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Music Village® Tuesdays 6 : ft. Special Guest Orange Gooey July 1 2025
Recorded: July 1, 2025 Duration: 1:22:54Space Recording
Short Summary
The Music Village is launching a groundbreaking social audio platform that integrates blockchain technology, partnering with Orange Gooey to enhance community engagement. The Blank Canvas initiative aims to empower independent artists with innovative fundraising and revenue-sharing models, fostering a growth-oriented ecosystem in the music industry.
Full Transcription
And we're rolling on.
Hey, there's Suzanne.
Hey, good to see you, Suzanne.
Please do come up.
Esther Ibrahim, who set this space up all those seven weeks ago.
Good to see you, Esther.
Come up if you'd like and shout out Foods and Frack, who are members of the Tang Gang,
who is inspired by Orange Gooey, who is going to be the special guest today.
Looking forward to that.
I'm sure Gooey will be here very shortly and Ken as well. So
yeah, this is Music Village, a weekly space about music inspired by really
chia music and the idea that we need a metaverse or a spoken audio environment to discuss a new musical system that is my ultimate goal
and along the way creating a social media network which at Music Village that's that's what uh
we're building towards so we're getting the campfires going via Twitter basically so uh yeah uh
I think that I thought Ken just came up there yeah a little bit of Pink Floyd
news I was talking to Ken last week about Pink Floyd the reform Pink Floyd plans which are
basically Ken didn't fully realize which was quite interesting he was not here the week that I talked about my plans for reform Pink Floyd
which I mentioned sporadically and he was not aware of it so we had a quick
chat last week and yeah he was intrigued by it he was he said he would write some pieces or a couple of uh articles on it perhaps and so yeah we'll uh we'll
see uh pink floyd's dark side of the moon it's gone up in the charts this week i think it's back
in the top uh i think it was a top hundred so i thought that that was uh pretty cool so uh yeah
if anyone wants to come up and chat,
hopefully GUI will be here soon.
I'll send him an invite.
I think that Ken as well.
Let me just send him the, boom.
There's the man himself and the lady herself, Suzanne Niles, is coming up.
We got orange dewy.
Here he is.
Well, welcome to the stage, Suzanne. Welcome to the stage. Here he is.
Well, welcome to the stage, Suzanne.
Welcome to the stage.
Orange Gooey.
I think he's there.
Maybe it's just refreshing.
Hey, Suzanne.
Hey, Gooey.
Welcome to the stage.
Mic check, mic check.
Good morning.
Good morning. Good morning.
Awesome. Edward, are you able to hear me?
Loud and clear. You sound bright.
Well, welcome to the stage. It looks like everyone is here.
Shout out Bullish in the audience audience ken is in the audience so yeah
just a very brief intro for the people who've not heard of music village space before this is a
weekly space to try and network in the world of music leading to a social media platform called
music village launching which will be a social audio environment to compete with twitter that's
music village ken is a music journalist and he's been working in
music for a few decades now Ken's well I'll send him an invite to come and
speak and this is really a networking event so I thought what a brilliant time
to invite our special guest orange gooey who is really been, I'll say the one of or slash delete the best,
one of all the best community builder in Chia, which is a blockchain, Bitcoin too.
And so music, blockchain, NFTs, we're talking about new technology.
So I thought it'd be great to have a meeting of minds and get Gooey on the stage,
ask him some questions, tap into his wonderful brain, technology. So I thought it'd be great to have a meeting of minds and get Gooey on the stage,
ask him some questions, tap into his wonderful brain and also, you know, introduce him to Ken,
Ken introduce him to Suzanne, Suzanne to cook his blood, you know how networking goes. So welcome to the stage, Orange Gooey. Well, thank you for the warm welcome, Edward. I'm
happy to be here. I'm waking up a little bit, but I'm trying to slam the caffeine as fast as possible without drawing any particular amount of attention to myself while doing it.
This Music Village idea sounds really cool. I'm actually just coming into it, but I know some of your networking from the past, especially around the music industry.
So this is exciting. I'm happy to kind of meet everybody and uh share ideas and see whatever uh comes of it
and welcome thank you very much gooey that's awesome we've got quite a big audience today
that's all down to gooey he brings the people hey ken good to see you I'm happy to be here. I'm interested in hearing some and listening.
For the most part, I do not know a lot of what we're going to talk about,
but I don't know what we're going to talk about.
So we will discover together, I guess.
Yeah. Ken, how was your week?
My week was good.
I had multiple interviews that I had to get done with musicians.
For people who don't know what I do, I interview musicians in popular music and jazz.
And I, I mean, I write about popular music.
Let me put it that way.
And so it was a busy week.
And we obviously have a lot going on in the world.
And so, yeah, I mean, I am very well.
And it's just, I just do my job.
Let me put it that way sometimes.
And I listen to a lot of music.
That's the way I spend my week.
Yeah, well, here we are.
We're all there.
Suzanne, welcome to the stage.
How was your week?
Oh, my week was very busy.
I'm tangled up in a day job and desperately wishing I could do more with my music avocation.
So no big news there.
Suzanne has worked with Wes Kuzma for quite a long time now.
She's very musical. She was married to a famous musician.
And yeah, so he's a standout, shining example
of really how to build a community
in this strange world of web three,
the internet and digitally.
So yeah, I guess I'm curious uh really is do you have a philosophy
on how to build community gooey what's your inspiration like how did you come to be so good
at it just uh be authentic um be yourself unapologetically yourself there's no sense
in building a community that you have to pretend to be someone you're not
to participate in. It's much more fun to have people that are willing to accept you for who
you are and are able to participate as who they are. We're not always going to see eye to eye.
We're not always going to agree on everything, but it's a lot easier to uh stay and sort of sustain an effort if you don't have
to compromise every day about who you are when you show up um but i tell me some more about music
village this sounds really interesting and i probably have some uh things in the works that
are developing that you might not even know about and i i'm
thinking that this uh could possibly be compatible awesome yeah i see music village as a
uh campfire ground for spoken audio conversations without a need for a host. So to fix, as Wes said, to fix the session initiation problem of needing
a host for spaces, I have the idea of a campfire where you can join it. And perhaps each campfire
is controlled by a different influencer or a different person, that kind of thing. And
to then have a private building that is launched later, and that would be the site of audio pay-per-views
so it'd be a free audio environment but influencers could also host paid for events
kind of like uh when i see those like um pbs tiny desk i think they call it that's like a
physical studio where people perform but there's probably it sounds like with music village there's like a internet
based campfires where people can go and talk is that it well tiny desk tiny desk basically is the
um npr national public radio oh yeah my bad npr no no it's okay. That is where they have performers, you know, play in the studios in Washington, D.C.
But it's behind a desk.
It basically started in which they could strip everything down and play before maybe like 50, 60, 60 people.
Most of the people who are just in the uh in the uh npr studios and uh yeah i mean
that that's more that is very has become musical that has become basically the musical launching
pad for a lot of young bands uh but obviously they have major bands that you know and major
artists play there and um yeah i mean i i that's an interesting idea in which it's more of a forum.
I think Edward's trying to create a forum for everyone and hopefully maybe have a musical
forum, I guess.
Yeah, exactly that.
The way I see it is that to have a musical revolution, you need to
have a place where you can talk about the revolution as it's happening. And I just see
a day that Twitter's censored, turned off, I'm banned, a musician is banned. So if I
could run a social media site and I can make sure no one censored, that's a big step in
the direction of, well, now we've, as you said, you said ken a forum that's a great word yeah so
if you don't mind edward um the the project that i'm working on it's kind of a long-term project
of mine it it involves the ability to provide access to these decentralized forums if you will
access to these decentralized forums, if you will.
We can incorporate technology as simple as a QR code
to give people basically permissioned access to a platform
that we could create or host.
We could use things like, you know,
once Michael Taylor's had a chance to get DigNode kind of fully fleshed,
we can use DigNode as one layer of censorship resistance
but we could also probably incorporate um for this for what you're building sounds like drax
rocket layer would probably be a really strong instantaneous connection network with censorship
resistant qualities um but let me let me keep getting the caffeine flowing and just chatting with you this morning.
But I'm already able to see things that in my mind kind of feel like a campfire forum with multiple outposts to choose from.
I could foresee structured conversation fires.
I could see free flow fires, I could see live performances, permission to access for affordable entry costs, probably less than a concert ticket, probably be able to access live performance and recorded performance content for way less than you would in the current Ticketmaster world.
I could see free flow fires.
Yeah, absolutely. I love the way that you saw all the different possibilities there. current like Ticketmaster world.
Yeah, absolutely.
I love the way that you saw all the different possibilities there,
like silhouetting back into the background.
And yeah, that's a key thought I've had is should it be influencer-based,
like one person controls the site or the campfire, sorry,
one campfire, or should it be topic-based?
I think you could do both.
You could do both, right?
So that you get the world of some people are going to want a little bit more of the talking stick leader.
They might want to show up because of the person
that's hosting that fire, but then other people might say,
hey, we're all capable of holding our own
and these are more open-ended conversations,
less kind of content being delivered from a host.
So why don't we all just go into this neutral fire
where we're all kind of understood to be on level footing,
whereas maybe in the Orange Gooey Village campfire,
it might be a lot of Orange Gooey talking,
a lot of other people listening.
So campfire without hierarchy.
Yeah, just to have something that's a little more neutral base.
You know, it's these clowns out here on the Internet.
the internet every all of us can run a show but that doesn't mean any of them are good right um
All of us can run a show, but that doesn't mean any of them are good.
Right.
and it's sometimes you find that you just got to keep the fire going long enough for some folks to
kind of warm up to the idea of sharing their thoughts and then you're like wow how did we
we almost missed all of this if we didn't kind of coax them out into the discourse we would
have never known about these perspectives and it turns out they've got some dank ones. That's what I do a lot in my spaces.
Even Joe Rogan identified this pretty early on
when he started doing podcasting.
To have meaningful discussions about complex ideas,
it probably takes like three hours, maybe more,
just to allow ideas to unravel
and for the talking stick to go back and forth a hundred
times and then get to the real meat and potatoes. So having that, like I'll run spaces and I'll be
talking up there by myself for two or three hours and then it kind of eventually hooks somebody
and they come up and it could evolve into another two or three hours of of spaces once the conversation gets flowing and there's something truly magical about one of those conversations
when it just it's almost it's ephemeral you're just there and you're in it and it's yeah it's
almost like you could have missed it it's like digging out a gem from the ground, I guess.
And it's just keeping the conversation going until it gets to that point.
Yep.
And that can be the tricky part.
That's a big part of it, too.
A lot of folks, I don't do structured how many hours, how many days,
how many spaces, how many posts, how many hours how many days how many spaces how many posts how many means
um again it's just raw me out here out here you're not getting any kind of like uh
secondary motives and so some people they ask me how to run like better twitter spaces
just run more of them and run them for longer. Uh, just don't
do it if you don't actually love it, because there's no formula where you're going to do five
for an hour and then two on the weekend. It's, you're never going to have some magic structure
that makes you popular. You're going to have to earn people's attention. And I, you know, I know how difficult it is for people that don't have
the backing of some major marketing brand or some agent network that's able to kind of place them in
the hot spot. I know how hard it is to have a representation or get your voice on the same
level of exposure as people that have sort of a machine working on their behalf as well.
So those are things that I kind of want to engineer better outcomes for
is having more equitable representation on the part of creators
and also their supporters with respect to platforming their talents.
with respect to platforming their talents.
Do you structure your space or what you do around topics?
Obviously, whomever you're talking to,
but is there a structure of either subjects or is it just a freeform expression of ideas?
It's usually pretty freeform.
I will use extremely vague nets for topics that I think we're going to talk about, but I'll, I usually just open my mouth
and then the saltwater radio antenna inside of my skull
pulls information from the sky
and makes it come out of my noise box in my head.
And that's usually where the direction we end up going.
Sounds good.
And are the people you have that are in the space, do they have expertise?
Oh, man.
The people that ride with me, Ken, are the best of the best of the best.
Fantastic.
If it's being built, we've got a hand in it.
If it's cutting edge in blockchain and crypto and it's not backed by A16Z or Prometheum or some of these other VCs we probably have a hand in making it
excellent sounds great and just to give you guys a little background I just
didn't want to commandeer the space Edward but I think it's compatible the
project that I'm working on right now and I've just come back from a birthday week
where I got nothing done. So today I'm actually hitting the ground, running hard, but we're
going to be delivering a platform called Blank Canvas. And it is a lot of things, but one of the
things that it does, kind of the primary thing that it does is allow people to
create print-on-demand products and distribute them while earning the industry best revenue share
or affiliate marketing share of profits but we go a little bit further than just printing products and shipping them around.
We allow users to become creators and closers on our platform, which means if you have any content, digital artwork or musical files or something like that, that you want to incorporate into your project, you can have them spread across any and all of the product
types that we're able to source from our partners and in the process you'll make
if you're a creator for instance you make one-third of the margin of all sales
of all of your designs and if you're a referral agent a closer i call them um you make 33 of the margin
of any sales you close and if you're a creator that refers your own sale you get 66 of the margin
of all sales on the platform blank canvas makes the other third we go and do some high level crypto
shit that no one needs to worry about right now because it'll just confuse most people but it's really not confusing it's just that you've never been given this much equity in a business
uh by simply clicking the buttons you were already going to be clicking before and we don't have to
explain all of that now because the more the more relevant part is uh part of my goals for
blank canvas are to incorporate hosted technology solutions.
And so the first one that I sort of began talking about was like a, you got, Edward was talking about sort of a music platform to replace X.
I was looking at sort of an indie film streaming service to complement Netflix. And you could imagine like the Sundance
Film Festival, all of the producers and filmmakers that contribute there, we would utilize decentralized
content delivery systems like the DigNode network and rocket layer and the blank canvas
customer base to effectively be able to distribute product that has its physical product
my my flagship favorite product is a drink coaster um and so it's just a very simple thing that can be, uh, like a canvas that has two sides,
very easy to ship anywhere.
And it can have a QR code that gives the purchaser access to these hosted networks, whether on
their phone and they want to maybe streamcast it to their TV or just on their computer or
at their DJ booth or whatever it is.
Um, they can access a platform that's being hosted in a decentralized manner
and then access content.
In this scenario, it would be like movies.
And you could have someone doing a live premiere.
They schedule it for July 5th or something.
They say we're doing like an america's birthday weekend uh premiere and people
that have the particular access product and therefore the gated qr code to um open the
platform would be able to watch that film as it goes live uh hosted totally censorship resistant and decentralized and effectively drive,
you know,
kind of group audiences to,
if you think about there's always the one winner of the genre for the film festival.
But there's probably a lot of really good flicks that are being made.
And so being able to put your flick next to other indie movies might be a way to get sort of a network effect of attention to drive more eyeballs to the catalog.
And then obviously music is just a separate media type, but with the same hopes in mind.
We have musical artists in our community that record their own tracks and master their own works and
do their own productions they're kind of like one-man bands or or one-man shows one person
shows and we would be able to host their files on the dig node network and provide gated access to
a catalog of independent artists with singles epsPs, albums, music videos, and the like,
all by kind of procuring a community-driven catalog.
So those are some of what we're aiming for on the long, long term.
It starts with the physical product, and it starts with some more basic functions of a business,
but the aspirations are to grow and to incorporate community and user talent in a way that amplifies
the platforms of the creators while delivering procured quality content to the users.
quality content to the users.
I'm curious of the inspiration for the drink coaster.
You said you're particularly interested in that.
Is it because it's the physical proximity of it?
It's a very interesting idea.
It's probably a little complex to try to speed run from zero to making sense in this space but
just know that work is now resuming as of today um to create these solutions we're probably
as far as a year off on the kind of Netflix replacement, Apple Music replacement technologies, but it'll happen faster than you think.
It's just a matter of addressing the low-hanging fruit, prioritizing the achievable measurables, and then we'll evolve.
We know that we have the talent and the technology to produce those products and services, but it's a matter of feasibility and execution.
But we have what it takes.
It's just a matter of making it fit into all the moving schedules
and pieces that people contribute.
One of the things that we, yeah, if anyone, Suzanne can jump in at any point if you want.
One of the things we chat about is physical media, i.e. records, vinyl, tapes, even, perhaps even mini-disc, although that's digital, I suppose.
But yeah, what's your thought on, are we better off in music with all this digital media?
Or are we losing something by not being physical in some form?
I'm happy to let Ken or Suzanne hop in on it. You know me, Edward. I'll I'll talk forever and I'll answer all the questions.
So just I'll I'll chime in when they've gotten a chance to remind us that they exist, too.
I'll chime in when they've gotten a chance to remind us that they exist too.
Go ahead.
I mean, no, I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
I've kind of talked about it in the last two or three weeks about my feelings on...
I am older, obviously, so I have a...
I still have a, I have still have a, I like to own, so I like not, I like to touch my, I still read books and still, I like vinyl, obviously.
And I just, I don't know what, I can't tell the future, honestly, of where music is going.
And especially with AI.
And so, you know, I'm interested in your thoughts on it, to be honest with you.
You bet. I've got them.
Suzanne, do you want to cut me off in case this one runs for 180 seconds?
I just wanted to say that there's always going to be people who want to hold something,
hold a book, hold a record, hold a CD.
People want stuff.
So I think, you know, but of course there's everybody with their, you know, digital libraries of music and stuff like that.
I think you need to service everybody who wants whatever medium they want.
You know, there's always going to be the old folks who want the vinyl and the, well, CDs aren't all that old.
But I think you've got to meet the market where the market wants to be.
I think you've got to meet the market where the market wants to be.
Well, the funny thing is that the people buying vinyl now are not old.
They are young.
That's right.
There's things, things come and go.
Everything, everything, everything dies.
Maybe that's a fact, but everything that dies someday comes back.
Absolutely, yep.
Say what you will about Bruce Springsteen,
but he understood.
Absolutely.
I mean, things regenerate,
and now young people are buying vinyl.
vinyl. You know, I mean, I, I, I just, everyone, every young person I know has a huge vinyl
You know, I mean, I just,
collection. So, but, but, you know, that's, let's, let's go, let's go back. I mean, I'm sorry.
No, this is all, this is all good. I'm probably a perfect case study for this because I love the aesthetic of a vinyl record.
I loved being in the car and having the CD sleeves and all of my burned music.
I wouldn't give you guys any recommendations.
It was just dangerous.
I had the freedom to put anything I wanted in consecutive track listing order on a disc um but i like all those things and yet i'm
really not a high consumer i don't really like buy shit um i mean if i really like something
i'll purchase it but i i don't have the vinyl collection because I don't like to buy things.
And I think people should get what they want.
I'm a big supporter of physical product.
It makes sense to me.
And I'm a fan of digital product that's delivered thoughtfully and part of the
purpose behind blank canvas is to thread this needle between things that are optimal for
digital distribution and physical claims on provenance and so while I may not be in the business of pressing vinyl discs
again drink coasters they sometimes look like vinyl discs I could imagine a coaster that looks
like a vinyl disc that would fit in a small vinyl disc collection mini set where you would have QR codes on the centerpiece of the
record and be able to access all of the music digitally. If I partnered with vinyl press
companies, I could easily go the extra mile and have real records made for that content. But I think the sweet spot that we're trying to really identify
is how to maximize the tactile experience
and minimize the overburdening cost
because when you're dealing with independent artists,
it probably doesn't make a lot of sense for them
to give back 95% of their revenue in the form of cost of goods sold.
And so that's actually part of what we are aiming to specialize in.
Creators and collectors alike are not facing overhead requirements to produce product through blank canvas.
So you only pay once you actually have finalized your
design requests and your orders and then the products are made you don't have to store any
inventory um and so part of you know what i would love to see is whether it's let's imagine we were all in a band okay we're in the music village band and we have designs that we
like for clothing merch we have songs that we want to distribute maybe in cds and vinyl record form
but we also obviously have our digital copies and we come together and we say, hey, I really like the artwork that Ken made for the upcoming tour. Let's sell some t-shirts, but let's have those t-shirts contain a QR code on the back somewhere in between the locations that we'll be headlining at. And if they access that QR code, they can purchase the songs for digital
play anytime they want. They can have the songs right there. Maybe the cost of the shirt even
covers the cost of the access to the songs. That's totally up to the choice of us as the creators.
And maybe it's not enough that we have t-shirts and knickknacks. Maybe we want to go the extra mile and create vinyl album artwork covers, like the sleeves.
We're either one step away from making the vinyl records themselves, or it can be a placeholder among your existing vinyl collection.
And you just know when you pull out that particular cover sleeve that it's a digital album.
And you could even have placeholder artwork if you wanted to set it on a vinyl spinner.
Or if you wanted, you could just access it digitally you know those are all aesthetic things preference things that people
may have but the hope is that you would be able to get independent artists to not have to own the
production side of the house blank canvas will facilitate and be a catalyst for the manufacturing
and distribution of product.
And then the artists just have to provide their talent and their provenance to kind of point and click and say, put my band's artwork on this album cover.
And in the corner on the back, put a QR code where they can open it up and it goes right to our band's website page where we have live videos of some of the shows that we've done recently.
We've got a song catalog. You can purchase an album. You can donate to the band, whatever it is that you might want to do.
way that we're trying to approach this is we are effectively delivering revenue
share and access to business equity to everyone from the people that make
content to their supporting fans who push that content or refer sales of that
content and then we also provide benefits to the collectors.
And so it creates sort of this financially incentivized social mesh network of talent, curators, and collectors who all stand to benefit financially just from performing the consumer or supply side of industry demand
that they were already, you know, kind of responsible for.
But I could see a world where if you try to do it as this or that, probably doesn't work.
If you go all digital, you're probably safer.
That's the more modern thing, but you're going to miss out on all of the tactile customers. If you go physical, you're going to miss out on
all of the digital centric consumers. And so I think the real secret is how do we deliver
minimal cost of goods sold physical product? And then how do we leverage existing technologies to be able to tap into all of the benefits of digital kind of free form, you know, software platforming?
And I think it works really well when you don't make the physical product be difficult to deliver. I think if you have something as simple as a t-shirt or a drink coaster,
you can use your imagination to turn these into access points for virtually unlimited digital
content. So I think we want both, but I think we want to minimize the burden of
raw material costs facing the end consumer. And ultimately's driving you know margins away from
the artist speaking of people who like tactile things and vinyl it reminded me
of a couple of things one is just recently I was watching a you know one
of those GBH fundraiser things where they, they show a concert and they give you, you know,
gifts for donating a certain amount of money. And this particular one was,
it was, you know, it was Roy Orbison's black and white night, that concert.
And for one of the gifts they gave with a certain amount of donation was a
bright red vinyl of a certain amount of donation was a bright red vinyl of a certain collection of the songs.
And so thinking of people who love vinyl having, you know, things like a red CD,
excuse me, a red vinyl, bright red, just because it's cool.
excuse me, a red vinyl, bright red,
just because it's cool.
And then I was thinking back to,
Edward mentioned that at one point I was married
to Bill Shenaman, who was a producer back in,
engineer producer back in the 70s, 80s and stuff.
And he worked on a Johnny Mathis album and it was produced on a vinyl record that was kind of partly clear, partly gray.
It was meant to be smoky looking for like smoke gets in your eyes.
So just clever things like that could attract people who want just like a,
I don't know what you call it, just a cool version of their favorite record.
Definitely.
I buy that.
You know, and even back in the old, when I was a kid, you know,
you could get records of Disney things that had stuff printed on them,
all over
them, stuff like that. Just the cool,
the coolness factor of people who love to hold a record and by God,
it's red or it looks like smoke or it's got whatever on it.
There's people who would love that.
Yep. I think that's the,
that's what makes it so difficult to compete in a world of mass manufacturing and kind of standardized product sourcing is they get their costs down so low that by the time we try to give people that unique experience, we're paying through the nose on all of these kind of little special things.
But that's where I think, so I don't, I'm not the expert of vinyl,
but I can say this.
I know that a vinyl record is usually a circle
and it usually comes in a square sleeve.
I know that they tend to be double-sided circles and the sleeves they come in
tend to also be double-sided if my math checks out that's four flat surfaces um and that's a lot of
real estate to be able to hold in the space of one surface because they're very thin. Vinyl albums are very much like
drink coasters in that way. And it would be interesting to know, kind of to test in the
public for people that collect vinyl records. Would they ever be interested in kind of the aesthetic of shopping for a vinyl record,
getting the sleeve, getting a disc that maybe has the name of the band or the songs or things like that.
And while it may not be a pressed vinyl record, it would blend in seamlessly with a collection on the shelf or in their archive,
seamlessly with a collection on the shelf or in their archive and it would come with all of the
instantaneous access points of being able to play so i could have perhaps a vinyl record player on my
tabletop and some of them nowadays even have bluetooth these speaker systems that are playing
the vinyl records some
of these newer devices i don't know how they match up on audio quality i'm not an audiophile myself
um but you could you know you reach in and you grab the johnny mathis album and you've listened
to that and then you say hey you know i've actually got this friend from Ukraine who makes these really cool indie folk songs.
But their album is right here. It's right next to Johnny's on my archive shelf.
But I can take the disc out. I can even set it in the vinyl record and it'll spin, but it won't recognize any grooves.
But then I just simply tell my speaker system to hook up to my
phone's bluetooth and i open up the friend's song catalog that i can get off of the cover of the
sleeve and now my phone opens up with the track list of the album i just tap any of the tracks
and that same speaker with my rotating disc is now playing those songs that my friend made.
That might be an interesting compromise where you don't have to burden the creator or the consumer with the specialty manufacturing of one-off albums or small run albums that people are creating physically.
And you could still get all of the tactile experience of a musical catalog you hold in your hands
that plays on a sound system and is delivered with artwork both on the disc and on the cover art.
And what that effectively allows then by reducing the exposure to the more complex side of manufacturing,
making grooved wax discs or whatever, vinyl discs,
wax discs or whatever, vinyl discs, rather than spending allocation on that, you can
redirect into providing greater creative control for the end user.
So what if a band, what if our band, right, the Music Village, what if we had 10 really cool, out-of-the-box visual artworks that sort of align with the emotions that we feel are elicited from our album that we're dropping?
We're dropping the Campfire album, and we've got some really cool different art designs.
cool different art designs. Now people are able to purchase access to our record while selecting
which specialty collector artwork they want their particular disc to arrive in. We don't have any
overhead. All of it is printed on demand and we simply have procured a finite set of designs we might even have a limited run of each
design so that if you are a super fan you might say i need one of all i need one of all of them
you know it's not enough that i get my album i really want i want every single collectible
variant that they made in the artwork.
Well, that would be a really expensive shopping catalog if you had to pay for,
you know, pressed vinyl every time. But if you were only paying for,
call it like analog technologies, there's no, there's no, I guess vinyl discs are analog, but there's really no bells and whistles.
You're paying mostly for the physical creation of the paperboard that covers the disc, the disc and the artwork that goes on each of those.
But by offloading the need to press an actual record, you're not paying the production costs on that side and so now maybe
your customer rather than only being able to afford one cut one album they might buy the same album
and purchase all of the variant artwork so that they have the full collection of the creative
works that went into some of the visual aesthetics that complement the energies recorded on that particular album.
And I think by trying to hit those efficiencies of price and that thing they say you can't account for, tastes and preferences,
thing they say you can't account for tastes and preferences. I think if you can reduce the burden
of price by becoming a creative solution that works around these steeper implicit costs of
manufacturing, say technology like a CD or a vinyl disc, if you can provide a lower cost product that achieves all of the same qualities
it's a physical disc it has artwork I place it on the disc rotating machine I access the music
catalog of the product that was a disc inside of a box, and then I'm hearing the music I want to hear while this disc spins.
I think that constitutes the majority of the experience
outside of maybe the actual feel of vinyl,
but I could probably, I know for a fact I can get drink coasters
that are made of vinyl,
so I'm sure I could get a pretty big drink coaster made of vinyl,
and it would probably look like a vinyl disc and then so now you've created just a little bit of a price
efficiency where we're able to deliver the experience without going through the traditional
manufacturing process and maybe passing those savings on to the community and
the customers leads to more repeat business or possibly purchasing more
product than they could have otherwise if a large cut was going to some
manufacturing process with minimum quantity requirements and things like
that you know it we can provide the single product solution
and we can even work with artists that do have a desire
to physically distribute and get the major savings on economies of scale
if they did want to make a quantity order.
I can see doing that sort of thing and having the, as you say,
you know, most of the experience,
and you can have the whole collection of all the art and all the albums and
stuff like that.
But why not have a division of your company deal with the,
the real vinyl files?
I just haven't researched it yet.
A niche market with high prices. If it costs a lot to produce that stuff,
produce it at a high cost and there are people who will buy it. And, and,
you know, I can see sort of a, a bifurcation of, or, you know,
a cultural split between the people who buy the, you know,
the sort of pseudo stuff that you're talking about and the real thing,
which you could, you know, capitalize on.
And you know what's crazy about that, Suzanne? We can even utilize through the platform
feasibly in the future. If you were an artist that knew that your masterworks were coming out and you say, look, I'm happy to sell a million copies, a billion copies, I'm happy to sell it, I want a vinyl record, but I'm not going to be real vinyl albums and make people effectively
reserve their right to claim that in such a way that as the reservation uh reservations come in, the down payment or the cost of goods quantity purchase for a
limited run is covered.
And so there could be maybe 10,000 people can get the digital pseudo vinyl record, and
maybe 100 people could get the real deal authentic vinyl sit and spin record and it's all understood
kind of as the artist is broadcasting their upcoming work to the public they say you know
we're we're planning on providing this many units of kind of pick your media version but we are also going to have an
exclusive run just to understand quantity for the sake of placing an order but it could be way more
than a hundred it could be a hundred thousand just whatever the demand justifies and that
limited run allows us to still tap into some of the economies of scale because when we go to a manufacturer,
if I can bundle 200 orders up front and I know that they're already kind of paid for and the
customers are already reserved, now it's just a logistic situation of mass produce the product,
drive down the costs, and then allow us to utilize a 3PL or some
logistic solution to get it to the final doorstep of whoever it is that purchased it.
But if the customers are willing to understand that process logistically, then they can effectively
pay. It'll be some premium, but I suggest that the price would be far less than if they tried to get a one-off
vinyl record from manufacturer to their doorstep with their friend's music on it.
I think we could probably find some cost savings by aggregating the collector base,
the patron base, and then reserving orders in such a way that the reservation price times quantity
achieves in economies of scale where the final cost to consumer is less than it would be for
individuals and still exclusive enough that despite purchasing in sort of a quantity order,
everyone knows that they're a part of this limited run
opportunity to get the real deal physical piece.
Yeah, and your vinyl files, I mean,
who knows what they'd be willing to pay.
You almost don't, I don't know, I'm not a business person,
but if people are willing to pay it, you can do it.
And also just think of the,
if you have your pseudo vinyl customer base and your real deal vinyl guys,
just think of the fun they will have dumping on each other and saying, Oh,
these, you know,
snooty nose people who only want the real thing and the real thing people will say
oh those guys who only like the cheap stuff they'll have a lot of fun you know in social media
they'll have a lot of critics you know what i mean you know the funny thing is um the community that
we are really uh pushing on all fronts on the internet and in blockchain and crypto and in multimedia.
It's called the Tang Gang, kind of like the orange drink that went to the moon, Tang, or the Wu-Tang Clan if you're into them.
But we use an orange as a muse.
as a muse. And around the orange, we create this unlimited roster of memetic references to pop
culture or pulp fiction or whatever it is that we want to be having fun with. And in our communities,
we actually have points leaderboards that everyone in the community can earn these social points for collecting each
other's artworks and supporting each other's projects. And so you could see how the cost
basis required to generate particular products, for instance, a real vinyl record, we could allocate
a steeper proportion of social points to the higher price tag item but you could
still gamify it in a way where maybe if you were to purchase all of the artistic variations of the
pseudo record it comes out to equal to or even just a little bit above the social points of
purchasing the hard vinyl real version.
And the idea there is the people, you know, you're snooty, cool, only buy the real ones.
They get the big fat chunk of points.
But if someone isn't in the market just for the vinyl record, they just really want to
both support the band slash artist and they want to get their hands on all the different variations of the album artwork,
then they might either be paying in total the same amount
or even paying a greater amount.
And we can just assign these social points
to represent the kind of barrier to entry
to acquire those goods.
And in our community having those
points results in you being given gifts on the blockchain which are worth real money and so it
kind of stimulates this exciting collector benefit that you're already going to buy this stuff because
you wanted it that's what makes it such valuable stuff is you actually want it. And then you just happen to accidentally get these kind of frequent flyer miles or rewards points and some benefits you don't have to do anything to receive.
Wow. I never thought of it that way, but I guess it's an amazing angle to the whole thing.
We've been doing it for about two years now.
Really? Wow. Huh.
And hopefully not too much animosity will grow between the vinyl files and the, you know, pseudo guys.
You know, you don't want... Once you get this deep into community curated work, people are so happy to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to support others that the animosity truly is more like what you were describing of it being kind of a playful thing.
of tongue-in-cheek showboat about their collections and their rank on the leaderboards, but we all
know that it's only possible when everybody comes together to put in their contribution and make the
whole group bigger. So there's really no shade that anyone can ever feel because to be in the
gang and to be earning the social points already puts you in the top 99.9th percentile of
highly engaged community-centric uh creators and and uh supporters so i think the
the idea of like people kind of going back and forth is inevitable because people are people and simply
aligning incentives in a way that ensures you can only kind of earn your bragging rights or you can
only really get the high ground to peer pressure your friends about not having as cool of sneakers
as you if you've already done something that supports a real artist or a real community member
anyway so you're all kind
of on the same team because you're helping other people realize their dreams and then it just comes
down to when you're killing time you know you show your buddy like yeah but i have all seven
variations of the the you know limited collection so i'm i'm really cool and you've only got one,
so you're only kind of cool.
But people aren't.
Yeah, but how cool would that be if you could bring
those two communities together,
the vinyl files and the pseudo files,
if you could get them together and have them laugh together
at how different they are and how they each love what they have and how they're all supporting the musicians. And that would be cool.
And here's how you do it. Whether it's a real vinyl disc or a pseudo vinyl disc,
somewhere on the centerpiece of the disc is where the label goes. And that label can have a very small but easy to
view QR code. And so whether you have the pseudo record or the real record, what if the artist
who used the platform to have their music productized, what if they wanted to do a live stream concert like our own npr little desk
concert and maybe edward has this world-renowned studio where artists are known to come and perform
in this studio uh room and maybe there's 10 or 15 people there for the live showing
and whether you have the real vinyl or the pseudo vinyl you could
scan that qr code it'll open up a website that you could cast onto your smart tv and now you're
sitting there at a last concert and you both get the same thing that puts you both at the same nexus
of that artist's concert and you both love it and one guy has it on the vinyl and the other guy has it on the
cardboard thing and but they both love the same thing and um that's pretty darn cool if you ask
me that's an interesting way it's like buying a remote concert ticket and and your concert ticket
might be the actual album it might be a real vinyl record.
And they're going to perform the songs from that record in a live concert studio format.
And you tap in digitally. And someone that was only able to get the lower cost, you know, pseudo disc, they can get that exact same.
They love that artist just as much, but they're in a different price bracket for collecting the products. They're able are earning in my kind of affiliate marketing and
crypto benefits background that no one has to understand anything about but um i think that's
how you do it is you give people the options and to your credit people have to understand
why something costs what it costs if they want limited edition physical vinyl discs that probably costs
more than a picture of a vinyl disc um but people understand that and they're happy to pay for the
things that they want right exactly i that sounds amazing to do that to you know to bring the the
halves kind of bringing the haves and the haves-nots together.
But what they have in common is they love that artist. And that's the whole thing,
is to support that artist. And I even argue that we should support the people that support the
artist, which is why Blank Canvas has revenue share for people who are able to refer product
sales as well. And if you refer a product sale
for an artist that makes music, you'll actually receive an equal share of the margin from the
product sale as the artist does. Because the artist could refer their own and they'll make 66%.
But if you are just a super fan and you're out having dinner and someone goes, you know, I heard there's a good concert coming up.
And you say, speaking of music, have you heard of this platform?
They might be on, you know, sitting next to you, looking at your phone.
You're showing them all these different artists in this online catalog and showing them the vinyl records, showing them the pseudo records.
And they go, well, heck, I'd buy one of these and just give it a try.
And now you're using your referral code to sell your friend's album.
Your friend who doesn't even know you're out to dinner that night
makes money on an album sale,
and you make money being the referral agent to make another sale happen.
Wow.
Because I argue that there's some super fans that just are on the wrong side of the economic you know bandwidth and they're willing to show up and
you know the super fans they'll they've got the concert shirt they're doing the
kind of community service volunteerism to try to drive traffic to the venue they might even
be outside saying like,
Hey, you guys got to get a ticket to this place.
Imagine if the person that might be in the have nots category
and also might not have some monetizable talent
where they produce their own music.
They might be obsessed with some creator that does have those talents.
And now they can effectively be their own salesperson,
their own salesperson, their own sales rep,
getting a bigger cut than they could possibly get working at a label or some boots on the ground,
door to door salesperson. Now they can be a part of their favorite platform's journey and make money
along the way. What you are doing is you are harnessing
fan energy no matter where it comes from yeah the way i look at it is i i view the kind of um
the market as creators closers and collectors people that have talents and make products or experiences, people that
can bring awareness to those experiences, and then the people who make a transaction
that supports the provider of those products or experiences.
And those three parties have to be aligned in their incentives if you want to maximize
kind of the, it's not enough to do it you have to do it
again and again and again and again how do we drive perpetual success i think you have to have
everyone rowing in the same direction and so we uh we will pay cash to the artists that are the creators. We will pay cash to the community members and or
artists that help push product and sell product. And then we also have incentives for collectors
where it turns out purchasing product at blank canvas earns you on a dollar for dollar basis,
you on a dollar for dollar basis two times the downstream crypto benefits of being an artist or
a closer and the idea is that using this kind of new age woo woo crypto magic I can deliver
equity in the form of marginal profit to the business, I can redistribute it back to anyone
who is driving sales on the platform,
whether they were that creator, that closer,
or just making a purchase themselves.
I'm able to actually distribute
a secondary stream of cash,
this time being on a blockchain.
And if you are just a super fan that buys a ton of product, you can utilize my platform and earn back equity that is representative of global
margins driven to the business itself. So we not only will pay people to be aligned at the point of transaction, we will further incentivize them to maintain a relationship with the platform in a way that doesn't bear any additional costs, but allows users to access additional streams of revenue. And the creator somehow manages to get a piece of all of this action
that's out there from the fan energy, however it happens.
I mean, I would hope the whole point of some of this is for the artist
to benefit from all this stuff that you're doing, all this economics of the
fans sharing their fandom and their energy. The artist somehow is at the bottom of the
funnel here from all that fan energy.
Artists are making revenue on product sales. They're also immediately cut into equity from the business. Repeat sales
lead to increased proportional equity share. So if you're a creator, it's more likely that you
could sell 100 products rather than to expect that every customer could buy 100 products.
And so as your success scales, you're not only being compensated immediately
for the cash layer of transactions, but because I'm willing to pass through corporate profits
back in the form of trustless, non-securitized equity for anyone that wants to have it,
have it, they will be in a position to compound their earnings because of the economies of scale
of having multiple customers, multiple supporters that purchase their product.
They're now not only getting paid on every single product sold, they're also increasing
their proportional representation of profits to the business, which means they're increasing their proportional claim on equity from the profits.
Well, this really sounds like you've invented an economy of creators and fans where everybody benefits.
I call it the regenerative economics model or REM, kind of like a deep sleep.
economics model or REM kind of like a deep sleep and in the world of crypto we deal with
MEV it stands for maximal extractable value and so I've tried to align these incentives to deliver
what I call the map maximal attainable profits and the goal is to have competing interests and synergistic interests coalesce around a model that invigorates and stimulates greater levels of exchange with equitable outcomes.
saying that the creator, the artist who made this thing,
none of this would exist without that guy or girl.
And what you've taken is the output of an artist
and built a whole economy around basically fandom,
people who like it, the energy that that artist has created.
And you've harnessed that in all kinds of different ways that you've been
talking about.
Yep.
You know,
the products and the swag and the this and the that and referencing and every
possible thing,
but it all comes down to the nexus of that person who created this thing in
the first place.
Yep.
And that's why the artists actually have an advantage play that no other user
has because the artist can be their own referral agent.
So they'll already be making a larger revenue share on just their one-third of margin claim on all products sold because, remember, no overhead.
So the artist isn't shelling out money to get their merch made.
The customer is stimulating the transaction with their own money.
That initiates a process that creates the product and delivers it.
The margin from the sale is distributed to the artist, whoever referred the sale, and then the platform.
the artist, whoever referred the sale, and then the platform. But if there wasn't a super fan
that sealed the deal, if someone just simply heard about you through the grapevine or stumbled across
your link to your creator page and they purchase your product, you're going to be able to get
your own sale for being a creator, but you could also get the referral portion. And now you're going to be able to get your own sale for being a creator,
but you could also get the referral portion.
And now you're making two-thirds of the product's margin
while the platform only makes one-third.
And we have to host servers and do customer service and all that stuff,
so we've got to make some money in there somewhere.
But the idea is that the platform is
non-adversarial to the creators or their patrons the goal is to alleviate the investment burden
for creators in the productization or manufacturing line of what it is that they do we also want to
facilitate their ability to garner exposure by platforming
them. That's why in the long term, I want to create these kind of indie film catalogs and
indie music catalogs and be able to give a whole planet access to content they would have never heard because of the algorithmic suppression
or the favoritism of advertisers and things like that.
Now you would have this sort of globally community procured roster of talent and media media that you could access regardless of if your purchase price point is $20 or $2,000.
You can access the same digital contents as everyone else, and you can stand to benefit
financially from contributing to the economy. I think that would bring a lot of independent creators into an
environment where some of the heavy lifting is done on their behalf without them paying through
the nose for it. They don't have to cover those costs. We take care of that in our model. And
then other people are able to use that savings to purchase more of the product from the artist that they like.
So I can't follow all of the details of what you've described.
But it seems like what it feels like is the artist, as I said before, the artist is the plutonium that runs this thing.
said before the artist is the plutonium that runs this thing and what you've done is you've mined
every nook and cranny of any way to monetize this you know as the energy flows uh from you know from
the fans to the all this stuff and so you've taken the artist who's the plutonium and you've mined
this whole mushroom cloud of an economy that comes out of that. Yeah, one of my degrees is in economics.
And one of the biggest lessons I've learned is the PSYOP that we've all been told is this phrase.
You've heard this phrase, supply and demand.
And it's totally backwards. It's totally backwards it's totally backwards it's actually
demand and supply you can make whatever you want if no one wants it you're not
making a sale if everyone wants a thing and there isn't any of it available
that's a problem and problems that get solved for others are profitable and so we have the supply
side are the artists but it doesn't matter if i give you a megaphone a stage amplifiers a technician
if if when you supply the sound no one wants to hear, we're not going to sell a lot of tickets.
And so there's this unavoidable reality where we all can supply or provide our best efforts.
And then the market decides if they want it or not.
But in this environment, we are honoring the reality that the demand aligns to a supply.
If there's demand for good music,
and then the artists show up and they start making music,
then we're moving in the right direction.
If we just start operating in a vacuum
and then hope that it tickles someone's fancy,
it's going to be a much more difficult dynamic.
So we honor the creators because without them, none of the sales are possible.
No one can buy anything if it doesn't exist.
And so as soon as they've decided that they want to support somebody, there's this unavoidable
exchange that takes place.
The supply side meets the demand side. And that's where price is supposed to exist. Right now, I would argue we're far away from that reality. have more agreeable prices and the margins that the business makes increase and the quantity
of product purchased by consumers increases.
So I think it's about just honoring the contribution margins that everyone brings to the table.
And won't this help?
I mean, there's a ton of good artists and good music out there that never sees the light
of day because they,
you know, they produce it and then it doesn't get picked up and they don't know how to sell it and
all this stuff. But isn't what you're doing going to sort of draw the good music and creators,
kind of draw them into this economic exchange more than they otherwise would have been yeah I think my goal is to make them make more money
than they can make anywhere else blank canvas really is not here to compete
with some mom-and-pop shop we coming for everything. And our goal is to deliver
those successes to the creators and their community of supporters. So we have the ability to
pass through profits more efficiently than organizations that rely on higher levels of infrastructure and overhead.
And so maximizing our efficiencies and passing through those benefits to the actual individuals
that make the next marginal contribution occur is sort of what differentiates us from other models with more opaque incentives and less
understood cost structures. We have very transparent cost structures, and I would argue
we present the least overhead and friction for the suppliers of talent to integrate with our platform,
whereas they likely need to compromise on their creative efforts when being boxed into someone
else's approach. Tell me the name of your business again. Blank Canvas. Blank Canvas.
Do you have a website? BlankCanvas.com? Maybe?
BlankCanvas.works. Works. Okay.
And it's currently in the building process.
And today I'm delivering some blockchain-related wizard math to a developer
so that we can continue to hone our scope, but it will feel similar to shopping on, say, Amazon.com,
if you're just a consumer,
and you'll be able to see all the different artists,
all their artwork.
You'll be able to purchase things in whatever size you want,
whatever variation you want.
The nice thing is an artist, even if it was a musical artist,
they can have their physical merchandise be assigned to any product
that we're able to source.
So if they want it, and they don't have to inventory it.
So they're basically just showing you a catalog that says,
hey, here's what it would look like if you bought a sweatshirt with their
design. Here's what it looks like if you buy a little drink coaster that looks like a vinyl
record and has the digital catalog kind of tattooed on the artwork. Here's what it looks like if you
bought a beanie that has the, you know, artist name on it. And you'd be able to see all the
different products that the creator has selected
to assign their design to and then you just go shopping and it's all it's all on demand so nobody
has inventory no one has inventory if people want to reach out to us and do like custom
quantity orders then we're happy to take care of those as well wow that's a fascinating business
model do you have competitors?
Is anybody else doing anything like this?
No, the closest that you'll find
is an affiliate marketing program,
but they use opaqueness
and leveraged revenue share splits
to justify their existence.
We're incorporating things
that exist on the most advanced blockchain on the planet.
And we know the devs to build it,
which is probably like a roster of less than 50 people on earth.
Well, I'm sorry I've hogged all your time,
but this is just so fascinating.
I don't mean to interrupt,
but I have to put words in a computer and go to work.
So, um.
To work?
I need to go to work, yes.
Oh, man.
Yes, I have to go to work.
So, um, and I, uh, this was very, very, very, very interesting.
And I learned a lot.
So I really appreciate this.
This was very interesting space.
So I really applaud you for really explaining a lot of things about your business.
And I wish everybody well.
Okay. And have a great week. We have a holiday week here in the states and uh so uh thanks uh everybody good take care
appreciate it bye bye ken
bye ken have a good day yeah thanks so thanks so much, Gooey. Awesome.
And thanks, Suzanne.
It's been an interesting back and forth.
And yeah, always educational.
Thanks for everything you do, Cookies.
And yeah, check out Ken.
He's just gone, I guess.
And also Esther Ibrahim, who helped set this space up.
M-M-A-I-B-I-S in the audience.
So yeah, any closing thoughts, guys?
Thanks again, Gooey and uh appreciate it
you bet always happy to hang out always love talking with the edward always love meeting
the people that you meet because you are all over the internet and i'm i like to stay in my little
hidey hole i am done doing my world tours for now I like to make them come into the courtyard
and we do a little campfire banjo
love it
yeah thanks a lot guys
cheers Suzanne
okay bye bye
I don't have a closing line
that's what I need for this space
what would be a good closing line?
Goodbye is good, but it's not that original.
Goodbye is a classic.
Good night or good day and good luck.
Stealing from Edward R. Murrow. Thank you.
