Educated Luck and Building Digital Bridges . . . with Dick Huey [Creative Innovators]

Welcome to Creative Innovators. Today we're gonna have Dick Huey from Toolshed and many other adventures.

You have how many hats now? How many different things do you do now?

So really, my business now is broken into three verticals. The first vertical, and this is gonna sound a little wonky, but this is what we do. So we're a wonky company. The first vertical is really focused on business development for post revenue, middleware or business to business software that's used inside the music industry. And, you know, clients

probably lost half our audience already with that with their we might have, yeah, yep. Somebody. So So what is the company? And what is it? What's the sorts of business to business? Well, company name is . . .

Company name is Toolshed, that's my company.

Toolshed.

We have a three legged stool that, loosely, I'll be less specific about it that loosely does business development, for select companies that I think have really strong products. We also do music license acquisition, usually for tech companies, but often for record labels that either are licensed in their catalog out to a digital music service, for instance, like Spotify, or Amazon, or companies that are building a music product and need licenses. So we'll acquire those licenses for them. And then the third part of what we do, I loosely put under ed tech, educational tech and new tech. And that's, that's the part of our company where I get to teach, I get to explore, I get to be an advisor for companies that are building an interesting product. But maybe they're startups and they don't really have a business model yet, or they don't have any revenue. And I get to play there to my sandbox.

Cool. How many different careers and companies have you worked for?

Well, not actually, all that many? You know, this is one of the things that I think maybe it's a little confusing about what I do. I've been a consultant, longer than almost anybody I know. I started my company back in 2002, Toolshed, and prior to that, I worked at Beggars Group for six years as their global head of digital. And those are really my only two proper music industry credentials, if you will. Now, under the guise of Toolshed, we've pivoted several times. First time, when we started our business, I built a business that was an offshoot, if you will, of what I was doing it Beggars Group. So at Beggars as global head of digital, I was in charge of negotiating licenses, I was in charge of articulating strategy sroup digital strategy. And so I took that model, when I started tool shed and said, let me see if I can offer that very same model to independent record labels, who don't have an in house person. And remember the timing of this. This was a 2002. This is before Apple Music or iTunes, it was called back in the day. But after Napster, it was after Napster. It was after Rhapsody. But it was in that sort of nether zone before Steve Jobs made that big announcement at that independent label event that he had in Cupertino. And, you know, prior to that, digital music was such a small percentage of revenue for the average independent record label, they couldn't have fired, they couldn't afford to bring somebody in house. And I filled that need for them. So I came up with a product that was a digital marketing product that really most independent labels didn't have a digital marketing person. So for a flat consulting fee, I would provide all of their digital marketing, which was mostly blog promotion. At that point, I would provide digital licensing services so for their licensing out to Apple or Spotify, or whoever it was Spotify wasn't around that but Apple. Oh, the precursor kind of precursor company, Listen.com.

Whoever else was your space back then?

All of those. I would do all of those a crowded

space back then. Yeah. Now this may be before the time if some of our listeners by Mahalo, you further backwards. So you seem to wear a business hat, a tech hat and a creative hat, kind of pulling it together and integrating that. I'm going to walk those hats backwards. When you were a teenager, what was your hat? Were you a member of band? Did you code your own computer stuff? Were you you know, brokering deals with your friends to buy and sell their worldly goods? What was . . . what was Dick as a teenager? What was his heartbeat stuff?

So as a teenager, I grew up in a very small town in northern Michigan. And I didn't do any of that. I didn't do I didn't. The music that I listened to was really what was on the radio, which was just sort of most banal and obvious. 80s, 70s or 80s, music that is still, you know, the radio station that I listened to, in fact, in northern Michigan, I listened to on a recent trip back there, and they're playing exactly the same music they were playing in 1980. But when all of this really hit for me was a little after teenage years. It was I went to University of Michigan. And that's when I started going out to shows. It's also when I picked up the guitar for the first time. And pretty much right after I graduated connection with a girl that I met, I started picking up the guitar in earnest funny how that works. And

well, what did teenagers still think you wanted to do? Then? If it wasn't this? What what did you spend your time on him? What did you decide to study at University of Michigan?

So when I was a teenager, what I found out, what I found really early was that I had a skill for assembling people, for getting people together and, and orienting them towards a goal of one kind or another. So I did a lot of athletic things, because that's really what there was to do in northern Michigan at the time. A lot of individual sports skiing, windsurfing, I instructed. And all of that sort of came back to me later and in January 2022, which we'll get to later, but back then . . .

We loop, we loop, that is one of the great things we look at back again, back then . . .

I was really just a sales guy. I was someone who enjoyed selling, I enjoyed meeting people talking to people figuring out what they needed. And I thought that was where my career was gonna go into kind of did. But . . .

So what concerts did you go to in the early 80s? In in Michigan?

Yeah, it would have been the early 80s. So I got, I would say, probably the first band, this is really going to be embarrassing in future generations when I hear this, but the first embarrassing

is my list would be okay, well, my first concert was the Cars.

That part is an embarrassing, I thought that was a great first concert to go to. But the first band that I really, really poured myself into was actually Genesis. And and it was the Peter Gabriel end of Genesis that I thought was fascinating. And did way too much air guitar into way too much. listening to records over and over and over Genesis and Joni Mitchell, those were my two touch points. And while I was at Michigan, I, I was exposed to what I loosely call New Wave. So New Order. And I thought oh, there's a whole different universe of music that I didn't know anything about out there. And that really took on serious legs a little bit later out of the teenage years. But So Michigan for me was I did a creative, creative degree. It was it was a customized degree. So I have a Bachelor of General Studies show

that if one can I'm a gigantic fan of those.

Well, did you hear that? The title so the title of it was Bachelor of General Studies. I don't think you could get more general than that. But under that catch-all, I did international business. I was an exchange student in Sweden for a year. So I did Swedish language and German language. I really have always had a knack for languages. I think it's connected to my music interest. And I also did a fair bit of sort of computer related work. So I did some programming. I wasn't a great programmer. But I definitely explored that area. And what I found was I was better at contextualizing what was happening on a computer for somebody that I was actually trying to programming or do something or create an application. And that followed me out of the University of Michigan my first my first career when I, when I sort of went all in on music, the thing that generated some money for me was in teaching software applications to classes. So I would stand up in front of the class, and I would teach them how to use Excel, or Word Perfect, or some of these really early Lotus 12, Lotus 123, all of it. And it was all of those things, it was the kind of thing where I could get up the morning, I had to do this, look at the application figured out enough to teach the class. So very sort of last minute, and I spent all the rest of my time playing guitar, or hanging out with musicians, and going to shows and, and, and that was how I, that's how I got into the music side of things.

So about this time, I think we're of a similar vintage. I got accepted to USC Film School. And I had been a nice respectable international relations, public relations, double major. And my parents were so happy because they thought, ah, with film school, you'll get a job, which meant they really didn't understand the entire thing that was going on. So what did your parents think of you coming out with a general studies major, spend a lot of your time playing air, guitar and guitar? And what did they think that you were going to do? And do they have consulting type or traditional or non traditional careers? What was kind of the model for a creative or a non creative life that your family brought you?

Well, so this is a an interesting question in our, in our particular family, so we had my, my mother's brother was gay. And he was an artist in New York City. So we had this a call eclectic and creative individual. Remember, I'm from Northern Michigan, so very sort of closeted, white, small part of the world. But we lived in a resort community. So there are a lot of city folk that came up. So it's a progressive community in some sense. And when my uncle would come to visit the artist of the family, you know, he would, it was the 70s, he would smoke pot. And, you know, I never saw him do it, but I'm sure he was doing it and sit and listen to Pink Floyd. And I could never quite figure it out. So we always had this sort of this individual in our family who had come into it. And I found him really, really interesting. And I think that spilled over into my parents estimation of what I was getting interested in. So it was kind of a love hate relationship. My mom, for instance, gave me a book at one point, which when I was expressing how interested I was in the music industry, the book was due to love and the money will follow. And I thought, Oh, how progressive of my mother. And then she proceeded to spend the next five years saying, This isn't going anywhere, you're not going to make money at this job. So you know, it was what it was, but

only did you have models of traditional static, single company, career regular job people, for your father is that kind of his . . .

My father was, was, was always self-employed, or had partnerships. He, he was commercial real estate, is still a commercial real estate broker. And so, you know, what I recall from that time was a lot of stress around money, which manifested in my parents' relationship. But I also recall sort of the sexiness, if you will, of having your own thing, I've never had a corporate model, really, anywhere inside my family. So, you know, I think I was predisposed at a pretty early age to try to do something on my own. And I did, you know, in those years post college, I thought at one point that the way you made yourself look impressive, and like you had it all together was coming up with as many different things to do as you could. And so when someone would ask me, what do you do? I would say, Well, I sell water filters, and I teach computer classes and I have this idea for an exercise machine that my uncle started and you know, I thought that was what people were looking for, I thought they wanted to see how many things I was engaged in. And what I came to realize, you know, 20 years later, was no, you got to focus, you got to drill down into something, people are looking for you to have specific expertise, and digital music was that specific expertise. But to get to that point, I had to move out of a really specific interest in the music business, which basically involves going out to, you know, shows three or four nights a week at a club, living with musicians living extremely hand to mouth, I can, I can remember many instances where I would think, Alright, I'm going to sell a CD. So I can go get some a burrito tonight for dinner, and playing guitar, you know, trying to live the life, if you will, but not really doing the other part of it, which is, which is creating music that might have a business attached to it in some way or another. So I was sort of going through all the motions, but not really during the creation part. And what I found out pretty quickly was I was better at the business side of it than I was at the performance side of it. I did perform a play with Vic Chestnutt once, opened for him, that was probably a highlight of my career as a musician. But as soon as I found my first management client, who I signed to a small record label over in Germany called Glitterhouse Records. I thought this is actually where I want to plant my flag. I did tour management for her on a seven-week European tour, which was a great lucky coincidence, I got to drive the van I got to try to meld a bunch of very disparate personalities in one van together and hold them all together and not have them fight with me or with themselves. And I kept doing that tour management in the following years. And the artist management piece and know what yours were these would have been in the late 80s I started that my first client was out in Portland and and then following with to the CD days, those are CD days. Yeah. And following with two other management clients, both of whom were assigned to beggars group or to Beggars Banquet at the time. So that the first one June was a band that had a lot going on in Chapel Hill, right I had been living in in North Carolina prior to that and got very close with this band. They had two offers on the table one from Epic Records, one Beggars Banquet. They took the Beggars Banquet offer which I think shocked the A&R guy from Epic. And I'm not sure we recovered from that for a while. And we put out a genius record that was produced by Jim Rondinelli, so you know, all of the I sort of put all the pieces, pieces in place, I thought for a great career in management. You know, the record came out on Beggar's they did their first North by Northeast up in Toronto, and then the band split. And so I panicked and tried to put it back together, couldn't put it back together five very different personalities in one band. But by that point, I had established a relation or relationship with Beggars Group.

Beggars Banquet, more specifically, who had just opened a new office in New York. And over the the next couple years, I signed a second band to Beggars this band Stella, that was Kurt Perkins and Alan Johnstone, Charles Wyrick, and Preach [Rutherford]. A couple of guys from Nashville, super talented, very loud, very heavy. And, and this is going to officially connect me to the music business now. So three weeks three,

music business working as a working as a guitar player and managing bands that are started. That's all still to music business. It's just not heavy in the business. Well,

well, it was all it was all investing in my future, if you will. So I hadn't really made I made I probably made under $10,000 aggregate for 10 years of work in music. So I thought of it as my career. It really was more of a hobby. But about three weeks before, before Stella's initial record was supposed to come out on Beggars Group or Beggars Banquet, the marketing guy at Beggars quit. And so I called the label ahead, we both panic. And I said, "Alright, I'm gonna move to New York, and I will run marketing. So there's going to be marketing on this record." And Beggars Banquet bit on that. And that's how I moved from where I was at the time and over Michigan with a wife and two small kids to New York City. And

so this was a jump, this is a pivot this was a, I'm now going to do this. Now I'm assuming that you made more than $10,000. During this time to feed wife, children or wife was working or children were working. What was the other mix of your life when you were juggling the music and management side of your life? What else was the skills you're building with other stuff?

So, so the, the income generation was not on the music side. The income generation was on, I had a company called A-Train. And it was on the training side and custom configuration of computers, both Macintosh and PC. So this is mid 90s . . .

Which was a big deal back then. it was . . . people didn't know how to do any of this stuff.

Yeah, teaching people how to use their computers. And it was easy, it was something that I could, that I could balance with spending as much of my time as possible on the music side of what I did. You know, in contrast to what happens today, there weren't, I mean, there were very few music programs full on music programs. At that time. It was either probably Berkelee, or maybe one or two other schools. At least on the on the business side of music, there were plenty of music programs. But if you wanted music business, you really kind of winged it. And so the last thing I would say about that that chunk of history is by doing all these different parts of the music business, being a manager booking my own tours, being a tour manager going out with Ron Sexsmith and Sarah McLachlan and a number of other bigger artists at the time doing a shed to or understanding what it means for the stage to be dark when you arrived there. I learned all these bits and pieces of the music industry by doing them. So when I actually came to Beggars Banquet, I had a pretty good, pretty good idea of what the music industry was from a manager's perspective, which of course is

an accidentally well rounded experience and

accidentally well rounded experience. That's exactly right.

So marketing then because people think probably a marketing now and have a probably a totally different idea of what music marketing is and was so when you came into this, you were stepping into marketing having not really done it this way before what was this marketing job that you stepped into? And then was there any magic or bizarreness of it for walking into somebody else's shoes who just walked out the door?

So Cory [Brennan], the guy that walked out the door, became a huge manager in his own right. And later years, he now manags Slipknot, and has for many years, he runs 5B Management. So yes, Korea was a great marketer at the time. And and I came in, I came in to the radio departments Beggars Banquet at that time was a really small label in the US. I was working for Lesley Bleakley who ran the office. And there were only three other people in the office. There was Brendan Burke, who ran publicity. Jim Heffernan ran sales and IT, or sales, more sales. And then I came in, in a quasi sort of radio promotion, ad placement. And IT role. And you know, as I brought in a lot of my sort of . . .

Wow, that's an interesting. Yeah, combination. Yeah,

It was a weird combo.

Especially for the time, where people didn't necessarily equate marketing and IT needing to be even talking to each other much.

Well, the first thing I did was, I realized there was this sort of half finished FileMaker database that had not really been I'll make or yes FileMaker and had not really done that did not really done. Thought had been thought through but it hadn't really been finished. And so I spent probably more of my time than I should have. Have at the time trying to integrate that into other parts of the business. So trying to create a module, you know, relational modules, and all that kind of all that kind of stuff. And this is important because it's going to lead to what wound up being the rest of my career. So because I was in this position in the US Office of being the person that sort of everybody sort of slowly migrated towards signing anything related to digital music to me, I was asked at one point to start joining these meetings. So we called the DOG meetings, the Digital Organizational Group. And DOG meetings where all of the label heads for Beggars. Now this is, this is at the corporate level. So this is over in the UK. So this would have been the head of 4AD, the head of Too Pure, the head of XL [Recordings], Richard Russell, and, and all of these, Gary Walker, the head of Wiiija, all of them would meet on a regular basis, and would talk about what was happening in digital music. And so we started doing these meetings on a regular basis, by phone at first. And it became clear about six months into this -- so this would have been about a year and six months into my tenure at Beggers -- that there was an opportunity to build out an area in the digital space at Beggers. And so I remember Martin Mills, the Chairman of Beggars, saying on a call, "Who's interested in, or is anybody in this meeting, interested in taking this role?" And it was crickets. So I said, "I'll do it." And the reason I said "I'll do it" is because I was the one who wasn't running a record label, or who wasn't, didn't have sort of an established if you will, position at Beggars. I was sort of a catch all. And that's how I got into digital music. So 1997, this move turned out to be, if you will, a lucky jump. But I always call the career jumps that I've had in my, in my career, educated luck. Because they they are luck. And I'm, I'm I don't ever pretend that I have more information than everybody else does. But I think I'm good at identifying opportunity. So for me, this felt like opportunity. And I jumped at it. And then of course that launched a 25-year career in digital music.

Well, I think also from the stories you've told, so far, you have a appetite for taking a bigger risk. And some people have really different appetites for that we've had lots of people on this show who increment a lot and it ends up steering into something that is wildly different, that's creating something new. Other people see that there's a gigantic hole and jump into filling it whether or not they have the skills. You've got a whole interesting story of iterative puzzle pieces. But then you have said yes to taking big identity leaps into the next thing to be in do that something totally different. But it's not, it's taking A-B-C -- you've been piling up and moving it to the next space. But being willing to step into the next space. It's not what a lot of people are indig . . . a lot of people we've run into in, in digital music, especially here, you either come from the outside and go, "Oh, I love music. I've been doing digital let me display something that I see from the outside is broken." Or they've been just this massive rabble-rouser or they bolted on repeatedly as the digital person in a bunch of different companies. You've sort of generated yourself but generated sort of, you know, Dick 2.0, Dick 3.0, very much like pretty much digital moniker as you move forward. But then been able to kind of own your own space with it too, which is a really great thing. Now. You, you have your time with Beggars. And so in doing digital for Beggars, what spurred the shift to Toolshed and then other things that you done what? What took you from that sort of identity and practice and building into what you're building now? And then I'll drag you into all the cool things you're doing now.

Great, thank you. So what took me there was, was really where the where the Beggars shot headed. So because of the timing, because it was 1997, I can still remember the first MP3 conversation I had with with Rich Holtzman, who was at 4AD at the time and now manages Portugal The Man . . . where Rich said, "Oh, there's a thing called an mp3." And I said, "What's an mp3?" And he said, "It's a digital music file." And, you know, so that's where we were at the time, this was really, really early days. And, you know, Beggars already enjoyed. . . .I mean, they've just had massive worldwide success with The Prodigy, at that time with Fat of the Land. So, you know, they were labeled, that sort of "all eyes were on Beggars" right around the time I started there. And I got this sort of pole position of watching Martin work with, work with individual artists, work with individual record labels, start to assemble a group, he brought in 4AD as, as a wholly owned member of the group, if you will, during that time, you know, from a relationship that was split with Ivo Watts-Russell. And so, and we were also able to articulate this whole licensing structure around free music and licensing free music versus just giving it to people. So we created this whole license structure. And that's what got me interested when I left Beggar's, which was really a function of, "Hey, I'm, you know, at that point at 38, or 39 year old guy, and I'm still not making very much money, and I live in New York City with a family. And I can't keep doing it on an independent label salary." So to Martin's credit, he sat down with me and said, "Look, we'll, we'll structure a deal that will essentially pay you what you would have earned at Beggars, but also, all the money that we would have spent on you, if Beggars will pay that to you and let you start your own business." So they gave me the leap. Martin gave me the leap. And I have huge respect for him, and always will have huge respect for him for having made that bet on me. And not only, so not only did they become my first consulting client [at] Toolshed, but at the time, Martin encouraged me to, to get involved with the SoundExchange board. And he said, "Look, you know, we . . . " There was a recent acquisition of Matador Records or partial acquisition of Matador Records. That happened in 2001, or 2000. So he said, "You can represent Matador Records, and you'll be our SoundExchange representative to the board." And that lasted for another nine years. And during that time, of course, I was building my business. But having this relationship with Beggars, Beggars Group and with Matador was hugely important, because it gave me an element of gravitas and element of being sort of in the middle of what was happening with this sort of growing space of digital music. When I started at SoundExchange, you know, they were bringing in maybe $20 to $40 million a year. Digital Music, of course, that now is over a billion dollars a year.

This was early internet radio-ish, very early. So this is not interactive as much, right? So can you for those, most people in the music space should know SoundExchange? If not, that's a whole other conversation. But can you share for those who don't what SoundExchange is?

Sure. So as you mentioned, SoundExchange focuses on non-interactive music. So that's that's music that you listen to passively. So you turn on your radio that's not interactive radio you hear. You're not able to influence that rather than calling the DJ and asking him to play something him or her to play something. You know, that contrasts, interactive music and interactive, fully interactive music is what the digital music services have built or are building. And that would be that would be Apple Music. That would be now Spotify. And in those early days, companies like GoodNoise, with GoodNoise, which became eMusic -- you might remember them. And certainly Rhapsody was around at the, at that point. They were one of the very early interactive, digital streaming companies where you could listen to any music that you wanted to. So all of this was pretty experimental . . .

You couldn't skip more than x per hour so that you were essentially listening to someone's curated example and experience. Pandora, Live365, I think is back but at the time other folks where you had a more passive listening experience -- direct curated experience, which was for a lot of people their online music.

That's right, that's right. Subscription was not, you know, it's not like today. Subscription was something that, you know, music geeks signed up for. And so of course, I had subscriptions to all of it, but it really was, you know, this idea that, you know, SoundExchange was focused on building the market for non-interactive music . . . was a really, really important, it was a important role for them to play. You might recall in the middle of the 2006, approximately 2007, there was a small webcaster settlement that I was deeply involved with. And, you know, that was about creating a licensing structure that would work for small webcasters, who would be focusing on presumably independent music, for instance. And, you know, so all of the, all of this, this sort of handoff if you will, from Beggars, to me saying, Okay, this will, this will give you a chunk of music industry gravitas, and you go build your company. But you can't just have Beggars as a client. You got to go find some other clients too... lead me to think okay, well, I'm gonna reach out to Slim Moon at Kill Rock Stars, and see if Slim is interested in having me. . . be his digital guy as a consultant and do his, his blog marketing for him, which is something that really only two or three other companies were in at that point, and also do his digital licensing for him and also hosts his downloads for him because that was expensive back then. And one of one of my employees at the time figured out a very inexpensive way to host downloads. So we had this sort of tri-part solution that we could offer to independent record labels, and they ate it up. We -- it's not hyperbola to say that there really wasn't another company that was focused on the independent labels base like we were. And we literally went around and cherry-picked our favorite record labels. So Kill Rock Stars, spinART, Righteous Babe (Ani diFranco's label), Merge Records, Touch and Go, Saddle Creek, PIAS. I mean, we literally just went around the world looking for who are the great record labels, who have the great catalogs of music. And I thought, if I build a brand that's identified with really high quality music, I can't lose. And that's exactly what happened.

So what now then is, is Dick Huey 2022? And Toolshed 2022, in an environment that has gotten to be mostly digital, mostly streaming? And now looking at all sorts of new technologies, what is the competitive advantage from having this phenomenal, diverse, high quality, having done a bit of everything career journey? What's now look like?

So, to, I'll do this quick, but to get to that point, you have to, you have to look at what happened inside the music business from 2002, when I started Toolshed, where digital music was maybe between two and 5%, of sales, to about 2010, where all of a sudden it was 60% of sales. And were all of these record labels, most of the record labels, I should say, started pulling all of this back in house, they said okay, this is 60% of our revenue, we need a digital person in house, it can't just be this one guy who you know, works external to our company. And we should be doing our own licensing, direct licensing to DSPs. So my clients started peeling off one by one, and I kind of saw this coming. So I moved into the social space. But at the same time, I thought, I should also start working with tech companies who are looking to work with the independent label community, because I know it so well. I've had so many of them as clients. And the first company that I found, turned out to be a big one. It was Spotify. So I went in under a bit of a false flag. . . presented to, I pitched Ken Parks, who was running the US office at that time, was really just him, and said, "Hey, I want to come in and talk to you about Merge Records." And I got in the meeting, and I said, "So I came in to talk to you about Merge Records. But I also want to understand how you're going to go out and license to all the independence because there are plenty of high-profile examples, right now, companies that have really messed this up, and approached it poorly. I know the States, I know this, the companies kind of do this for Spotify." And he hired me to do that as a consultant. And I worked with him for a year and a half around the launch of Spotify in the US during the time of. . . .So I started in 2010. And worked through 2012. And that opened my eyes to the revenue potential for one of working in this segment. But also got me focused on looking for music tech opportunities, instead of music promotion opportunities. And as we sort of moved slowly into and then slowly out of the social media marketing space, got more and more focused on tech. And . . .

. . . not just tech, it sounds like, but being a bridge to tech, the bridge to tech to be an accelerator for tech.

Yeah. And accelerator for tech. You know, the first, the first long-term relationship that I had in the tech world was probably with Jaksta. So that was a company that I worked with, for, for the last six and a half years, with a very forward-thinking business model, and one that the music industry had not really wrap their head around focused on something that's not sexy music metadata. But that is incredibly important. And I was able to be with that company, and, you know, the guys have their head of licensing and, and share the importance of metadata with not only independent record labels, but with the major record labels, and get their heads wrapped around why this all mattered. I would say there was a broad understanding of why what I was doing, you know, either was important, or, or wasn't important. I probably didn't say that quite right. But I guess what I'm getting trying to get across is it was a ton of education.

Who is it important to and why? Because a lot of it is that, I was about to say that, even again, we've talked about metadata on prior shows. But for some people, it's like, well, what is metadata? Is it just having the right author, songwriter name on the piece and its depth and its layers? It's good, it's, it's all the information that could be about the track, but that's including who played on the track? And a lot of it is early on was messy and junk and inappropriately put, right? I mean, so part of it is that it's, it's not just the way you track back to how money goes back to the song, but it's lots of information about the track.

Yeah, there's, I think that's a fair way of putting it. You know, the, for me, I approached the metadata question as a response to a failure in the marketplace. So when digital music came around, it was very, the presentation of information that came with digital music was super commodified. You know, what's the name of the artist? What's the name of the album? What's the name of the track? How long as it done? You know, is there is that maybe what year? Yeah, that's starting to start, let's say starting it starting at iTunes, the original iTunes player in 2004. And, you know, I mean, Apple Music didn't, didn't display, label information, label information. Until, I mean, you're probably gonna get the little bit wrong, but the late 20.. 2016 2017 2018, maybe even later, it was it was a multi year set of discussions that I had that a ton of other people had to try to get. Just the basic information shared. Forget about relationships between bands. You know, hey, you know, Stephen Malkmus, you know, is in Pavement, but he also is part of Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. You know, is there a way that we can get both of those? You know, music is there, some interconnectivity between those two things, and, you know, many, many, many 1000s and 10s of 1000s of bands that are smaller than Stephen Malkmus. Also, you know, needing to benefit from those relationships, and having no connection to the digital music player. So I saw that as a failure in the marketplace that we had lost the record jacket, we lost the information that was in it. And my my desire to be part of Jaksta was to try to start bringing that back. And I would say that, that, that we successfully brought this issue to a front burner for an awful lot of different major distributors, major record labels, independent record labels, in a way that it just wasn't in 2015. And so, the to get to the, I think, the end of your question, which is what I'm doing now, doing this thing for Jaksta was important for me, because it helped me realize that my focus was on big picture, enhancements to the music industry. And I look for clients that are focused on focusing on something usually in the tech space, that that solves a problem inside music. And I don't just mean a flashy marketing problem. But that really fixes something. So my, you know, my clients today are companies like Entertainment Intelligence, which has, you know, a company that's been around for for quite some time, but that has, you know, the preeminent music analysis platform for independent record label to send distributors. You know, it's really a high end, highly granular product. And there's a big market for that, you know, it's post revenue. AIMS API, the artificial intelligence music search platform, is also -- it's a big picture idea in that it, it optimizes music similarity, allows you to take a song, and match it against the catalog and find other songs that are similar to it. So if, for instance, you're, you know, a music supervisor, and you give a brief to a label and say, hey, you know, I really want to use this -- I don't know -- Lady Gaga track, but I can't afford it . . . so do you have anything that sounds like this Lady, Lady Gaga track? AIMS will show you that. So I just think that's it . . . it also does other things. It does tagging, etc. But I think that's fascinating technology. So I look for those kinds of entities for business development work. And going back to this idea of a stool with three legs. That's a big chunk of what I do at Toolshed now. The second chunk is to try to stay affiliated with record labels, or companies looking specifically for music licenses. So I hope to expand the record label part of our business going forward into 2022, 2023. I have some ideas. And then this educational tech and new tech piece, which is for me focusing on teaching, and which ,which I have always loved, as I said earlier, but also focusing on some of the new community-focused things happening in the music industry, specifically around Web3, and DAOs, creative communities. I am particularly interested in the community aspect of a, of creating and monetizing a community to the benefit of all of its members. That to me is . . .

. . . and we could probably spend a half hour last Web3 and DAOs. So DAOs we haven't talked about, I don't think, yet, on, on this show, distributed autonomous organizations, right?

Correct.

Which . . I know that Cherie Hu has been building her one long with her token that goes with that and that's probably even a whole deeper rabbit hole than the time of it. And maybe we can do a follow up conversation on next-generation communities, which could be really cool. But you're teaching also there, right,

I teach for I teach for Scott Galloway's new company. So he has an edtech company, educational tech. And for those of your listeners who know Scott is just reputation precedes him if you don't know who he is, he's an NYU professor. He's also a serial entrepreneur, he's had a couple spectacular flameouts. And a couple very spectacular exits, and is now he does a podcast with Kara Swisher, he does his own podcast, he was on CNN, he's regularly on a wide variety of business shows. So you know, I became really interested in the financial tech space. And I'm still very interested in it, and did some consulting and advisory work for a couple of different companies, including paper chain, which was focused on optimizing sort of the payment process for, for artists and for labels in digital music. And I thought, Okay, I can't do worse than upping my financial gain. So I'm going to associate with this business leader, who's got great command of financial space and financial lingo. And, as it happened, I took a very early class that he offered in in subscription strategy, and got noticed and was asked to be a teaching assistant for subsequent classes. And since that time, about a year and a half ago, I've taught 15 different classes for the company. So that's been a ton of fun, and a real learning experience, and opportunity to move outside of our fairly small music business, to a global cohort of companies working in CPG. And big corporations. So gave me access to a part of the music are a part of the business world that I've never really got. I never really had corporate experience. And all of a sudden, I was in a position to talk to people who had worked for corporations their whole life, and understand, you know, what it was like to work a corporation. And, and you know, the unique challenges that you have when you work a corporation. So it rounded out my background. And that's why I did it, and why I'm still doing it.

So we've covered a lot here, we talked a lot about your iterative career building, which has been some big pivots, but wonderful expansions into new spaces. We talked about you, what did you do when you started out? And you have two kids? What journey path have they seen of yours is kind of three kids, three kids. So what journey paths have they taken from your journey? And where are they going is my last question as we get toward the wrap up

here? Great, thanks. Well, so and this is actually the one other thing that I wanted to talk about. My, my three kids, they're all in their 20s. Now they're all girls, two of them live, where I live now, which is in the Columbia River Gorge. About an hour east of Portland, and the other one lives in Boston. I would say that when I when I started my own business, you know, on one hand, back in 2002, on one hand, it was it was about, you know, trying to create a financial framework that would work for our family that will let me put some kids through college. But the other part of it was, I've always been a big believer in stories and in creating a story for yourself creating a brand around yourself, if you will. And my kids growing up, always saw me being part of their life, being very close to them working in this little office that was right outside our farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, where I lived at the time, you know, gardening, we started a garden, my wife and I started a garden Co Op, and invited dozens of families, including some people who are pretty highly placed now at Apple and Amazon to be part of this thing. And my kids saw this growing up. So we had we'd have lots of events. We'd have lots of parties at the house that were music related or music connected with music people. And so all of them got to See me create a story around myself. That was deliberate. Even if he didn't really know, it was deliberate. So I think all of them have, you know, they're all big travelers. They're all my eldest daughters in a business development career for a startup in San Francisco, and worked in a ski industry prior to that. So, middle daughter works for an ad agency in Boston, youngest daughters and medical assistant. They're all they're all pretty worldly. They're all, you know, understand the value of creating a story. And and they, and they probably see me still doing it. You know, I mean, it's moving to the Columbia River Gorge. If when you're not retiring is not something that everybody does. COVID did make it possible. And I'm really glad that I made it possible. But, you know, it's, for me, it's just another iteration of my personal story and where I'm trying to take it, and how I'm trying to remain relevant in music, you know, to both further, you know, my particular spin on what's happening in the digital world, but also to, to allow me to continue to advocate on behalf of the artist community, which is, where it all started for me. And what's really important for me. And when I, when I look for, when I look to drill down into something, I always try to take a look at, how does this look from the artists perspective, what's going to happen to the artists that this impact, and you don't always have all the information you need? But you do the best you can?

Dick, it's been great, we've covered so much, is there anything else you want to mention before we close out here today?

Um, I think the only thing I would say is, you know, I'm, I feel very blessed to have been able to come up in music, and make choices that weren't, that weren't tied to climbing a corporate ladder. And also, to have been able to make a really, really wide friends circle and network of music industry colleagues, not just in independent music, but in the major label space in the tech space. I think I'm very fortunate to have been able to do that. And the way that I've been able to kind of pull that all together is by always being open and willing to take that phone call from somebody who needed a hand or a leg up, either starting in the business, or someone who's thinking about changing careers. You know, without ever being really sure where it was how that was going to come back to me or whether it was even going to compete with me, at some level or another. So I feel happy to have had the sort of self confidence, if you will, to go out and be that networker who pulls together disparate groups, you know, going back to when I was a kid, you know, being captain in university, Michigan ski team, to early digital music days, you know, creating a digital music collective, around around heads of digital and independent record labels. All of this has worked for me in my career, and whenever I talk to people who are getting into the music business, and they say, How do I do? How do I do this? How do I do that? I say, you know, you have to get to give, or you have to give to get and and giving means giving without an expectation of something coming back to you. So if you can do that, if you can be that person that assembles other people, that helps other people collectivise in one way or another, you're gonna find a path, you're going to find connections, you're going to find people that want to be in your orbit. And so, yeah, that's my big blessing. And and the thing that I'm still trying to do almost 60 years old here and

hey, so Deke, who would you like to reach out to you on how would you like them to reach out to you?

Well, I'm, I'm always available on social So, I think the best place to connect with me is probably over LinkedIn. I'm not on Facebook as much as I used to be these days, and I really try to reserve that for more personal friends. So you know, follow me on socials, I'm pretty active on Twitter. At D human D Hu M as in Mary a And as Nancy, or on LinkedIn, find me there you can find our website at at tool shed dot biz B as in boy, I Z. And, and I encourage people to write reach out to me, I always answer emails. I'm sure somebody's gonna write in Saline never answered my email, but I always try to answer emails. I'm pretty good about it. And I love hearing from people. I love hearing new ideas. I love you know, people reaching out to me and saying, I've got this problem inside this complex business we call music. Can you help me fix it? So I encourage people to reach out and I'll be here to listen.

Sounds great. Thanks for joining us.