Today, host Devin Becker is joined by Sam Means, Founder of Wavlake, and Ben Cousens, Chief Strategy Officer of ZBD, for an exploration of alternative payment systems for creators in the music and gaming industries. The conversation dives into how Wavlake leverages Bitcoin to revolutionize artist payments and music distribution, offering unique benefits over traditional platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Sam shares the story behind Wavlake, its current mission, and how its collaboration with ZBD opens new doors for “tipping” (rather than purchasing or subscribing) as a way to support creators.

We explore how this technology reshapes interactions between music artists and gamers, with potential applications for UGC platforms, music in games, and live-streaming environments. We tackle pressing questions about copyright enforcement, the role of AI-generated music, and emerging policies that impact artists and game developers alike. (Also be sure to check out our previous episode with Ben, discussing ZBD in more detail!)

We’d also like to thank TikTok for making this episode possible. Powered by automation and precision, TikTok’s advanced product solutions work seamlessly with its newest creative tools—making content creation easy, effective, and scalable—to drive installs and boost in-game revenue. Learn more about making the most of Q5 with TikTok by visiting: https://bit.ly/Q5ProgramNAVPodcast

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Devin: Hello everyone. I'm your host, Devin Becker. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Ben Cousins, chief strategy officer at ZBD and Sam Means, founder of Wavlake, although it's spelled Wavlake, I guess. So just to make sure for people typing that in, that you know, it's like that.

ZBD, as you may have heard previously, is an API for awarding players with Bitcoin using the Lightning Network and Wavlake is an open music distribution system. Today, we're going to be exploring the integration of music, artists, crypto payments, and games. And, just to, just to start with and get this out of the way real quick, Ben was on here on a previous episode and it was pretty good, pretty good background on ZBD. So we're not going to get too much into the details of ZBD, but both Wavlake and ZBD work together on payment processing to make sure that they're able to handle the Bitcoin lightning network stuff.

So I'm just going to have Ben introduce himself real quick and then we'll go ahead and get into Sam.

Ben: Thanks, Devin. Yeah, I, I wouldn't spend too long given folks may have already heard my intro. So I work with ZBD. We, we provide payment solutions to the entertainment world. In the context of this podcast, I'm a massive music fan. And so it's a real pleasure to be working with Wavlake and supporting Sam and his vision.

Devin: Cool. Sam, why don't you just go quickly over your background, the origin of Wavlake and what you guys do today?

Sam: Yeah, for sure. So, uh, I am a musician myself, used to travel quite a bit in a touring band, signed to major labels, did the whole thing, kind of started playing music when I was a teenager and made a career out of it.

And then that band took a break and about 17 years ago, I started a merchandise company that works in the music industry. Work with about 400 artists. I started getting into, you know, the, I guess some other technologies in the e-commerce space. Bitcoin popped up, you know, being someone who was in e-commerce and kind of the early days of that been through many, you know, jumped through a lot of hoops and been through a lot over a lot of hurdles in that, in that area.

So I started getting into other forms of payment started paying attention to Bitcoin started seeing how that could potentially, benefit the music industry. When I heard about this thing called lightning network, which is a second layer on top of it. That that Wavlake is now using as its payment technology.

So really, you know, about 3 years ago, started looking really, really closely into how that could potentially be, I guess rebuild the music industry, with this technology that maybe wasn't there 15 years ago when, when streaming music started really taking off and, in 2023 started Wavlake with my co-founder, Michael and, Wavlake, just to put it simply, it's just a, an open music distribution platform.

So artists go there, they upload music and it can be pushed out and live in and be monetized in a number of different places.

Devin: So I guess the, the key question here, you know, especially since we have been on as well is, how does Bitcoin offer benefits to music distribution, artist payments? Like why have that involved as opposed to traditional payment methods?

Sam: Traditional payment methods are just bulky and expensive and slow. You know, it's like if you're, if you're trying to send money to someone, you're either going to, you're, you're almost always going to play it, pay some sort of fee, you know, like even just buying a 10 t shirt or something, you're going to pay the vendor is going to pay, you know, 30 cents and 3 percent transaction fee or something like that.

And it's going to be a lot more if it's, if it's cross borders. If I wanted to just send you money through PayPal and you lived in a different country, that's obviously going to come with some hefty fees. If I did it over traditional banking rails, it's going to be, it's going to take a long time. And a lot of people are going to have to talk, talk to make sure that that can actually happen.

Bitcoin and the lightning network is just fast. I mean, hence, hence the name it's fast and it's, it's free and it's. Like virtually free on the fees are so microscopic, it's just not something that you have to worry about when you're sending small amounts of money. So that's that was the main appeal for me is, you know, if you could send right now, you're kind of limited on streaming services.

When you're listening to a track, you're, you're paying, you know, a percentage of a penny to an artist for every time you listen to it, wouldn't it be cool if you could, you could do that or you could do more and you could do that as frequently as you wanted to over this second layer network?

And so, you know, we just started looking into that and built it out and it's, it's working really well.

Devin: So, I mean, you're talking about the, the streaming services and anyone's like Spotify, Apple music, things like that, that when people listen to the music, then, you know, some of these subscription fee gets distributed out through, uh, you know, licensing.

Companies, things like that to the artists, but that's not at all what you guys are doing, right? This is a system where you guys are optionally providing payment systems for the, you know, the fans of music to be able to let's do, but they don't have to pay to listen. They don't have to subscribe. They're not paying to download it.

Just describe how it works in terms of the financial aspect.

Sam: Yeah. I mean, most people don't think about it like this, but it works basically the same as It's everything else. I mean, if you're listening, you're not really paying to listen to a song on Spotify either. You know, you have to listen to the track has to be played so many times in order for you to make any kind of, you know, noticeable amount of money.

So let's just start there. It's like you're most people aren't making money off of traditional streaming. If they are, they're. They're making money everywhere else. And so it's, it's not really a problem for them. So we're mainly focused on the 95 percent of artists that are on Spotify that are making almost nothing.

I think it's about 3 percent of the artists on Spotify are making 95 percent of the money. So, you know, we're just trying to have a place that's, that's for them. And there have been other things before us, like SoundCloud or band camp, both of which allow you to listen to the music for free. That was the business model.

You could stream that music on those platforms themselves. Those could be embedded to live on websites and various other places, but they were still sort of siloed into. Those those places and, you know, SoundCloud maybe was more focused on exposure. Like, I'll, you know, make my mixtape here and someone's going to discover me and I'll get signed where band camp was more of an indie music community where you could just discover cool new music.

And that's really what they they focused on. But those things really hit a wall because it could only really live. On SoundCloud on Bandcamp, they could, they could be embedded in other places, but you can interact with them really in a different way. So we're trying to take a little piece of, you know, from the playbook from each of these services and be able to really do all of those things.

And on top of that, be able to monetize these tracks. Everywhere, so you can monetize them somewhere like, like this library can live, could live theoretically on bandcamp. It could live on Spotify. It can live within podcasts. It can live within YouTube videos, um, and it can be that the money will get directed, straight to the artist instead of having to go through these other intermediaries, which they have to go through now.

So, like, for example, if you, you, If my song is on YouTube and someone uses it, a license, some licensing company is going to collect that on my behalf, then they're going to pay that to me. And at some point in time, nine months down the road, I'm going to get nine cents. Whereas theoretically with this model, you could have that direct connection.

So if somebody, if there's some sort of monetization that happens within a video, it'll just go essentially straight to your wallet. So, right now we're working mostly with just directly to artists, but we also see a world where labels will want to be on this as well because it sort of cuts out the, you know, bigger picture without rambling too far and getting too ahead of myself.

It cuts out the accounting. It's a big part of it. That's a huge issue in the music industry is the accounting. You know, royalty accounting can be very daunting, and there really is no auditing that there's no way for most people to be able to check on that. And so to be able to have a system that has instant settlement is also a really big part of why we're using Bitcoin in the lightning network.

Devin: Well, it all makes sense. Definitely like an efficient way to do it, at least in terms of the current state of things, right? Where there's, like you said, the, you know, transaction fees, things like that. A question for Ben then. So, you know, previously when we talked, we were talking about a situation where it was basically players spending money in a game.

And then that was going potentially straight to the game developer. Although more often than not, it was the game developer going straight to the player. This is a bit of a different situation, right? Where it's like more of the consumer spending the money, but then it's not going directly to Wavlake necessarily.

It's going to all these different artists, but also like a small cut to Wavlake. How is that all handled on your end then in terms of, you know, distributing all that and handling all that and the wallets and all that sort of thing.

Ben: Yeah, that's right. This, this model is like direct to fan monetization for the, for the artists and can't underline my agreement with Sam enough that, you know, you, if you give, if you take out so much of the headache of actually claiming your royalties or payments as an artist, and you go direct to fan and you can monetize your relationships with your fans directly.

Those artists tend to make a lot more money than they otherwise would. So, and this is how you foster, you know, independent music, in an, in an era where like AI is just destroying, uh, so much as well. So, um, what, you know, in what we provide for, for Wavlake is, is wallet infrastructure where the way Simon and Michael and the wave late team don't have to, Worry about the tax implications, the compliance implications, a lot of the kind of regulatory stuff that comes with achieving this vision.

And it's, it's. You know, stopped a lot of folks in music at that. That's been like the blocker for so many people in music is as soon as you want to pay an artist directly, you walk into a wall of regulation about how and why you cannot do this. So we are basically our foundation, our wallet infrastructure and our licensing enables Sam to do this and build his business without having to spend exorbitant amounts on trying to solve all of this payment industry stuff, by himself.

Devin: So I think the clear, the clear parallel I see here outside of just music is also in games with user generated content where, for example, right now in Roblox, if you wanted to support a creator, you just have to try and depending on what they've implemented their game, spend Robux in their game.

Right. And they eventually get a portion of that. Not a, not a great portion, but a portion. And then in fortnight, it's even more indirect where it's like, Oh, I go buy random stuff from the shop for V bucks. Like while I was playing your game and they kind of like sort of causal casually link those two things together, or I just play your game a lot or in the music, you know, with Spotify, things like that.

I just listened to it a lot where it's like, you, you, you try and consume as a way to sort of pay out, but this is like a more direct thing. Is there some, like these systems that you're building to help out this sort of payment infrastructure and spread these things out? Is that something that would apply very easily to a UGC platform?

If let's say a Roblox type of platform were to implement something similar to be like, Hey, I'm having fun in this game. I'm just going to send money to this, the creator of this mod.

Ben: That would indeed, yeah, that would indeed line up with our vision and we could do it in real time, with instant settlement, you know, using the lightning network.

And I think because this system is also interoperable and open, you know, there's, there's the opportunity for all this content to intermingle. And, you know, people talk about big, sort of overly used terms like metaverse, but this, this is one where it truly is already here. In terms of, you know, we, someone playing Roblox could want to add music to their experience, and it would be very easy for them to pull some songs from the Wavlake Open Library.

And all participants in that ecosystem would be receiving their fair share and it would be monetized properly. Cause it's so, it's so trivial to actually do the payments in this ecosystem where in incumbent ecosystems, payments is the hardest part. This here is the easy part. It's, it's kind of like the creativity and experience is like the real challenge here is that how do you, how, you know, where do you take this? Cause it's brand new.

Devin: Yeah. It sounds like it could work with both the creator of the content for the game, as well as the creator of music for the game. So in, on that topic, Sam, when it comes to integrating the music from the platform into the game. Different areas like games. Is there, I mean, you talk about this as a platform or like a library, is there like technology to be able to integrate this easily into games?

There's, I believe you mentioned open source. How would people go about utilizing this music from this platform in games, making sure that, that the artists are able to get payments if people like the music, let's say they're driving around in a driving game, listen to it on the virtual radio, or, you know what, even, even a, maybe a rhythm game that actually uses the music in it.

Sam: I mean, it's really just, I mean, yeah, to, to comment, I guess on what Ben was saying a little bit too expanding on it, we, we saw how fast everything sort of moved into a subscription model. And that was just one way of thinking that just seemed to work really well after people, you know, started with like, you know, buying stuff on iTunes, but then eventually Spotify came along and really showed that a subscription model is a better way to do it.

And then everybody just moved towards that. And this is really similar. It's just a different way of thinking, you know, so it's, it is incredibly easy for people to put this into really virtually anywhere. We have an open API. People can not only use it, but they're incentivized to use it. We pay them half of our half of our half of our royalties.

If payments happen when something that someone built, you know, so we're, we were actually encouraging people to build music players and find unique ways to throw this into really anywhere. As long as they sort of agree that there's going to be a way for them, a way for this music to be monetized.

That's kind of the catch for them. And I think really all it's going to take is a couple. People to do this in a successful way and the more people start to think about it that way, because not only will everyone sort of part of this exchange and so not only will the artist. Make a cut of this, but also the developers will make a cut of this, the games, you know, also will.

So like everyone's kind of a part of this split. I mean, we do a really basic version of this that we have is, you know, we're a thing that we did earlier this year is, um, we added the ability to create a music broadcast within Wavlakes. So if I wanted to just play DJ for an hour and on my podcast, I could play Drop these songs into my podcast and it can be like, Hey, this is music. I've discovered on Wavlake. It's really cool I want to talk about it and then I can throw what's called a value block into my feed and when people pay me while they're listening to this on the podcast 2. 0 spec, while that track is playing portion of that money is going directly to the artists. And so artists are being discovered in, in podcasts and then they're looking at their accounting fee, their activity feed and wavelength and going like, Oh, this is crazy.

Where's this money coming from? So now it's coming from a different place or, you know, there's a client called fountain that that actually also works with ZBD and they're really cool. And they started out as a podcasting app and now they're a podcasting and a music app because they've. We're one of the first people to pull in our library and now they have, uh, you know, thing that they're doing.

They did one today. It's called an artist takeover where they're essentially doing, um, you know, very similarly to like a, like a Reddit AMA, they have an artist come in and just play music that they like that's living on fountain that was uploaded through Wavlake. And we're seeing right now, sort of what's unfolding is people are starting to discover all these really cool things you can do with an open music library.

Okay. And, you know, kind of circling back around my original point is I think it's just going to take a couple of those things to really take off. And then other people will start following along. And I think eventually it will become just second nature where we move away from the subscription model and we go into this.

This, kind of open exchange model where you can pay for things as you consume, as you consume them. And if you're getting a lot of value out of them, you can, you can pay more, which is very typical for a lot of things. That's really sort of how the music economy works in almost every other aspect with fans to artists is if I like this artist, I'm going to go buy their album and buy their vinyl record.

I'm going to go buy a t shirt. I'm going to go see them on tour. I'm going to do as much as I can to support them. Unfortunately, you're just really limited in how you can, how you can support them on the music itself. And so it's led artists to have to do all these other things to try to, to try to hustle in order to be able to monetize their existence.

And it's just kind of a bummer. So that's, that's something that I think is really, you know, the artists are going to come first. And as soon as they go there, as long as they have these platforms and these, these places for their fans to go to, I think you'll see people flock to them because ultimately the fans are going to want to, are going to want to support the artists in the, in the place that the artist is essentially asking them to go to, you know, if I'm a musician myself, and if I discovered way Blake for the first time, I would certainly say, Hey, I made a hundred dollars last week.

This is clearly working better than anything else you should come over here and listen to my music here. And I would expect a pretty decent portion of my fans to go there as well. So with Wavlake, we're trying to make that really easy for them to be able to do that. And that's been our main goal this year.

Now, the first step was to get the artists on board and now we're working on onboarding fans easily.

Devin: So, in this case, you know, talking about different people using the music, you know, the podcast, things like that, different ways of sort of sharing and treating it like an open music library. But what does that mean in terms of rights licenses?

What can or can't people do with these, this library of music? You know, if I want to throw it in the game, can I just throw it in the game without asking? Or can I just stream random songs? What does that look like in terms of how those rights work?

Sam: Yeah. So, I mean, it's a little loose in just that, like, you can use this library as long as there's a monetization, a monetization source there, you know?

So you can use it on your live stream. If there's a QR code where you can pay the artists and we've, you know, sort of made that pretty explicit. You can throw it in a podcast as long as they've included this value block in order for them to be able to get paid. So there just has to be availability for the artists to get paid.

Otherwise you're just using it illegally, like you're using everything else, you know, so it's, as far as everything else is concerned, it works virtually just like all other copyright infringement would work. Like, you couldn't just put this music just because it's on an open library. It's an open library that's meant to be used in a certain way.

And if you're, if you're not using it in that way, then you're basically breaking the rules, you know, and that's kind of how everything else is as well. With all that being said, we do want to make that more explicit. We are working on, and there are a few other people in this space that have been sort of, you know, theorizing what the best method is, because it is a little tricky because there are different ways, places that it can live.

Like what's the, what does the license look like? If it lives in a music player, what does the license look like? If it lives in a podcast episode, what does the license look like if it lives in a game? You know, those might, those are all very different. So, there is some of that ahead of us where we will have to probably as the scale scales up expedite the idea of, of a new music license.

But that's really all it is. You know, this will be scrambling the same way they were scrambling for streaming licenses. And now it's just been condensed into a single letter. I get them every week. There's some new streaming service or something where it's like, Hey, they want to use your music library.

You have 60 days to say no, otherwise it's just going to show up here. And that's virtually what, What this will be to down the road. We'll just have to cross that bridge when we get there, but we're less, less concerned about it today, because as of right now, there's really only a couple of clients pulling this in.

But once it starts going more mainstream, we'll definitely have to consider that. Also the, the level of artists that are on, we have a thousand artists on wave link right now, but we're just starting to see some people come in that have more significant reach on, on other streaming services. So, just the caliber of artists we've been working with their, their music quality is incredibly awesome.

You know, I've discovered some, I've now have become a fan of music. I otherwise would have never heard because of wave like, but unfortunately those people are very underserved by the other platforms. And so they're not worrying as much about licenses, but we will have to do that soon.

Devin: So you mentioned that, you know, this idea of, okay, well, as long as there's sort of a monetization path for people to be able to, to, to give money and donate or tip or however you want to phrase it to the artist.

And that kind of makes it okay, because that's what you're sort of doing is you're not just giving them exposure, giving them exposure and bringing along that tip jar, so to speak. And so, I guess the question I have for you, then Ben is if I'm say a game developer and I want to be able to integrate something like this, how hard is it for me to also set up?

Okay. I want to set up a split to me as the game developer. I want to set up a split to UGC content developer for this so that it's like, if maybe they're spending in the game, then like, Oh, a small cut goes to the musician. But if they're spending like, Hey, I really liked the song, then I get a small cut.

And that the artist gets large. Those kinds of things. Obviously like that's. Sort of the, you know, sort of thing you guys are facilitating, how difficult or easy it is to sort of set up these more custom splits or different payment methods that are not very easy to do, to say the least with traditional payment methods and usually involve ASCAP and all these other things sort of as middlemen, maybe unnecessarily.

Ben: Yeah, that's a good question. So that without sounding overly, it's it really is very simple. One of, you know, one of the core innovations that is part of the lightning network is something called the lightning address. It was actually created by ZBD CTO, Andre. It looks like an email, but it's for money.

So you can pay me at ben at ZBD. ggb. You can pay Sam at Sam at Wavlake, the money will go to both of those wallets easily So if I'm a developer like a game developer And I want to I've got music in my game and I want to make sure that there's a split going to the artist But maybe in certain conditions, there's a split that goes to me you are essentially adding lightning addresses To the payment request or payment demand, and that will that will automatically using our API split that payment and pay all the relevant participants is it's very, very trivial to do.

Think of it like adding CCS on an email. It's, it's super, super simple.

Devin: Well, it definitely sounds like a nice value add in terms of at least people trying to find different ways to monetize, because this is overall does sound a little bit like free to play in a way where you're not charging for admission, but you're also making it so that hopefully those with the means can help you Spend a bit more and sort of compensate for those that are just listening for free or, you know, that through that exposure, bring in other people that might be able to spend a here and there a bit more since I imagine there are a number of people who are actively spending, at least initially, maybe sort of feeling things out first.

But one question I definitely have is, I think it's kind of. May be important these days, especially with what Spotify has been going through, even through sort of different licensing things and, and fake labels and things like that, which is around AI policies and things like copyright enforcement, meaning like, , you know, if I'm, if I'm generating AI versions of, of stuff, is that going to be acceptable or people do people have to do disclaimers sort of what's the policies around that.

But also like if I sampled music or I have any form of copyright infringement. What is the, you know, the platform's responsibilities around that? Are you just like, Hey, we'll just get DMCA. I know those are kind of two questions, but they are a little related, especially around AI.

Sam: Yeah, I mean, so as far as AI goes, I mean, we definitely have AI music being uploaded to Wavlake.

I mean, when I say that, I just mean. Sort of people have made prompts and created what are essentially meme tracks, you know, kind of for various around various things. I mean, we, we do see a lot of Bitcoin themed music and, and Wavlake, which is fine, you know, and we've had mixed, mixed reviews and we've discussed the AI music at length on our podcast waveform where we're, you know, we're not like huge fans of it because we're musicians ourselves.

So we like to see people creating music and. Anyway, I won't go off on that tangent, but yeah, that stuff is there. I mean, if something is like, as far as everything else goes and copyright guidelines, we have, we have just basic copyright guidelines that are essentially SoundCloud or, or Bandcamp or anywhere really, which is yes.

If you upload music, that's not yours. We're going to take it down. People have been doing that on for years on all the platforms, especially like, you know, back, back in the day when Taylor Swift wasn't on Spotify, there was a huge problem with people uploading fake Taylor Swift music and, you know, there's just take down requests.

And so we just monitor that right now. It's very, very manual. We don't have music being uploaded at such a rapid pace. Pace that we don't see it. So we're just really tracking that stuff. We do a pretty good job at verifying artists are who they say they are. We get really excited. I mean, we listen to everything that comes through.

So we get really excited when we see. Someone who seems to be sort of, maybe a little bit larger artist out there checking out socials and whatever. So we'll go and do some very manual verification and be like, Hey, we saw you're on Wavlake. Is this actually you? And, you know, a couple of times it hasn't been.

And, but it usually is. And that's really exciting because then we get to communicate with them and walk them through the process if there's any confusion on it. So, yeah, we're just really careful about that, you know, soon enough, we will be automating that in the same ways that all the other distribution platforms do, which is essentially just works like, you know, Shazam would work or something.

And things, things will get white labeled by artists who, you know, in the same way major labels have to do that on YouTube and stuff, it'll happen in the same way. So we're not super worried about that. Luckily, so many of these problems that we will face down the road as we scale have already been solved by other streaming services.

So we can just follow suit.

Devin: And from what I understand, looking at the platform as well, like you guys aren't just hosting music and just having music in podcasts. You also have podcasts on the platform as well, since it's just an audio platform and it, there are like a number of tools now, like notebook LM.

And I believe there, you know, there's more coming out around being able to sort of create podcasts using AI. On different topics and things like that. This does seem like potentially an interesting way to maybe monetize those in, in a different way. Then obviously you're not going to probably get those on Spotify very easily.

And if you do, you're probably not going to monetize well off those and, you know, the podcast typically monetize off of sponsors, which is obviously different than music, right? Music's going to monetize usually off of either streaming or trying to sell or performing in some way. Whereas podcasts generally have to do it through, okay, we're going to have to have sponsors interjecting in there and things like that.

Maybe this is an alternative, whether it be AI generated or not, but I just mean like that general idea of being able to monetize in some alternative ways. Have you seen people using this, you know, pretty broadly for podcasts or alternative monetization? Now that podcasts are so popular.

Sam: Yeah, so we didn't start out with, with podcasts, but people just started uploading them and they was getting kind of mixed in with the music, which, so we just, we literally just created the podcast section just to filter that out of the music stuff.

And so, yeah, we don't, we don't really have a lot of tools there for podcasters outside of the music podcasters. So that's something that we are pushing for. So when we created that section, we, we, we sort of did that in tandem with like, Hey, you know, you can upload a podcast if you want to, you're not going to, this won't be optimal.

I don't know why any, I really, truly don't know why anybody would, because Yeah, That we just have such little to offer them as far as, you know, other podcasting hosts comparably comparatively. But we do have a lot to offer for the music stuff. So you can very simply pull music into your podcast and, and, and upload a music podcast and music broadcast.

If you think of it as almost like a, you know, a music broadcast, a DJ show. I want to DJ. I want to, I want to put these songs in here. So you sort of have to do that in the, in like the post production, you know, maybe put that together in a very old school way. We do see, we do have some ideas and being able to do this more and more of a live environment, but, We do incentivize people to put music in their podcast.

And if they do that, we have some very simple tools for doing that. You know, it's like I included this, I can search the library, drop it in, put the timestamp on it. And then that way of music, or if money comes in to that podcast while the track is playing, we make sure it goes to the artist. And by the way, and we also offer splits to the artists themselves.

So that's another, we'd sort of talked about like how you could split out, you know, give money to the, The in gaming and, you know, various other things too. But when, when an artist uploads a track to wave, like they also have the opportunity to create splits there on the spot. So you could, you know, throw in the drummer or throw in the record label, throw in the publishing company.

And so if someone sends a dollar that gets split instantaneously as well. So, between anyone who's involved in that track. So we offer that today now too. So that's, that's something that will be very easy to implement because the technology is already there. You basically just have to sort of implement it for the other.

Devin: That makes a lot of sense. Definitely something I imagine people will play around with. I, I am kind of curious too, like whether or not there's been any sort of reaction to drive people to this sort of platform after the, the whole thing that we got revealed with the licensing policy for DJs on Twitch.

It's like been part of some controversy and then it sort of. Like long battle to try and figure something out there, because that's typically music that you're going to find going through licensing things where they have to deal with all of those issues. And you have all of your, you know, things being muted or like on YouTube, where you're getting copyright strikes and potentially losing your channel.

Like all those sorts of things are sort of fraught with peril in terms of trying to just DJ with, but I mean, in the topic of DJ, I'm kind of curious, is there any particular music genres or types of things that you're seeing More prevalent on the platform that sort of either just makes sense for it or just happened to have been where people outside of like Bitcoin related stuff and that sort of crypto thing.

Sam: Outside of that, no. I mean, it's a very wide variety. We're seeing a lot of, I mean, I guess if anything, I would say international music because they don't really have access. Um, and the money goes a lot further. So we have a lot of artists in Africa. You know, if they're making 50 bucks a month on Wavlake, that, Okay.

That goes really far for them, so you see, you're seeing people kind of flock to this in ways, or, you know, it's not that they don't have access. To other music distribution platforms. They do, but they don't have the ability to get that money quickly. So it's really cool. It's an artist called man like quacks.

He's very prolific on Wavlake and has uploaded a lot of music. You know, he pays his electric bill on, on Wavlake every month with wave like money every month, which is really cool to, to see that happen. You know, this is, this is very real for a lot of people. I mean, I think when a lot of people think about, about Bitcoin, they think of like, Crypto bros and gains and, you know, just whatever, you know, Elon Musk or something.

I don't know what people think about but they don't think about people who like don't have banks in other countries and don't have access to money for their art. And certainly not any kind of expedited way. So that's something that we see a lot of. And it's really incredible to see that. I mean, and yeah.

I mean, there are artists that have single handedly on boarded dozens of other artists in these other countries in these communities because of that reason. They're like, Hey, nephew, you know, like I'm making money and you're, you're 16 and you're an incredible rapper. You should upload some music and, and I'll, I'll sort of help.

I'll use my platform now to, to tell people that you're here. And so people discover music through, Through these other communities as well. So we're seeing a lot of really cool things on that front. Like in like, literally like in villages and stuff, people are doing onboarding lessons to wave like in order to like, this is how you can make money.

This is a creator economy for us now. So, you know, it's starting there. If you're, if we're starting there, that's pretty incredible. And obviously when, once people figure out, um, and stop being scared of the word Bitcoin, and we're not even really, I mean, honestly, outside of you wouldn't even know it really was a Bitcoin thing outside of that, all the Bitcoin music on wave.

Like if it weren't for that, we really do a pretty good job at masking it. We're not really super, Into being evangelists about Bitcoin itself. We don't want to have to explain 15 years of technology to every single person that uses the app. So we're just trying to use it as technology and not kind of strip away the cold elements of it.

Because it's an incredibly useful tool. And so that's what we're, that's what we're primarily, primarily using for. So eventually people, I think, will come around because, you know, if we, if we believe in the technology, we think this will sort of exist in a lot of places, much like all other technology exists that people don't have to really know about it.

It just one day it's on your phone and you see your friend do it and now you're doing, you know, so, we think it's going to get to that point. And we're trying to just make it incredibly easy without having to need the onboarding. And if people can do it in other countries and pay their electric bills with it, I guess we're off to a great start.

Devin: Definitely. Assuming they can, of course, cash it out to an actual bank at some point and deal with all that. But that's a, that's a whole another, it's amazing.

Sam: Yeah. It's like man, like wex does it through a text message on a, on a. On a normal phone, you know, like a, not a smartphone, there's like these really, there's, there's crazy networks for stuff like that.

If there is a will, there is a way people figure it out. You know, if someone, if you have a way to generate revenue across continents, they'll figure out a way to get that off, get that off of Wavlake.

Devin: Well, excellent. I mean, speaking of the technology you've mentioned, you know, like non-financial side of things, interaction with the artists and some of that a few times, what kinds of things can they do and how does that work when it comes to interacting?

Outside of just payment. Like I hear the music now I want to do something besides just send the money. What are the things that look like for that? How does the technology platform enable some of that, that sort of thing?

Sam: Yeah, well, we're using another, another open source protocol called Nostr, which is what we're primarily using for the social layer.

And that that's an interoperable thing. So if you know, you create an account. An account. I'm using air quotes for those who aren't on video to create an account on wave. Like you're essentially given an encrypted identity, a universal identity that you can take anywhere. Theoretically, if other places start to enable the option for you to do so.

So, you know, if you're using a client like fountain, which is a podcasting app, Um, you could go log in with the same account that you created over at Wavlake and all the people that you follow will be over there and all this stuff. Everything will just sort of exist and play along really nicely, and there's a lot of really cool stuff that comes with that because it's universal.

If you discover a track on fountain and you, and you comment that on that platform, it'll show up on Wavlake as well. And so you, you start to see this like interoperable community element that's gonna come out of this, where these comments are sort of tracked by this open source protocol and can and it can exist on multiple platforms.

So your social, your social layer is no longer. Siloed in your application. It can be pulled in from various places. So, you know, fountain, when they activated, when they activated Nostra, all of a sudden there was a lot more activity on their tracks when previously it was only the activity that was, that was, that had been established on fountain itself.

Now it's what's, what people are commenting on these social Wavlake and whatever. So that's a really cool thing that's happening, and you know, there's just so many different ways that this can. Be expanded. I mean, we've done concerts. We've done live concerts. We did one in Nashville, ZBD actually sponsored it.

We did one in Nashville and over the summer and we had a few artists play and there was a live stream. And so people were watching this concert from all over the country and giving money to the artists that were performing live as were people just walking around and scanning QR codes and paying for them there and discovering music.

You know, there's going to keep pumping fountain, but fountains really cool. They're doing some cool stuff. They're doing these things called artists takeovers. And, you know, that's another way to just have this connection with artists. Artists are going on fountain and playing music that is being uploaded through Wavlake, but they're playing music in a, in sort of like a, a live playlist.

And then they're communicating on a chat with fans of that music, you know, so long, and there's an artist called longing who's on there today and he was just playing his music. Yeah. And so people were discovering his music while he's in there, like DJing his own set, you know, of his own tracks and communicating with him real time.

And then going over to Wavlake and creating a library now with his, with his music. So that's, you know, I can't stress enough how cool it is that. This stuff is how in a row. I mean, I hate using the word interoperable. It sounds like such a buzzword, but it's just, it truly is like, it just, these music can thrive again because it can exist in so many different places without permission, really?

Fountain did that. I mean, we're friends with the guys at Fountain, but they really sort of did that without permission. Yeah. Needing to talk to us at all. You know, we just had this library and they just tapped into it. And now all of a sudden they're a music app, you know, so we're hoping to see a lot more of that and we're hoping to see a lot of social, a lot more social, um, applications do that as well.

I mean, there's, there's Twitter like Nostra clients that have really cool. Implementations with the Wavlake library as well, where you can, there's embeddable players within the, so your social media feed, yeah, there's, there's, I mean, there's really so much you can do. That's kind of the future is wide open with that stuff.

I mean, it can, when I say it can live anywhere, it truly can live anywhere.

Devin: Well, it's perfect. I mean, that leads into my last question here, which is you're talking about a lot of futuristic stuff. You could do a lot of the things that you could try and work towards with this technology as a platform and things like that.

And obviously it's, it's funny to have all this technology around what is a very old medium of music, and in these different ways to sort of propel it forward, despite the fact that the music itself has only changed somewhat over all these years. But I, I, the question and I'll ask both of you, but I'll start with Sam, which is, you know, looking ahead, what do you see in the future for music distribution, artists, income, music and games, these different ways that sort of all this technology can flourish. I mean, I know you spoke on some of it already, Sam, but just what do you see kind of looking forward to this?

Sam: Well, I just see putting the power back in the hands of the artists, you know, that's just somewhere where it hasn't existed.

I mean, there's like an actual glimmer of hope now for that not just having to tap into your super fans not having to hustle super hard in order to squeeze every last penny out of your 10, 000 fans that are supporting you, but be able to just create music and, and put it out in a place that's able to be monetized in a very, very Normal way without having to worry about someone else getting in the middle of it and determining what that rate should be and how quickly it should come to you.

So the future looks really bright. I mean, I think literally every single artist that I've had the pleasure to talk to that has just been excited about Wavlake has, has told me that's like the number one thing that they say is I just, I didn't think that there was any way that this was You know, I just didn't think this is mind blowing to me that, I mean, that I can make a hundred dollars in a week.

I mean, to a lot of people that doesn't seem like a lot of money, but it's very difficult to make a hundred dollars streaming music. It's almost impossible, statistically. So for someone who's literally never made a penny on streaming service to be on a streaming service, to be able to come on and upload a track from a different country and instantaneously, you know, through, through the community, just discover that they're, all of a sudden able to generate revenue and they're finding a community that's really powerful.

And so that's only going to get stronger. And, you know, we have 10, 000 songs and a thousand artists on there right now, and that's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. I mean, we're very proud of it, but in the grand scheme of what's out there. It's, it's nothing, you know, so we have a long way to go. So I'm very hopeful for how much better that's going to get.

And, I think we're going to see a lot of artists making some really cool music again, because they're going to be supported finally.

Devin: Well, cool. Sounds like just the beginning for you guys. Ben, same question to you.

Ben: Yeah, I do. I mean, Sam mentioned Nostra and I think that is, it might be something new for your listeners.

Um, but I'd highly encourage folks to look at it. It's, it's heavily backed by Jack Dorsey. Having left Twitter, he has devoted tens of millions to it and said that it's the protocol he wished he had built when he, when he founded Twitter, you know, that ability to have. An ecosystem where your content and your followers come with you no matter what platform you log into Is really really powerful It means when someone rage quits YouTube and moves to twitch or vice versa All the videos all the followers everything completely like you don't actually care because it's all distributed openly, this is this sounds futuristic, but it exists today Nostra, the protocol itself has hundreds of thousands of users act like active users.

It's a little bit behind Blue Sky, but it's a, you know, they're very different propositions. Nostra is multi content. It's not a Twitter clone. It supports music. It supports video. It supports whatever. And payment rails are built right into it. So I think what you're seeing is in a world where, you know, the cost of living is getting increasingly tough and users are expecting to monetize themselves or people who use the internet, like humans, not users are beginning to think about like wanting to make something of the things they put online.

And you look at the growth of Patrion, you look at the growth of only fans, you look at, you know, UGC and fortnight, you look at roadblocks payouts. All of these industries are focused on actually giving people money because earning money now is harder than ever. And these rails and everything Sam is building are that future realized today and on a really surprisingly strong foundation.

That is not going to go away, you know, we, I thought Sam expressed it really well when he said, you know, people are a bit afraid of the word Bitcoin. Maybe that changes over the next five years. Maybe it doesn't, but what one thing has stayed true, which is since inception, Bitcoin hasn't failed or gone anywhere.

And it continues to really upend how we move value and express, you know, like our support and ability to transact economically over the Internet. It's, it's really revolutionizing that continues to do so. And we want to support everything that empowers individuals by enabling them to actually become like free economic agents on the internet.

Devin: Well, cool. It sounds like a lot of good stuff, obviously. Like, I think there's definitely a possibility then for, you know, this, maybe even Nostra to work with, with game mods or UGC content. Outside of just simple, you know, music, things like that. So definitely, I mean, kind of makes me wish we, we had the, the whole thing hooked up here for this podcast.

Right. So we could just send over some Bitcoin right now while listening. So definitely, definitely food for thought there, especially when we're looking at how do you monetize music. A lot of the user generated content in the future that will be very tricky, I think. So there's a lot of possibility here.

A lot of like demonstrating use case, which I think is great, especially when you're talking about people in, you know, other countries, things like that. We, we, you know, when it came to web three games, that was always a big thing of, you know, suddenly people in the Philippines can make money and things like that, and what Sam's saying sounds like a lot of this sort of being enabled for artists and things like that.

So I think there's, there's great potential there. But I want to thank both of you for coming on, Ben, again, especially for coming on second time, always great to hear from you guys are doing really cool stuff, Sam as well. It sounds like you guys are doing fantastic stuff. Definitely have to check out Wavlake.

If you haven't already, we'll of course link in the show notes to the website, as well as to the previous episode with Ben and Paul, for those who didn't catch that and managed to stick all the way through this without listening to that yet, you'll get the prequel when you get to check that out for, for a bit more detail on ZBD and how that works.

So I want to thank you all for listening. To the end of this year, a great discussion. I think a lot of cool stuff happening in the future as always for music, games, technology, crypto here at all kinds of crazy stuff happening in the world. So definitely check all this stuff out, including Nostra. Sounds very interesting as well.

So definitely link to that in the show notes also, if you want to check that out, but thanks for everyone for tuning in and I will catch you guys in the next interview and have a great one.

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