Transcription
Hey everybody. I'm here in Sweden with my friend Nicholas, who is going to give you a demonstration that he gave me on an app that's for music creators. And I found it so interesting that I said, "Why don't you come on and do the same presentation for you?" Nicholas, why don't you introduce yourself and tell and talk about this app?
Thanks for having me. Uh, it's an honor to be here with you. I've been watching your videos forever, so it's a real honor. Um, my name is Nicholas Malinder, a songwriter and music producer. I've been writing and producing music for 20 plus years. Um, at one point, I got so frustrated why I didn't understand how the royalties that I received, they were too low. There were songs missing on the statements, so I really know wanted to learn more.
This is maybe, yeah, about how people get paid, right? How you're supposed to get paid. So I wish that I, I mean, I would love to talk to you now about songwriting and producing. And but what we're going to talk about now is a super important part of the creation process. It's not the actual music making itself, but it's everything that goes on behind the scenes, the things that makes creators get credited and paid when their songs are used in the world.
Me and my songwriter partner, we were pretty successful, so we couldn't really keep up delivering all the songs that were requested. So we grew as a company, so we started a publishing company and uh, signed really talented up and coming creators. Now I was on the other side of the table. Now I was the publisher. That was when I realized the data and the information about who did what, where, and when on the songs. And when we used the term song, what is that actually, right? So all this got so much for me. So I realized, oh, I need a tool for this. Because as the whole music industry, publishers, labels, societies, CMOs, everyone involved, they need to have the correct information about who did what, where, and when. And there's just one group of people that can tell us that, the people in the studio, right? The only people that knows the truth are the people in the studio. So therefore, for my own need, for my own frustration, I created this platform that is called Session Studio.
I have the great honor and opportunity to do this together with two giants. We met them both together today, actually. Uh, we, so my partners here is Max Martin, a Swedish songwriter, music producer, very successful, absolutely. And beyond all this, so with those two, uh, we have created something that is really simple to use, help the creators in the studio do this boring data administration that no one cares about, right? Simple, simple. But it's how people get paid for their, for their music. Yeah. And we creators, we're funny because we scream, shout, and complain when we don't get credited and paid, but we don't want to change behavior. This is the funny part of it. So, so I wanted to, to do something that helps the industry and the creators to do this so everyone can get credited and paid.
Before I show you the platform, yep, I'm just going to give you the, a quick background of how things works in the industry. What you see on the screen right now are five identifiers. These five identifiers control the whole back office system in the music industry worldwide. If you don't know as a creator, your numbers, because we're going to get to what the numbers are, if you don't know them and what they stand for and when to use them, you will get zero out of the system, right?
Wait, and who, who gets that money then? Where is that money? So the money, there is an expression called "black box," uh, and that is a term. Yeah, that is a term for unidentified money, unclaimed, unclaimed money. Yes. So today, the revenues into the music industry from the consumers are back again. I mean, we see big chunks of money coming in. But if the music industry, and I know sometimes it can be hard, just if I say the music industry, but there's so many stakeholders, absolutely. But money comes in, but if the receivers of the money don't know where to send them forward to us, yeah, we will never get it. So there they stay there in this, so-called black box. And every now and then, and this is different from the company to organization and where in different places of the world, they do settlements. The money is given out to the music industry, to the publishers, to the label, often, most often based on market share. So the big companies that represent the large amounts, because of the companies, not to the creators, exactly. It goes to the, to the companies, right? To the creators, yes. Uh, so, uh, and you don't want your money going to the companies, you want it going to you. Yeah. And the way to get the money is to understand what you see on the screen right now.
Okay. So I'm, and this is the most unsexy part of the music industry. And the music industry is so filled up with acronyms. I mean, we see five right now, right? And, and they're the names of them. I'm just going to go quick through them. So three of these numbers are individual numbers for creators, for you and me. Yep. The other two represent the song, the two different parts of the song. Because now we're getting into, I'm gonna do this quick and not bore you too much about it, but a song is legally two things. It's a musical work that is what the songwriter, the songwriters create. They do in musical work. Nothing you can listen to. It's just actually a score paper, yeah. And the lyric and the information about who they are. That's right. And when you record it, you get the sound recording. So that's the two parts of a song.
So if we start here, IPI, Interested Parties Information. It's kind of a social security number for all songwriters. If you don't have one, you will never get paid for for songwriting, right? With one exception, if you sell the music, so-called buyouts, then you don't need to be involved in this. But if you want to be in the systems, you need an IPI. All publishers also need an IPI. When IPIS songwriters create a musical work, we get an ISWC, International Standard Work Code, which is the unique number for it, just that musical work. When we record it, it gets an ISRC, and that is actually the, the identifier that most of the creators actually know. They know that's the one that they've heard of, yeah, because you need to have one because that's the unique identifier for the sound recording, right? International Standard Recording Code, yeah. And you cannot get your music out to Spotify, YouTube, Apple without that. That's right. That's right. And to get an ISRC, we need people to perform. And maybe we get into AI later on, but now we're talking about, we'll stick with real people now. So now people are creating music, and then we identify performers, which is singers, producers, whatever, because they're deserved money as well. Yes, exactly. And they have IPNs, in some parts of the world, International Performer Number, yeah. As an umbrella. And for countries that not use all identifiers, we have ISNE, International Standard Name Identifier, as an umbrella for all these.
When everything is in harmony, we, it should look like this. And we have an example, which is "Dancing Queen," which Bjorn brought together with uh, two others. You think that is, he wrote it with one more, but it's actually two more. So when everything is in order, this is how it should look like. Three songwriters and a publisher. And Stig here was actually Abba's manager, but his role here is not manager, he's part of songwriting. So he's a songwriter on "Dancing Queen." Okay. He wrote part of the lyrics, I think. Okay. So they have four IPIS, and those four IPIS are then linked to the musical work "Dancing Queen." And it's a funny story, it was "Dancing Queen" was the first musical work ever given ISWC. So it has one. That's amazing. And then Abba did an original recording that has a unique recording identifier. And they did a live, should have a separate, and old thousands and thousands of covers made on this song. And on old recordings, they, there are people performing. But all those recordings should be appointed to just that one musical work because every time someone's doing a cover of "Dancing Queen," Bjorn and Benny and Stig and Universal gets paid as owners of the musical work. So this is how it should look like. Even if this should be the most simplest musical work to keep track of, it has number one, and it's one of the biggest songs ever written. Yeah. Last time we checked, it had over 89 different ISWCs for the same musical work, some with different names. And, and the links to the ISRCs, a mess. So what I wanted to fix with Session was to solve this. If we can have all identifiers assigned, linked, and matched before the first commercial release of the sound recording, we are gonna avoid black boxes. There might be problems, but we can always find the owners of the sound recording and the musical work, and we can solve things. Because when we release something out to the market, information gets spread to thousands and thousands of databases around the world, so we can never update everywhere, right? But if there's links from the beginning, it's solved. So that's why I did Session.
So, a bit of education about the identifiers. So I'm sorry if I bored you, but this is pretty important, actually. It's incredibly important. Yeah. So how we've sold it. Um, we creators, we don't like admin. We just, we care about most of the time, but one thing only, what comes out of the speakers here in the studio. That's the most important thing for us. So I wanted to create something that don't disturb creatives, make it super simple, and to give an incentive to use it. We call it a more collaboration tool. We know as music creators, because we are music creators behind it, we know the pain points of today when creating music. So we have added features on this platform that simplifies the creation process. And in the background, we do all this unsexy, boring stuff.
Here's the song. Yep. Uh, Brianna and I have been working on together with a few others. And, uh, as an example, uh, we're gonna start with demonstrating the platform with inviting you to be a part of the song. Oh, great. Yeah. So if you just open your Session app on your phone, okay? And I am an engineer. And what you see is Pro Tools, which is one of the recording softwares available. But Session Studio is available on, on all recording softwares on the market. Okay? And what's new here for, uh, for is that we have Session floating around. So Session is here. It's not a plugin, it's, it's software on the computer that lies on top. You can use the software with, it's not disturbing you, but it's always here. You can hide it if you want, right? And if you hide it, you can always find it up in the menu bar. Got it. But now you walk in, and if to get all the information about you, so I get all those identifiers correct, there is somewhere between 5, 10, sometimes 12 data points I should get from you, your full legal name, team, your, you know, where you live, your, all your numbers. And you have no idea. And it's going to take forever. So how we solve that is by something called Studio Check-in. So I say, Eric, welcome. We're just, you know, we want to invite you to be part of writing this song. And I bring out this code, and you just scan it. And scan it and see what happens. Okay? Let me scan it here. There you go. So instead of asking you what's your identifiers, I now that with the app, ask you what is your role? Because you wrote, know your role, okay? So you just add songwriter, okay? Click answer and check in at the bottom. There you go. So now the system automatically brings. That's it. Yeah. And there you are. Here I am. Yeah. Together with me and Bjorn as a songwriter. Okay. So, but, but what about my percentage on this? Okay, let's get to that. We need to do stuff first. We don't know, right? And we don't know here, of course. I mean, there are some, some things that we need to do to be able to do when, when things, when you get those identifiers, you do what's called a registration. So some information needs also to be added, your role, for example. You might not, we might not know that at this point, but the most common role as a songwriter is called CA, and that stands for composer and author. That's a combination. Historically, 50% of the musical work was, was composition, and 50% was lyrics. Nowadays, it's more or less a mix. So I'm going to give you CA because that's the most used thing. Okay. And we see all information about you. Uh, and, and when we are now save, it's gonna see, it's gonna be clear when you were was added, who added you, and all this.
Now, is this part of the session? Is this online? Does this go somewhere to a database? Is it both? Is it on my phone? Where does this lie? This information. The whole platform is cloud-based, okay? So from technical services, Amazon Web Services, so it's something, so it's actually going up to the cloud every time this is updated. This is instantaneous, yeah. When on all your devices. Fantastic. And now security, because I get this question, yeah. Is it secure? And in the second, I'm going to show you who can access this, what we see on the screen. But my, one of my, uh, tech engineers told me like, if you ever get a question about how secure our system is, say it's NASA quality. So it, this is encrypted, and no one can get in and all that. So, so now you're in, and now we can start using the, the, the features that helps us during the creation process.
So now we provide under the song title, the umbrella, this one umbrella for, for the song, for everything. We have audio management. So we have all the way from voice memo recorder. How many times have you recorded locally on your phone, and you two months later, you want to find that actual recording you did for a song idea? And pretty much every day, yeah. Here on, on the mobile app of this, of the Session app. Yep. The voice memo recorder is on a song level. So you can always now, when I start recording, it's going to be here. Yes. Simplify the whole thing. Got it. And if you have recorded something and you want to share it with me, you know, you can give me access to hear it. And if I'm the producer, I can actually drag and drop the audio file directly into Pro Tools and I can use your voice memo idea. So full audio management. Shareable. We can share links if we want to share something externally. And we believe strongly that no one should send MP3 files because then you lose control. So we have shared links. And that's how we give all the creators that are linked to this song access to the audio under one umbrella.
The most used tool on the platform, lyrics. Lyrics today are written like all over the place, you know, uh, and maybe ends up on a piece of paper. And then if Bjorn wrote it, you and I don't have access to it. This is the best way for the creators to have the lyrics on one place. This will update when somebody writes changes something, update, and it'll say who changes it. Correct. Exactly. And as you see now, Bjorn is writing something. No, it's, it's actually Campbell. Let's see now. So it, it works like a Google Doc. So it's fully dynamic, and we can see who wrote what, and it timestamps who did what, where, when. So the songwriters can always, you know, see who did what, where, and when on the, on, on the lyrics. So this is an amazing way of writing lyrics, transparent. And your publisher and the label, they don't have to chase you when it's time to get their, you know, just bring it. Well, this also prevents the arguments of who did what, right? I mean, this is really a big thing. Many times in the past, you finish a song, and you don't have determined song splits, and then people argue about them. Sometimes people never get paid because they can never resolve the song splits. Totally. And we're going to get to this place, this place is a really interesting thing. So, but if we get there in a second. So lyrics, super, uh, good. And one last thing about that, today, even on Shazam, you get lyrics for all songs everywhere. The majority of the times when you see lyrics on the streaming services, it never comes from the actual songwriters. It's companies that are generating the lyrics again because the lyrics are not there available. This changes that.
Then the credits tab. We went through that when you checked in. This is a list of everyone that in one way or another one contribution, yeah, on both sides, both on this musical work and the recording. One place for everything. Now, split. Songwriters, and I mean, I've been in so many songwriting sessions, and it's something weird with splits. No one knows that we need to talk about it, but no one wants, who wants to talk about it? Exactly. So, uh, if we, as Session, do identify people, we can always sort out the split later. But the sooner the better, because we avoid errors. If we do it earlier, and if it's hard to look me in, in my eyes and say, "I want more than you," then we can do it here. So we have created a digital split sheet. Okay. If there was a previous split or not, doesn't matter. We just added you. So whatever was decided before, forget it. We need now to do it again. So let's propose a new split. Uh, Bjorn, you and me. Yep. We are now the, the trio. And now we need to determine here. It's interesting now, because I get this question all the time. Can Session, you know, propose a split? No. A machine can never, ever propose a split. This is human negotiation, okay? Yeah. Because, I mean, even if you did it all, and Beyonce, you know, was here, but he says, "Now, come on, I'm a bigger name than you, I want more percent." You know, it could, there are no rules for splits. So we need to talk about it. Lucky enough, most of the time, equal, I think. Equally fair. So we have split equally feature. And now you've got the 34%, which is good. And now propose. So now, if you open your phone again, and you go into the song tab on the left-hand side, click on the song. Yeah, just on the song there, one more time. And then click on split. Now you have a proposal. Wow. So now you can say, "Accept," if you think it's fair. If you don't, you can propose what you think is the right thing. Well, I think this is fair. Yeah. Okay. That's great that you think that. And so now, and what the good thing, if you have a publisher or a manager, yeah, everyone gets this information. Because we have created Session, so it's dynamic for usage. Both for high-level creators like Max and Bjorn and ourselves at the moment, but also it works for the new up and coming band in the basement, you know, next door. It's very flexible. And I showed you now how we add someone. Wait a second. So I, my publisher is Sony ATV. So would they get this then? This information immediately? Depending on how you, as a songwriter, want them to have the information. Okay? And we are, of course, working hard to get this system implemented in the whole industry, okay? And, uh, it's a lot of things going on in the background, how we integrate with the music industry. So our goal is that, yes, if your publisher, if, if you want and they want, they can get it immediately. Got it. Yeah. But the system is very flexible and, and, and as I said, it works for anywhere on the, what level you are as a creator. And it also works with a lot of types of of situations. Now we demonstrate how you walk into a studio and scan the code. But of course, you can use Session if you work remote, or with someone you know, or someone you never met before. So it's very flexible.
Anyhow, display it, look, accept it. Even Bjorn accepted. Okay. What about the producer? What about the, the players that are playing in the session? How do those get memorialized? So in the same way as you scanned in, every contribution, everyone. So if we have a, uh, keyboard player that comes in a session person, they have their phone with the app on it. And do they use the same thing? And exactly. And we've, we've done an experiment. We have done this in London with the Philharmonic Orchestra, okay, with 65 musicians. Walk-in on Pro Tools. I just saw the contributions like for the performance from music. Amazing. So before they start recording, we had all their names, all their identifiers, everything is in order. No one had to use pen and paper and chase people anymore. Great. Great. So now, which is a nightmare to do. Which is the nightmare. Nightmare. Totally. With, yeah. Now you can download the split sheet. And you're, if you have a publisher connected, they can download it. And behind the scenes, the industry is filled with what we call standards and different file formats. And that goes on in the background. We, as creators, we don't even have to bother about that.
Now, who can see this information? And that's really important because that's the security thing. So we have separated credits and access. So even if you are added with credit, let's say a session musician, for example, mostly paid for coming here, do the performance, and then leave, should not see splits, should not have access. So every person on the access list can access this information, but only those people. Could be your manager, it could be an A&R, you know, it's a new select who they are. Exactly. And if, since now you are also on, you can add whoever you want. But from the difference from how it works without Session, you can invite anyone without me knowing it. As soon as you invite someone, I see it. So it's transparent. And that makes, you know, that's what makes it so brilliant. Got it. Yeah. And then we have details, that is information that Session automatically pulls out from the, uh, the Pro Tools file, tempo, key signatures, and stuff, if available. Excellent.
This is how we collect the information. And we, from the beginning, I said, I don't want another source of chat and communication. So I was against that. But our users, we want to have a chat. So we recently also added chat. So on a song level, so now all, uh, people will act now. We can communicate. Let's lower the bass drama, you know, when it, or we should rewrite, you know, everything that concerns this song. One stop shop for.
Foreign. That's great. Yeah. So, uh, oh, look, Bjorn wants more bass. Yeah. So this is how we use the chat for, for, for communicating. And, uh, for all your songs, when you click on songs, you get a list of all the songs you're working on. So if you switch song, you know, all information is there. You can go from, from a bounce, you just get in your car, now you move to your phone, everything is there. So it's, it's a perfect way of keeping track of your administration, but also all the audio and lyrics and stuff.
Now, when, when the song is ready to be released, we of course provide all the features for doing the release and send it out. Session is directly connected with SoundCloud today. So if you're a SoundCloud user, you can connect your SoundCloud account and now for the first time ever, upload content to SoundCloud with all the data connected to it without you doing anything. When you upload to SoundCloud normally, you just drag and drop an audio file, and the only information that goes out is the name in the audio. But here, we get everything. And if you're, you're assigned to a label, you use the label, and the label gets all the information. The next company that's going to become here in September is TuneCore. So from now on, you are also going to be able to release your music out to the market directly from here with all the data without chasing people. So really great tool to use. And if you want to share music with others, there of course, you can share music, share links on the song level. But we also of course have playlisting. If you want to pitch to a label, if they're looking for new songs for an artist, you can put a collection of songs together. So, um, so this is Session. Now, we've been spending some time just talking about Session. But our goal is that the creators are going to be 99.5% here creating music. But every time they need to add data or do something, they're just going to click on that one and use Session. Fantastic. And what you've seen here is free. We, we don't charge anything for it. Just download it. We don't ask for your credit card. And then the question of course, what's the business model then? It's a freemium model. So we give you this for free. Sure. Of course, if you want to use multiple playlisting or or more hard, hardy space, we have subscriptions for that, and then you pay for it. But all this is free because we want this to be a free tool that makes the life easier for, for all music creators out there. So this is Session, my friend.
Excellent, excellent. That was really well explained, and I've learned a lot from this. This is great. And now we're connected. So now I'm going to start inviting you to songs. Excellent. Yeah, excellent. Good. So thanks so much for, uh, for, for having me and, uh, yeah, let's hope that we can do more stuff together. Be great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Yep.