Michael Walker: Yeah. All right, I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Caleb Shreve. Caleb is the founder and CEO of Killphonic Rights. They offer comprehensive rights management services to indie artists and labels. He's a veteran music producer and engineer who's worked with Phantogram, Tegan and Sara, and Switchfoot, among many others. He's an advocate for artist empowerment, focused on transparent royalty collection and educating artists about their rights.

So Caleb, I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on the podcast today and share your perspective—coming from working deeply within the music industry as an artist and an engineer yourself, to now having this company that helps artists get connected with their rights and manage their finances in a more transparent way. Thank you for being here today.

Caleb Shreve: Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk about all this.

Michael: Absolutely. Maybe to kick things off, I’d love to hear just a little bit more about your story—how you got started and eventually came to start Killphonic.

Caleb: Yeah. So I was a musician and played in bands all through high school and my teen years. Right after high school, I actually got a development deal, which is something that doesn’t really happen anymore. This was the late ’90s.

That development deal included us getting a producer and a studio to record a record for the band I was in at the time. The record was a tragic failure—it just didn’t come out well—and I remember telling myself I never really connected with the producers on it. I decided I’d probably have to figure out how to produce records myself. That’s what I wanted to do.

I got a job at Sony—actually as an intern while I was still in high school. I left, popped around a couple other studios in New York City, and then went back to Sony in 1998. I worked my way up to being an engineer and got on the Special Products team, which handled all of Sony’s bigger artists. I was working with Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Michael Jackson, Destiny’s Child—almost every day on different sessions as an engineer.

I moved on from Sony, freelanced as an engineer for a while, and then started producing in New York. This was around the time Brooklyn was becoming a big thing nationally—bands like MGMT and LCD Soundsystem were coming out of Brooklyn. I latched onto that scene and produced a bunch of indie rock bands. That’s when I met Phantogram, and another band I was in went on tour with Tegan and Sara—that’s how I met them.

I did a lot of touring, made a lot of records in the studio, worked for major and indie labels for a couple decades, and signed my own publishing deal with BMG as a songwriter.

When I moved to L.A. in 2015, I was starting to want to get out of the studio. I knew from all my experiences that I’d probably be a good manager for young artists. I started managing a few artists but found that I didn’t really like management—it’s a lot more interpersonal relationship work. I wanted to focus on the business, and I saw that most of my clients didn’t have good options for publishing.

I’d been through the co-publishing system with BMG and didn’t like the idea of selling rights so early in an artist’s career, but I knew publishing was important. So I started helping my management clients go after international royalties they couldn’t access. I got on the competing board to become the MLC with Jeff Price, but we lost that bid to the current MLC board.

After that, I let my management clients go and started building the publishing company I wished I’d had access to when I was managing—this was really the birth of Killphonic Rights. That turned me into an expert in rights, royalties, and intellectual property. I found that most artists—and even a lot of people at labels and other publishers—didn’t really understand where these rights were, how they were collected, or what their entitlements were.

So I started educating. I speak on panels and podcasts to help artists because there’s a lot of money that falls into black boxes around the world and gets distributed to the majors. That never sat right with me—I think majors make plenty of money, and I wanted to funnel what’s owed back to independents. That’s what I do now.

Michael: Awesome. Thanks for sharing. It sounds like you’ve had quite the journey in your music life, and now you’re helping artists who are maybe at an earlier phase—who don’t have access to the resources they need to understand the complicated map of royalties and collection.

So for anyone listening who’s somewhat familiar with the landscape but still a little confused, could you explain how royalty collection works for indie artists? And when you say “black box,” what is that and how does it work? Also, what are some of the most common questions artists have when they first come to you about this topic?

Caleb: Yeah. So I’ll start from the beginning. I know I tend to get very deep in the weeds quickly, but to start—for anybody who doesn’t know the basics—it’s actually fairly simple in my mind. Again, this is my perspective, and I’ve been doing this for years, but there are two copyrights associated with music.

The first is the composition, which is the words, music, and songwriting—the underlying song itself. The second copyright is the sound recording, also called the master. So there’s a copyright associated with writing the song with other people, and there’s a more physical copyright for the sound recording or master that’s created from that song.

Each of those copyrights has two royalty usages. This is specifically for royalties—there are other ways to license your music, like sync, but royalties only come from two usages: the public performance of both copyrights, and the reproduction of both copyrights.

The most common thing people know about in publishing is ASCAP or BMI. They collect the public performance, or broadcast, royalties for your songwriting. That’s anytime it’s a one-to-many situation—your song is played on a TV show, on the radio, or performed live in a venue to an audience. There’s a public performance royalty paid to the songwriter for that usage.

On the reproduction side, there are mechanical royalties for publishing. Every time your song is reproduced, mechanicals are owed. For years, the label was responsible for paying mechanical royalties when they produced a CD, tape, vinyl, or other physical medium. That money was often prepaid before the sale—when production happened, they would pay the songwriters for the rights to reproduce their composition.

When streaming came along, you couldn’t predict how many streams a song would get, and the copy actually happens from Spotify’s server to your phone. The label was out of the loop, so the responsibility for paying mechanicals shifted to the DSPs. That’s why the MLC was created in more recent years.

On the sound recording side, there’s also a reproduction royalty—your streaming royalties, also called artist royalties. That’s the traditional income from selling or streaming your masters—the money you get from DistroKid, or from selling vinyl.

Then there’s the public performance of your masters, which many people don’t fully understand—these are neighboring rights. If someone asks you what neighboring rights are, it’s the public performance of the sound recording. Each of these four royalties is also subdivided.

On the performance side for publishing, half is paid to publishers and half is paid directly to songwriters. On the neighboring rights side, half goes to the master rights holder (the label or whoever owns the sound recording), 45% goes to the featured artists (split however the band decides), and 5% goes to background musicians, which in the U.S. is distributed through the union.

On the mechanical side there are splits as well, but those are the four main royalties you need to understand. If you can grasp that, the basic concept is simple—but the ways to collect these royalties, and where they’re located, is much more complicated, especially in the U.S.

When I started Killphonic, my idea was to help U.S. artists collect their international royalties. But I found that many international clients also needed help in the U.S. because we have five PROs—ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, and AllTrack—which is a lot for a single country. Brazil has seven, but most places have just one.

We also have the MLC here, but mechanical societies are not reciprocal like performance societies are. For example, ASCAP can go to the UK’s PRS and get your royalties there through reciprocal agreements, but the MLC does not go to MCPS to collect your mechanical royalties. That’s why you really need a publishing administrator to collect globally.

In the U.S., there’s also another split of mechanicals for what we call micro-sync—platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, where music is consumed like a stream but paired with a moving picture. It becomes a sync royalty. Those are generally licensed through a company called Music Reports. Killphonic has a direct deal with YouTube, but if you’re not with a publisher or publishing administrator in the U.S., you’d need to collect from your PRO, the MLC, and Music Reports to get most of your royalties.

As for black box royalties—YouTube has them, but the MLC is more known for having a large black box. This started when streaming launched in 2012 and companies like TuneCore began uploading tons of music to platforms. Spotify wasn’t requiring publishing information at first, so these songs had no publisher or songwriter attached in the system. Spotify knew it had to pay mechanical royalties but didn’t have the data to know who to pay, so it just held the money.

That’s what a black box is—royalties that are unclaimed because the rightful owner is unknown, sitting in a big account somewhere. In 2018, the Music Modernization Act was passed to modernize the rules. In that act, they created the MLC, overseen by the U.S. Copyright Office, and designated a board to run it. The MLC’s job is to educate the market, get artists to register their songs, and pay out those mechanical royalties from the black box.

When the MLC started, there was about $440 million in the black box. They have not done a great job finding those people, and some estimates say it may now be close to $1 billion.

Michael: Wow. You know, I was looking at my books the other day, and it did seem like I was missing about a billion dollars from my music streams. If they’re looking for the person they were supposed to send that to…

Caleb: So, I’ll have them over to you. But yeah, it was like some tax audits and stuff that a few publications had done that had found that they were basically claiming the taxes that they had this big trench of money that was exceeding the $440 million that was originally there. So yeah, that box is actually getting bigger.

And what they do with black box money is eventually they hold onto it for generally—I mean, PROs do this too—you know, if you have a song internationally, which is another reason why it’s important to have an administrator, but if you have a song, say, in Germany that has the same title as the song here, or your song is written here but has the same title as another song in Germany, ASCAP and BMI have reciprocal agreements, but they don’t really sort conflicts out.

So if they get a, like I said, a tranche of conflict back from GEMA, which is the PRO in Germany, ASCAP’s not going to go through and try to fix those conflicts. So a publishing administrator like us, we go direct to every PRO so that we have access to all of their databases. And when we see conflicts in their portals, in their systems, we resolve those conflicts.

We actually get a file back called an ACT file, which is an acknowledgement of registrations that tells us when there are conflicts and problems and missing data—stuff like that. So anyway, again, if you’re just going through ASCAP or BMI and you have a song that’s in conflict in their territory, the money sits there for three to five years as well, and then they distribute to their members after that.

That black box is distributed. So yeah, all PROs, and YouTube, and the MLC all have these black boxes of money that they generally hold for a couple of years to try and resolve. And then if they can’t, they distribute it to their market by their market share.

Michael: Got it. Yeah, so it sounds like what you’re saying is that first they put it in this box as sort of like “unknown” who this belongs to, and then after a certain amount of time they will distribute it, but just kind of guess based on the average percentage that they’re already paying out. And to me—like when I’ve heard that before, and I think you were alluding to this earlier as well—unless there’s something I’m missing, it seems like that system would disproportionately affect artists. Because most major record label artists aren’t making the mistake of not declaring their publishing.

Caleb: A hundred percent. I mean, that was why we had such a brutal fight over the MLC. What happened to me was, I knew that this was—because before the MLC, there’s, I mean there still is, a company called Harry Fox Agency. Harry Fox Agency kind of worked for a long time for the DSPs and the publishers to match that money.

So major publishers were getting these mechanical royalties out of Spotify through their own registrations from 2012 on. So all of the black box money—that $440 million—was independents’ money. It was not majors’. Those artists that, like I said and you said, have been getting paid because they understand the royalty landscape much better.

So when I found out the MLC board was coming up, I looked at who was proposed on the other side, and it was all major label executives. And I was confused why—no conflict of interest here. Yeah. So that’s when I reached out to a friend of mine, and he said, yes, it’s a huge conflict of interest and that’s why Jeff Price is starting another competing board to try and become the MLC. And he put me in touch with Jeff, and that’s how that all started.

So yeah, that’s a huge conflict of interest. And, you know, seemingly, because again, at the end—in three years or five years, whatever—they decide to empty that black box. It was statutorily only one year, but they’ve extended it because of COVID and things like that. But at some point soon—I think at the top of next year probably, I was assuming the top of this year—they were going to distribute it, but very soon they’re going to say, “Hey, we couldn’t find these people, and we’re going to distribute the money.”

So it’s not really even like guessing, like you said, who it belonged to. It straight up just goes by market share. So if you have the biggest market—which is, I guess, Sony right now, and then Universal, they kind of compete for the top spot in publishing—they’re going to get the majority of that money. And none of it is theirs. It’s just money that belongs to independents that couldn’t register, couldn’t find the mechanicals before the distribution happened.

Michael: Hmm. Wild, man. Well, it makes me grateful that there’s people like yourself and companies like yourself that are trying to help educate independent artists on how to receive some of this money that they’re just owed. It’s their money.

Caleb: There’s too few of us, to be honest. I mean, I’ve run into very few people that take this kind of cause on. I think that publishing’s not quite as valuable as the master overall, but it’s still a very valuable resource and revenue stream. So yeah, I wish more people would take it seriously.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, especially for indies, it feels like probably every dollar counts.

I’m curious—whenever I talk with someone that’s smarter than I am in this area, like yourself, I always start out and I’m, every time I hear this, I’m starting to understand the landscape better. I’m like, “Oh yeah,” around the root fundamentals. And then at a certain point my brain starts to be like, “Whoa.” It’s like when it’s, “Well, then this breaks up into a different sub…”

And at some point in the conversation, I’m wondering to myself, is this the best way to handle this? Or is this the simplest way? Or is there a simpler or a better way? And obviously it’s just, you know, there’s so many roots that have been formed around the way that it is.

So I’m curious to hear your perspective as someone who literally spends so much time figuring out the conflicts and the issues that exist right now. If you could wave a magic wand and just sort of erase everything that exists right now in terms of how the structure is set up, and you were kind of looking at it knowing in hindsight how things have panned out, what do you think it would look like in an ideal scenario if you were starting from scratch and they gave you a crown—like, “All right, Caleb, it’s on you to figure out a structure for this”? What might that look like?

Caleb: Um, I mean, it is a really good question and, you know, I will say things that I think some people would absolutely disagree with. But I don’t think anybody would disagree that it is too convoluted and too opaque.

It’s funny—my thought, because in the beginning I was like, “Oh yeah, this is very much purposeful to make this opaque so that major labels and other people can kind of siphon money out of the system.” And then I kind of learned why all of these things took place.

The songwriter royalty was basically—it was always just publishing up until the late ’60s, early ’70s—but I believe it was in the ’70s that they looked back and saw some predatory agreements that had been made with a lot of artists who maybe couldn’t even read, who were signing X’s on a contract just to get the label to put out their record, and not understanding that they were signing away their publishing.

So this kind of songwriter royalty was a way to make up for those injustices—saying, “Hey, publishing was misunderstood for many years. A lot of artists signed away their publishing without knowing what it was, so we’re going to create a second royalty that’s paid to writers.” And that’s what ended up splitting the performance royalties between publisher and writer.

That never happened on the mechanical side. So right there, that makes it really confusing because ASCAP works on what they call a 100% system—50% goes to the publisher and 50% goes to the songwriter. For years, actually, they both worked on a 200% system, which meant that if you owned 50% of the song, you got 50% of the publishing royalties and 50% of the songwriting royalties, and there would be a 200% pie in the performance royalties.

But in the 100% system, basically what makes it confusing is that on your mechanical side, you’re registering at 50/50—like if you and I write a song together—but on the performance side, you’re registering at 25 and 25 on the publishing side, and 25 and 25 on the songwriting side. So that kind of convolutes things.

I feel like I would like to go back to maybe just a simpler world where we don’t have to subdivide the performance royalties and they can be quite equal to the mechanical royalties. Or, I think, do the opposite—make a songwriter royalty for mechanicals, which doesn’t exist right now. One of those two things would make them equitable.

The biggest thing I think we should do—which I kind of fought for—I went to ASCAP’s offices in New York during the MLC debate and said basically, “Why are we starting another society?” You know, around the rest of the world they’ve got what they call CMOs, which are collective management organizations. MCPS and PRS are sister companies in the UK that handle both performance and mechanicals.

I was like, “Why doesn’t ASCAP take over the MLC and distribute the mechanical royalties? You have all the streaming data, you have all the things you need, the infrastructure—why build another company for people to register with?” The answer was kind of like, “We just don’t do mechanical royalties. We do performance royalties.”

So I think—and there is talk, too, about consolidating the five PROs we have here in the U.S.—like, is that necessary? ASCAP is actually our only true PRO. They’re the ones designated by CISAC, the kind of UN of all PROs, as our PRO in the U.S. BMI, SESAC, and the others are called RMEs—Rights Management Entities. So we really only have one PRO, but we have five generally in practice.

Michael: You know, what’s pragmatic—the way that those entities are set up? Are they a for-profit entity, or is there market competition between them? What’s the compensation model for those companies?

Caleb: So ASCAP is not-for-profit, which is not the same as nonprofit. Nonprofit means that nobody in the company can be paid—they have to do the service and volunteer. That’s like homeless shelters or nonprofits where people volunteer their time, or food banks, things like that.

ASCAP is a not-for-profit, which is very different. It means that the employees who work there, including the CEO, can get paid large compensation packages for their work. I believe the CEO of ASCAP makes a seven-figure salary, but they don’t show a profit at the end of the year.

BMI was not-for-profit for many years, but in the last couple of years they were bought out and turned into a for-profit company. SESAC is owned by BlackRock and is a for-profit company. Same thing with GMR and AllTrack—those are all for-profit companies, and they do battle for market share.

One of the problems we have because of that is they’ve incentivized bigger songwriters. People like Max Martin get larger royalties for the same usages that independents get, because they’ve created these “super producer” type credits. If you reach certain thresholds, you get paid more per stream, per radio play, and per TV performance than an independent artist who doesn’t cross those thresholds.

The reason was they were trying to attract bigger producers to their side so that every time they negotiated a new contract with radio conglomerates, for example, they could prove they had a bigger market. They go back and forth, having a race to the bottom on how little they pay their independents and how much they can pay the top upper-echelon 1%, so they can get more of the market and bigger parts of these blanket licenses they enter into with radio stations and TV broadcasters.

So yes, there is a fight for market share, because it ultimately ends up with larger parts of these blanket licenses. And they do that by offering incentives for bigger writers to come over to them and paying them more.

So yeah, the whole system is definitely broken.

If you go way, way to the other side of things, there are some people who think that maybe copyright in general is not a great idea. It’s interesting—copyright was set up to create scarcity in the marketplace. That was the idea of it.

Once things like printing presses were invented, they realized, “Oh, we can mass produce these sheets of music,” and the idea was to incentivize people to still write music. So they created a copyright system where you had to license your work to press a certain number of sheets out of a printing press, artificially creating scarcity in the market.

The problem now is that with Spotify and other newer technologies, there’s no scarcity to music at all. You pay one subscription fee and get access to everything. So we’re trying to fit this new model of consumption into an old model of copyright that hasn’t been updated in a hundred years, conceptually.

In this new model, is copyright even valid? Is it the right system at all? Or should we all just be paid by these companies to put our music on their platform, and then move on from it without a royalty system?

A lot of people scoff at that idea quickly, but ultimately what’s working right now is not working. It’s two competing philosophies over what consumption of music should look like—is it this unlimited idea where you pay one fee and get all the music in the world as much as you want, or is it something where we go back, create scarcity, and have copyright actually work for the rights holders? Because it’s just not doing that right now.

Michael: Hmm. Really interesting. I’ve thought a lot about that too, just in terms of the effect of streaming on market economics. When you have unlimited supply of something, the economic demand for it goes down.

So what I’m hearing you say is that one interesting thing to consider is an alternative model where these streaming services would actually pay upfront for the right to stream unlimited—to give that unlimited access to their user base—as one way to fix this “race to the bottom” effect of unlimited streaming but paying out for royalties.

Because the amount of music is going up so much, and we just don’t have enough time to stream all the different songs. It does seem like something needs to be fixed there.

Caleb: I mean, there are other models too. I’ve always fought for the user-centric model, which is the idea that the money you give goes to the things you listen to. So if you paid $10 and listened to one artist ten times, they’d get your $10.

Right now, in this unlimited streaming model, what happens is artists like Taylor Swift—whose fan base is mostly younger people who are maybe on a family plan—aren’t even paying the full $9.99. Their subscription fee is probably closer to $4.99, and they’re over-consuming—hundreds of streams of one artist or a couple of big pop stars.

Meanwhile, people paying $9.99—like older people such as myself—work all day, come home, and probably listen to very little music. We’re under-consuming. So our money is really going to pay artists like Taylor Swift for the overconsumption of their fans.

I’m a Britpop fan from the ’90s—Blur, Pulp, and so on—and those artists aren’t making as much of my money even though I subscribe to Spotify specifically to listen to them. They should be getting my money.

I’ve had people try to push back against why user-centric modeling doesn’t work, but I’ve never honestly heard a good reason. The main answer I get is that it takes money away from the top artists, and you need the support of Universal and Sony—because those companies own parts of Spotify. The whole system is very rigged against independents.

There’s one counter-argument I’ve heard that’s not great either. Some people say there are a lot of dead accounts on Spotify—people who pay for it every month but have forgotten about their accounts, or who have passed away and their credit card is still paying for an account that no one is using.

Where does that money go? Spotify takes 30% of all revenue off the top, so I don’t see why they couldn’t just take that dead-account revenue first, make up whatever they need, and then distribute the rest among active accounts. I don’t think 30% of Spotify’s accounts are dead—that would be crazy—so they could solve that problem easily.

Michael: Hmm, that’s interesting. Thirty percent is a pretty decent chunk of revenue. I know Apple’s been under fire recently for their 30% App Store commission, and they actually just lost a case over that.

So yeah, really interesting. As it relates to scarcity, copyright, and different models of music ownership or music assets, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Web3 and music NFTs. Obviously, NFTs had a big bubble pop, they’re unregulated in many ways, and there’s a lot of scam activity—so it’s kind of the wild west. But I’ve always felt like music was an interesting place where NFTs could actually make sense. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts as someone who’s an expert in this.

Like how do you view some of these emerging markets and ally around, like digital collectibles and assets and the ownership there? 

Caleb: Yeah, I mean, I think tokenizing music in an NFT is interesting. Again, it creates a limited supply that brings back that scarcity factor. And anything that can, to me, put the artist closer to the consumer without those people taking 30% along the way is better in my mind.

At this point, pragmatically, I don’t think the system for NFT delivery and functionality is simple enough that people will go there. It’s always that argument of, how do you replace Spotify when it’s so easy to pay $9.99? That was the idea of Spotify—people were file sharing, which is not much different than going on OpenSea and buying an NFT. It’s just that you were pirating on Pirate Bay, but you had to have a program and a protocol that would file share amongst a bunch of different people who were uploading.

I remember those days in the early 2000s with Napster and Pirate Bay where we’d download MP3s from file sharing services. But that was so complicated for some people that when Spotify came along and said, “How about this—you pay us $9.99 and you get everything,” people said, “Great.” That ease of use is what resolved music piracy.

To try and replace that now with an NFT model—where you have to get a wallet, buy the stuff on OpenSea, download it to your wallet, and find a player to attach your NFT wallet to—might work for people in their teens through their thirties, but my parents are never going to get an NFT wallet to listen to music.

I see the future in it, but I don’t know when we’ll get to the point where it actually makes sense to replace something as easy as Spotify. That’s the only real argument I can make for streaming—it prevents piracy because it’s so easy to use.

Michael: Yeah, that totally makes sense. What I’m hearing you say is that you think some of those territories are interesting and could potentially work in the future if they were simple enough and accessible enough so people wouldn’t be tempted to illegally pirate things like we did in the past. One thing streaming has done really well is make things accessible and easy to use in a way that’s somewhat regulated and at least pays out something to the owners. Maybe at some point in the future, when it’s more pragmatic, there could be a way to cut out the middleman more and reconnect artists with their fans.

Caleb: I think it kind of goes towards that user-centric modeling I mentioned, where you, as a user, are buying the NFTs you listen to and having them in your wallet. You can stream as much as you want, but all of your money is going to the artist you’re listening to. It feels more like that user-centric model instead of this pay-per-play system where people have inequities in what they pay to Spotify and how much they consume.

I can see it working in a way that’s more profitable for independent artists and more fair—which is also a big barrier. The biggest problem against user-centric modeling is that it takes money away from the top artists, so companies like Universal, Sony, and Warner don’t want to do it. It needs the actual industry to jump on board.

Michael: Yeah. It’s kind of hard when the people with the most sway don’t want something to happen. Unless there’s equal influence in the opposite direction, it’s hard to move the momentum.

Caleb: Yeah.

Michael: One thing that’s interesting about collectibles is that, on one hand, you could imagine a platform where, in order to stream the music or listen to it, you have to own the actual collectible. I don’t know if we’ll ever go back there because the cat’s out of the bag with streaming and digital downloads—it’s so easy for things to get out that it would be really hard to enforce.

On the other hand, it seems like people are still interested in the status of owning a limited collectible, even if you can stream the song. That inherently makes it more valuable or at least gives it some kind of value. I think of the Mona Lisa—you can print out a copy and hang it in your house to appreciate the art, the same way you might stream a song. But if you put it side-by-side with the actual Mona Lisa, one’s worth $800 million and one’s worth $10.

Why is that? People have arbitrarily decided that one is cool and one is one-of-a-kind, so they’re willing to pay that much. Even in art, it’s so subjective—some of the most famous artists’ work had no value when they were alive, but after they died, it became priceless.

Caleb: I think music fits the NFT model better than art. When the Bored Apes became really popular and a big status symbol, there was still cynicism about buying a JPEG. The problem was connecting the actual artistic piece to the NFT in a visual medium—it’s harder.

A sound recording is a copyright, and it’s already a half-physical, half-digital thing. So it makes more sense to connect a sound recording to an NFT because of the way we consume it. We don’t look at a song, we listen to it. An NFT of music feels more connected to the art in that way.

Owning an NFT of music is easier for me to understand than owning an NFT of a JPEG I have to look at on my computer. Once you have an NFT of music, you can play it through a stereo and it’s the same as a CD or a stream. A JPEG is just a file—it’s not appreciated the same way the Mona Lisa is in a museum. You could print out your Bored Ape, but then it’s no longer the NFT—it’s just a physical print.

There’s obviously the social media aspect—people were putting their Bored Apes on Instagram or Twitter and verifying them there—but it’s not the same consumption experience as music. With music NFTs, you can play them through a stereo just like any other music, and you own it.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Cool. I don’t know how much you know about Modern Musician or our Street Team, but it’s very new. About a week and a half ago, we released a software-as-a-service called Street Team. The idea is to modernize the traditional street team concept—fans supporting artists so much they promote them in exchange for access or recognition, like a backstage pass or community role.

We wanted to modernize that and connect artists with fans in a way where the artist owns the fan data. Right now, they don’t—on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, someone else owns their audience.

This conversation excites me because next year I want to lean into using our community platform to help artists create digital assets around their songs and give fans utility—access—through what we’re calling music relics. They’re our version of NFTs, since “NFT” sounds strange to most people. “Relic” feels like something treasured.

This is a precursor to that, but I rarely get to talk to someone with your experience and perspective on royalties and the value of these assets, and how you can license and monetize them. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast and share your experience. I’m grateful people like you exist to be a voice for independent artists who don’t always have that kind of backing. For anyone interested in connecting more or learning more about what you’ve built with NMS, could you share the best place to get started?

Caleb: We have Instagram and Facebook pages. We’ve tried to post educational content there, but it’s often not as appreciated, so it’s a hard territory.

Michael: A lot of people know it’s important, but it’s a lot to wrap their heads around.

Caleb: Honestly, the best place would be to Google podcasts I’ve been on—I’ve spoken on a lot of them. If you go to traditional places like A2IM—the American Association of Independent Music—they have a lot of resources. I did a webinar with them a month or two ago.

We’re associated with many traditional outlets for education. If you want to hear more from me, I’m speaking again on a panel at A2IM’s conference in June. I usually go to Music Biz as well, but I couldn’t make it this year. My educational outreach often goes through platforms like yours that have bigger audiences, where I can partner to get the word out.

You can also find articles I’ve written or been interviewed for—links are on my personal Instagram. But really, Google us, DM us—we answer a lot of independent artist questions on Instagram. I’m able to get in touch that way.

We don’t have a hub for education—our main mission is dealing with royalties for artists, not education—but these things mean a lot to me. I speak on other platforms that do more educational outreach.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Awesome. We’ll put the links in the show notes for easy access. Caleb, looking forward to talking to you again soon.

Caleb: Thank you for having me, Michael. It was great.