Michael Walker: Yeah. All right. I'm excited to be today with my new friend, Gaurav Sharma. So Gaurav is the founder and CEO of Hook, which is a groundbreaking AI-powered platform that's transforming how fans remix and share music while ensuring that artists actually get paid for it. He is the former COO of JioSaavn, where he helped scale India's largest music streaming platform to originally over 100 million monthly users, and it's closer to about 200 million monthly users now.

And so he is a proven music tech innovator, and he helps to bridge artist creativity with industry needs. I'm excited to connect with him today just to hear his perspective on where things are headed right now in the music industry, and how, as an independent artist, you can leverage the tools that are available to actually build an authentic relationship with your fans and a sustainable business.

Specifically, with the rise of social media and the remixing tools that he's helped create, it certainly feels like what it means to be a creator or creative is expanding because of the tools that are available. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the podcast today.

Gaurav Sharma: Thanks for having me.

Michael: Absolutely. I know that was a very long-winded intro, but I feel like it was—

Gaurav: No, I really, really appreciate that. It was way too nice, but it's great to be here.

Michael: Awesome. So maybe for anyone that this is their first time connecting with you, could you share a little bit about your background and how you helped the platform build from the beginning to 100 million-plus users?

Gaurav: Yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up in the intersection of music and tech. I studied—it was a year after graduating that we started Savan. I was studying computer music composition in college, engineering as well. I'm a musician, composer, and I've always been really interested, even as a kid, in figuring out how to make music with the least amount of effort possible—which is really bad—but I tried to play guitar, I tried to play drums.

I actually do sing, and I really loved composing, but I found myself programming a lot of the beats that I was creating and using tools like Ableton and Logic and using technology to create a lot of the music that I was making.

I ended up graduating in 2010 and worked at a major record label for a total of one month and got laid off. Labels were falling apart at that stage. It was kind of post-Napster, post-LimeWire. Labels wanted to push everyone to CD shops and keep that kind of level of monetization still there, and iTunes wasn't really getting picked up—at least globally.

I ended up meeting some really great people that were founding a company called Savan at the time. Initially, the mission was just to help Indian rights holders—whether it be independent artists, Bollywood companies (which were the majority of the labels), and even major labels that were out in India like Sony India, etc.—just helping these businesses digitize all of the Bollywood content and Indian content that they'd had for years and get it onto iTunes.

That's really—I ended up falling into music streaming with Savan. But what we found very quickly was that the iTunes model wasn't really working. People didn’t really have the disposable income in India to just purchase songs digitally. And in fact, back then there was an appetite to purchase—they just didn’t have the means to purchase online. People would go into shops in Indian villages and buy SD cards with music preloaded on them.

So it was just a really interesting market. We ended up doing a partnership with Google really early on to get all of this digitized music into Google’s search in India. We powered it, and we just found so much consumption of the music digitally. That became a streaming service. This was very much in parallel to when Spotify was also getting their first deals in place.

We ended up working directly with the labels and signing some of the first digital streaming licenses that have kind of become the model and framework we've worked with since then.

That was about 10 years of my life, and it was such an incredible experience—also just being an American of Indian descent and having really not spent that much time in India when I was younger. Being able to go out there and build a team—it was one of the most incredible markets to be in, especially for artists.

What we found even during that experience was that things went from Bollywood being what Indian music was (because that was, in a large way, the distribution of music back then) to Savan and YouTube and all of these digital platforms creating a platform for actual musicians—where the musicians are the people known in India.

A lot of these Bollywood tracks are associated with the actors that are lip syncing them. So all of a sudden, when we started Savan, it was like 95% of our consumption was Bollywood. And by the time we sold it to Jio—and now it's JioSaavn—it was close to 60–65% Bollywood. The rest were Indian musicians—singers, songwriters, DJs, you name it.

They had different flavors regionally. Some of them were really inspired by Western artists, so you had these really cool kind of mashup artists blooming. I got to see the independent scene really blossom in India, and that's why I think it's such a unique market, even for independent artists.

If you think about it, all of these artists were signed to independent labels in India, and then all of a sudden the digitization of music made them have the same level of distribution as Bollywood.

So that was 10 years of that, and then I started Hook.

Michael: Incredible, incredible experience. Cool. That sounds like quite the journey. And like 10 years is—you don’t have that many chapters in your life that are 10 years long, so I’m sure that cycles.

Have you been to India? I haven’t been to India yet.

Gaurav: Okay.

Michael: Bali’s in India though, right? Am I remembering that correctly?

Gaurav: No, Bali’s not in India. But there are islands similar to it around India, like Mauritius, things like that.

Michael: Okay.

Gaurav: But if you ever go, shoot me an email or connect with me and I’ll introduce you to some really cool people on the music side out there. It really is one of the most unique environments for music in the world, I would say.

Michael: Awesome. One of our artists, Rishi, has Indian descent, and he does Karnatic music that blends together some of his roots. It’s really, really cool. He’s really blown up in a big way on his Instagram—if you search for Rishi. So I would love to visit at some point.

Gaurav: I'm pretty sure I know who you're talking about, actually. I do try to keep up with a lot of the artists of Indian descent that are also beginning to make noise out here, or in the UK, or wherever.

There’s a huge scene in Toronto, and now they’re expanding into India. It’s so funny—for people like us growing up, we were kind of running away from our heritage. And now I think everyone can see this bubbling moment happening there.

It’s really cool to see people that are saying, “Hey, even though I didn’t grow up there, I’m seeing this creativity blossom, and I’m going to go see what the vibe is.” It’s pretty amazing.

Michael: Hmm. That’s super cool.

Awesome. So, you have this 10-year journey of helping grow this company to the number one streaming platform in India—100 million-plus users. Could you share a little bit about the transition for you going from that company to starting Hook? What was the purpose behind this new company? What's the vision behind it?

Gaurav: I’ve been building it for about three years now. After Savan, I was still actually working at Savan after the acquisition, but with the pandemic, I wasn't able to go out to India as often. And at the same time, I think we all just build our thinking around the experiences that we've had. And for me, Savan being 10 years, I started seeing similar signals to what we saw early on that led us to making Savan into a streaming service. I started seeing similar signals happening on social, which is—

Before—because, as I was saying, at Savan, we fell into streaming. We didn't say, “Hey, we're going to start a streaming service because consumption habits are shifting from CDs to digital and people aren't able to pay.” That was not the thought process. It was realizing that there was a pattern in how a certain audience—Indian music listeners—were consuming music.

And similarly, I think when you look at the last few years, now that—if the goal of music streaming was to make music available to anyone, anywhere—I think we've accomplished that. And now, you can pretty much find any music anywhere. What people are doing with that music has been evolving.

And that's what I'm really interested in. And that's what we're interested in at Hook, which is that shift—if you add up all these 30-second clips of music listening on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat—all of that consumption of music together is more listening than what you have on traditional streaming services today.

And we think of music consumption as this almost passive experience where you're listening to it, and you put your phone in your pocket. But what if we challenged that? And what if music expression and consumption was something a little bit more active, where the fans and the artists are taking part in the creation? Because that's really what social media is.

I think in 2023, there was a study that came out that said 38% of the music on TikTok was modified and remixed—and that was prior to this whole AI boom over the last year and a half.

That's really interesting. So people are consuming music, but they're staring at a screen, and the music they're consuming is that of an expression that someone else made. And almost half of that—maybe even more today—is modified and adjusted.

So we went and interviewed a bunch of kids, and my brother was in college—a junior in college at the time—so I just went to Syracuse and talked to a bunch of his classmates. I was asking, “Why are you guys posting remix versions of a Travis Scott song or a Billie Eilish track versus the original that the artist intended?”

And they said, “Well, look—Travis expresses me better than I can myself, and I want to express myself through him. But I also want to be unique in my expression of him.”

And I just think that's a really interesting way to experience music that has grown and grown and grown—lucky for Hook.

But there's no economy built around it. Artists have no say in how fans interact with their music. It's not—you know, most of these platforms—they're not consumption-based models where the more your remixes and UGC are consumed, you are making millions and millions of dollars. That's not happening, even though there's more listening happening.

So that's really what we wanted to challenge in starting Hook—to say, what if music expression wasn't a one-way street from artist to fan, but artists and fans could engage, and it’s active? And that opens up all these new opportunities for monetization, for getting closer to your fans.

What if artists had a say in how their music could be remixed? Would their opinion of AI change? Does their opinion of AI change in the construct of short-form music versus long-form? Would you let your fans have fun if it’s 30 seconds versus a full song?

If you were able to nudge fans into a certain kind of remix—like, “I'm about to go on tour in Latin America. Let's nudge fans into Latin American remixes. Let's see what they come up with, and maybe we’ll make a full-length version out of that with the winning fans.”

So that was really the inspiration for building it. And it's very similar to the beginning stages of music streaming for me.

Michael: Wow. That is so cool.

So, if I'm understanding you correctly, this is a platform that's meant to create a better connection between the artists and the fans—to kind of rethink how creativity happens in the form of remixes for the people who are fans of the artists. To be able to use those songs, and for the artist to have more control or the ability to nudge certain ways that the remixes happen.

So that, for example, if you're going to do a tour in Latin America, you could actually make a remix challenge or do something where it’s guided in that direction.

Gaurav: Yeah. And everything is short form. We don't allow for fans to completely pick your song and create a completely new version. That's a decision the artist can choose to make.

And that also creates these physical guardrails—that it's really about the fans' expression.

You can add your video to it. You can share it to your TikTok. You can share it to your Instagram. So we don't necessarily need to be the social network, but we are the social creation tool whose responsibility is to the artists—tracking everything and making sure that the fans also have just a really fun experience and get closer to their favorite artists.

Michael: Wild. Yo. One thing that came up was just thinking about how powerful it is when you have a body of work, and then it's translated into a different language—how that opens up this body of work to an actual language—

Gaurav: Like a musical language?

Michael: Well, to start with—the metaphor is just like an actual language. Kind of like opening up a movie or a book to a completely different language—it opens up how people can connect with it and absorb it.

And it sounds like part of what you're building with this platform is similar, in the sense that when fans can remix this music, they almost translate it into a way that they understand more.

It definitely feels like a major opportunity or a trend that's happening right now—more remixes.

And also, I had this thought with AI—and this probably exists, and maybe this is something that you've already built into the platform—but the ability for an artist to take their creative work and say, “I want to translate this into all of the different genres.”

So it’s the same song, but just in all of the different genres.

And it seems like that’d be a way to tap into all of these different markets at the same time with one piece of work—because of that.

Gaurav: Ability to remix, and artists could choose to do that on our platform. And the other thing that an artist can do on our platform that I think is very core to our vision of product is like, when you think of AI platforms that exist today, especially in the creative realm—this is where it really kind of annoys me and our entire team.

This idea of prompt-based AI—make this sad, make this Bollywood, whatever that would even mean. To just say, "make it this," "make it that," and it just gives you an end product—that, to me, is not art. Art is when someone takes something that's a tool that was intended to create something, and they break it, and people connect with that.

So, this concept of creative misuse is something that our product really leans into. When you go on our platform, we have these things called filters. What these are meant to be are little nuggets of music expression that are tied to you as a person, as a creator. You can design them yourselves. Today, we design the music filters, and we're working with artists, producers to design music filters. Tomorrow, users are going to be able to create them themselves.

This is a concept that I think is, in my opinion, very different from the current applications of AI that people see, because we want people to design their own filter that completely breaks every rule. Sure, it's leveraging AI to create a remix, but if it goes against what we would have thought would’ve sounded really cool as a genre or whatever—and it connects with people—then that's art. And that’s art through AI, or at least where AI is a piece of it. And it's also something people can connect with and say, "Hey, that's my expression," as opposed to, "Oh, that company has the best electronic algo, and that company has the best reggaeton algo." That's not how you build creativity or art, in my opinion.

So yeah, artists can design filters on our platform. Not only can you say, "I want to nudge people into these different genres because these are the filters that exist," but maybe there’s something you want to specifically create. Instead of people speeding up songs, you're a producer or a DJ that has your own suite of filters on Hook that you are encouraging your followers to use. Now you have an entire army of people expressing through your filters and your AI expression. I don't know if that's kind of confusing, but that’s what we're building.

Michael: You gotta play with it. It's super cool. You gotta play with it to see it. That was my first—there’s been several times as we’ve been talking, I’m like, man, this sounds awesome. I can’t wait to get my hands on this and put it into use.

Cool. One thing that came up as you’re sharing this—I think the root of this idea of remix culture and why is it so compelling, or why does it feel so good to be able to express ourselves and remix these songs that we already resonate with, but then to be able to infuse a part of who we are, our own identity with it—just reminded me of one of my favorite prompt examples that I’ve seen lately.

More and more, in the vein of ChatGPT having memories of you—it starts, the more you talk to it, the more it understands who you are. I remember the first moment that I was like, “Who am I?” And then ChatGPT told me who I am, and I was like, wow. That’s actually a pretty great bio, like immediately.

It feels like the more it grows, the more personalized it’s gotten. And there are a lot of these prompt examples like, “Tell me something about myself that I don’t know, but would be really valuable.” And then it’ll be like, “Well, based on who you are, you probably have this blind spot.” I’m like, whoa. That is wild.

It seems like what a lot of those things have in common, and a lot of what you’re describing right now with the platform that you’re building and have built and that’s helping fans to tap into as well, is this movement toward personalization and self-expression, and it being more co-creative instead of a one-sided equation.

So I’d love to hear you speak a little bit to what do you think is at the core of that? And as a trend—if we were looking forward 3, 5, 10 years from now—where do you see this evolving into, in terms of the wider ecosystem?

Gaurav: Well, you just said it—evolve, right? The essence of evolution is individuality. That’s how evolution works. Everyone does one thing, and someone does something else, and it works, and then we all evolve. That’s literally what evolution is.

What AI does for people—and this might be contrarian as someone who built an AI company, an ethical AI company that rights holders can learn more about—but I think what AI is going to allow for is easier ways to get to the same wavelength of everyone else around you. So when you’re saying, “Who am I?”—it’s giving you its best guess based on the data it has, which is everyone around you. When you say, “Make this piece of art,” you’ll begin to notice a lot of artwork looking the same, because they’re all being trained from the same thing.

But evolution comes down to the individual and individuality—people that are willing to break it and that connection happening. I think we’ve seen this through advances in technology throughout all of human evolution, where as things get easier and easier to do, and we build more and more tools, more people conform to those tools, and then someone breaks the norm, and that becomes the next tool.

So I think that’s how we’re going to evolve—by co-creating. Otherwise, everyone’s going to look the same and sound the same. And if human evolution or any animal’s evolution is a data point to learn from, we’ll get bored, and something will change it. Our platform’s hoping to lean into that musically.

Michael: Cool. That’s so interesting. I love this conversation—evolution and how that applies to creativity and music.

It reminds me of when it comes to remixes and just virality and content in general, it seems like there’s this formula. I’ve seen a lot of people who are smarter than I am who speak to the science of it, but a lot of these viral pieces of content have an element of familiarity, and they have an element of a twist or uniqueness or breaking expectations.

It seems like remixes do that really well, because they have the familiarity—the recognition is there, it connects to something—but then it twists or breaks it. It’s something different.

What it reminds me of is DNA and our parents, and how we have kids, and those kids are both a reflection of you and also original and unique. They have their own expression.

So I really resonate with what you’re sharing in terms of this next era of creativity, because it seems like it’s always been that way, right?

Gaurav: It's always been like, yeah, we're trying. I was gonna say it's been that. We're getting real deep. This is good. I like this concept of the kids. I'm gonna use that. But I was gonna say, everything does effectively come from a certain level of DNA. And what I do think a lot of the AI platforms that are working on original content will allow for is giving you that base level of DNA that is familiar to people.

So I do think a lot of—I mean, we don't do creation of original music on Hook, at least right now. Maybe in the future, but we don't have any plans at this stage. And I'll tell you why in a second. But for the ones that do, I think it will be that—it'll give musicians a baseline of what a blues track is typically supposed to sound like. And then my guess is the musicians are gonna go and change it, and the creatives are gonna go and change it and make it their own in the same way as you're describing.

The reason we decided to do remixing—sure, it's become a more cultural thing, and I thought it was really cool that the Grammys televised the Remix award this year. That's a big sign. But actually, the goal, the motivation to build Hook as being more so focused on remixing, didn't as much have to do with just feeling like remix culture was growing, but more so it had to do with—if you look at, like, one of the things that people would challenge us on early on, was that people don't care. Regular people don't care about expressing with music—only video and text. That's what people have said. That's what people would say to us very early on. And I've heard about other AI CEOs being like, "Music—making music isn't fun," blah, blah, blah.

And my thought is, music expression has existed for non-musicians literally forever. But it's just not typically original music creation. You go to a concert and people are singing the same song at, like, a football match. You go to a religious event 10,000 years ago, they're singing the same song together. You go on AIM 20 years ago, you're gonna find my 182 away message lyrics. Music expression for regular, non-musicians is typically through an artist. It's through something familiar.

And that's kind of why we decided to go into remixing, because what we're trying to do is help people build their confidence and feel that moment of like, "Damn, music expression is unique." It's unique from photo expression and film expression, writing something down—and you know that it's different. And I think that the roadmap to getting people to feel that way is enabling them to do what they've always been doing, which is expressing through music that there's a community built around. Whether they're shared fans of a sport, of a song, or an artist, or like White Lotus. It's like when you find music that people have built community around, then they all express it.

So that was just, like—to your point of remix culture—we didn't even expect remix culture to be a thing. It was more just about how do people express with music today.

Michael: Hmm. So cool. Yeah, that was beautiful. Awesome. Well, Gaurav, this has been a really fun conversation. We definitely went down some roads I wasn't necessarily expecting, but it feels well-traveled and makes me really excited to explore using the platform more.

So thank you for taking time to be on the podcast. And for anyone that's watching this right now who is like me and wants to go check out the platform and start playing around with it, what's the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Gaurav: Well, we're in the App Store. I would say right now our ASO is not great. If you search for "Hook," it's a lot of hookup apps. But if you search for "Hook Music," we're the first thing. Or "mashups" or "remix," whatever. Or you could go to hookmusic.com.

And if you're someone that loves music, is involved in music composition or technology or anything, and you're interested in wanting to be part of the team, email me as well, because we're expanding and we are looking for more people in our tribe.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome, man. Well, it is really cool. I'm a fan of the ideas that you're sharing right now, and the platform sounds very cool. And in terms of trends as well, I feel like it's right on point in terms of where I feel things are happening right now and where they're heading.

So really looking forward to playing around with the app. Thank you for coming on the podcast. And like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access. I'll look forward to talking again soon.

Gaurav: Thank you.