including a number of the band members—wears Iron Maiden T-shirts.

This is the unwritten rule: You never wear the T-shirt of the band you're seeing when you go to a gig—unless it's Iron Maiden. Then everyone wears Iron Maiden.

The first Iron Maiden show I went to, I turned up in a Metallica T-shirt, and the manager of Iron Maiden came pouring across the pre-show party, grabbed me. He said, "What the hell is that?" He basically grabbed a T-shirt from the merch desk and said—"Okay, I know what the rules are." I do now.

So fans—the fan club T-shirt also had the year they joined the club printed on it.

They were members of the fan club, and they were so proud. The proudest ones were the ones that had the earliest date on it—had been members of the fan club the longest. That’s loyal fandom.

These are the guys that, every time a new T-shirt comes out, they’ll buy it. Whatever comes through on the merch side of things—they want it. They collect it. If you go to their houses, it’s just Iron Maiden everywhere.

They love it.

For every artist, there are those fans. It’s just—how do you find them? How do you tap into them? Depending on the genre of music you’re working with—how do you engage with them and provide things that they want?

They will want it. When you get to a certain level, they want to engage because at the end of the day, it’s art. You're creating— as an artist—you're creating something that touches people emotionally. As a result of that, they feel good, they feel happy, and they want to give something back. They want more.

What are the things—depending on the exact type of music that you’re creating—that you can do to provide that? Because there’s definitely demand.

Fan clubs that you sign up to—even for some of the artists that we work with—they don’t make you pay to join the fan club. They have a tier, which is the free tier. 

Join the fan club, and you get some exclusive stuff. Because again, at the end of the day, that data—that email address and the location of that fan—is invaluable.

It becomes invaluable when you start plotting tours. If you want to come to Europe as an American artist and you’ve spent two years building up a database—giving content away to European fans—then you can actually plot your tour.

You might think, “I’m not going to play in Cologne because I don’t have any fans in Cologne, but in Stuttgart I’ve got five fans that I can contact.” So we’ll do Stuttgart.

And you won’t be able to contact them unless you’ve actually got this database.

It’s how to provide content that works for your fanbase—people will engage with it—and then you can get that data together and provide information.

As I mentioned earlier with ticketing, if you’re talking to a local German promoter and you say, “I’ve actually got email addresses of German customers that I’ve got direct access to,” it’s a very different conversation. Compared to saying, “I’ve got some fans on Facebook, I think, in Germany, but I’m not really sure.”

Very, very different conversation if you say, “I’ve got direct access to them, I can send them an email, and I want tickets—and I want to sell them directly.”

Michael: Mm. Super smart.

Love the idea of the T-shirts with the year that they joined on the back—honoring the people that were kind of the early adopters.

It sounds like one of the things that you’re pointing to with the artists is that it’s the community. The community is an extremely valuable thing to be a part of.

Music in general is—maybe that’s one, if not the most valuable parts of what we do as artists—is that we create community. We bring people together.

So if you can honor and shine a light on fans who’ve been there since the beginning, that’s a really valuable thing. Being recognized is something they get validation from. It’s something that is truly valuable to them.

It’s not necessarily begging them to support you. It’s something you can truly provide as a service to the community.

You have a lot of perspective and experience, having witnessed this major evolution from the first ever direct-to-fan connections, or the direct-to-fan channels that got opened up.

At the time of us recording this right now, it feels like we’re kind of in the midst of another major revolution in a few different areas—but specifically in terms of AI. That’s a big one that’s opening up what’s possible as a creative.

Lots of controversy and kind of fear around: What does this mean for our role as artists?

As someone who’s witnessed major shifts in the music industry—from different mediums of what used to be an asset, like CDs, and now obviously vinyls are kind of making a comeback—But the point being, there have been major shifts you’ve seen come and go—different waves.

This is a major wave that we’re experiencing right now. Maybe one of, if not the biggest wave we’ve ever experienced, with this new form of digital intelligence.

How do you view the role of a music artist in a post-AI world—where people do have the ability to generate artwork faster? How do you recommend that artists listening to this right now calibrate and align with these new technologies without getting overwhelmed or drowning?

Tom: I mean, it's a very good question and one that I spend—I don't know—two lunches a week with managers of bands, including the big ones that we work with.

So this comes up all the time. I mean, they are—when you're dealing with bands the scale of Iron Maiden—AI is a huge concern to them because they're being ripped off the whole time.

This is an iconic brand that is now being used. You can even, with AI systems, say, "Create me an album cover in the style of Iron Maiden for my band," and they will come up with something that looks really cool.

At the end of the day, they're playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to keep on top of this. It's just—it’s not going to slow down.

For emerging artists, I think we're going through a phase now where pop is actually fairly dominant. And certainly in Europe, there's a— It feels quite manufactured, almost like back in the late '80s kind of style of manufactured pop music. 

Part of that is down to the way the record companies are operating. There's a lot less live music scene in the UK at the moment than there has been for a long time. A lot of the venues are closing down. The Gen Zs are not going out to watch live music like the previous generations did.

But music is an art. There's going to be a swing back to the live performance and the importance of the live performance. And I've always been a big advocate of perfecting your art—not just from a recording perspective, but from a live performance perspective.

I think the cream always rises to the top. I can go on and on about it, but the cream will rise to the top. And if you're absolutely brilliant and awesome and can put on a fantastic live show that touches people in a way that you cannot do through recordings—

How do you navigate the world of modern technology and AI? Well, you can't AI a really fantastic live performance. That requires a human being standing on stage and engaging emotionally with an audience. There’s nothing that can replace that.

Focus on that side of things and get that absolutely perfect.

We've had this sort of—wake up one day and think, "Oh, I'm going to be a musician. This is great." Then they can record some stuff in their bedroom and get out GarageBand and make some noises. Then they put it on Spotify and nobody listens to it, and they're trying to wonder what's going on.

It’s like, if you woke up one morning and decided you wanted to be a professional football player, you can't just do it. It takes a decade. It's not something that you can suddenly decide you want to do.

So don't be disheartened and dispirited if it doesn't work out initially, because it probably wouldn't. You've got to hone your craft. It is a craft, and it requires an enormous amount of work.

When you see the artists that do pop up—certainly in the UK—the amount of hours that they've put into their craft is absolutely phenomenal. These are proper musicians that actually know what they're doing. They shine through.

Focus. Stick to it. Work hard.

The old 10,000-hour rule really does apply to music. You need to have done 10,000 hours of actually honing your craft before you're really going to be any good. It's just the way it is.

So how do you deal with AI? Be awesome. Just be awesome and really work at it. No AI can replace that. It still requires a human being.

AI just takes things from the internet and mashes it together and comes up with something that's okay.

All creativity and all art is derivative. There's never an original idea. But AI really is not an original idea. It just mashes stuff together and comes up with something that kind of looks and sounds okay.

What actually takes an idea and then processes it through the human process—with 10,000 hours of experience and performance playing—and then comes up with something slightly different and improved? That is a real skill.

So focus on that.

Is that a different response than other people have given?

Michael: I mean, I love hearing people's response to this.

I would say that the pattern I hear—and I'm very grateful to at this point get to surround myself with people like yourself who are smarter than I am in different areas of the music industry and who have a very experienced perception of what's happening—

I think if you ask the average bystander, most of them would probably be a lot more afraid of AI.

Often I'll have conversations with artists or with someone who has less wider perspective, who are concerned about losing—being replaced by AI.

I absolutely understand the concern because it’s valid. We have some stuff to figure out in terms of the ethics of the training data and how this happens.

Also, like you said, everything is derivative to a certain extent. So where do we draw the line of what’s original versus a copywritten work?

But in general, what I hear is similar to what you're describing—looking at these as tools to extend our creative capabilities.

Ultimately, not replacing that spark or that humanness or whatever you want to call it.
 That thing we’re channeling when we're being creative and putting it out—there is something almost transcendent about where that comes from.

And that’s the thing we want to kind of channel or unlock.

These tools can be used in a way that accelerates that but doesn’t necessarily replace it. That’s, I would say, the general sense that I get.

I view it the same way.

I just don't know where things are going. I mean, I'm like a geek for things like the Singularity and the book by Ray Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near.

I watch a lot of news about the new AI tools and where things are headed.

It certainly feels like there's something unique about this specific era of technology in a way that might be different from what it’s been in the past.

I get the case of drum machines and digital—analog to digital—these are all tools that help us express ourselves better.

Maybe for the first time ever, there's actually a greater form of intelligence that we're creating—with AGI or with superintelligence.

This is very theoretical, but if it stays exponential, then it's just hard to predict. It’s like that asymptote where it's hard to predict where we're going to be in 2044.

But I'm hopeful that humanity will come along for the ride and that we'll have something like a Neuralink that helps us interface with it.

I had a conversation with Nolan Arbaugh a few months ago—he was the first human patient that got a Neuralink installed. He’s quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down.

On the podcast, he used his Neuralink to create a song telepathically using his thoughts and AI. That was an eye-opening experience for me.

Just thinking through, what are the implications of this 10 or 20 years from now?

What if we could communicate with each other telepathically? What if we could dream up an idea for a song and just have it materialize in front of us?

So yeah, I don't know what’s going to happen in that world.

Tom: Everything you're saying—I think that's the direction it's going. Whether or not that will have the emotional impact that music created by a human being will have, we don’t know.

You mentioned a few different things there— One of which is how you actually consume content. 

It’s just neurons. It's just electrical charges in your brain. So you can get straight in and make that happen.

But we don't—I don't think we know enough about emotions and the human… What is human emotion? Why is it that when you listen to a certain song, you start crying?

What causes that?

We may not ever know.

There’s one thing called artificial intelligence. But emotional intelligence is a whole different thing.

For me—I listen to a lot of music. I’ve got a big vinyl collection. That’s how I listen to music. I'm definitely going back to analog.

I've even canceled a lot of my subscription services. This is in a little bit of a protest, by the way, to what a certain president is doing worldwide with tariffs.

There’s a lot of us, in particular creative communities, that have canceled everything for the moment—until these things change.

So I don’t even have Spotify anymore. I'm completely disconnected, and I’m very happy with this.

It’s like, you know what? If I listen to music, it’s going to be my vinyl. That’s how I listen to music.

If I want to really engage emotionally, I’m going to go to a live show.

And it's lucky for me, living in London—it’s easy to get to a lot of gigs very easily.

That’s how I consume music.

I just wonder if there’s going to be a backlash.

Music's always been about punk rock. It’s always the audience pushing back.

So suddenly, if technology goes too far in one direction, I can bet you there’ll be a massive backlash.

Then suddenly it’ll go in the other direction—Back to vinyl, going to gigs, wanting to see musicians playing musical instruments—not laptops.

That sort of thing will start coming back.

Then it’ll swing the other direction again.

Back and forth.

We went through a big dance phase here in Europe in the late '90s.

Then it became indie music. It was all about skinny jeans and guys playing guitars.

Now that’s not cool anymore.

Swings and roundabouts.

Whatever is cool with the new generation that comes through— They have to do exactly the opposite of what their parents did.

That’s always going to be whatever the new cool thing is.

Who knows which direction that's going to go?

At the moment, I agree—I think the tech side of things, we're going through quite a wave.

But then the next generation is going to go, "Oh, that's so what Dad did."

Who knows?

None of us can predict this.

If I could predict this, I’d be a wealthy man.

Michael: We don't—we need more compute, we need more tokens to accurately predict the next word.

That is—I love the conversation. I think this is like one of my favorite things to talk about and think about. And I totally agree with what you're saying in terms of like, there's a—
 I think all of us can—well, maybe not all—but I feel like most people can feel it, right?

There's this tension or the amount of dependence that we have on social media and technology feels like it's sort of distracting us or removing us from our roots, or grounding us as humans and as beings. Like when we go out in nature, it's this amazing, transcendent experience that's sort of on the opposite end of what we feel with technology and being plugged in.

I feel like most of us can relate to that and kind of feel that, while also having mixed feelings because we also depend on these technologies. And in many ways, it's better than it's ever been in terms of what poverty used to be—like 80 or 90% of the world—and now it's like 10%, or something, and it's going down, even though it feels like it's getting worse.

It's like actually, overall, things are trending in a good direction.

Yeah, I mean, gosh—I think about this sometimes with my kids. I've got a 7-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 3-year-old. And I think about them, like when they're teenagers—and if they put me through half of what I put my parents through when I was a teenager, then I've got my work cut out for me.

But it does seem like there's sort of this balance or this pendulum swing that goes back and forth. And so it's important to be grounded and sort of take a step back from that and understand that this too shall pass. It's not worth going to these extremes too tightly—but being able to have perspective to know that it's all balanced, and it tends to balance itself out over time.

Tom: Yeah, as one gets older, it's important to be present as much as possible and to reduce stress levels and all these things.

When I was—20 years ago—I could handle a lot of stress. Whereas now, I do everything I can to get my head out of my phone. In fact, even if I'm meeting up with somebody and I'm early—say maybe meeting at a bar—I don't look at my phone anymore. I look at the surroundings.

Because think about this—20 years ago, people didn't have phones. I mean, okay, you did have a phone, but you'd play Snake on it—an old Nokia thing—and you could send text messages.

In fact, I was having this conversation with my wife the other day. I said, when I went through university, this was pre-mobile phone. No one had a mobile phone. 

And how did you meet up with people? I was thinking, this is really weird—you'd actually arrange to meet somebody at a bar. And then you would go there, and you would actually meet with them. You couldn't ring them if you were going to be late. You couldn't text them. No one had mobile phones.

But you still managed to do it. You got there. And when you got there early, you'd look around the bar. You'd look—if you were in a café—you'd look at the actual surroundings.

I would argue most people these days—if you ask them what the inside of their favorite café or their favorite bar looks like, what are the color of the walls—they couldn't even tell you. Because they don't look at it. As soon as they get into the place, they're on their phone.

The person they're with goes to the toilet—what do we do? We bring the phone out. And we’re checking whatever—social media, email.

I don’t think it’s actually good for us. In fact, I think there are quite a few studies coming through at the moment that are proving that it’s actually not very good.

So I do this when I'm—I'm not allowed to have a mobile phone now. It never comes out of my pocket. I have it there if someone needs to call me if there's an emergency, but otherwise, I don’t look at it.

And then you look at the architecture. You look at the interior design. You look at the paintings on the wall—paintings. Have a look at a painting. It's really interesting. You don't need to do it through your phone.

Anyway, this is an old fart talking now. This is a boring old guy who plays vinyl.

But I think there's something to it. The happiest you feel is when you get out in nature.

We have an all-hands meeting every week with the team, and I always finish it with: "Please get outside. If it's sunny, get outside. Go for a walk. Go for a two-hour walk during the middle of the day. Leave your computer and your phone behind. Just go for a walk."

No one will ever criticize you. Because when you get back, you'll feel grounded, you'll feel happy, and you'll be wanting to engage with work again.

Nothing will happen in the world during that two hours that you can do anything about. 

Go and enjoy yourself. And the guys do. I think it's really important.

Anyway, I don't know how we got to this—about your mobile phone.

Michael: I really appreciate you sharing that. I think this is important.

Yeah, I also—at night—I purchased a lockbox for my phone. It goes in at like nine o'clock because of exactly what you're describing.

I noticed a tendency to—at night, especially when my willpower is down—I would end up being on my phone in my bed, scrolling.

And man, it's addictive. It's extremely addictive and it's hard.

Even though I don’t—yeah, like you don't necessarily feel great after you do it.

A lot of money and a lot of AI has gone into figuring out how to hijack the human brain and to hit those dopamine centers.

I think it is really important to have that reminder to be present and show up and to be able to disconnect.

And remember who you are, aside from this fast-moving, digital space.

So it definitely has zoomed a bit out into philosophical territory, but I appreciate it.

I think it's really important. It's part of the role that we play as musicians—reminding people of who they are, the communities, bringing them together, and coming back to these kinds of real experiences.

So I appreciate you sharing that.

And also, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation.

And for anyone that is listening or watching this right now who's interested in acting more—what’s the best place for them to go to reach out or dive deeper?

Tom: So, if—I mean—

There are various levels of pricing depending on what you want.

What I will say is that we have a fantastic web designer who I would happily have build a store for anybody.

Having a really good-looking storefront makes a huge difference.

Conversion is everything with e-commerce.

If you've got a storefront that looks a bit crappy and looks amateur, people get a bit nervous and they don’t want to part with their cash.

Whereas if you've got something that looks professional, then they will part with their cash.

We’ll happily mock something together.

We’re not going to build a theme from scratch, but we’ll say, “Do you want it to look a bit like Metallica’s store, or do you want it to look like Bryan Adams, or do you want a K-pop store that we do?”

We’ll give a few options. You provide the content, and my designer will then build a store for you if you've got an account with us.

We'll do that for free for anyone who's listening to the podcast.

To contact us, just do that through support: support@musicgurus.com. The guys are being alerted to this and they'll know what to do.

Michael: Alright, fantastic.

Like always, we’ll put the links in the show notes for easy access.

And Tom, thank you again for coming on the podcast and talking a little bit about how things have evolved over the past couple of decades in the music industry—and how to stay grounded in a quickly moving world with technology.

Tom: Cool. Thanks.