All right at embracestormcom. So today we have on e smitty. He’s a player of all kinds of instruments and he has sound live records. And uh, e smitty, thanks for coming on today, man oh, thank you so much for having me, man uh dude, I don’t even want to start off where we were talking, because the conversation probably won’t ever end so so I’m gonna try to avoid that at first.
So what I want to do is start from the beginning. And okay, you play all these instruments, you run a record company. What was your first encounter with music and when did you discover that’s your outlet for kind of creativity? When did you figure that out?
0:01:04 – Speaker 1
Well, I’ve always been really musical as a kid and I sang in my chorus. I sang in a choir, I was doing solo, I don’t know performances in front of my entire school. By the time I was in, like you know, second or third grade. So I always had a great voice, I could sing and I was just really into music. And back then in the 80s it was like Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson and Kenny Loggins, and all this great music and I got to experience that era and just that era right there.
It moved rapidly into the early 90s and then that was when I really, really, really got into hip hop, and when I say I really got into it, I mean it became like my life.
0:01:51 – Speaker 2
I hear you.
0:01:52 – Speaker 1
Listening to hot 97 every night and just just hearing. Look, I had a dual cassette deck and back then we would take the blank tape and we record the radio. You know Exactly, I’m with you, dude. And then, um, I had, uh, these little advertisements for, uh, you know, 10 cds for one cent, or something like that, columbia bmg and columbia house and stuff, exactly. Yep, exactly, I started just taking my um allowance and the money I was making, uh, being a caddy and stuff like that I would just dump it into.
I had cases and cases. I had maybe, I don’t know 1.800 CDs in my collection.
0:02:35 – Speaker 2
I’m with you, dude. I was almost there myself at one point.
0:02:38 – Speaker 1
Man, so became an expert on, like you know, hip hop and R and B and even rock at the time, Cause I was, I was really into like alternative uh, rock and roll, uh, stone temple pilots, you know yeah, like Nirvana and sound garden and all that stuff, yeah. Yeah, stuff like that yeah.
0:02:56 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:02:56 – Speaker 1
Just a huge variety. I just loved great music and um you know when by the time I think I was uh, to that extent I met my buddy Radar Ellis, who’s a professor at Berkeley in Boston, and basically he introduced me to MCing and we just started writing rhymes and then recording them.
0:03:20 – Speaker 2
That’s cool.
0:03:21 – Speaker 1
Yeah, it was crazy From there. I wanted to be a DJ. What year was that?
0:03:24 – Speaker 2
What year was that? It was like ninth grade, ninth grade, no kidding, no kidding.
0:03:26 – Speaker 1
That’s cool. Yeah, it was crazy From there.
0:03:27 – Speaker 2
I wanted to be a DJ. What year was that? What year was that? That was like ninth grade, ninth grade, no kidding, no kidding, that’s cool.
0:03:30 – Speaker 1
I started radio broadcast believe it or not in seventh grade at my school’s radio station, that’s cool. We had, like you know, really old school setup, but it was broadcasting.
0:03:41 – Speaker 2
Like a legit, no kidding broadcasting, like a legit fm that no kidding that’s.
0:03:45 – Speaker 1
That’s crazy but they had. You know, we had turntables and eight track players. So that’s awesome a lot of like vintage 70s music and stuff of that nature I brought the first ever, uh, compact disc player into the, the station that’s funny so that’s where I got that knack.
And, uh, because what I do in music I’m known as a you know for my production and for my engineering, my sound engineering mixing mastering abilities and and the fact that I have um you know, I use an all analog setup that’s awesome I still like turning knobs and I I like circuitry and know the depth that analog gives you music, and you know I’m fond of some of the digital solutions but I really, really enjoy making music that I can kind of handle with my hands, you know what?
0:04:36 – Speaker 2
I mean, I hear you, I get you.
0:04:38 – Speaker 1
But yeah, that was like the beginning. I ended up, I think let’s see 2000. I was at East Carolina University and I spent probably like the next two and a half years skipping class and I was I started.
Were you doing like your own music stuff, then yeah, I started my first production company out of my dorm room. I started with like a little Sony Vialial computer and a yamaha djx keyboard and then, next thing, you know, um, by 2003 to 2005, I was, uh, traveling across the states and selling tens of thousands of cds out of the trunk of my car.
0:05:17 – Speaker 2
So dude no kidding it’s that’s sick that you were doing that yeah, it was so. So what was it like getting the cds and stuff to like? Well, how was like?
0:05:28 – Speaker 1
because that you that was like in the in the early 2000s, right, yeah, so what I had is I had a series of of pcs with, uh, multiple um cd-rom burners, burners so you were just putting blank disc in and burning down all the laptop.
0:05:44 – Speaker 2
Dude you are you? Are a sick hustler man like that. That is some sick stuff that you were doing.
0:05:50 – Speaker 1
Man, that’s like no joke, you weren’t messing around well, also, um, at that time I was actually able to print like color labels and then put them on the discs and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can remember those and I would order the um, the uh. I would order the glass or the yeah, the jewel cases, right yeah jewel cases.
Yeah, that’s what yeah yeah, I’d order them in the thousands. Uh, because they were really cheap back then and even the cds were ridiculously cheap. It cost me maybe a dollar 25 to make a c and then I would easily sell it for 10 bucks.
0:06:24 – Speaker 2
I hear you dude, yeah, no.
0:06:27 – Speaker 1
And I would take the, I’d order the shrink wrap or whatever, and it would just be a slide, the, the, the CD with the cover and and the jewel case, slide it into the cellophane and then unseal it and reseal it and that, that was it it man fast process. So I mean, I could get in about an hour if I’d had already burned um like 100 discs, I could probably package about 100 an hour that’s moving man, that is crazy, but yeah, that’s so.
0:06:59 – Speaker 2
You had just have a trunk full of cds then, huh, selling them. Yeah, that’s crazy.
0:07:03 – Speaker 1
I gave a lot of them away as well, yeah I estimate over like the period of that period of time, over like a three-year period of time? I know I went through at least 150 000 cds, you know man, that is crazy, yeah so wait, were you playing?
0:07:20 – Speaker 2
live shows and stuff too.
0:07:22 – Speaker 1
Yeah, I was, I was touring um up and down the east coast and then I went out on the west coast um, and you know, sometimes packed venue, sometimes it was, you know, five people in the crowd yeah yeah, dj, and the sound engineer and that’s it.
0:07:38 – Speaker 2
You know what I mean?
0:07:39 – Speaker 1
yeah, yeah that because I didn’t, I’m unable to pay the sound engineer because I didn’t make any money that night no, I hear you, and promoting was harder back then.
0:07:49 – Speaker 2
I mean, you know that that there is kind of the internet, but it’s not what it is. Right now we have myspace, you know? Oh, that’s true, that’s true, yeah, yeah, I had uh 65,000 friends on myspace, so that helped a little bit.
0:08:02 – Speaker 1
Yeah, um, and I tried to book my shows in advance and then, uh, do invites for the people who are closest by. So every now and then I’d get a few MySpace fans they would come to, they’d turn out to shows and whatnot. But I mean it was really. It was like before I’d land in a city I’d have maybe I don’t know, I can’t remember the number maybe a thousand or two thousand flyers, their cards printed, and I’d already have my street teams out there, basically, you know, getting awareness and inviting people out to the performance and whatnot. So I mean, it’s a system with it and at the time I had a pretty good booking agent. He was pretty awesome. Um, the one thing I could say is I did make good money on um, like college and community college performances, because you know they always have budgets with their um yeah, I know totally their student, uh, recreation social, whatever society I don’t.
I don’t know what it’s called anymore, but it’s, I think it’s like student, not student affairs.
0:09:09 – Speaker 2
Might not be totally correct, but it’s like something like that student rec.
0:09:13 – Speaker 1
I don’t know yeah, yeah I can’t remember.
But um, yeah, that’s like very early and um, by the time I got to like 2006, I I had a little bit of um money that I’ve made and I put it into actual building, building my first studio and you know, getting some good equipment, getting some nice mic pre’s and microphones, analog gear. You know eventually that that spawned into you know much major, much more major, robust setup with a, you know, a baby Trident console and you know lots of cool stuff, yeah, yeah. So that’s yeah, um and uh. It goes from there to you know, around 2005, 2006, I started um. I was working with some talent agency in in atlanta and they were basically taking all my tracks and then just selling them to these big time producers.
So I started hearing my stuff on the radio shortly afterwards and, dude, I would have been like what the well, you know people were calling me and they’re like yo man, you, you know they playing your stuff on the on the air and I’m like you know that’s my, my track, but that’s that’s not my artist and like, so I kind of um, I, I uh found out that basically I, I got been got my first lesson, yeah, the first lesson right there, and that’s really what?
what made me want to, you know, pursue a completely independent music career and then do my own label and then move from doing my own label to creating the new blueprint for an entirely new music industry that would keep yeah, tech artists and yeah, and move the intermediaries, do that you know it’s really funny.
0:11:00 – Speaker 2
No, just knowing this little tidbit of your, your history right now, how you know hearing your tracks being played, I I told I read this. It’s a side note. I read this book a few years ago called I want to say it’s called the sound machine. I could be a little bit wrong in the title, but it was a. It’s a book written about the guys that live in Sweden or Switzerland and they’re like the top three or four guys, the biggest producers that write the biggest number one hit songs, and how they just turn out song after song after song and they pitch them to like Britney Spears, christina Aguilera, like hey, we got a song for you. And so when I started learning about the music industry that way, you know now I, I, I 100, get what you’re saying about. Like you thought it was for this one person and they took it and they’re like no, no, let’s give it to this person. You know, but like you’re, you’re so far removed from out of the loop, it’s out of your control. You know what I mean.
0:12:03 – Speaker 1
Completely, completely and like no, and they had, um, and they still do this. Um, I can’t say names or anything, but they’re still companies and platforms and basically they onboard a ton of independent artists and the only reason to onboard them is to steal their, their ideas and take their, take their, their stuff. It’s really a conversion of intellectual property, is what I would call it, but, um, it’s really hard to prove, it’s hard you’re not talking about one of the biggest streaming platforms, are you?
I’m talking yeah, of course, man, but you know there’s, there’s, it’s not just the platforms, you know these.
0:12:44 – Speaker 2
Oh, like the distribution companies and stuff.
0:12:47 – Speaker 1
Oh, everybody, everybody, everybody. You know, like I said, I can’t say names. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re getting my mind going, though I’m like oh man. They’re all in cahoots with each other.
0:12:57 – Speaker 2
That makes sense.
0:12:59 – Speaker 1
You have to understand. They have these guys called musical programmers and what they’ll do is if they hear an idea or they hear something they like. They’ll just go and they’ll recreate it. You know, play it how they want to add the robust um instruments and you know, take an idea, steal the. Basically take the whole idea, steal it and re rebuild it retool it, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what a musical programmer does.
0:13:26 – Speaker 2
They program the music oh, that’s a little bit different from arranging yes, so, like as a producer, I produce everything from scratch.
0:13:36 – Speaker 1
You know, I’ve got all my own sounds and then I have the instruments that I like to play or incorporate in um, but I’m producing it, so that makes me the. You know, every sound I’m is a contribution, so I’m the contributor to every sound in the production.
If I were, to take this and give it to the wrong person, you know they might say, yeah, that that I can do something with it. You know, maybe somebody else has a pipeline or a connection to you. Know, like I said, it’s it’s a very exclusive club of people in the music industry, um, and you’re not invited yeah basically yeah, no I, I hear you, I, yeah, that’s.
0:14:20 – Speaker 2
Uh, yeah, my mind’s going now because now I’m like, wow, that’s actually really interesting and terrible all at the same time.
0:14:27 – Speaker 1
Uh, that’s a storm right there. One of the storms I had weather uh was the first one was, you know, basically dropping out of school and becoming what? Nobody supported it. Obviously, you know even right parents.
0:14:42 – Speaker 2
They looked at me like I was a total idiot and right you’re going back, especially in, especially those days. It’s like that.
0:14:49 – Speaker 1
Especially then college was like the like golden ticket thing or whatever you know it was, it isn’t now no, no, not at all, not at all no it’s sad what the way things are right now, but I think it’s it’s a good thing, because it what we’re going to open the doors up for is actual real education where you actually taught things like finance and you’re taught you know useful skills that you can actually use in life, because you know a lot of a lot of college curriculum nowadays is just programming for political warfare.
And just basically a scam to take your money. You go to school and you come out and you’re $200,000 in debt Exactly. Holy crap. I haven’t even bought a house yet. I can’t barely, you know, pay for my apartment and keep gas in my car and then my insurance is 300 bucks a month. I mean, you have to understand. This is like it’s the end of this system and uh yeah, no, do you?
0:15:53 – Speaker 2
do you know? Are you familiar with frank zappa much at all? No, I never heard of him. Oh, oh, my goodness. Okay. So frank zappa was this like rock musician through the 60s, 70s, 80s. He passed away from cancer in the 90s. But one thing he said was he was like oh, you want a college education, get a, get a library card. He was like good, he’s like the library is full of all the information you need. He’s like just go get a library card, start reading all the books you need to read.
0:16:19 – Speaker 1
He’s like don’t, don’t go to college and he was saying that, like the 60s and 70s, well, yeah, because they don’t teach to college, and he was saying that like the sixties and seventies. Well, yeah, because they don’t teach you anything in college anymore, and just you know it’s gotten so far gone. But but you know, I think before we had started the conversation I expressed to you that that you know things are changing.
0:16:40 – Speaker 2
So everything right now is burning down.
0:16:44 – Speaker 1
This is the changing of the guard, the systematic change of the guard. I think we’re coming into something really amazing. You know I’m very optimistic and very excited and I’m on the optimistic side of things.
Like I know, there’s a lot of people who look at things as bad, but I look at it and you know I’m connected too. Like you know, I have a lot of friends and really powerful friends who are really high up as bad, but I look at it and I’m connected too. I have a lot of friends, really powerful friends, who are really high up in sectors, in the government and in the military. I can tell you things that most people don’t know and, at the same time, I’ve also been knowing these things and watching these things kind of unfold over like the last 23 years since 9-11, because 9-11 is my birthday oh no kidding yeah wow, no kidding waking up to that phone call was was crazy.
But yeah, I think that, um, you know that that opened my eyes to. You know there’s something greater going on and I I think that if you believe in God or if you believe in the universe which I do, I’m a firm believer in that there’s a higher power. But I feel like, over the last well, I want to say, since JFK was assassinated, we’ve been in a spiritual um, and which is much different than the physical war, but in it’s a war over your mind, a war over your body, a war over um control and whether you comply or whether you, um, you say, hey, you know, I’m going to provide a solution and help change humanity, you know?
So, that’s where we’re at now and I think we’re getting towards the end of this whole thing, which I’m really optimistic that this will all be done within a few months. I think it’ll be over with and we’ll be moving into things very rapidly. So that’s why I said you know, I see all these major blockchains right now and we’re moving aside into blockchain, but I’m just going to say this one Everything will be tokenized, including music is to bring transparency and change into what can be a pretty unfair and what has been a very unfair world for the people, because it’s only benefited a handful of powerful people who have controlled everything in the world for so long, and I think their time is up and now it’s time for new leaders to emerge and just people like you and I, everyday people. I represent music and the record industry and I also represent the creators, the artists, the producers, you know, the song writers, the talent, the world-class talent, because you know it’s time for us to shine.
It’s time for them to shine because for so long, you know, we’ve been kind of just fed this, this nonsense, and I think now you know we can have an actual music industry that’s not um, controlled by one person and it’s not. You’re not force fed. You know certain music all the time. You can have the choice to choose and also there’s a good selection to choose from. So we don’t have to keep mainstreaming music that’s not beneficial for humanity. You know, we can start mainstreaming the music that actually uplifts us and music in the right frequencies, in the 432 hertz, in the 888 hertz, you know, in the frequencies of abundance and healing and so forth, because music does heal and that’s absolutely man everything in this world is is built on a frequency, so there’s a frequency for everything and for every color, I agree.
The frequency. And for every pitch, like every key, every note, is a frequency, there’s a frequency attached to it and when you figure that out, that’s how you figure out music and the perfection of music, and and how to do it all right, I want to go down this rabbit trail then, because it’s really it’s, it’s.
0:20:57 – Speaker 2
I love that you’re saying all this because I I did like a I wouldn’t like say a deep diver study, but I researched a little bit like the top, like you know 100 billboard songs from like I either went from like the 30s or 40s, like up to you know kind of current day, and one of the things that is like that I noticed the most was like all the top songs going from major scale to minor scale and I was like what do you think that does to like society when, like, instead of all these happy songs being pumped through radios all over the place, now it’s all these minor key songs pumped through? You know what I mean? I was like that’s gotta affect society, right?
0:21:46 – Speaker 1
yeah, well, what? What it was? Is music was, um, supposed to be, uh, created and played in 432 hertz, and what they did is they removed it and they moved it all the way up, uh, they moved it out out of that scale and stopped playing that type of music, and then they put it into frequencies that basically they give off negative vibes and at the same time they also they cast spells on people who they normally wouldn’t be able to through the music.
I hear you, I hear such a society of people who, who don’t really want to change um, because you know the narcissist um when their approach with change, they’re either too scared of change or they like to, you know, turn a finger around and point and blame everyone else. So when you can take a whole society of people and I don’t want to say I don’t even know, is narcissize a word? Because if it is, maybe you know, if you wanted to narcissize society and that’s just a made up word, probably.
But if you wanted to make everybody a narcissist, what would you do? Well, you would pump them and pump their minds through subconscious, subliminal messages, using the right frequencies, okay, and get people so dumbed down and so numb to the point where, uh, they won’t change, they don’t want to change. And then, at that point, you can implement your, you know your system.
0:23:20 – Speaker 2
Right, so I think um right.
0:23:22 – Speaker 1
The system has been implemented a long time ago. It’s a dying system now because, you know, people have finally woken up and they said you know, this is not right. This is you know. And then, of course, you’re seeing the destruction of humanity. You’re seeing the governments go down and you’re seeing the economies implode and the currencies devalue. The economies implode and the currencies devalue, and so I mean you’re seeing so much of this and that’s why I said I know we’re near the end of this kind of era, and I said the new era. And that’s why you had blockchain technology emerging and you have other things that are emerging that are going to be much more robust and much more transparent and they’re going to nurture in an era of thoughtfulness, thinking, um, you know, embrace love, uh, joy, uh, happiness, unity, community, you know, and break down all these barriers of negativity that we’ve been surrounded with.
0:24:20 – Speaker 2
Know for the longest um, but blockchain technology, nfts, 100 music videos, all that stuff it will and it is going to be on. You know, blockchain technology. I’m a firm believer in that like, even though we had all these mishaps and flops and you know kind of scams or whatever with nfts and this that it’s all just like birthing pains of of what’s coming. You know what I mean. Like, but I I 100 believe like and we were saying this before like in the future, which could be very soon, but like, blockchain technology is just going to run everything because it’s such a crazy technology. It’s just revolutionized everything.
0:25:08 – Speaker 1
I’ll put it to you like this For people who don’t understand what blockchain is, let’s take a bank account number or a routing number. Traditionally, I think the routing number, the bank account number, is like 9 to 13 digits or something like that.
And the routing number is like 9 digits, or 7 to 9 digits, something like that, and the numbers, like you know, nine digits or seven to nine digits, but they’re all numbers. And so how can you hack that? Well, you put it into a AI automated computer and you run the numbers until they match up and basically the little AI bot will tell you it’ll say well, you know, it’ll take two weeks to crack this code, and they’ll crack it in two weeks while they run the software. Or you put a blockchain code which is like 25 characters or longer, and it’s, you know, letters, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, zeros and you put that into an AI like hacking program, program or whatever, and it’ll say well, we can hack this program in 300 years so exactly yeah that’s.
That’s why the, the blockchain technology is so robust and, let’s say, every 10 years, you you know you change your codes, um, or. Or you or you know you change the blockchain code, um, or assign it a different, you know different code. Basically, it’s unhackable because the you know the time length that it would take to hack it. It’s just not able to do it. So I mean, that’s what I think. I think people need to understand that blockchain is a secure system of codes that actually you know.
If you look at Bitcoin, bit stands for the data and coin is the finance, so also linking data and finance, and then you’re taking ownership of your data and then being having the ability to you get to say, okay, well, this is going to be the value of my data, of, of of what I own, and you know you can place your own value on that, because an nft is a non-fungible token, so it’s a token itself, you know yeah, yeah and the token represents the data, and then it also represents the value yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I well, like I said, that we’re, we’re going to be, we’re in some interesting days for sure.
0:27:25 – Speaker 2
So, all right. So, like you were, I’m trying to, I’m trying to circle back around to uh, to, to, to, like 2005, 2006. So then when, when did you start the record? It sounds like maybe around that time you started your own record like company label.
0:27:41 – Speaker 1
Then, right, Unofficially, I had been running my company called smitty productions since uh 2001. Okay, and that lasted uh up until about 2012, and about 2012 uh 2013, I established sound alive records and sound alive records.
We signed a um distribution deal with orchard sony um in 2015, so celebrating about nine years with them. Now that’s cool and um, you know what? What happened is, in a nutshell, just just real briefly, I went from the you know, you want to call the hustle or whatever you know selling cds out of my trunk. Yeah, yeah, yeah To platforms, and we started with SoundClick and I think I had like 50,000 friends on SoundClick and then I moved it to MySpace. I had 65,000 friends on MySpace and then I moved it to Twitter. So now my Twitter I’m at I think, 171,000 followers on my account, and then my record label has 80,000 followers.
And then the new blockchain platform that I’ve built for the music industry DistroMint. We’ve got about 4,000 followers right now. But this is a fairly new company. We’re about a year and a half old and we are in probably like phase two or phase three of the revamp of the platform. Platform’s already been built, built on aws. It was originally built on the bsv blockchain, which is the bitcoin satoshi vision. However, um, you know, I’m dealing with weathering a storm right now. Uh, in terms of that whole situation. So hopefully within the next week or two, I shall be announcing our move to an alternate blockchain more than likely.
There you go gonna be, uh, xlm, stellar or possibly, um, I don’t know.
Uh, we’re looking at, we looked into Avalanche and we also looked into, you know, aptos Solana, and then there’s another blockchain right now called Evernote, who has actual data storage on the blockchain.
So, which makes a lot of sense, because and I know I’m speaking foreign language, but if you’re a developer or a builder or you know full stack developer or DevOps, you’ll understand the cost of building on something like AWS, amazon Web Services, and you have various instances of programs and things running and being deployed all at once. It can be really really expensive, and I will tell you, in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per month or per year, to operate a platform that’s built on AWS. So one of the things that I’m trying to do with my platform, distromint, is move it to either Microsoft Azure, where I’ve got a bunch of credits just sitting there, or I’m going to put it on another blockchain, where the data storage is 10 times to 100 times cheaper and it’s going directly on the blockchain. Now there’s only two that I know right now that store data. One is the Siri Siri Bellum network or whatever.
I think they have 22 terabytes, but this Evernote network I’m hearing I hear they have 73 terabytes of storage space on their blockchain, which is unheard of for a blockchain, because this is kind of fairly new anyways, most of these blockchains are like built halfway on the blockchain, halfway in AWS. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah you know what I mean.
0:31:25 – Speaker 2
What about?
0:31:30 – Speaker 1
Are you talking about Filecoin?
0:31:32 – Speaker 2
No IPFS.
0:31:34 – Speaker 1
IPFS.
0:31:35 – Speaker 2
Yeah, interplanetary File System. We’re talking inside baseball, but whoever is listening might be getting something out of this. So IPFS, it’s basically a decentralized I don’t want to call it cloud storage, but people that do NFTs or like want to store data on almost any blockchain. You upload this to, you upload your files to IPFS and then the blockchain can retrieve the data from IPFS. So you’re not hosting that and it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s all decentralized.
People run nodes. So what you could do is you could run your own full IPFS node, put all of your files that you’re going to host or you’re going to point to in your blockchain. You could put it on your own IPFS server, but then it’ll distribute that stuff out to all the other nodes, so all the other nodes will start carrying your stuff too. So if your server goes down and if you have an app that’s using, you know, all the information off your server, it’ll still be able to retrieve all this stuff that’s been distributed through IPFS anyways. That sounds really interesting. So that that’s that would be my way of doing it, because you know, although 72 terabytes is unheard of, multiply that by thousands of people uploading stuff like 72 terabytes goes away real quick, you know so yeah, you know what I’m saying.
Like 72 terabytes, that’s only 72 000. You know gig like uh, gigs, gigs. You know what I mean.
0:33:13 – Speaker 1
So you know, it know, if you’re talking thousands of people uploading stuff, that that number doesn’t look, you know, significant at all at that point, you know well, I would say that probably content wise you’re looking at the average user is probably gonna gonna probably upload somewhere between, I would say, one gig to two gigabytes of of data, because, and you know, what we we have is a on my platform we have like a limitation. I think it’s 50 megabytes is the limitation per file.
Per file, yeah, yeah, if it’s a if it’s a, an MP4 or wave or a um mp3, you know. And then, of course, you can upload a gif or a jpeg file as well, because and that’s the thing I’m I’m skipping all the the main points I’ve created this uh platform for specifically to address and to bring forth the change and that we need in the music industry Right now. The biggest problem that we have is we have various platforms that stream artists’ music and do not compensate them. In fact, I would say they go as far as accepting your money for a subscription and let’s say that your music starts to actually do well and stream, you start earning some residuals. Well, they’re going to come back and they’re going to pull your music and they’re going to flag it and they’re going to say, well, hey, you know, we detected that you’re using AI bots to artificially blow up your music and at that point they pull your music.
Now the crazy thing is, these major artists out here, they um, artificially, you know, blow up their music all the time. I mean, look, look, who was it? Taylor swift? Uh, she had billions of views removed from youtube because they were artificial, they were not real, um, but they never get their music pulled. And you know, 99 times out of 10 times, these major artists out here, they’re doing exactly what an independent artist does, which is trying to get their numbers up, but they have deeper pockets and they’re they’re doing a whole lot more of the fudging, you know, fudging the numbers.
And you know that’s, that’s what it is nowadays, because nobody really even listens to the music because of the quality of it. They listen to it because it’s popular and um. So fudging numbers is is nothing new, you know, especially with the shit quality music.
0:35:47 – Speaker 2
Excuse my language that’s coming out now. You know, it’s why I’m coming from an analog guy.
0:35:52 – Speaker 1
I believe it it’s horrible, and it’s not just the quality of the sound, I mean, everything sounds the same. They totally removed um, the, the mid frequency range, to the point where you know you all you have is is you have highs and lows, that’s it well, it’s because everyone’s either listening through earbuds or their their portable mp3 speaker oh, it sounds, horrible, it sounds so bad.
Um, and the crazy thing is you should never touch uh 400 to 4000 kilohertz. You should never, ever touch that that range in there, 400 to 4000. That’s where all your juice is and if anything you can boost some of that good stuff in there and you know, if you have some blemishes in there you can polish them out. But at the end of the day you know you don’t want to suck the whole thing down like a V.
And you know that’s what they do in a lot of these radio mixes and a lot of these sounds that you hear now. You don’t hear the robustness of the instruments and you don’t hear the quality of the actual instrument and the qualities that instruments carry, because that’s the whole purpose of instruments, and having different instruments is because they each have a different tone, texture, depth, quality, character, and that’s what makes music so beautiful is understanding what goes where.
0:37:11 – Speaker 2
And you know, yeah, I need to fill in here what goes where.
0:37:15 – Speaker 1
And you know, yeah, I need something to fill in here, so I’m gonna add a string or I’m gonna play some guitar, or you know, I like this organ here, or maybe a whirlitzer or maybe uh, uh, you know whatever, there’s like a million ways to do this. But and I’m getting to the sidetrack, but uh, I lost my thought there for a second brother brother.
0:37:33 – Speaker 2
No, no problem man, but you’re talking about all the music that’s been coming out, how they took out the mid-range and took all the you know the sweet spot out of everything. They took the feeling out of music. Yeah yeah.
0:37:47 – Speaker 1
And music is supposed to make you feel, and my entire life has gotten me through every storm that I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been through so many storms.
0:37:56 – Speaker 2
I’m right there with you.
0:37:59 – Speaker 1
I can’t even tell you I try not to even tell people too much about my history in music, because I have a pretty sad history in terms of I’ve been done wrong quite a bit of times in the industry and I’ve gone through things like having my master stolen, my studio robbed, you know, having producing platinum records and never seeing my name in the credits and never seeing a plaque in the mail.
I mean it’s been crazy you know, and I’ve gone to war with some of these companies before and I’ve beat them in court. But you know, and I’ve I’ve gone to war with some of these companies before and I’ve beat them in court. But, um, you know, that’s not really what I like to do and I don’t want to hear that.
I hear you, I want to um, I want to build a solution, and that’s what I’m doing now, or what I’ve been doing is building on blockchain and then, at the same time, I’ve been onboarding new artists to sound alive records. Now people are wondering like what? What is Sound Alive Records? Sound Alive Records is an all-in-one independent record label music distributor, and then we also provide services, various services that an artist could need. Let’s look at it like a Cadillac that has 100 spokes on its rim and each spoke represents a part of the artist music business career.
0:39:14 – Speaker 2
So you have management.
0:39:16 – Speaker 1
You have distribution. You have, um, you know, mixing and mastering. You have marketing production um, uh, publicity, um, advertising. You know all that stuff and and I’m I’ve been doing this for so long and doing it independently and being successful at it as well that now I know exactly what to do when I hear a great artist and and they need help and they need somebody to give them the expertise or even as far as, uh, you know, just be a friend or a mentor or consultant for them.
That’s what I do. And and then sound alive records. Uh, we’re various. Um, we were a mainly hip-hop, r&b, um reggae type of label, but we’ve actually expanded out and now we take all genres. So we have there, you go, we’ve got, like you know, alternative rock, we’ve got southwest latin, we’ve got um jazz, we’ve got everybody that’s cool Heavy metal, you name it.
There you go and you know I’ve got a big old analog console and so I love using that on all these various types of music, because that’s what these consoles were meant to do. They were meant to actually bring out the music, because that’s why they give you these tools, these amazing tools that you can’t find in a plugin. I love the plugins but you know, I like to use them. Where you know something I can touch or I can’t touch with analog, I can use the digital for the solution. And if there’s something you know that I can’t do with the digital, you know my analog kind of provides that, that solution for it as well.
And I’m saying, like you know, not all music is meant to be full analog and not all music is meant to be fully digital.
0:41:02 – Speaker 2
It really just depends on like what’s needed for the at the time?
0:41:07 – Speaker 1
yeah, how, and you know a session can be like robust, and when I say robust, I mean you know a session can be like robust. And when I say robust, I mean you know tens of sounds and layers, yeah, yeah. And then some sessions have music that already has distortion built inside of it. So the instruments that they’re playing are, you know, purposely distorted from a guitar to a synthesizer, guitar to a synthesizer, you know. So you have to be very careful, um, because some instruments and some um, analog, uh, synthesizers, they already have their tone in it, so there’s no need to run it through.
0:41:45 – Speaker 2
you know, if it’s a solid yeah, yeah, I hear what you’re saying, it’s already got it.
0:41:49 – Speaker 1
It’s already got that tone, it’s got yeah no need to run it through too much stuff, even though I’m known to. I’ve been known to do that a little bit here and there, so I just have. I have a knack. My ear is still hearing things from you know. Death row records.
0:42:05 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:42:07 – Speaker 1
Exactly Exactly when I say that anybody who listened to you know the dog pound or Snoop or Tupac back then, like the.
0:42:16 – Speaker 2
Chronic and stuff.
0:42:18 – Speaker 1
And you listen to the DJ Quick. You listen to these sounds, man. You listen to the way music was created and put together. You know these guys are recording on some of the best quality equipment in the world and then their songs are being mixed on know, the sslg series or something, a neve console, like something really, really nice and you can hear how the engineers back then, um, they make the sounds kind of like, um, vibrate, I don’t.
I don’t know how to explain it. It’s, it’s, you can feel it. It’s like an experience when you listen to music that’s done right, when it’s done the right way.
0:42:58 – Speaker 2
I remember reading the BC boys book. I can’t remember what it’s called now, but I remember them saying, like they’re talking about oh yeah, you know that drum beat and Paul Revere. They’re like that was actually a tape of this drum beat we made a loop of and the um what the guy that passed away, the bc boy that passed away from cancer. They were like he took the tape and ran the tape. He like made this own loop and actually played the tape backwards. He’s like that’s actually a drum beat played backwards in a loop. I was like that is funny. Like you know, like just got dudes coming up with like ideas like that because you know, now you could install a plugin that just says I’ll reverse this. You know what I mean. But like they didn’t have that choice back then, like I thought that was awesome, like the ingenuity those guys had.
0:43:48 – Speaker 1
I was like that’s, that was amazing well, there’s a lot of tricks, uh, back then that they used, and you know if anyone’s familiar back in the day, you know it was a lot of um, everything was recorded to, to the, the master tape reel, basically, um, two inch tape is what they used, or they used uh in the 90s. Uh, adat an adat machine.
Yeah, yeah, um, so things were were very different. I mean, I was pretty much in the mid to late 90s. I was still on that kind of, uh, recording everything to tape. Even before we would record it, um, and burn, burn cds. We’d record it to the tape deck first and then we’d play it back and record that into the, into the pc and open up, cool, edit, chop everything up, you know, um, throw fades in there and then, um, burn it on a disc. So I mean, it’s crazy, man, and we’ve come a long way. I hear you.
0:44:47 – Speaker 2
I hear you so, like when you, if you, if you bring an artist on, do you record all their stuff, do you re-record their stuff or do you promote, like what they already have? If they already have like an album recorded, like, what do you do?
0:45:03 – Speaker 1
It’s a different process for different artists. Some artists come and their music is already like professional industry standard and at that point you know we can uh distribute it. And we distribute it out through orchard sony and it goes to 263 territories worldwide. Wow, it goes to hundreds of stores. Um, if the music is really good, you know we’ll pitch it to um touch tunes, kks, which you can find in waffle house and many clubs and bars. Um, where else does it go? You know we pitch it for television, film, commercial, things of that nature.
Yeah, um, and then, of course, we promote it on our our platforms and uh on Facebook. Uh, and it’s uh facebookcom slash sound alive records. We have I think 17,000, uh followers up there and we have uh 17,000 followers up there and we have 80,000 followers on Twitter. It’s twittercom or xcom. Slash at sound, s-o-u-n-d underscore alive, a-l-i-v-e underscore R-E-C soundaliverec.
Oh, yeah, yeah you can also find us, you know wwwsoundaliverecordscom. So I mean we, we, we share our platform with our artists and we promote them and at the same time, we also consult them. We help them. We help them with their engineering, if they need mastering or mixing, or if they need mastering or mixing or if they need full song production, then we go in there and produce the whole record for them.
Um, and then we also have other various services because, being in this industry for so long, you know we can run anything from a canada um fm radio, uh campaign to national uh FM radio campaign, to a college radio campaign, wow, um. So yeah, you know, being in this so long, you meet a lot of people and the ones that are serious, the ones who are actually valuable and helpful. You never lose touch with them because you’re always constantly working with them. So I’ve got colleagues of mine that I’ve been working with, you know, for various uh business and things that I need help with um for up to you know, 15, 20 years we’ve known each other. So it’s um, it’s, it’s really uh, it’s, it’s a journey, I’ll tell you so how many?
0:47:32 – Speaker 2
how many artists do you like, do you have? Do you only work with so many, or like, how like? I mean how many, if you don’t?
0:47:38 – Speaker 1
like saying or whatever.
0:47:39 – Speaker 2
How many do you do you work with?
0:47:41 – Speaker 1
I mean, we we’re constantly bringing new people on board all the time, but you know, some need smaller things, some need, uh, larger things. It really depends on what the artist wants and what they need um on boarded. Right now, I think we we have about 150 artists that are on board in terms of um we’re handling their distribution yeah, yeah minimum.
You know, wow, wow, um. Yeah, we want to onboard another hundred within the next 30 days and then we’re looking to onboard a thousand total between now and the end of the year, because when I launch my blockchain platform, I want to be able to migrate everybody.
0:48:19 – Speaker 2
I hear you Exactly.
0:48:21 – Speaker 1
The platform as well, so that they can take advantage of all the great things that we’ve built up and that we’re creating for them in terms of change.
0:48:30 – Speaker 2
I get that I get that.
0:48:48 – Speaker 1
I get that the storm is always brewing and there’s always somebody that looking to try to do some, something kind of evil to you. So you have to be you got to be on your P’s and Q’s and then just remember that you know how you treat people is is only a reflection of how you want to be treated. So you know treat people good.
Be, professional yeah, be helpful. Good, be professional, yeah, be helpful. You know, and if I can’t help somebody, I tell them I say hey, look, you know I, um, you know I regret to tell you that. You know there’s nothing I can really do to help you out here. Or if it’s a bad fit, you know, and at times there’ll be a bad fit, I’ve been doing this for so long, so sometimes you can tell ahead of times when somebody’s not willing to change and you know that’s where that little, uh, that little narcissism kicks in. You know, when you see people like that that don’t want to change, um, you know you can’t.
Kind of got to let them just go through it themselves yeah, yeah, no, you’re right one thing I’ll say is anytime I’ve had an artist right that either dropped the ball on us or they didn’t want to come on board because they thought the way they were doing things is better than the way that we showed them how to do it. We let them hang and let them and they just watch. And then, you know, a few weeks, sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes years, they come back and they say you know, man, I should have listened to you guys and I should have been working with you guys and you know I lost all this money, or you know I quit music or you know what I mean, so I mean I hear you, I hear you
it’s an experience thing and I think sound alive, we’re, we’re open to working with anybody, doesn’t matter what your uh music genre is, doesn’t matter your, your race, your ethnicity, your sex, nothing. It all really just varies on the ones who really want to make this a career or a business. Because that’s what I do music business and so I want to teach other people how to do music business, and to the point where it’s no longer a hustle or a struggle but it’s a um. It’s a successful business that you built and you’ve created your, your funnels and and you’ve created ways to um. You know be successful and get income, and then you know affect the world. You know either give by your beautiful message that you put out, or you know be successful and get income, and then you know affect the world. You know either give by your beautiful message that you put out, or you know um, by the expertise of what you do.
0:51:21 – Speaker 2
You know in the music business man, I, uh, I’m, I’m, I’m excited for you on like a ton of different levels, dude, Um.
I yeah no, I, no, I you’re, you’re wicked, inspirational and like you’re, you’re almost like you’re doing. Like all these things that I, I always wanted to do someday or had thoughts of, because, like I’m a musician myself, I’ve never been anywhere near anywhere near the level of success that you’ve been at at all, but like I understand what it is like to be a musician and all that I was in all kinds of heavy metal bands in the mid to late 90s and stuff and like so I, I, so I totally get it and, uh, musicians 100 need someone like you fighting for them because, you know, I’m not saying anything bad about record labels or whatever they all have their their place in history and whatnot, but they’re not necessarily looking out for too many people.
0:52:21 – Speaker 1
I’ll put it to you like this Every major record label all leads back to just one company. I’m not going to say what company it is, but it’s a company. Let’s say an oil company probably owns, you know, 90% of the major record labels, and then that oil company is. Is is owned and controlled by Lords of London. So I mean, get into the, the actual like, break down the the tree, the pyramid, it’s a pyramid.
0:53:01 – Speaker 2
Yeah, it starts out big, and then it leads to a point a perfect.
0:53:03 – Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, it’s, it’s, it’s needed, man, because I mean, no, it really is out here, unfortunately, because music is a $26 billion industry per year. There’s 8.2 trillion hours of music is listened to every year, so that’s 23 hours of music per week per human being on the planet. Wow.
0:53:32 – Speaker 2
That’s crazy.
0:53:34 – Speaker 1
And all that music has to be monetized fairly and securely, and that’s where I was going with. The other utility that I feel like blockchain provides is the ability to monitor that content. Print the transaction on the on the blockchain, and then administer a micro payment or a micro transaction to directly to the wallet of the of the owner exactly, or however many splits need to happen at, even at the transaction.
0:54:05 – Speaker 2
It all happens right there, like it just does it.
0:54:08 – Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That solves the problem. And then, absolutely, xyz can’t come in and say, well, you know you should have, you know, well, you have a billion streams here, but we’re only going to give you $45,000 because that’s what we feel we should pay you and we’re like what are the metrics of?
what are you using to measure the value of what I’ve done? And you know who this happened to. He was just talking about it. Snoop Dogg was talking about how he had a billion streams on Spotify and they cut him a check after paying everybody else off. They cut him a check for $45,000. And he said he was itching his head and he was like where’s the money?
0:54:52 – Speaker 2
Yeah, because that’s like chump change. I can’t even do the math in my head right now, but that’s like pennies. If pennies Listen, you know what I mean. That’s like a fraction of a penny.
0:55:04 – Speaker 1
Of somebody buying. The value of someone buying. Just your CD, tape or vinyl is worth $1,000. Real money. But it would take you 5 000 streams to get the same amount of value out of one, one purchase.
0:55:22 – Speaker 2
You’re saying yeah, yeah, I believe that I am most of these artists right, they’re not getting 500 streams right. Well, I mean, there’s so bad, there’s so much noise. How do you cut through it all?
0:55:36 – Speaker 1
It’s a very crowded, overcrowded marketplace, and it’s crowded because of this DIY era Do it yourself. Everybody thinks they’re a musician, everyone thinks they’re a rapper, everyone thinks they’re a producer. You know, and even it’s just, it’s turned it into total chaos, because now, like I said, it’s impossible to discern the ones that are actually really the world-class talent that we used to appreciate and listen to back in the day, because that’s what it was If you were world-class talent.
You could walk into a record label with your demo If you knew the right people sit down, they play your demo and they say, okay, here’s a record contract, here’s an advance for five hundred thousand dollars yeah, yeah here’s your new manager um, this is the times you’re going to the studio next week.
Uh, you need to be there, uh, 30 minutes early, xyz. And that that’s how it was back in the day. And you know, the crazy thing is, in the music industry, there’s this saying the game is to be sold, not told, and most of these people who’ve been in the industry for years, decades, they don’t tell you the truth. They carry on this lie that we’re still in in the 90s and you can walk into a label and get signed. It doesn’t work that way now. Now, yeah, everything is based off of numbers and all they want to know is how many monthly listeners do you have on spotify? How many spins do you have? Um, how many sales do you have on itunes? Are you charting, you know? Do you have on spotify? How many spins do you have? Um, how many sales do you have on itunes? Are you charting, you know? Do you have millions of views on youtube? Xyz, because they want to measure whether or not you’re monetizing or you’re monetizable right, exactly right.
That’s the value that they they measure. So if you got somebody whose music is average, but they figured out the system, how to monetize it and get a lot of people on board with it, that artist, who might not necessarily be the most talented, can go into the industry now and as pretty much a gimmick gimmick is what they are now.
0:57:54 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, I hear what you’re saying.
0:57:57 – Speaker 1
They get paid and they get their music on the airwaves, while the guys who are making the amazing music are sitting in their mom’s basement just twiddling their thumbs and trying to figure out what next hole in the wall they’re going to play at. You know what?
0:58:10 – Speaker 2
I mean, I hear you, no, I hear you, man, I hear you. Well, honestly, that’s where you come in, though man like that’s, that’s where you come in, though man, like all your experience, you can help those people like bridge that gap or be I don’t want to say the middleman, I can try, you know, no, but I mean like, like, you can show them the ropes of how to utilize.
You know, because I I come from the belief that, uh, although I do not execute this myself as a musician, I believe this can be done. Having done lots of digital marketing, I build websites, I’ve done crowdfunding, marketing and or, uh, you know not, not willing not to give up, I think a musician, this day and age, with the technology, can earn a living being a professional musician. Does that mean you’re going to be a millionaire? No, you know, but you could have all your bills paid and you could be living like. I think that can be accomplished, you know yeah, no, no and uh, it it’s um.
0:59:21 – Speaker 1
All the tools are here to make it happen. I think the number one thing that artists and bands need to understand is identity. Who are you? What do you stand for? Do you eat french fries? Do you dip your beer? Do you dip your hot dog in your beer at the ballpark. Okay, what type of person are you? And I think you can establish that. That’s how you can establish fans because that’s what fans want. This is the feed me, feed me, feed me, nonstop technology era.
So everybody’s on TikTok or they’re on Instagram. They’re on X or on. Facebook Feed me, feed me, feed me, nonstop technology era. So everybody’s on TikTok or they’re on Instagram, they’re on X or on Facebook, they’re on Discord, they’re on Telegram. It’s so robust and I use that word all the time robust because it kind of explains and people’s minds. All they do is look at their little device all day and swipe.
So you have to know your identity, you have to create your, your identity and your personality and get, get people to trust you, because when they trust you then they’ll buy your music, then they’ll support you totally yeah, absolutely, that’s.
1:00:36 – Speaker 2
That’s really that, that honestly, that’s really that, that honestly, that right there, that’s the roadmap for the professional musician. Like, if you do execute, just say even though I’m we’re really oversimplifying this, but that’s, that’s honestly, that’s your, your gate roadmap to success, right there.
1:00:53 – Speaker 1
So um, moving on, the DistroMint LLC is like I said, it’s built. We’re going through a few things. We’re weathering a storm right now, unfortunately Just going through a bout with the ex-partner slash developers that helped me put this together and so hopefully, like I said, that’ll be resolved in a week or two, and then, because it’s been going on since last October, oh man.
Yeah, I have a real long story in my journey in blockchain and you know it has to deal with Satoshi and there’s a whole bunch of crap that I’m tied up in or that I’ve witnessed being in blockchain. And I’ll say this the reason why I know that it’s coming so quickly is because there is so much fighting, infighting on every blockchain and there’s so much fighting amongst blockchain and this is like blood sport.
This is the most competitive technology that I’ve seen ever that I’ve seen ever, and so, and you know, they’re fighting for dominance, relevance, and you know who’s going to be utilized first. So, like I said, I think it’ll be a handful, like a handful, it’ll be a bunch of these blockchains that are going to be really, really big.
1:02:17 – Speaker 2
So it’s not just going to be one, you know? Yeah, I know there’s definitely not going to be. I mean, there will be one that rises to the top. That’s like a Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is its own thing, right, but like all the other coins are more like each other. So like there’s definitely going to be something and they’re better. Yeah.
1:02:46 – Speaker 1
I don’t think it’s going to be ethereum. I think ethereum has problems with the governance and that could go sideways. Ethereum is to me, um, it’s only purposes just to store a store of value, like bitcoin. It’s. The network is slow, um, and you have lots of corruption in between, and yeah, like I said, the governance it’s not, it’s not fully.
The sec has has done things that that they shouldn’t have done. They’ve done favors for ethereum, and, and, while other tokens who are legitimate are being, you know, lambasted and put through the ringer. So, and and I’ll say this uh, you, when we talk about a blockchain, a blockchain is only as good as its speed of transaction and its ability to transact and so forth. So the fastest, and we’re talking about these new blockchains are talking about, you know, 50,000 TPS and 100,000 TPS, and you know, if you look at MasterCard, mastercard only does 500 transactions per second. Exactly. Did you know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I mean.
1:03:47 – Speaker 2
So, I’ve seen. I’ve seen blockchain like blockchain technology will do like when, when it comes to like trading, you can do like three or four like simultaneous transactions all within one like movement. So like like when you could like be like I’m gonna borrow yeah, you could be like I’m gonna borrow all these tokens from this thing, sell them over here and, like you know, not have the money, but pay for it after the transaction.
1:04:14 – Speaker 1
You could do all that in one one trade well, you can set up an ai bot that automates that trade for you exactly exactly? You know, why am I saying this, when I’m not even doing this myself? I’m? Maybe I’m an idiot, or maybe I haven’t taken the time to actually learn this stuff, but I would love to. That’s something. That’s a whole nother conversation, I think, um, I think, after we we uh finalize this convo, I think we should definitely schedule another time just to talk about blockchain.
Absolutely, man, absolutely. It’s very interesting. It seems to me, like you, you’re very knowledgeable yourself and, um you know, being a computer programmer yeah, um yeah, there’s. There’s lots of brains here and I and once we get off the call too, I have a wow, it’s 333. That’s good luck.
1:05:00 – Speaker 2
Oh, there you go.
1:05:02 – Speaker 1
When we get off the call. I do want to talk to you briefly because I think that we can kind of connect synergies.
1:05:09 – Speaker 2
Yeah, man.
1:05:10 – Speaker 1
We can actually work together.
1:05:12 – Speaker 2
Yeah, man.
1:05:13 – Speaker 1
It’s just exciting and I’m really like impressed with your knowledge and what you know. But it’s crazy that we linked, because lately I’ve been linking up with people and we’re kind of from of the same era, the same time period, if you want to say. And so we have so much of the same and it’s like I don’t know if this happens to you, but I get around young people and I feel like where are their brains?
and then I get around older people and I’m like, I’m talking about, like you know, my parents, generation or whatever I get around them and I’m like where’s your brain? So it’s like we’re kind of stuck in between, and it’s like you’re looking around and the only people who are intelligent are people from your era yeah, and it’s like I don’t want to say everybody’s like that, but it’s just crazy because it’s hard to find people to connect on that level yeah, well, that’s how the universe works.
1:06:06 – Speaker 2
So, man, it always it. It knows how to, to make, to make people to find people, to have people find each other. You know what I mean.
1:06:13 – Speaker 1
So, um, but I I agree with what you’re saying, like there’s definitely I’ve met some of my best friends and my closest friends over the internet.
1:06:21 – Speaker 2
Honestly, me too yeah, no me too but uh yeah. So like I guess uh, you know is, is there anything like other than uh I don’t want to say other than you know uh, the, what is it? The distro mint. I don’t want to say other other than that. But like, do you have like, is there any other like current projects, any like? Yeah, like artists that just come up. Do you want to promote or anything, or?
1:06:45 – Speaker 1
I would love to I mean, I would like everybody to check out my brother, joe Rosati, who’s an artist on on on my label and he does like kind of classic alternative rock and roll. It’s really just calm music, but patriotic music. And he also has a show on Rumble called Truthstream which is extremely popular. And when I say extremely popular, he’s got I don’t know he’s got to have 50 to 100,000 people that tune in to his stuff monthly and they follow him. And he has various amazing guests on his show, people who are very informed, a lot of government, ex-government, a lot of doctors, lawyers, um, computer programmers, technicians, um, and and people who are I would call alternative hollywood in terms of we’re not the, the, you know the, the old hollywood which we see is kind of going out the window now, but maybe the new emerging creative sector. So yeah, I would tell you to check out Joe, joe Rosati, he’s got Lifting Veils and Freedom.
Now are two of his singles. He’s got a nice little little thing going on. Another artist, dave Dave Height is his name and he’s got an album out now called a night in santa fe, which is um southwestern latin, um, the guy plays, like everything, and he’s a amazing when I say amazing artist and engineer. He’s got a little studio. It’s nice. He’s kind of similar to to what we um work with and, uh, he is just super mega talented. So, yeah, night in Santa Fe by David Haidt. And then I would say, and moving on to the hip hop stuff, said the Wicked out of Florida, out of Jacksonville, florida, he’s got an album out called PTSD. Really awesome, just put a lot of heart and thought into it. He’s been with us for about five years and then accomplice, uh, from uh, london, ontario, canada. He’s a, uh, a hip-hop artist and a multi-talented instrumentalist.
This guy is like a classically trained pianist and he plays like every instrument and, uh yeah, he plays like gigantic concert halls and everybody’s going crazy when he when he touches anything that he does. So he’s really, really talented. His album is called pain accomplice okay, okay, I produced the entire project um, that’s cool head to toe, all the production, all the mixing and mastering, engineering.
Yeah, it came out pretty good, but we’re working through the wire. So sometimes the recordings, I feel like sometimes I’m not there to actually dial the knobs like I want to, so it’s a learning process, but nevertheless I still think it’s a great project. And then we have another album out now from an artist named Elsie Green out of Washington DC, and he is a singer and a rapper. But if you were to listen to his music you would get the feel of kind of blending Jaheim or D’Angelo tank R&B type of singing mixed with like a really soulful, really poetic, um melodic, uh, real hip hip hop sound. He barely uses like language in his in his music. I mean, I think all his music is clean, so it’s really, really nice and he’s just in there. The guy is super duper talented.
When I say he’s talented he’s like beyond, like you know, somebody that’s going to continue to do great things, um, that’s’s cool and then I’ve got my project coming out here around my birthday, which is another hip-hop album, but I’m gonna uh, haven’t actually got a name for it yet, but it features um the late great chino xl, who’s one of my brothers who passed um about two weeks ago. He passed away suddenly. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty crazy the whole entire world. If you google chino xl, you’ll see this guy is all over the place, like you know every news media outlet picked it up but he’s on my project.
I got uh black poet, the legendary uh mc from queensbridge um, he’s on my album. I’ve got Sadat X from Brand Nubian on my project. Craig G, another Queensbridge legend, from the Juice Crew with. Cool G Rap and Cool G Rap’s on my album as well, and you know a couple other. Like a little special thing, Cannabis is on the album as well.
1:11:34 – Speaker 2
Nice.
1:11:35 – Speaker 1
So I’ve got a very, very all-star cast so far and you know it’s just. It’s a beautiful project that I’ve been working on for about a year and a half and I’m really excited to to bring that to the table. And of course, we’ll have lots of lots more releases. Um singles are always coming out weekly, so you just go to soundaliverecordscom and just click on releases and you can browse any of the music and then, uh, click on any, any album and then it’ll pop up a link tree and you can pick whatever service provider you want to use. If you want to do it that way, we’re getting ready to um do our direct to sale store, which will actually be able to um sell physical copies and then the digital downloads directly from our site. So artists can be paid directly. You don’t have to go through the middleman. There’s no waiting for your quarterly royalty check. You get paid the minute somebody clicks and buys.
1:12:32 – Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
1:12:35 – Speaker 1
We’re implementing a lot of things and, um, I’m just excited, uh, about that. And and then, you know, excited about distro mint, hope to be launched by the end of october. It may be november or we may even wait till 2025 for the launch, but, you know, either way, one, one or another, um distro mint will launch and it will be the first uh music platform that does what it does. Um, I’m not going to explain it all right now. Obviously, I think it’s a whole nother call, but, um, you know, it’s different in many ways from what you see out now and and there’s a lot of thought has been put into into the build of distro mint, and you know the ultimate goal is to, you know, prioritize the, the creators. Um, you know, and I wrote this patent digital tokens using blockchain. Though, when I wrote the patent, I was really considering anybody and everybody when it comes to the idea of a digital content creator, so this could include you a podcast or a show.
1:13:39 – Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
1:13:41 – Speaker 1
It could bring a lot of transparency, freedom and and monetize, monetization of content for everyone that that uses audio and video. So I mean, which is? You know, 99% of everything is audio video visual or images. Yeah.
1:14:04 – Speaker 2
Or digital books, or digital comic books, or you know, a book report. It goes on and on.
1:14:10 – Speaker 1
Yeah, medical transcriptions. Yeah yeah, it’s robust. It’s robust, my favorite word, robust.
1:14:20 – Speaker 2
Well, east Mini Mini. I mean, I appreciate your time, dude. Like I said, is there anything else you want to go over?
1:14:25 – Speaker 1
because we’re we’re rounding third base. So I’m like excited and I’m really appreciate you having me on your show and I’m definitely going to tune in and listen to your other interviews. I think that what you’re doing is an amazing thing and I’m just. Anytime I get a chance to come and share my story, then you know, I think it’s a great opportunity.
1:14:51 – Speaker 2
Yeah, no, I agree, and I definitely will have you back on anytime you want to come back on. Or if you ever want to have any artists on or whatever, definitely hit me up like 100%. If you want to come back on, or if you have any, have any artists on, or whatever, definitely hit me up like 100. Uh, if you want to utilize my platform for any kind of promotion, for sure. Um, yeah, dude, I I love everything you’re doing, I’m excited, I, yeah, I, like I said, I think you’re an inspiration and hopefully people listening. Uh, you know up some of what you’re putting down and yeah, dude like it wasn’t too technical.
No, no, no, it wasn’t at all and, like I said, one of my favorites was that hustle, though, like just selling the CDs, having different like laptops burning CDs, and that’s freaking awesome man, Like I love that, but you know, back then we really didn’t even use laptops, we were using these towers. Oh, that’s funny too. Yeah, no, totally, yeah, no, totally yeah.
1:15:43 – Speaker 1
You could slide four DVD or CD-ROM burners into the front of the machine. Yeah, you could and you can burn, you know, four disks at a time. So I mean, that was the trick back in the day.
1:15:55 – Speaker 2
Yeah, that’s so funny. Yeah, trick back in the day, yeah, that’s so funny. Yeah, back in the 2002 I actually opened up and ran my own computer business. I used to build custom computers and laptops and stuff for people way back then. So I I totally get what you’re saying. I know what you mean, dude. That’s, that’s freaking again, it’s genius. Um, yeah, dude, I mean, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. You want to give a shout out for your websites and stuff like that, where people can find you again?
1:16:19 – Speaker 1
Sure, the best way to find me is at TheRealESmitty on Twitter or X. I keep calling it.
1:16:27 – Speaker 2
Twitter. I’m sure everyone does.
1:16:31 – Speaker 1
SoundCloud is SoundCloud slash, soundalive Studios and if you’re trying to get in contact with me, you can go to soundaliverecordscom and either give us a call or fill out the email contact or you can send an email to info at soundaliverecordscom and then if you’re interested let’s say if you’re interested in talking to me about DistroMint or becoming an early equity holder in DistroMint you would just contact info at DistroMintcom. So other than that, you can Google E Smitty and click on my Wikipedia and read about me there you go Find out a little bit more about my history.
Know that I’m not fudging the numbers. And other than that, yeah, man, check us out. Come to this amazing show podcast subscribe. Do you know? Do your due diligence as well. Yes.
1:17:34 – Speaker 2
Awesome, yeah, thanks, thanks, skamian. I’m looking forward to having you on again sometime soon, soon and everyone. Thank you for listening, thank you for downloading and don’t forget to embrace your storm, see ya.