Michael Walker: Yeah. Awesome. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend Danny Garcia. Danny is the founder and CEO of SongTools, which is a platform that helps automate music marketing for independent artists, labels, and managers. He's also a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music for his work with democratizing access to music promotion tools.

A former artist manager, a serial music tech entrepreneur, and I'm excited to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit about, as an independent artist, how can you leverage the tools that are available nowadays to be able to cut through the noise, make a sustainable income, and build a real community around your music?

So Danny, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Danny Garcia: Thanks for having me on, Michael, and thanks everyone for listening.

Michael: Absolutely. And it was kind of fun—we were just talking backstage. We're both Florida natives, and so we were talking a little about what we can do to bring music tech to this part of the country.

I'm excited to talk a little bit more about that. We've been talking about our virtual conference, the summit that we do in Orlando, and the magic is swirling in the air. Just planting a seed there for anyone that's listening or watching this—Florida's a great place to come, especially depending on the time of the year.

So yeah, keep an ear out for live events. Maybe do a quick Google search for live events in Florida from SongTools and Modern Musician if you're interested in participating in one of those.

Danny: A hundred percent. And if you're an artist here in Florida, reach out. We're always hoping to connect with people, go to shows, support, and hopefully help even with the marketing tools that we've built. There’s a lot here in Miami—amazing artists. Not only electronic music, but rap and hip hop, Latin music. It's a melting pot.

I grew up here, left, and now I've been back for six months, kind of relearning and reconnecting.

Michael: Awesome. It is something that I’ve felt a desire to get more involved in. I feel like I could do a better job of connecting with the local community. That’s part of why I’m really excited about the conversation we were just having, and about hosting these events here to bring back some of the community hub that Florida, Orlando, and Miami have historically been in the music industry.

In certain decades, it’s been the place to be. So kind of make it that way again.

Danny: Yeah, that’d be awesome.

Michael: Cool. Well, Danny, for anyone that this is their first time meeting you or connecting with you, could you share a little bit about your story? How you became a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music, and the formation of SongTools? How did it start, and what was the core problem or mission you set out to solve?

Danny: Yeah. I’m an artist myself. I’ve been playing guitar since I was in the second grade, and was in indie rock bands and rock bands growing up, recording in the garage. I’m definitely not a stranger to the artist’s mentality and experience.

I grew up always putting ideas down on GarageBand and later Ableton. I always found it relatively easy to record music, get ideas down, and even get them out on DSPs like Spotify, SoundCloud, and before that YouTube. But I was always perplexed—or just confused—as to how artists I’d see with a hundred thousand followers or thousands of streams on their music got there. I never understood how that side of the industry worked, or how to break into it.

So I ended up going to NYU to study music business. During that time, I started a bunch of different marketing companies and agencies. With a friend, I ended up working in SoundCloud repost trading, Spotify playlisting, and all these different areas that I found really intriguing.

Throughout that time I learned about how that side of the industry works and made connections. But I also saw a big disparity in the independent artist experience. Artists would spend so much money producing their music—even just a Logic license is $200—so by the time they got their music on Spotify or SoundCloud, they’d already invested a lot.

Then there were agencies and marketing tools charging hundreds or thousands of dollars. And I saw a big delta between what you were getting out of those campaigns and what you had to pay for them.

So where we came in was: how do we bring down the cost? If you automate it, you don’t have to pay a marketing person. It makes it more affordable, more scalable. That’s what we set out to do first in playlisting, because at the time, playlisting was what all the artists wanted. And still, people are very interested in it for growth.

That’s where we came from with Playlister Club, which then became SongTools. That’s my background—I’m kind of like an artist turned marketer.

Michael: Awesome. I can definitely relate. I don’t know how much you know about me, but I’m a musician, and it was basically the same story. I toured full-time for about 10 years. My family stumbled upon this world, and I always enjoyed this side of it. Then I realized there was a big need.

That’s awesome. And you’ve developed a tool to help automate and make this more accessible for artists who can’t necessarily afford what a typical online business owner might pay for marketing tools. Could you share a little about SongTools? What would you say is your genius zone, or the secret sauce that SongTools has cracked?

Danny: Yeah, that’s a good question. The main difference—or the secret sauce—for us is we do it all in one click. When we set out to build it, the idea was: if you gave us just a Spotify link, could we get it on playlists? Could we run social media ads? That’s all you’d have to give us as an artist.

Flip that around—we thought, how cool would it be if you could just give someone a Spotify link and they do everything else, without it costing an arm and a leg? That’s what we’ve built.

So what happens in our system is you go in, create your account, pick the song you want to promote, and then on the backend there are algorithms matching your track to the right playlists, the right audience on TikTok, or the right audience on Meta.

You can launch campaigns targeting people who haven’t heard your track yet, or curators who might be interested in your song. Obviously nothing is guaranteed in terms of results, but we’re confident—we’ve placed over 2 million tracks through the playlisting system, and we’ve run over 20,000 marketing campaigns through our ad tools.

We’re not a bespoke agency, but the algorithm works really well to match you with the right people. That’s what allows us to run scalable marketing campaigns for artists.

That’s where things are moving too. As an artist, tapping into these tools that let you do more with less work and automate the boring stuff is where you want to be. That way, you can spend more time making better content, get it in front of more people, and create that cycle of great content reaching the right ears.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. I love that. I mean, that sounds like a dream come true—literally taking the song, the Spotify link, putting it there, and having the system do the work of figuring out what genre it is, who’s going to resonate with it, and what kind of campaigns should be run around it. It’s almost like having a record label that just plugs in, but because it’s using your technology, it’s able to do it at a fraction of the labor costs required.

Cool. That might be a nice segue. At the time of recording this, there’s just so much awesome stuff happening around AI. And there’s maybe a double-edged sword—there’s a lot of controversy or fear around how it’s being used when it comes to generative music. But as it relates to what we’re talking about right now—like a marketing tool or software development—it’s sort of a golden age.

I’m curious to hear your perspective on AI and where things are headed. If an artist is here right now and they’re feeling a little disoriented, like, “I don’t really know how to maximize and get the most out of this,” what would your thoughts be around them and their relationship with AI?

Danny: Yeah, I think AI is such an interesting thing when it comes to music. A lot of people are against it right now because it, in a way, automates the whole creation process, which I don’t think is the right way of looking at it.

Using it as an assistant to the creative process is awesome. I’ve seen a lot of people do that—maybe use it as a song starter, then pull that into whatever DAW you use and build a song off of that, or just bounce ideas off of it. I think that’s a great way of using it.

Aside from the creation side, you can look at AI agents and tools to help automate the other things you need to do as a professional artist—whether that be email reach-outs, content creation, album art, and things like that. A lot of artists are using it that way, and that’s amazing.

I think more than ever it’s… because why not? What do you think about it?

Michael: I’m on a similar line of thinking as you. I think right now there are a lot of different use cases for it, and the low-hanging fruit is the stuff you don’t enjoy doing but is necessary. Making that part easier frees up your time so you can focus on the parts you do enjoy.

But I’m with you in that as a generative tool, most people would agree that just prompting it and not doing any sort of creative work yourself isn’t very fun—and the output isn’t going to be great. It’s better to interact with it, to collaborate.

I think it’s easy to overlook the flip side, too—that as a producer, or as someone using these tools, you can get huge leverage. The role of a producer is really important—maybe the most important part of creating a song. So if you can put your producer hat on and then use these tools as if you were in a studio with 10 or 50 other people—like, “Hey, do this, do this, do this”—then that’s amazing.

Danny: Yeah. That’s where I think it’s going. Companies like FanLab, based in Singapore, have these amazing creation tools for artists. They’re turning normal people into music creators—it’s the stage even before GarageBand or Ableton. It’s for people just curious about making beats, then moving into becoming actual creators. FanLab is pretty amazing at that.

I think more and more, the pie is growing—the number of people actually releasing music on streaming services. And AI is going to exponentially increase that in the coming years. That’s something else to think about as an artist: how do you stand out from all of those tracks being uploaded? How do you dive into your artistry and develop it in a way that stands out more?

Michael: Yeah, that’s a great point and a nice segue into that challenge. It already feels pretty saturated, because it’s never been easier to record and release music. And like you mentioned, AI is making it even faster and easier to create more music.

What are your recommendations for artists to actually cut through the noise, get their music in front of the right people, and build an authentic relationship with them?

Danny: Yeah. This is kind of at the crux of everything we do at SongTools. I always say—and my main framework of thinking about this nowadays—is going back to the funnel. Creating a funnel around your music.

Across the board, the common denominator of artists who’ve been able to build careers and approach it from a professional perspective—like building a business—is that they’ve been successful at creating funnels.

As an independent artist, one of the things you can do is think about all the different work you do post-release as the top of the funnel. Playlists are an example—getting in front of a lot of different people. But it doesn’t have to just be playlists. It could be organic posts on social media, or maybe you’re active on Reddit, commenting on threads and mentioning your project in a way that’s cool with the moderators.

That’s the top of the funnel. Then you move down to the middle of the funnel, where you want to actually drive fan engagement and convert fans. For most independent artists, it’s not that many. At the top, it’s thousands—people seeing your posts, hearing your song on playlists. Then a small percentage of those people actually really like what you’re doing. Those are the ones you want to latch onto—ask them to follow you on Instagram, join your email list, or follow your Spotify.

That engagement is really important because those people will stream future releases and eventually move to the bottom of the funnel—buying concert tickets or merch. The middle of the funnel is the most important.

It depends on the artist. For some, it makes sense to create a Discord community. For others, maybe they prefer an email list. But the key is engaging people at the top, then in the middle, and eventually monetizing them at the bottom.

That monetization could mean selling an NFT, touring, selling merch—it depends. But I think a misconception a lot of artists have is, “I uploaded my song through DistroKid, I’ll just sit and wait, post a few times, and then wait for the money.” That’s just not how it works.

The funnel framework is great for organizing your efforts. When you have a fan interaction, you can say, “Let me latch onto this person—follow me here.” That’s how artists build sustainably. You can do it by hand or use platforms at different stages. SongTools helps with some of that, other platforms help with other parts. It’s personal preference, but that’s the way I’ve seen artists stand out.

Aside from the obvious—make great music, stay true to your artistry, have cohesive branding—beyond those basics, it’s really about building out funnels.

One more thing is iterating. Making sure you’re learning from each release. Maybe even keeping a spreadsheet—tracking how each release impacted monthly listeners, saves, followers. Then look at the delta between releases, learn what worked, and use that to inform future releases.

Those are the two main areas I’ve seen people who are good at it get a lot of success.

Michael: Good stuff. Yeah. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that the starting point—it’s not really enough to just release the music and post a couple times on Instagram. The analogy that comes to mind is starting a fire. If your music is like the logs, it’s not enough to just put the logs on the fire pit. You need a way to generate the flames or sparks.

One of the best ways to do that is by building a funnel. A funnel is really just a system—a step-by-step process for someone to go from the top of discovering you, to connecting with you, building more engagement, to eventually making an offer.

SongTools is a great resource to help you with certain parts of those steps, to connect with your fans.

I’m curious—this is probably a challenge you hear a lot from artists. Maybe they’ve worked really hard, built a decent following on socials or Spotify, but they’re still struggling to pay the bills or make sustainable income.

What do you see working really well right now in terms of more of those down-the-funnel kinds of things to help monetize?

Danny: Yeah, I mean, live music if you can, because certain genres can't, or certain types of artists can't. Like, if you're a lo-fi producer, it might be hard to go and play at a bar or whatever. But if you can play live, do that as much as possible because that's going to, over time, make you more money than you probably would be able to on streaming, and also drive socials and streaming links. So it's old school, but I think live is definitely still one of the main ways to do that in terms of monetization.

I think one of the other things that I've seen trending a lot are these direct-to-fan monetization strategies. And there are platforms out there, I think Even is one of those. You know, obviously there's our—

Michael: New software. I'll throw our hat in the ring there. Street Team is basically the exact category that you're talking about.

Danny: Amazing. Okay, so then I'll redo my reference. Street Team is one of those—there's no other—

Michael: Platforms that exist. There's only one.

Danny: Exactly, yeah. So that's amazing that you're building that, because that's a huge thing. I've been surprised that there aren't more of them coming out. It's amazing to hear that you're building that because that's definitely where the world's moving. I think it comes a little bit later for these artists, right? It can't be the first thing you do.

I think focus on making that framework first so that you get some sort of traffic and engagement. Then once you have those first—could even be like 20 people—that sign into your email list and really care, you can then start to monetize them through these platforms. And you don't have to do it in a way that's asking for money. There are definitely rewards that you can give these people, whether it's access to unreleased content, or I've seen artists do really cool stuff with personalized content, like songwriters writing a 30-second snippet of a track personalized to whatever you want—almost like a Cameo.

So things like that depend on what kind of artist you are and what your genre is. But monetization-wise, that's one of two of the main things I've been seeing work well for artists. It's obviously tough to monetize right now, and a lot of these platforms where you get a ton of followers, it's hard to see that translate into income. So it's definitely a question in the industry, but it's good that more and more people like yourself are developing tools.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, super smart. So what I'm hearing you say is that to start with, it's important to build a relationship with those people and not just immediately go for the jugular in terms of some of these offers. It'd be sort of like asking someone to marry you on the first date. You want to build the relationship first and make sure that you have a good connection before making an offer.

But once you reach that point, live shows are a great way to deepen the connection, monetize, and drive engagement across the board. And there's a certain tool—actually, there's just one tool—it's called Street Team, and nothing else exists, for deepening the fan connection.

Just kidding—there are definitely other tools that exist. Some that come to mind are Patreon, which is sort of an obvious one, Even sounds like one, and there's one called Vault I've heard of that seems cool. Lots of good companies doing good things.

And you know, Street Team is definitely where our heart and soul has gone into. Especially with the Journeys builder and the full-stack integration with everything from start to finish with the project. I'm going to geek out if I go down too much of it, but I think there's a great opportunity for artists right now to build a deeper relationship with their fans, as long as they're doing what you're talking about here on this podcast: exploring the tools, exploring what works for them, what resonates.

Yeah, it's a pretty amazing time to be a musician in general, with the rise of technology and how quickly things are changing. I'm curious—you had mentioned, and this is another maybe somewhat controversial thing depending on who you're talking to—but NFTs. They sort of had a rise and a fall, a bubble pop around them, probably for good reason. Like, is a gif of a hamster really worth millions of dollars?

But I've always felt like music was one of those rare things where it makes a lot of sense for you to have a digital, one-of-a-kind asset. So I'd love to hear your perspective on digital assets and where you think the world might be headed related to those kinds of assets.

Danny: Yeah, I share the same sentiment as you. In music, it could be huge. And there is more adoption in the NFT and digital asset space for music. More than anything, I think the issue with some of those NFT solutions back in the day was that they made it about the NFT. It should have just been the underlying pipes that this runs on. Beyond that, there are all these benefits to using it.

That was one of the main mistakes, aside from everything you mentioned, why it didn't stick fully with music. Because in theory, it should work. It would be much better. In theory, you could have instant royalties off of a specific file and do instant splits to the label, the artist, and whoever's involved. Which is a million times better than what exists right now, where it takes you three months to get paid out.

But for some reason or another, it never caught on. It can definitely move in that direction.

As an independent artist, one of the main things is offering more value. And this creates a greater point: in a way, streaming has devalued actual music, because now everyone just has access to it for free. So you have to think of other ways as the artist to offer more value, so then you can monetize. Whether that is merch, a concert ticket, an online experience, an NFT, or whatever.

Find whatever makes sense to your user base or listener base and offer them a whole bunch of value. It's like a page out of the book from the world we come from, where we want all the artists listening and people using SongTools—our goal is always to give you a lot of value. That's why we're doing this podcast, giving it to you so that you can extract value out of it. Take that and do it yourself in your artist world.

That's super important. Always think about: what is my listener getting out of this? It can be as simple as just an amazing song with an amazing video, but that value chain is super important, and it ties into that digital asset world as well.

Michael: Good stuff. Yeah, one of the points you just made there is a really helpful focal point in general: always focusing on what they're getting out of this. What's the value they get? When I see artists getting tripped up on monetizing their music or the money side of it, it's usually because they're not asking that question enough. They're not focusing on that enough.

They're focusing too much on themselves, how they're coming across, and what they're getting out of it. But if you take the approach you just described—actually asking what they're getting out of it and how to provide more value—that unblocks a lot of that tension.

Danny: Yeah, and I think there are different types of artists too. Some artists don't want to think about that stuff and just want to make good music. Those are the artists that might need a manager, a label, or to sign onto a distributor to think about those things for them.

But in general, as an artist, there has to be someone on the team—or you—thinking about that. Ultimately, that's what's going to drive people. You can look at any artist that's famous. They all do that in some way or another, whether it's through fan clubs, VIP tickets, or even just doing free drops of songs before they're out. There are so many things you can do to drive engagement.

In the earliest stages, it starts with directly engaging with people. A lot of artists that I've seen get success are literally DMing their fans—the people that like their music. They're having constant conversations with them, whether it's comments, DMs, or Discord. That one-to-one connection is important. You're not Adele yet. You need to engage with these people and show them that you care.

That's another thing I've seen a lot of artists successfully do: talk to the people that are their early supporters and start building that army out as well. 

Michael: A hundred percent. Yeah. So, really, especially early on, being focused on creating real connections and having conversations and engaging your fans is a powerful way to, like, sort of like fertilizer on the roots so that it can blossom and grow.

Sweet. Danny, yeah, it's been fun connecting. And I definitely, just the conversation we're having, I'm like, this guy—like, we clearly live in very similar worlds.

Danny: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: So it's refreshing to have a conversation like this with someone that is, you know, at this level of expertise around the artistry, with the music, with the connection, with also the future thinking as well. I think many people, when they hear the word NFT, just instantly put their guard up—which I get, understandable.

But also, you know, it's great to have an open conversation or idea about in what ways those things can actually be valuable and used for artists. So thank you for being on the podcast today. This was fun.

Danny: Yeah, thank you. It was awesome. I hope we dropped some good knowledge there for people, and hopefully people can put some of this into action items. I think a lot of this is just, for me, observing people that have been successful and just learning myself because I'm so intrigued by it. Hopefully people can put this into action items and see some results from it.

Michael: Absolutely. And I'm sure they will. And, you know, there is some sort of value in—coming back to the analogy of fertilizing the soil—the mindset and the understanding of what to focus on.

I know for me, I'm so grateful for podcasts and conversations like this with people like the founders of OpenAI and Claude, and just seeing how they think and have conversations. That osmosis of learning from it can save so much time and energy, and help alleviate a lot of unnecessary suffering, mistakes, and wasted time. So, super appreciated.

For anyone listening right now who is interested in learning more about SongTools, could you share a little bit more about where they can get started, and the best way for them to kick things off with the tool?

Danny: Yeah. It's a fully open tool. It's free to create an account—just go to songtools.com and create an account. We also have some free tools on the site as well that you can use, like a landing page builder for your track, a blogging tool for SEO, and even an ad builder. They're completely free and unlimited, and a lot of people use them.

And then obviously, there are our marketing campaigns that you can work on as well. We also do one-on-one marketing consultations with anyone. So if anyone wants to reach out, it's completely free to jump on a call. We’ll learn about what you're doing as an artist and what your goals are, and we can help direct you into how to use our tools or just general work to get to where your goals are.

You can just reach out to me—my email is Danny@songtools.io (not .com). Those are the two easiest ways to get started.

Michael: Alright, awesome. I'll put the links in the show notes for easy access. And Danny, thank you again for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Danny: Thank you so much, Michael. It was an awesome conversation.

Michael: Yeah.

Danny: Let’s go.