Eli

Tony Lashley, Welcome to the pod! How you doing today?

Tony Lashley

I'm Good. It's very hot in New York City but other than that I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Eli

You made it out of Burning Man alive?

Tony Lashley

Oh no comment on Burning Man. I love everyone who goes, yeah, I don't think I'll be going anytime soon. You never know.

Eli

Yeah, I don't know if it'll still be happening it well yeah, of course it will. Don't let a few heinous tech billionaires keep you down from Burning Man.

Tony Lashley

I also think there's like an interesting parable about social media. I heard it wasn't that bad. And yeah, you know, the way that social media works, it just rewards like extreme opinions on that kind of amplified very quickly. But I heard like they set up cell towers and everybody had internet. So like, you're just chilling on your phone, you know I mean? You could do that in NY.

Trey

When you put the mud to dry like there were things.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, exactly.

Eli

Is this your first pod?

Tony Lashley

No, I've done a few. I think the one that I enjoyed the most. Is this one, of course, I already enjoyed so much. But yeah, I've done Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst. Their podcast in a couple of years ago, two and a half years ago, I actually just saw them in Berlin.

Trey

Oh no way what's she up to?

Tony Lashley

Stay tuned. I don't want to speak on her business. But she has a lot of exciting things in the works. I think they are some of my favorite multidisciplinary artists. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited for whatever they do.

Eli

So that's how you build FOMO right there.

Tony Lashley

Yeah exactly. I know cool people, you know, give me money and all of the things I want.

Eli

Perfect. That's a recipe. So we definitely want to dive into Marine Snow. But before we do that little bit of background on you how you got into the music industry. We're curious. I think our listeners are curious as well. So give us the brief, brief elevator pitch if you would'nt mind.

Tony Lashley

Yeah. So I think a lot of things in my life result from the fact that I am first generation American, and specifically, first generation American where my family's from a very, very tiny island. I think that's had an outsized impact on my life in two main ways. The first is growing up, I felt kind of between cultures very classic Third Culture kid. I felt partially Caribbean but not necessarily fully Caribbean I grew up here. I felt partially American, but not necessarily fully American. I grew up in a very Caribbean household and even being black American, to be honest, was something that I had to figure out. My parents grew up in a majority black, tiny country, my parents from Grenada, used to be the smallest country ever won a gold medal at the Olympics is now the second smallest as of 2021, but it's small. And so they grew up in a tiny majority black country, and they moved to a huge minority black country. And so that experience of being black is very different. And so music was my cheat code and figuring out how it could be any one of those three things fully, and more importantly, how it could be all three of those things at the same time. So I've been a music obsessive since I was about eight or nine years old, my parents could tell you stories of how into music I was. I was the kind of kid who was playing my dad's Carlos Santana CDs so much that I would scratch the CD and my dad and and I went to Barnes and Noble or borders, whichever defunct bookstore chain. Okay, yeah, let me not like slander frustrates at Barnes and Noble unnecessarily, you know. But yeah, we went and got two new copies of the CD and my dad jokingly very seriously was said, This copy is mine. And this copy is yours. Please don't touch my copy. It's so I think that's a good story. Also, when I was in fifth grade, I remember my friend at the time Cape singer left me this very breathless answering machine message saying that he had gotten an iPod. This is 2003, and that I should try to get one too. And I remember the answering machine was like here and I turned to my parents. 90 degrees. I don't want to turn away from the mic and ask them if I could get one and they said Of course not. So I ended up flipping my lunches, my very Caribbean lunches, which were not popular in elementary school, but were much more popular in middle school because I went to very progressive Middle School and yeah, I ended up selling them for $3 a pop $2 for the brown suture kit and 50 cents for the plantain and 50 cents for the vegetables and 15 bucks a week I would save up money to buy my iPod and then my my mom specifically heard through the grapevine that I just wasn't eating lunch for six months and she was so and that's after saving up about 200 bucks. She was so horrified that she just gave me the remaining $100 And that's how I bought my first iPod and then once I bought that I bought I was also the kind of kid who very quickly ran out of iTunes gift cards and started torrenting like 1000s of songs.

Eli

Were you a PirateBay guy or Limewire guy?

Tony Lashley

I was Limewire people don't really remember Bear Share. Bear Share was like underrated Bear Share. It was like the music one in my opinion, but I had to uTorrent had all of Yeah. Youtube to mp3 is like much later. Yeah pure piracy.

Eli

We're talking crime on the pod.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, exactly. Just pure illegal activity.

Trey

I'm shocked. Do you went straight to iPod? Because like I had a RCA lira or something like one of those like little tiny had a one button on it.

Tony Lashley

I wanted to Zoon the Microsoft. Yeah. But yeah, I think when I started saving up the money, I think actually, I just realized I could get the iPod if I had 100 more dollars. So the timer just kept going. So

Eli

Yeah, was this the first gen sorry.

Tony Lashley

I think it was might have been second gen was the first one with the click wheel. Because the first gen had like no click wheel. It was actually four buttons. Yeah. And so yeah, it was the second gen. I also remember, now that I think about it. People at school used to play the games on the iPod, like the breaker game or the music quiz game and kind of wanted those games too. Which is why I wanted the iPod

Eli

My dad has the 1st Gen iPod and I looked at it the other day or a month ago and I was like you can sell this for a lot of money they're going for like

Trey

More than they were.

Eli

I mean, yeah,

Tony Lashley

There's some guy who collects them on the internet. And he's made a lot of money, like he has maybe 1000s. And they're all in pristine condition. He has like pictures of and he has every generation like the colors. It's kind of crazy. So.

Eli

At what point do we refer to those people as hoarders, though?

Tony Lashley

I don't know if you're making money. Yeah, like, you know what I mean, then call me a hoarder.

Eli

We'll take it. Yeah. And this era of digital music physical. Yeah. Very important. Yeah.

Tony Lashley

We can talk about like, why that is. And I think it's an interesting conversation about like, physical music versus digital music and the differences between them. But yeah, a lot of those experiences were really formative to me. And I think that's really when I, I formed a love for music. And then I went to undergrad in Chicago and I went to undergrad in Chicago, in part because I wanted to major in econ in English. And the school that I went to was really good at both of those things. But then also, because I was really interested in Chicago's musical scene, I was interested in very obscure and very noncontroversial rappers like Kanye West. Yeah. But also Lupe Fiasco twist, common rhyme fest. And then there is a rapper from Chicago, if you know, what's your fantasy by ludicrous, the woman on that song as a rapper named Shauna and shot as dad, his Buddy Guy is like a very famous blues musician. And so that kind of exposed me a little bit to that. The fact that Chicago had this whole other rich musical history that I didn't know that much about, it was very exciting to me. And so that was another reason why I was really interested in going to school in Chicago. And so, yeah, I went to Chicago and I definitely explore the blues and jazz scene there. Also, people like Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones are from Chicago. But actually, what I got much more into was electronic music understanding by being there, the black origins of house music, and yeah, it really opened my eyes to the history of electronic music. So I would say that has kind of been my musical journey. I also through concerts when I was in college, I brought a lot of artists that I'm super proud of I'm trying to think of like we brought the first job yeah, the first artist I was about to say is like also very controversial. So I was kind of funny to be like a broad artists that I'm super proud of like, it's got to banks, but

Eli

Slightly less controversial, but for different reasons.

Tony Lashley

I mean, the music is is impeccable, in my opinion. So yeah, but we brought like Sleigh Bells so I'm a huge fan of and I think that sound might come back. I kinda have a feeling it will yeah, we brought Maddie and T-Pain, Ludicrous, Jeremih. Who else am I forgetting, Chance the Rapper, Cashmere Cat, Danny Brown, Neon Indian, Cults. So yeah, that was really what I understood that working in music could be a job and not just a hobby. And so yeah. From there we can talk about my my actual music industry past.

Trey

Well, yeah. So because you I guess you were interested in music more from like, a consumer aspect or did you make music? How did you play instruments?

Tony Lashley

It was always consumption and more identity via consumption. I would say it's really been my interest and community via consumption has been my interest in music. Yeah, I like took piano very briefly. I didn't really have the attention span and be honest to pursue it at that age. I think if I was a little bit older, I probably would have proceeded with much more to do but also it was just something my parents wanted me to do and you're initially always rebelling against that to some degree. just unfortunate. But yeah, and then I was like, I was fucking around with Fruity Loops and like trying to make beats, I did that for a little bit. And then I was like trying to teach myself how to DJ and then did that in college. And so yeah, it was really always though about music as a tool for connecting people and people and music as a tool for people realizing who they are. That was really the appeal to me, I still believe this. But if you were to meet somebody, and you were to ask them what their favorite musicians were also who they've listened to throughout their history, you can paint a very clear life portrait in a way that I don't think you can with really anything else to some degree, other than asking them straight up, like, where did you live where your parents from? I think you can find out a lot of those things, the psychographic demographic data through what people listen to.

Trey

So I'm curious because you've started a new platform called Marine Snow that I want to hear about it. But sort of through the lens of like, why you felt it was so important to start this platform? Like what was the big need for it now? And what does it do?

Tony Lashley

Yeah. I ended up working in Spotify for a couple of years. I also interned for SoundCloud here in New York, actually not that far from here. And yeah, I think a lot of marine snow is informed by my time at both of those places. I think, just to be really honest about it. When I worked at Spotify, I felt like my music tastes got worse, just due to the way that the algorithms work in the filter bubbles work on with the algorithms. And so yeah, I felt and I've always felt this way, but I thought that the people who care about the music the most are the most valuable audience in music. I think that from a financial standpoint, and they're also like my people, you know, and I felt Spotify increasingly trying to cater to the median 50th percentile music listener. And I remember very clearly, for example, there were Spotify made a lot of product decisions that were designed to appeal to the masses and stripped away things that the top two or 3% of music lovers listened to, or use. So one very clear example was DMS. I don't know if people remember that. But you used to be able to DM people on Spotify, and you could share songs with them. And yeah, it was like how I would try to connect with any crushed. Yeah. So yeah, things like that, I thought, didn't really make sense. But I understood why Spotify made those decisions, like the upkeep of those kinds of features doesn't make sense if like point 5% of your user base is using them. But to me that point 5% is a very valuable point 5% financially, and also like culturally and that they're the first domino and affecting a lot of things. So yeah, that's really the thesis behind marine so I think there are a lot of different ways that you could view Greenstone a lot of different lenses. I think one very powerful one is if you look at the data, music fans spend $350 a year in the physical world, going to show was buying vinyl buying merch. And that cheap show. Yeah, Taylor Swift. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah, I forgot those tickets are so expensive, but and by the way that excludes booths, if any of you factored in booze, that's like another 200-300 buckd

Eli

For two beers.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, number is really big. That's like three to three bucks a year. And if you look at Spotify is average revenue per user. It's like 60 bucks, right? And so there's this delta of like, $290, to some degree where music fans spend much more in the physical world, and what we're alluding to than the digital world. I think the reason why that is, from a first principles perspective, is because those goods in the physical world offer a set of psychological values that music, consumers and music fans in particular, are not getting in the digital world. And I would say there are four values. First is a sense of community, right? You go to a show to be around people who care about what you care about. Second is a sense of social status, right? You go to a show, so you can put it on your Instagram story. So you can let people know what kind of person you are. The third is a sense of identity, which is related to social status, but not the same, which is that even if you never signal or use use a show to signal your tastes to other people allows you to feel like you're being you're fully actualized idiosyncratic self. And then the fourth, which I think kind of like amplifies the other three is a sense of scarcity. Right? You go to the Taylor Swift show, in part because I don't think Taylor Swift just toured it like five years. So yeah, I think in a lot of ways marine snow is designed to imbue a digital product with those values with the hypothesis that if you imbue a digital product with those values, then the money that delta can also be ported over.

Trey

But it's not public yet?

Tony Lashley

Public ish. Yeah, it's out. I'm very interested in making Marine Snow aspirational in a lot of ways. And I think you do that through scarcity, just to be really honest. I also think that's a nice antidote to just the way that a lot of digital platforms operate today, which is like on abundance and mass and so it's out but it's waitlist only, you know, there are other

Eli

Private Instagram.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, exactly. Private Instagram, Raya. Whatever. Yeah,

Eli

I'm still waiting. As for Instagram not Raya.

Clara

Exposed. I guess I'm curious. I mean, I know you're still sort of like starting to roll it out. But like is there's anything you've noticed in terms of how people are using it so far? Like, are they using it to, you know, connect with other people who are into the same artists as them? Yeah, and just sort of what that's started to shape up to look like?

Tony Lashley

I think the biggest surprise or biggest takeaway, for me so far, has just been the audience excuse me younger than I anticipated. Marine Snow was originally built for somebody like me or my friends who was once. And I guess I'm a little bit different than what I'm about to say. But once obsessed with music, were like the hipsters on campus, where I went to college, all the hipsters worked for the coffee shops. So like, were worked for the coffee shops prided themselves on having good taste and cultural objects, then life got in the way, maybe they worked for JP Morgan or something, yeah, you know, just spitballing here. And they still in their head thought they had good tastes, but their actual consumption patterns didn't reflect that because they were just too busy to keep up with what's going on in culture. And so Marine Snow was designed for that person who's like 30-35, even 40, for them to be able to quickly jump back in and understand what is at the center of contemporary and critical music culture. What we've realized is it's not for the person who was once the hipster on campus, and is now 30. It's just for the person who's the hipster on campus. And so I would say the audience skews much younger, like 19-20, which is interesting and cool. I think that raises a lot of interesting design thoughts. And the app, the app, the design is maybe I wouldn't say counterintuitive, but unexpected. In some ways. I think it's designed for our audience. And the visual language is very drawn from gaming and things like that. So.

Eli

So you talked about Spotify kind of got rid of the more social elements, and you saw that as a whitespace. So to what extent would you say marine snow is both a platform for music discovery, but also for like, community discovery as well, for you to maybe DM someone or, you know, definitely our music tastes, etc?

Tony Lashley

Yeah, I think that the easiest metaphor and the most apt metaphor that I use for Marines, no, I think there are two one of them, I think, is more humorous than the other. But I, the single comp that I use from Marine Snow the most is Art Basel, right? You go to Basel for two main reasons.

Trey

To party!

Tony Lashley

Exactly. The first is to look at art, yes. Second is to be around people who care about art and to party with them. And I think if you were to take out one of those two ingredients, Basel would lose a lot of its impact, right? If there was no art, and it was just the people, it wouldn't be that fine. And I think if it was the inverse, that would also be the case. And I think that's also true for like a club, that I think a club is the easiest metaphor and a lot of ways and that you go to a club for two main reasons for like music and the people, right. And if you go to a club, you walk in, and the music is amazing. And there's no one there, you leave, right. And if you go to a club, and there's no music, and people are just standing around talking, you also probably leave just as quickly. So I think you need those two things. And I'm really interested in the synthesis of the two things where outlier exclusive cultural objects can be used as use as a catalyst for community and then the community can help inform those cultural objects.

Trey

I think it's interesting because you kind of described your core consumer, I guess, or the person who might use marine snow as this person that sounds exactly like me, like, I'm not gonna flex my tastes and say, I've got great taste, you know, the whole way through, but I definitely come from like a magazine background where I spent a good part of my day either getting pitched artists from PR people, and I would have to like sit through and listen to whole albums to like, determine whether it's worth coverage or whatever. And since then, you know, and because I've just gotten older, I think like, the ability to discover new artists has kind of fallen away, I have less time for it. The algorithm kind of directs me towards like the lowest common denominator music or whatever. And I think that I am sort of in this slump both digitally and I don't even know where to go. physically, like, there's no HMV anymore. There's no, like you're playing borders or whatever. Like, I'm curious if you feel that this ability to discover new artists or what you might like, has fallen away, both in physical and digital spaces, like are things bad bad? Or is it just me?

Tony Lashley

Um, I think you just have more to wade through, right. And so like, the sea has gotten much deeper, right. And I think you just have to be an even stronger swimmer right now than you maybe did in the past. I think if you were an Olympic level swimmer, you can still find stuff. But not everyone can be an Olympic level swimmer. And so I think a lot of what Marine snow is trying to do is bring important cultural objects closer to the shore so that you don't need to be an Olympic like kind of mixed metaphor there in terms of depth and like, going out to see but

Eli

We're choking on algorithmic fumes. We don't have the lung capacity. Was waiting for that one.

Tony Lashley

So yeah, I do think the music climate hasn't gotten any better or any worse. Anybody who says that I don't take seriously to be really honest. There's always good music, there will always be good music short of like nuclear apocalypse.

Eli

Short of Burning Man.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, even even Burning Man has like good music, you know, you just have to go way out in the desert to find it sometimes. But yeah, I'm reaching that age where a lot of friends are like, yeah, music is not the way that it once was when I'm like, it's just bullshit. You're just at a different phase of your life. And you don't have the time.

Trey

Or don't have time. Yeah. You know, I know there are more. There's more good artists now probably than ever before, because of the access to be able to create music in the same way that it's the same for film. Like, there's so many good films right now. But because there's 1000 films on every 1000 streaming platforms, I'm like, I feel so paralyzed. I don't even know where to begin. Like, there's he said, there's so much more to wade through.

Tony Lashley

And I think that's importance of curation and brand, right? Like I think in film, it's the reason why A24 like cuts through, right? Yeah, because people know if A24 has a perspective, they have taste, it's no different than like movie or criterion or even HBO Premax, right? Like, when something was on HBO, you were much more likely to check it out, because you knew that it's probably stood for something and that HBO just had very high standards for what they put out, right. And so I think that's really the value and importance of curation and having curation embedded in a platform. So that's really...

Eli

How do you build that then?

Tony Lashley

I think a lot of it starts, maybe at like a philosophical level, I'm really interested in the notion of having the best music in the world. And I think the way that you do that is by minimizing bias in a lot of ways. I think the way that you minimize bias is by synthesizing top down curation, and bottoms up curation. I do think you need the voice of experts, critics, all experts, and critics are people who spent a lot of time thinking about one thing, and I don't think that's a bad thing, right? I think the role of a really good expert is to show how something you may not have thought had value actually does have value and to be early on new forms of value. Right. And I think that's fundamentally a good thing. And I think if we didn't have that, for example, and we was just a bottoms up curation that it would be pure populism, right. And then the artists who created the most noise or who were like the most visually attractive would probably went out as much as like, the weird artists who didn't have social media and that is a bad thing.

Eli

Is that how you get the like RNC weirdos who saying, like, rich men of the Northmen or whatever, topping the charts, you know? Yeah, not aesthetically pleasing, but you know, make the most noise type thing?

Tony Lashley

I don't know that one, I actually think, is really interesting. I think that guy is speaking to a segment of the large segment of the American population that don't have good or even like, decent content made for that. Right, like, and so I think, anytime you have something that speaks to a more conservative audience, that's even like remotely good, it will do pretty well, because that, like the people who make cultural objects don't really cater to those people.

Eli

So it's like, I mean, we can circle back on the politics. Yeah, very briefly, but it's like they say like, politics is downstream of culture. Yeah, culture is not dominated by conservatives. Although now because there are like, you know, smaller niche streaming or social and podcast pockets that do cater to that audience. I suppose some of it is but yeah, I mean, that's a good point.

Tony Lashley

Yeah. And I think specifically in music, that audience is not really spoken to right film and in like, commercial, like, what's the right word, but high production value content that audience has spoken to and like user generated content? On YouTube, right? Like, yeah, it's a big audience like the right wing YouTube world, the right wing Twitter world, just that they're not used to having like polished cultural objects made for them. And so when they do have one that speaks to them, you never heard of it. Yeah, most of that guy pulls a lot of tricks to like, get to where, yeah, number one. He's like a very savvy, music industry marketer, in a lot of ways. And there are a lot of tricks and levers that you can pull to move up the Billboard charts around on the laying around, he actually specifically had people buy the iTunes version of the song, I don't know if you read the New York Times about it. But yeah, that because the charts are really the way that they're constructed. They're designed to be reflections of revenue. So a download is worth, like 200 streams. So if you get and it's very savvy and very smart, you realize that 99 cents, or $1.29, whatever it is, now, doesn't mean that much to any one person, but it it holds the weight, like I said, of 200-300 streams, and so you can jump, or you have to all you have to have is like 1/300 the streams, right? Where if you convert those to downloads, so he did a lot of really smart things, also that this kind of how like K-Pop has really succeeded, like in mobilizing your fans to move the needle on your commercial success as like a political statement. And, or as like an aesthetic statement was really, really interesting and really, really powerful.

Trey

From the artists point of view, because I know you are obviously well connected and like speak to a lot of people who are probably both like really high up in their career, but also trying to break out at the moment, I was kind of talking earlier about this person who I won't name but like a new artist emailed me recently, and was like, guy, you know, I get the random pitch or whatever, from a PR person still, even though I don't write much anymore, but somebody reached out was like, Oh, hey, can you check on my song, like, it's on Spotify, or whatever now? And you know, I just didn't reply, or whatever. But he like circled back and was like, Hey, I realized this came late on a Friday, like, Do you have a chance to hear my music, like, I used to work with Roy Blair, and like, blah, blah, and I, you know, I listen to the song and like, it's good and stuff, but I was like, whatever I can do for you, which is very little. But whatever I can do for you will not mean anything. Because like, I just, there's no the barrier to entry. I guess it's just so high now. Like, whether you get articles written about you, or you get, like, you know, gamify, whatever audience you have to get your streams up in that chart, whatever. I just feel like how do you approach it or see it from? How hard it is now? Or is it harder for an artist to kind of break through,

Tony Lashley

I think it's about the same. I think most things in life, end up being pretty net netting out specifically being pretty neutral. I think technology has been a real help in getting a certain class of artists discovered. And it's also been a real hindrance in that it's just created like a plethora of music, and then it makes it much harder to cut through the noise. So yeah, I think what you care about as an artist can also vary pretty dramatically. I think artists tend to care about three different things. And that's kind of any work that I've done with artists is really, to help them identify what they care about a lot of ways and understand that. You can't have your cake and eat it too. And that there are trade offs to some degree, if you care about one thing, it comes at the expense of something else sometimes. So yeah, I think artists care about reach. artists want a lot of people that know their music, right? They care about revenue, they want to make money, right. But then the third thing that I think a lot of artists care about that is really hard to quantify. And as such, I think has been forgotten from a lot of discourse around creators, artists is what I would call resonance, which is that artists don't just want a lot of people to be familiar with their work. They want the people that are familiar with their work to feel deeply about their work, right? It almost is worse, to have somebody know who you are, and not give a fuck than to not know who you are right? So I'm really interested in that concept of resonance, and how do you help artists form deep relationships with an audience? I think part of it is just you identified the people who are most likely to form those deep relationships, which are just the people who care the most about music, which is if you can get them all in one platform that I think it's a really good thing for artists.

Eli

We're gonna blow past another segment. That's okay. Because I want to ask you a question about I can't belive I'm saying this, but I want to like what do you think about TikTok because I feel like Tiktok has now starting to, at least they were more passively involved in music and you know, helping artists get more space. Spotlight I suppose and now they're making a bigger push into streaming. And being thought of as a streaming platform, maybe not in the US now but in other countries in Europe and South America, but like yeah, what are your thoughts on music on TikTok rather in like the music industry as a whole and its impact there.

Tony Lashley

Um, I feel about TikTok the way that I feel about a lot of social media, social media platforms, which is that it's all about tuning the algorithm, right and being as intentional and lean forward in your consumption as possible, rather than lean back and being spoon fed, right? I think them enabling people to be spoon fed and mindlessly looking at things is a bad thing. But them enabling people to be hyper specific about what they're into and find these weird pockets that express portions of people's identities that they didn't even know they had is a good thing. Right. And so yeah, TikTok is doing interesting things in the music streaming world. I think it's a quite different audience. Because I think that tick tock consumer, like I said, it's a much more lean back consumer for the most part. Yeah, I'm interested in what they're doing. I'm actually much more interested in how TikTok has changed music aesthetics, in terms of slowing songs down or speeding them up or shortening songs or like, specific weird genres, or maybe not weird but genres that you wouldn't expect to be big getting big, like funk music, or like hardstyle music. So yeah, that's really much more my interest in TikTok but they're the most, I would actually say that the second most important platform and music I think YouTube is still number one. I think music, YouTube is a unique place that allows you to both reach a huge amount of people there a billion people use YouTube every day. And also like world build and tell your story in an effective manner. I think it's really hard to do that 30 second video on TikTok, when you control the video length. And I think for one, the longer video formats just mean that you can do more interesting things. And then two, you just have more room to tell your story. So yeah, I think after YouTube, TikTok is the most interesting, most important platform in music. But yeah, I'm much more interested in like I said, I'm how those platforms affect aesthetics.

Clara

I'm also curious from like, kind of a TikTok creator standpoint, like separately from people who are musicians. And maybe you guys are familiar with these types of folks, too. But there will be, you know, TikTok creators who are, you know, one of the girls that I follow, she works at NTS or like, does work with NTS. And so she will do a TikTok video that's like my top five songs of July or whatever. And she's kind of like running through. Some of them are contemporary, some of them are oldies and then she'll put them all on like a playlist, like whether it's on her SoundCloud or on her Spotify. But she's kind of like Spotify famous. I was like, where she has like all of these followers and she's like, parlayed that TikTok audience into this music platform. And then you is her sort of follower also kind of get to, like, this sounds bad, but like capitalize on her taste, you know, it's like, you can put her playlist on at your party. And it's kind of, I don't know, it's like, cool. And it's like, oh, yeah, like she works at NTS. And it's like, a fun, fun thing. So I'm kind of curious at all, like, if you have, I don't know, like a point of view on that, but also to the extent and we talked about this too, but that TikTok has done a lot to kind of revive older tracks and older songs, but has been kind of, I don't know, an interesting place for new artists to break out like, obviously, some people have, but more of a statement? I guess?

Tony Lashley

No, no. Yeah, for sure. I think it's sick that people can gain an audience based on having interesting tastes and different tastes. I do think there's a difference between curation and taste. In a lot of ways, in my opinion, and tastes, display, let's call it that and that I think curation and economics are very linked together in a lot of ways. And I think curation is as much about what you don't have as what you have. And so I think identifying a set of songs within the Walmart of music that is Spotify is not really curation. I would say, in my opinion, I think I think it's like taste display, which is very closely related to curation. But part of the Marine Snow model is that we pay artists upfront for 90 Day exclusivity around the music. And so I think that forces us to be very selective and very restrained in what we choose to identify, like, I think the incentives of platforms like TikTok and a lot of digital platforms today would just be to recommend a lot. It's quantity right? Like, if she made five videos a day, she would be even better off making 10. Right? And then I think he starts to lose very quickly like what it actually means to curate. And so I think, to me, there's a minimalism that comes with curation that I don't think is embedded in the incentives of most digital platforms for the most part. But nevertheless, I do think Marine Snow is designed to have all of those people talking about music. And I also think that TikTok is very much like a broadcast medium, for the most part, right? There are comments or things like that. But it's not about like peer to peer conversation. It's about like one person, conveying whatever they want to convey. And it's one directional. So yeah, I'm much more interested in the bidirectional conversations. And then I'm also interested in those conversations, informing decisions that are made with limited resources around music. So whether that's money or like, if you have five slots to highlight, like a week, that's much more what I'm interested in than like kind of the freeform taste displays. I would also say that the incentives of those kinds of platforms are very linked to I don't know if I would use this word per se, but like, extreme opinions, right? Like, I think the today's digital media environment in general, just towards like, very intense or very, like polarized. That's the word I was looking for. Thank you. Opinions. And so I think I'm not sure that you can really recommend something subtle or interesting. On a platform like TikTok in like a very thoughtful way I think you can to some degree, but I think there's a limit, I guess, is what I'm saying. Right? Like, if this NTS lady, recommended person I have actually already I just chatted with them, I have no idea. Recommended like a noise song to you. Or like the harshest music you've heard in your life. I think he would be kind of like disgusted. Maybe in a way, maybe not, maybe not you but like, somebody in their audience might like, not want to continue to listen to that person if they hear something they hate. And I'm kind of interested in a platform that you can also have things that some people might hate. And I don't think you can really do that in today's social media environment.

Trey

Like sit in your discomfort of it you know.

Tony Lashley

And like, feeling discomfort is feeling something and feeling something is really important for the definition of like good music doesn't have to be a good feeling all of the time. You know, I think there's that viral post. Have y'all seen that going around on Twitter of like, good art versus bad? Yeah, that like, makes you feel bad. It's just kind of funny. But I think bad art is often like good art, if it makes you feel really strongly one way or another. And I guess, my point is that I don't I'm not sure that today's social media platforms allow you to do that. And then also, the final point that I would make is, even if they do allow you to do that, once you get known for a certain thing on today's social media platforms, it's very hard to deviate from that, right? If you're known for like having a little bit of indy UK electronic tastes plus a little bit of whatever old R&B taste plus a little bit of indie rock, electro clash taste. Once you're known for that thing, you become kind of crystallized into that, that thing, and it becomes very hard for you to then recommend, like I said, the I don't know the Dabka Lebanese music, right? Because your audience is formed around what you've previously like. So yeah, that's kind of the point around like minimizing bias in a lot of ways when we were talking about curation. I don't think today's digital media platforms really do that. I think they enhance bias in a lot of ways because of the incentive structures of the platform. So yeah, you can have somebody cool on NTS and on TikTok and be known for a certain thing, but I'm interested in how do you have a variety of people where each person might have a bias, but together, their biases might cancel out to some degree.

Eli

Once you're known for eating liver and raw meat, you can deviate?

Tony Lashley

That's right. Yeah, exactly. Then you just start taking steroids. Exactly. Yeah.

Clara

Slippery slope.

Eli

Yeah well, great way to close this out. I wish we could talk for longer, but before we do, where can our audience find you? Where can they learn more about Marine Snow on social or Marine Snow in general?

Tony Lashley

Yeah, the website is marine-snow.co. The Instagram is Marine and then with five underscores Snow.

Eli

Make them work for it.

Tony Lashley

Yeah, exactly. Honestly, a little bit. You know, I'm a big believer in certain points of intentional friction. Yeah, but I mean, not everything has to be frictionless. So yeah, I am on Twitter or Instagram and Instagram. You can find me on those things. I don't believe in like self promotion, so you're gonna have to find me there.

Eli

It's actually not even called Twitter anymore. So...

Tony Lashley

Exactly nor do I want to like, shout out these platforms. You know, give them free money and attention. But yeah, those are the places if you type in Marine Snow and music, you'll find some things in the App Store. You'll find some things on Google

Trey

Asking for a friend. How do you unlock the waitlist for anyone who is waiting on it?

Tony Lashley

Oh, it's pretty random. I'm gonna be honest. I don't really think about it, which is f**ked. But yeah, it will just happen from time to time. Yeah, exactly. We've actually just deprioritize as we speak in real time. It'll happen. I want it to feel like kind of random and serendipitous and put, yeah, it'll happen soon.

Eli

Cool. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. Appreciate it.

Tony Lashley

Thank you for having me. It's it's great. And I enjoyed it a lot. Yes, great convo. Thank you. Best podcast ever.

Eli

Full Circle. Yo, thanks for tuning in. Stay up to date with all things day one of them by subscribing to our page on Spotify, following us on Instagram @d1a, and staying up to date with the latest trends and insights on d1a.com/perspective.