I fell in love with IP . . . with Mike Huppe, SoundExchange

Mike Huppe is our guest today on Innovating Music. Enjoy his conversation about how he ended up in intellectual property and tying that to his longtime love of music, how SoundExchange works for artists and creators. And it's something you may know nothing about as a nonprofit working behind the scenes in the United States, and with neighboring rights and other things that may be new to you, or might be old hat to you. So we'll enjoy the conversation about what the challenges are, as in innovation and working with existing large pipelines of artists music, and where the world is going in terms of non interactive rights in a changing technology world enjoy the show.

SoundExchange is a very interesting company in the music industry. But really, you should think of us as a company at the intersection of music, technology and data we are in we represent the entire recorded side of the music industry in the US, if you are an artist or a label that gets played on any of these digital stations, you probably get a check from us. And what we've done for the better part of 10 years is we help facilitate the royalty payments for digital streaming. When we first started out it was you know, companies like AOL and Yahoo Music, and obviously, it's now progressed into a whole bunch of other other services that basically pay us the royalties and send us data for a lot of the non interactive streaming out there things like satellite radio, Sirius, XM, 1000s, of internet radio stations, cable radio, your music choice, for instance, on your cable. And what we've done for many, many years, is collect from all of those services, and help get the royalties out to every single record label and every single artist as well as all the background musicians. You know, when I first came over here, we're paying out something in the neighborhood of $25 million a year, and now we pay out over a billion a year, which is, you know, 12 to 15% of the US recorded music industry. So that's sort of the bulk of what we do but but we've we've expanded beyond that as well. We've gotten into music publishing, trying to help the music publishing infrastructure work better, and we are now offering all sorts of products and services to the industry to really help remove friction, you know, there's, there's a lot of things that make the money and the proper payment get hung up in our industry. And our driving goals are part of our DNA is what can we do to streamline all of that remove the friction, make the whole industry work better, so that, you know the people that make the music we love get properly compensated.

So this would be the journey from ad-based internet radio where if I'm listening to Pandora, but not subscribing or if I'm listening in my car to Sirius XM, and something that is both spoken word and not spoken word, all wanders through you guys, correct?

Yes, if it's if it's a commercially released sound recording, which includes his, which includes spoken word, comedy, obviously, all genres of music, and, you know, we, what we administer includes both ad supported and subscription based. Now we don't, we don't do everything, all the streaming out there, if there are certain functionality that that that a service once they actually have to go to the record company directly and get get the rights. That's why if it's, you know, fully fully interactive, like a Spotify, they typically would have to go to the record label, but for those 3600 services that are essentially radio like, you know, non interactive, linear streaming, Leanback listening, there's several ways to describe it. Most of those entities can just use this license and federal law and they pay us and, and then we take care of everything else. We like to think ourselves as the easy button for you know, for the for a lot of these services.

Or I metaphor in my brain was going to the plumbing of your the drain. Oh, maybe that. Because in many ways, we've had a lot of people on this show that are innovators who want to take this piece and add it to this piece and grow this tiny thing into a large thing. And they need to sit on an infrastructure and you guys in many ways are the infrastructure making this work?

We are although I would say we are also innovators. I hopefully we'll get to that later on. There's a lot to do. We have we have you know, we have I think up to the game of what it means to do this type of work in the music industry. There's entities like us around the world. We're kind of the only entity that does what we do in the US. There's some analogs you know, the other collectives out there people probably, you know, the PRO's like ASCAP and BMI, they're similar but different. There's also something called the MLC, which which is similar but different. But I think we have done things over Our short little lifetime we're 20 years old this year is our 20th anniversary. I think we've done some things over our lifetime that it really raised the standard of what people should and could expect from a collective music entity like ourselves.

So are you then by your emotional history and in what you love, a musician, a data person, a technologist, you come from the sort of legal policy side of this. Are you also at heart, a data geek or a tech geek or?

Well, yeah, I'm a recovering lawyer. As I tell people, I will, I guess we'll get to how I got here. But I came here through through the legal... I'm def... I'm definitely an amateur musician. You know, I'm not good enough for anybody to pay me. I grew up since the age of four playing keyboard, or piano back then, but turned into keyboard. Played keyboard and you know, stage band and jazz bands. And I also played trombone in high school, in college. Not at the same time. You know, they have a little thing for... if you play harmonica, you can play piano on harmonica at the same time. Can't do that with trombone, but, but

It would be weird. That would be strange.

It would be weird.

So where did you grow up?

I grew up in the first state, Wilmington, Delaware. I'm a native Delawarean.... one of those you probably don't know a lot of them.

Aubrey Plaza, just one thing for the most famous Delawareans, beating Joe Biden. That's my only Delaware not knowing of.

Right?

So . . .

So I'm I am you know, I'm a musician. I love music. I have a very eclectic set of tastes. If you look at my pre programmed Sirius XM channels, you would you would see quite a diversity. But I wouldn't say that I'm a great musician. We have a lot of people even here on our staff who are professional musicians, they gig you know, and they're really good and really talented and really knowledgeable. I'm nowhere near their level. But yeah, I thought I grew up loving music and listening to all sorts of music.

So when you were 16, 17, 18, and playing various things, not at the same time, as we've established already. And you then were thinking of what you wanted to do next. Were you looking for something that engaged music? Did you have family members going? No, no, no, you must do something reputable, where you're looking to be someone who is working with innovative people. I mean, what kind of rang your bell back when you're that age.

So this is going to be different than probably a lot of your guests. You know, I see these things a lot of people come on, and they say I always wanted to do you know, I was wanting to be in the music industry. That wasn't really where I was headed. I liked music. But I really was headed towards what you ready for this? I was a physics major for a year in college. And if in my mind, music is physics, right, sine waves and math, I mean, it's physics is through everything. And music is physics. But But really, I was thinking, well, maybe I'll, I'll head to law school because I thought I always wanted to be a lawyer. And in law school, I really fell in love with intellectual property. We had a general intellectual property course at law school. So it covered, you know, copyrights, patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and intellectual property just fascinated me because it's, I hope I don't sound too geeky for your, for your listeners here.

But hey, this a geek crew.

Okay. The thing about that, think about what intellectual property is, it's this thing that doesn't really exist, you know, you can't hold it, you can't touch it. But government decides this is a valuable thing for our culture. And so we're gonna invest a property right in it and protect it. Because we want to encourage the community in our culture, to invest in it, whether it's music or patents, or, you know, research on the next cancer cure, like whatever it may be.

Part of the music... of the of the human genome, which also to me seems very weird, that ownership and ownership in in part of genes is now part of the whole IP structure, which just seems crazy.

I totally agree with you, we could do a whole another whole. So I, I loved IP, and for a while I thought, oh, maybe I'll become a patent lawyer. Because, you know, I had this sort of innate science, love of physics. But I'm so glad I'm not a patent lawyer. Because as I sit here now, today, and having known what patent law is like, it probably wouldn't even take me the direction I want to go. But I just loved music and I and I loved. I love the aspects about it. So, you know, went to law school, and that was clerking in a court, one of the fastest dockets in the US. It's the Eastern District of Virginia right now in Alexandria, Virginia. So because of that, a lot of intellectual property went through it, you know, there's, like intellectual property cases, you can be losing 10s of millions of dollars a day if someone is knocking off your product or infringing or whatever it may be. So a lot of IP went through there and I picked up a lot of IP and got to like it even more, but it really wasn't until, until you know I after clerking I worked at one of the big law firms here in DC doing commercial litigation. And it wasn't really till I got a call to head over to this entity called the Recording Industry Association of America, which is a trade association for the major record labels. And that was sort of how I, how I landed my feet in this magical industry that we both work in.

So I'm gonna back up a little bit as to the . . . 'Cause sometimes there's wonderful young people who listen to this. And some of them think, Oh, I just go on, and I fill in a thing on a, you know, LinkedIn or whatever. And then the magical job will connect to me. You had a bit of a walk about that. So you did go and try out different things. Yeah. And music wasn't necessarily right, in that path of life. Did you go right? Again, this is sort of in the weeds of it. But did you go right, from undergrad to grad? Or did you also wander in the weeds before law school?

So I took two years off before law school, and I wanted to do something really interesting, you know, so I actually, you ready for this? I looked into working on a cruise ship. I actually looked into you know, other interesting career paths, shall we say, and I ended up at sort of the very creative, interesting, very unusual job of being a paralegal at a big law firm.

Wandered in the front door of this, you didn't want a side door, you wandered into the, because I'm always nudging young people, if you want to do music, go to music, if you're not sure, go do other things. And sometimes that walk in the door walks you into an understanding and an option you wouldn't have seen otherwise. So you actually wandered in via the paralegal direction.

Okay, that's absolutely true. And then I went to law school, and like I said, I had this itch for intellectual property. But even then, even you know, right out of law school, if you told me I would have ended up in the music industry, I would have been surprised, because, you know, I didn't I didn't have any real connections into it. I didn't have any people that, you know, were sort of mentors guiding me in that direction. But you know, sometimes life serves you, but life serves you, right? You know, there's a famous philosopher who you start to talk about, like your fate, as you know, half half fortune and half virtue, right? It's half half. What What would fate send your way in half what you make of it?

Here, we sometimes talk about postcard moments, which has a whole other narrative with it, that sometimes a postcard shows up. And nowadays, I'm not sure people use postcards, but we're something shows up and you go, Oh, that's the right thing at the right time that I will try, but it happened to show up and I happen to be ready for it. So you ended up then postcard in a bid at the RIAA that you ended up then taking that after having digested and learned and fell fallen in love with IP. And this was an affair is that so the RIAA largely historically, maybe I'm gonna show my biases here, has worked with sort of large labels. And is kind of the trade association for how we move forward as an industry from a big label point of view.

Yeah, I mean, they have more than just the big major labels on their board. So you know, they obviously look out for interest that affect all labels, but their main and most influential members are the three majors when I first joined, I think it was six might have been five. That's some consolidation. In the US. There's a sort of an analogue for the indie label, A2IM, a great organization, the American Association of Independent Music. You know, they're, they're on our board as well, great organization, but they, they tend to represent the interests of the Indie labels. And, you know, indie is generally defined as, quote, not a major, so

And not part of a major, because the majors can be chunked in all sorts of great ways, too. So

And when I went into the RIAA, you know, again, remember, I came as a litigator from from, you know, commercial litigation background where I, I did some intellectual property litigation, but I did a whole bunch of other litigation, everything from you know, you know, rocket engines to Title Seven to contract disputes to, you know, pen, all sorts of litigation. And when I went to the RIAA, I was actually in the anti piracy department. That's where I went in. I started the RIAA the month after they filed the Napster lawsuit.

I was gonna say that you were right after the Napster adventure began.

Yep. And so I, I worked with the anti piracy unit, which again, it's funny how quickly the world changes. So this was probably, I don't know, 2000 and kind of think, you know, late 2000, probably 2010 something around there. Back thenat . You know, piracy was still physical. The piracy unit, you know, at their offices all over the country. We were investigating even even pirate tape duplicators. You know, we're starting on CD and the pirate CD manufacturer manufactures, including imported CDs from other countries where, you know, they were commercially pressed. That faded its way into people doing their own burning in CD towers in their closets. And eventually, you know, to the online world and most most of what . . . most of the piracy that the industry is focused on right now is is, is online now and that, you know, we were part of all of that as well, I was involved in that, but also worked, eventually moved over to the general counsel's office over there. And I, I worked on policy stuff there as well worked with government agencies stuff in Congress and on the hill. And then, you know, the last few years at SoundExch... at the RIAA, I was sort of partly on loan to this little company called SoundExchange, that, you know, was sort of burgeoning. It was this experiment artists and labels working together, how interesting. And I helped them with some of their big rate litigations, I helped them with some other legal stuff. Then eventually SoundExchange asked me to come over and be the general counsel, and then eventually, I, the board, tapped me to run the place. And, you know, I knew I knew back then that that SoundExchange and really streaming generally had a bright future. But wow, neither I nor anybody I know, had any idea how quickly would explode? It is. It is amazing how not that long ago, streaming was, you know, single digit percent of the US reforming the tort business or the tort non business.

Right. And so that, you know, you were you were battling piracy, but you know, fragmented files and, and, you know, what was what? I have a long story, which I can't record of working with some of your members on various piracy issues back when I was early at UCLA. So saw way too much stuff I wasn't supposed to be but see back then, of sort of the puzzle pieces of all the different ways that the different member companies were looking at piracy, and from different points of view. So you were kind of herding cats, herding cats during changing technologies, when not everybody was in the same point of view.

No, and that's, you know, that's always the case. Right? It's human nature to resist change. I actually love change. I think, I think disruption is a positive term, a great term. You know, not everybody believes that some people think disruption is a threatening term, but But to me, it's progress. Right? It's we Yes, there's lots of challenges about the industry right now. And for sure, creators are not participating fairly in the wealth that's being created. I mean, you can get to that if you want. But I will say this. I just think the ubiquity of music, not only what you want to listen to, but where you can access it. I mean, it's great. It's absolutely great. And I am so glad that the industry is moving in that direction, we just need to make sure that the creators that make the music participate fairly and all the wealth that's created,

it's been explained to me what at one point in time that when you're working with a community of entities, is that you have the ones that are pulling on one end to move the growth organization in the future. And you have the ones the back end are going no, so you kind of have this stretched out balloon of different interests in the same environment. And I'm assuming you're needing to deal with both sides of that, as well. Yes.

And no, I mean, our board, I will tell you this, the sound Exchange Board is very diverse, we pretty much represent the diverse meaning from different different, you know, aspects of the industry. To give you a sense, we have 18, board members, nine of them represent label interests. And we have all the major labels, we have a couple of indie labels, and we have the heads of the two big trade associations. And then on the artist side, we have the head of the head of the two big union heads of the two big unions AFM and SAG after a couple of artists, and then artists, managers and lawyers and representatives. So it's an you know, it's basically a very eclectic view set of perspectives on the board. But I will say this, in terms of the people, you mentioned, that when you when you try to manage a group, there are some that are, you know, pulling you back, and we're not wanting to move forward, I don't find that on our board. The SoundExchange board is 100% behind trying to make this industry work better. That's why they've invested in the company and allowed us to do the amazing things we do. You know, we we operate at a scale that that blows away everyone else around the world. Let me give you an example. What we do is called neighbouring rights. That's what it's more of a European term, but neighboring rights means sort of the performance of the sound recording. That's how the best way to think about it. And if you look at all of the entities around all of the world, the whole world that operate in the neighbouring rights market SoundExchange payments represent almost half of the whole of the whole globe 40 42% And we have 3600 services that pay us every month. We pay out monthly, you know a lot of other people pay out once a year maybe you know, maybe less than that. 90% of our money is out the door within 45 days of receipt. A lot of other entities around the world take 12, 14, 18 months or longer to pay. And you know, we have some of the best databases, some of the best matching technology in the world. And all of that's an investment by the board. So I would say there's no one on our board, pulling us back. They're united in wanting us to figure out how to remove friction and make this stuff make this industry work a little bit better.

So I'm assuming that some of your, your your team's time and energy is in though educating people in innovations coming up the pike, and also kicking the tires on new innovations to see is this worth being part of the effort and the ecosystem and negotiations, et cetera? How do you and your team, look at new tech coming up the pike? I'm assuming with all the things that are bubbling, you guys are at a bit of a dead run, but needing to have good BS detectors?

Yes, we look at new tech, I want to say salaciously. Like it's, we, it's exciting for all of us to look at what's coming down the pike. And I will tell you, Tech is a tool. You know, a lot of people, you know, Tech is a tricky issue nowadays, because people talk about the tech industry and their very strong views about what the tech industry is doing or not doing. And those views depend on where you sit, like everything in life. But to us technology is just a tool and any tool out there. We are always looking at it, you know, hey, this could be really cool. How can it be applied? AI is a perfect example. AI has a lot of risks, a lot of things that, you know, could be a threat to our industry. And we have to be mindful of that. But we look well, are there ways we can use AI, for instance, to improve our matching technology or to help with you know, creation of certain documents that we need or et cetera? Similarly, we're very interested in where the future goes with web three in the metaverse. There are two. There are things over the past two years about, you know, that genre of topics that you know, you have to be a little careful on the crypto crash, the crypto winter that we're all in was something that a lot of us you were predicting. But . . .

Wanting to short on my side, I kept trying to figure out, how do I short that? And people said, so that's a whole nother podcast on how that could have been done. And yet, it's education, right? Because Web3, people have to keep reminding me that Web3 actually, is actually a technology whole system and nomenclature coming this totally separate in terms of the next internet than the Web3 as to the crypto-based Metaverse in mass... And then Metaverse also is another code almost, that can get muddy when you're trying to explain the impact to people as to the . . . is it immersive, next generation multimedia content? Is it having to have coinage attach... So you begin to have to undo some of the stuff other people have done to explain it to your different parties? How much . . . How much time and energy do you guys spend on that part of thinking through how to detox some of these labels? And then working with members to make sure you're all on the same concept page?

Yeah, I mean, we spend, you know, I don't have a percentage for you, obviously, you know, good chunk of our time is spent on the day to day getting the money out running the operations, we have to make sure it's as interesting as their shiny new objects are. We, our first priority is making sure we pay our, you know, 600,000 accounts accurately, efficiently and fairly, and that we are transparent in how we do it. And that we have the best data. So when we talk about technology in our work, you know, sometimes technology or the future and technology, the current are wound. But our number one goal is making sure we do today's job as well as possible. But, but we definitely are constantly looking and testing all of these things. And you're talking to our board about it, researching it, talking to partners, you know, we're constantly in the mix with some of these cool companies about is there a role we can play? You know, is there an ownership stake to be had? So it's, it's a it's a fun time. It's a fun time to be in this industry. I mean, it's in a boring, that's for sure. Not a single day I get up and and say oh, it's going to be boring day to day.

Excellent. Most people actually can't say that right? That they're dealing with what they're worried about what they're wrestling with some big cloud over the horizon and, and this is a good time in music, that this is a good time to be to be making things happen efficiently for people and effectively and and being where the where your fingers on the pulse of things going on. What things are you presently really excited about?

What am I really excited about? Well, some of the things that we talked about I'm, I'm I'm dying to see where the web three Metaverse concept goes, because I do think, you know, like you said earlier exactly what happens with cryptocurrency that's different, you know, what happens with Blockchain or has deployed is different. But the metaverse is here, right with dish, you know, there are, there are

You have companies closing already and have been closing for a while, and the new companies coming in and you're going Wait.

But I do think that when you think of Web 3.0, it is going to bring a new way for music lovers to experience music, it's going to be radically different. So for instance, I think a Web2 is long and shallow radio very, very wide and shallow, I should say. Services want to have, you know, 30, 40 50, 60, 70, 100 million sound recordings, but all they have is the sound recording, maybe they have the liner notes and lyrics. And that's what people are looking for. I think, you know, I think the web three, the web three experience is gonna be very different, where you're going to be maybe in any, any individual user is going to be narrower, but go deeper, right? They, they may not need 70 million tracks, they may have the 10 artists they really like, but they're gonna want to get really close to those artists and all these new ways. And I don't just mean virtual concerts and virtual merch in virtual merch, as they call it merch. But new ways to connect through creative products that are that are experiences that are built on web three. So I'm very excited about what that means what it means for artists and songwriters, what it means for them connecting with their fans in a different way. So I'm very excited about that, I think that'll be a fun place to go. I'm, I'm intrigued by AI, you know, excited is, is a is an AI has a lot of risks that we got to watch out for. But it also has a lot of potentials. You know, we we want to make sure it doesn't displace the real human creators that we all are know and love. And we also need to make sure that, to the extent AI capitalizes on stuff, people own, you know, using copyrighted content to learn, learn and teach the algorithm while the Creator should participate in that, but I think it has a lot of potential, it's going to be interesting to see where that goes. You know, and when you think of . . .

Maybe this is a sort of branching question from that. What I'm seeing already in many places, not just music, is that it's ratcheting up the volume of production, so that people are able to put out a lot more content either with assistance or my very cynical point of view, junk fooding the system and putting out Stuff. And so it's happening already in the ebooks space, it's happening already in the audiobook space, as well as I'm seeing it extensively with music and hearing of companies who have been on our show already, who've been needing to create tools that are actually using AI to help debunk a lot of that stuff. How does that does it maybe gum up the works for you guys to be having stuff in the pipe that's not then that suddenly blossoms cure the need for curators and pushing through the pipeline?

You know, I wouldn't say gums it up from an operational standpoint. You know, if it's, as I said, we operate at a scale right now that's kind of mind-numbing. You know, we I think we process 35 billion performances a month, something like that. So we can we can handle more sound recordings, right? So if you had this AI technology that creates, you know, millions more sound recordings, we can handle them and process them and assign a royalty to them. So I don't think it comes up the operational aspect. But what I what I do think it does is I personally, you know, not speaking for the industry or for SoundExchange. But you worry about platform dilution or diversion, you worry about, you know, these commercial streaming platforms, which are great, we all subscribe to multiple of them. But if they are driven to sort of improperly divert listenership to content, just because it's cheaper, or maybe content that they own, so therefore, it's cheaper, that doesn't feel good to me for the industry, right? I think that's that's kind of a bigger worry, I have about the this explosion of new sound recordings, not not handling it from an operational side, but watering down the real creative stuff that your average listener wants to hear. And all in an effort for these services to lower the royalty load and make more profit that that that doesn't feel like a healthy thing to me for the industry.

And you can see that in other industries wrestling with this as well -- whether it's gonna go buy a product in Amazon and finding now that there's 40 different things that look and smell exactly like what you were seeking, that you have no idea what it is that that's happening in lots of platforms right now is the ease of creation. And the the no code, low code methods, not just AIs that are all coming in. It's, it's an interesting world to be walking into. We have, we could keep talking. I love this topic. I love this whole area. But we need to be wrapping up our time here and your time here. Is there anything that you'd like to talk about we haven't mentioned?

The one thing I'd love to talk about is one of the things. So we talked, we talked about sort of how I got here, what SoundExchange is. You know, hopefully, you, you walk away thinking about us as a music tech company. But another thing that I'd love for your listeners to know is, you know, we're not only music tech company, but we are advocates for the value of music. We are fighting every day to make sure that creators of all sorts sound recording owners, performers, background, musicians, songwriters, we, in our DNA, believe, you know, they need to be paid fairly for, for what they do. So part of what we do is sound changes we, you know, make sure everyone's playing by the rules and are part of the of the of the web. You know, we audit people and do enforcement measures occasionally have to sue some bad actors. We have a fairly well known lawsuit pending right now against someone who, you know, hasn't paid fairly and and stiffing the artists. We fight all the time in rate court, you know, what part of what we do is this government license that I mentioned. So we go into tribunal, up on Capitol Hill, they set rates and we have gotten the highest rates in the industry. I mean, globally, the rates we get from some of our services are higher than any any of their analogues around the world. And we also fight on Capitol Hill to try to get creators paid fairly. We just recently, in the last Congress had a piece of legislation called the American Music Fairness Act, which tries to get terrestrial radio to pay performers. You know, this, I'm sure Gigi but your your, your many, your listeners may not believe it, or not the $12 billion FM radio industry in the US $12 billion, they make off the music, and they pay 0% of the performers, which makes us basically a pariah in the industrialized world, we're the only entity that doesn't doesn't do that. So we're always fighting for things like that as well. So in addition to being which has been . . .

A longtime fight, This fight has been going on for a really long time.

Frank Sinatra. Yeah

It actually goes back to jukebox and player piano rights too, right? It goes back quite a way as to how we got where we are.

So when you think about us, please think about us as tech forward, music tech, we're doing everything to make the industry work better. But we're also doing everything we can to look out for the music and look out for the people that make the music because at the end of the day, you know, they call it the music business. And we've talked a lot about the business part of it. But first word in that pair is music. And if we don't fairly compensated people that make the music pretty soon, we're not going to have any new music. So we very believe very much believed that that's part of our mission as well.

And adding one more tweak to that, that you guys also have to look forward. So in many of these rate settings, you're actually looking out of ways anticipating what's coming, and what will be fair in the future. So I think always that's, that's always an interesting lens that you guys go through.

You know, what I say to my team, not not infrequently is like, when you're riding in a car, there's the reason the rearview mirror is this big, and the windshields this big, because you got to be aware it was fine here, but what's coming in front is much more important.

I got really big mirrors on the side, though, so you know, too much driving really big mirrors. So I appreciate the being able to look backwards and see where you've come from. So that's been really good. Would you like anyone to reach out to you? And if so on What issues what what would be? Who should reach out? And how should they reach out?

Well, first and foremost, if you are a performer, you know, someone who has created a sound recording and whether or not it's you know, it's you're signed to a label or not, if you have a sound recording that might be out there being played on any of these digital radio services, you should absolutely sign up with sound exchange, it's free to register with sound exchange. Because you know, and we need to know who you are and what you own. And that way if, if your song or recording pops up on one of these services we can pay you by the way, you can also become a member and we can collect for you around the globe also free -- all free. So that's certainly . . .

Free to sign up. But you guys do take a small portion to help facilitate that pipeline.

We do. The way that we basically operate let you know, we're actually a nonprofit. Many people don't know that. And certainly we don't . . . if you came to our offices, if you went to our planning meetings and where we talk about throughput and ROI and leveraging our assets and how do we you know, the way we've structured, we don't act like a typical nonprofit, but technically we're a nonprofit and the way we fund it As we take a small, small percentage of the revenue stream, since you brought it up, we generally the past several years, it's been in the neighborhood of 5%, which you know, give or take sometimes even lower. That is, again, by far the lowest in the world of people who do what we do. In many other in almost every other example, their double digits could be 12, 15, 18, even 20%. So we're very proud about how efficient we are and how little we take out. So we take a nickel, but we send the rest of you 95 cents,

And you have to have signed up, though. So that's the key part, you can't win, if you don't play, you got to sign up to be part of this. And he had benefit of it. Right.

And the other you know, you mentioned other people who, who could contact us. As I said, we are ravenous about, you know, what technology can do to make the world a better place and make the industry a better place. So, you know, as people are thinking about ways to use it, use technology to improve how this whole machine works, you know, if they see a role that we might be able to play or, or partnership, we're always interested in, in having those discussions because, you know, you never know could be could be the next great breakout thing that makes a big difference.

So we've walked through your journey where we've talked about all the instruments that you don't play at the same time, how you wandered in into the great direction of intellectual property and brought music back to the fold for that. And then how you end up exploring new technologies and creating a wonderful working system. Thank you very much, Mike for being on the show. And we'll put the show notes so people can reach out. And thank you very much for for being on the show.

Gigi, it has been a pleasure. I have a feeling we could talk for many more hours. We can . . . .we can book a future one if you want.