Adam Curry Interview with Ryan Dennis [Transcript]
By: Ryan E. Dennis
Tags: Music, Adam Curry, Podcast, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Ryan Dennis: Welcome back to the ICO Alert podcast, I’m here, joined by the one and only Adam Curry of Dench music. We’re so excited to actually get to know the project. We’ve seen a few different music-oriented projects, but I think you’re not going to see many that have this level of partnerships and influencers who are kind of crowding around and trying to find out, “what’s going on with Dench? This was brought to our attention, we were really excited as a team to get Adam on the phone, and I just would love to welcome Adam to the ICO Alert podcast.

Adam Curry, Dench Music: Hey Ryan, alright, yea good, good, how are you today?

Ryan: I’m feeling great, it’s probably The best day of my life. I get to talk about blockchain, I…

Adam: So every day, we get up and every able to a blockchain, it’s a good day.

Ryan: Absolutely. I mean, what’s a better feeling than just chasing a new passion and being ahead of the curve, why not?

Adam: Well, and that’s exactly why we started Dench music, was we saw the music. And when I say We, older friends of mine and we’re all in our early 50s, where we’ve been around for a while, in the entertainment and music business and everything was changing very rapidly and really started with the unbundling of the album. Thanks to Steve Jobs and iTunes. And then, of course, streaming became the way to distribute and make money with music. But it’s…but it’s not necessarily beneficial to everybody.

We’ve heard a lot of gripes about the amount of money for stream, but it’s also I think, how money is made in the music business is poorly understood in general, certainly by the public but we see things changing, we see how Blockchain is eventually going to be a distribution method, not just for music, but also for payment. And we wanted to be the company, the music production and publishing company that was ready for any change.

Ryan: The readiness is so applicable to block thing because we’re all playing this patient game, we’re waiting for other industries and Blockchain to kind of gain some more enterprise readiness, as you put it to be ready to attack these industries. So here on the podcast, we love to chat with new projects, to find out how ready they are and to kind of investigate what they’re working on, but when we’re talking to you, we kind of have already seen you guys have already negotiated some partnerships. So, let’s just get going. I, first of all, I want a little background I guess you have a really interesting background yourself. Adam, I’m sure a lot of people are interested in… so your story with the music industry, but I love to hear from your perspective how the music industry kind of readied you… and I prepared for you to serendipitously find yourself in blockchain, if you don’t mind.

Yeah, we have to go back a little bit then. For my personal history I… I was on air, and VJ on MTV in the ’80s in very early 90s, but it was in 1987 that I discovered the internet and it was really quite by mistake. I mean, I had a Mac Plus and a big hunk and twenty megabyte external SCSI Drive. Do you remember those days? And my bad modem, and the internet, I heard about it, and I heard about this internet thing and it was very hard to get on, but once you were there, all the cool kids were there and you had to get a dial-up account and a slip account or PP start-up or there was no World-Wide Web and this was all just text-based stuff, but who was on the Internet was kids at universities who had access to mainframe terminals. And I really went very quickly from there throughout my TV career when I eventually launched MTV dot-com with their full knowledge and compliance initially, and I saw how this was going to be an excellent distribution for media of being a long-time broadcaster, and I was the co-founder of podcasting and so that was one of the things that I was very frustrated about. How do we broadcast on the internet and how do we make it work for everybody?

And so, having seen this integration of media and technology continuously, and then of course when we had a Napster,

I was like… All right, now everything is completely different. I’ve had several companies, one fact, which I took public in ’96 that dealt specifically with internet distribution in an advertising — monetizing the network to a degree. And it was very frustrating I could not convince two groups that their world was about to be rocked. And the first one was newspapers. In fact, I went to Mercury in California, I went to many big publishers in Chicago and said, “Hey you’re about your lunch is about to get eaten because the classifieds which is your bread and butter are going to move away. Look at this thing called Craigslist..ah! We don’t care.

In the same music business to look at what’s happening at the time. The music business would really run by five lawyers. It’s five guys who are doing everything, it’s all kind of shake handshake deal over here, we’ll do this back there. Very, very non-transparent. So I’ve seen that how technology can rip entire industries apart and I don’t think we’re done with either one of those, not with the news or newspaper business, or how news is disseminated, and made profitable or at least doable.

And the same goes for music. And when you see it’s really… it’s more about ownership of something of the past. We don’t necessarily want to own our car, we don’t wanna own our home, we wanna use Airbnb we want to use Uber and Lyft, and it’s about access. We don’t necessarily have to own the music, we want the access to the music and once you make it easy, then it turns out that people will actually start to consume the media, that way.

So, we’re seeing these companies like in music and other blockchain initiatives that are coming up, they have yet to prove that their system is right, but we wanna be ready.

Having the technological understanding of how to translate that to media and to seamlessly integrate into whatever comes across our path that we’re lean and mean, and that’s exactly why we’re in business doing this.

Ryan: So, the music industry was run by five lawyers and now you’ve got a blocking industry, which is pretty much run by five block chains. You know, or people are trying to decide..

Adam: I’m a Bitcoin maximalist so I have all kinds of views on that.

Ryan: I love that. If you’re a bitcoin maximalist, this, is the podcast for you, and that will be the clip. But for sure, I mean, I love… he described how ownership is being something of the past, right? And access, we don’t want to own things and maybe we’ve done ownership wrong ever since colonial times, that Native Americans are like, you guys want to own our land. How does that even work?

Yeah, and thusly,, also value itself kind of need to be redefined to… but how I value being allocated in different places. And what are these things that we’ve thought to be hard and true being really being redefined what does that mean for us and how we play a role? And I think that when you say… Yeah, I want to own the music, I wanna own my album. You don’t really own it, you just get the ability to listen to it and so people are like… Well, I just want to listen to it. So, and you really went back into your history of with podcasting as well.

Just a quick question on, I gotta ask the pod Father, will podcasts be available in the blockchain world, in a different place? How do you see podcasting kind of evolving on the blockchain as well?

Adam: That’s a good question, what I’m seeing with crypto currencies is a way to define and value what I call value networks. So an example of a value network very basic in my case is the no agenda podcast, which I’ve been doing now for ten years in my partner, John C Dvorak and… and we use the internet, but the value that is created within our ecosystem of what we don’t call them listeners, we call them producers, because they literally are producing stories clips artwork background information, knowledge, and money.

We don’t take advertising, so some people, they just give us money, as their input to the Value Network. Now what they get out of it, should be similar, to… I went to the movies this weekend with the day had some popcorn sat in the dark room with people for an hour and a half spent 45–50 bucks. It was worth it. That’s good value. So, all we ever said was, we’ve just brought you three hours of entertainment and news. What is it worth to you to… one is worth five bucks, to another is worth nothing and to another, a thousand. And so, you get out when you put into it, for some creating an album. artwork, just being recognized is the value. So the logical next step is to say, how do we define this network is a value network, which runs on top of the internet infrastructure, which is just a network. And that’s where your crypto comes into play when you have a community of music lovers, and they want to be involved in all things in order to have some way to exchange

a crypto-currency, perfect for that, not only because it is easy to use, as a transaction, mechanism, but it is also easy to track and you can see exactly what the value of that network is at any point in time.

So that’s where I think the future is going, and I like all the different crypto. Not for the same reasons. I like Bitcoin because Bitcoin which has been mis-evangelized in my opinion, as the new paypal, it’s not, it’s a reserve currency, and all the cryptos tie into it. And of course, he theory and which our MIC token, will be placed in this world, as well. But again, it’s related to Bitcoin so you could almost see this tree structure forming,

And I think we’ll see take-overs of entire tokens by one token may take another one over just to merge the two networks. You have to change the thinking from Wall Street financials into what represents this network of people.

Ryan: Wow, so the network effects are really… that’s the phase two, that we’re heading into, and understanding how these networks work, together. When you’re talking about the community of music lovers who wanna be involved in all things super true. I mean, where is it more true that people are fanatics than the music industry, they are were they would auction for $40,000 for Michael Jackson’s hat from a tour in the ads, right?

So when you think about the experiential value of these musical artists or these labels or any of the concerts, Dench Music wants to play the role in that, right? You have this kind of gap that you wanna bridge from fandom to experiential value. How will people be able to experience or be able to get different value for these experiences on the block term with Dench music?

Adam: Well, let’s start by first recognizing that the music business itself from a technical perspective has changed enormously where back in the day, my MTV days you had you walked into a studio and it was 48 track s huge 24-track machines, what we call take monkeys running around engineers a musician streaming in one by one when convenient, for them playing a baseline put in, a little track down and all of that has been completely supplanted by and digital technology. So when you listen to hit music today and I’ll just take Beyonce,, there’s really two sides to every… well, the three but the different sides to a record, you have the, the composition which is the music you have the lyrics and then you have the production then production can or cannot have a piece of the back end that depends on the deal you set up.

But really 50–50 between the music and the lyrics, so we see lyrics often done by an artist such as a Beyonce, who will also sing on a track but the music may be done by what we call a DJ. These days is very different from the DJs from my days and they’ll create the beats and yeah, they might have some live musicians, but it’s much easier to roam around with your laptop and just studios by itself these days or basically a USB interface, and kick-ass speakers in a great environment. So the creation of music has become so much more accessible to just hundreds of thousands of people. Dance music, is located in the Netherlands, the Netherlands is important because all of the top DJs in the world right now

if you look at Tiesto, if you look at Armin Van Buren, and venue, and if you look at the 15 different top DJs, Martin Garrix, these guys all come from the Netherlands and there’s just a culture of creating beats. It’s very integrated with influences from all over with now, Western Europe and Moroccan, Turkish. There’s all kinds of interesting groups and beats and these kids are collaborating it cause all kinds of cultural and perhaps even racial boundaries if you want to look at it through that lens.

So participating in that can be as simple as, “Hey I have a cowbell that I want, add to this track. And now you can do it.

We have, there’s all kinds of vernacular like you talk about stems which is really a music format. But these days I was like, “Oh I’ll give you a STEM. It’s got the horn section on it, to have some drums, and may be a guide track, and then that can be integrated into someone else’s Digital Audio Work Station. They can create something completely different.

You release a track today, it’s not one track. We’re gonna release Chris Brown, the title track a special…we already have five remixes, and it’s all by different DJs who in turn will make money properly for a change on their actual creative input and not just on some… just some streaming revenue.

I don’t wanna under-play it, because it’s still very significant.

And one of our board members is a covers who was the CEO of the music video site online and he understands how the flows work and the money is definitely big, but when you get a piece of the actual back end because you are recognized as a producer and you’re given that which Dench music does to its artists, that’s a big difference, and that’s really our model, our model is we wanna take at least half of the equation. So usually DJ who produces beats with himself his friends, his group, whatever it is, we want to develop them, help them hone their craft, we can even provide management services, but we will match them with the Superstar. So we have a number of Dutch DJs who’ve done music now in our first release, after the summer will be Chris Brown, and so he did the, the lyrics and the melody and everything else comes from Dench music. This is a perfect, a perfect way to participate.

That’s from a musician standpoint. But then we have the marketing aspect which has also become incredibly cost-efficient music video is the main thing you need to have, and be anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000. and that investment depends on how much are you going to invest into this particular artist? So, for Chris Brown, we envision a higher budget than normal would be close to the four or five hundred thousand, but you can… have people participate in that.

And every participation on the internet has always sucked. Every voting thing, every contest it all sucks because there’s no transparent way of seeing what happens once you click enter on the website. That’s what a distributed ledger can do, that’s what blockchain can do for us.

Ryan: There’s no way that I’m gonna enter a sweepstakes and believe that I’m gonna win. Or that whoever won legitimately one and somebody who gets that opportunity, to go and meet, I don’t know, Justin Bieber behind the scenes. deserved it more than I did, so I was first to…

Adam: I mean, I’ve worked at radio stations, “Hey everybody it’s z100 and yeah!!!” It could have been caller three hundred. Yeah, there’s no transparency, no accountability. Now by the same token Ryan,

We’ve set our ICO very differently from most ICOS as we’re offering a completely legal structure for people to invest in the company through a silent partnership. I think this is what’s really unique about the Dench ICO.

Ryan: I do wanna talk about that a little bit, but before that when you’re talking about the actual DJs creating music and being a part of that process, I think a lot of people who have understood the real evolution of music coming out from the production standpoint, those who are making music out of their garage, or their bedroom, it’s much different than it was ten years ago. You can actually put a song on the internet and put it on one of the streaming services easily, but there’s also the problem of music when you’re putting those contracts together or you own a part of that music. You broke down. So what’s the answer?

Adam: You are understanding the sample problem

Ryan: Right, exactly.

Adam: So for instance, an example we have some guys in the net and Jackpackers and they’re in production with us and so they have

little bits of sound like: *sound*

So, they created this little opening and then there’s an answer to that music. So those two pieces can be registered with us through a ledger and they take that they’re put into that song in that particular mix. So actually I’m gonna give you a world premier for a second here, if you don’t mind,

This is the new Chris Brown track coming out after the summer,,

[Music Plays]

Adam: So, that’s Dutch guys doing the DJ work, and Chris Brown did that in his studio in Los Angeles. I mean, this to me, is mind-blowing that this is all gonna be done tracked, completely accountable, transparent, to everybody,

Ryan: That’s beautiful, I mean that flute alone is gorgeous. So it’s a dream come true to actually have the credit that you deserve as a producer or a musician linked to a block then that’s crazy, and I appreciate that you guys are even building this and you were kind of getting into how investors can play a role in this blockchain as well, so feel free to share more about that.

Adam: Yeah, so in general, for those of you who may not be as familiar with the ICO process, although you are listening to this podcast, I presume you know something. Regular token sales, than ICOs, do not have the legal option for profit sharing. And what we did with our partners as we looked for a way to have people invest in the company with actual profit sharing, so not just some…Yeah, well, it’ll be okay some day, I… so, no, it’s a silent partnership. It’s a world-wide accepted investment method, which allows private individuals and companies from every country, almost every country in the world to invest in any company in exchange for-profit sharing completely legal. And you have to, of course, fill out a KYC so we understand who you are, but as an investor in the Dench ICO, one Ethereum invested, you get 1200 MIC tokens. So a 00 there would be 120000… coins, ERC compliant, but more important 30 percent of Dench’s profits will be distributed every quarter to investors over a period of six years. Now, your portion of the 30 percent is dependent upon how much you’ve invested obviously, but we take 30 percent of our profit and are giving that to investors quarterly for six years.

I think that is something that is instead of a spray and pray like… Oh, let me jump into this and see what happens and see if I can bop out. Now, you buy in and our white-list starts on the fifteenth, just a plug, you actually will receive money over a six-year period, from the profitable revenues of Dench music. This is something that you can’t get from any music company let a lone an ICO.

Ryan: That’s unheard of. If you’re not familiar with kind of the music in the splits, how it goes… you sign up with ASCAP or BMI or something, and you just hope and pray those quarterly checks come in, and there’s very little transparency and analytics there.

So to see it all kind of fleshed out there would be remarkable. And it’s something that’s unique with your ICO because you’re talking about actual profit sharing. Can you explain why you chose to not do a regular token sale and how profit caring and ICOs can actually be legal. Because I’m sure some people are like… How can you legally do this in a country like the US?

Adam: Well, the silent partnership is a legal entity worldwide in the US as well. Now, you do have to submit your Kc so we have to know you are a camping anonymous investment, if you want to purchase mic tokens later after the ICO for abuse on a retail platform for all the things that you and I discussed earlier, in this podcast, that of course, is going to be available, but the actual investment upfront…So we’re old school guys and we come from the music business, we’ve seen so many people screwed including people invested in Music companies, so we want to be very sure that we had a completely… which is what, ledger does. Blockchain does it. We’ve a complete transparent way of seeing exactly what’s going on with everybody’s investment not just yours, but everyone else is and how all the… everything is flowing.

It’s not that uncommon for silent partnerships, so I don’t think anyone has done it in an ICO and maybe they haven’t had the organization or the business case to warrant such a close relationship with people who hold their tokens and are thus investors in their organization.

We feel we have the back office… we have, and if you look at the white paper, I think we have quite a number of people on our advisory board who are not just people pulled off of some website, but they’re actually…actual experts in the field and we want to really build a business pretty much right out front in public and we have no problem. We’ve run public companies, so we understand what this is like. This is just a new version. Just like the music business is changing. So, is investing. We do not see a logical business case for any one to invest in something that’s just an ICO. Give us your money. Here’s the white paper, it’s gonna be great.

No. We want you to know who we are and…and when you invest in us, through the ICO you’ll learn who we are, you’ll speak with us, and if someone wants to come and look, they can… this is a real organization, and it’s not just Chris Brown, that we have… we have at least 15 records were going to release in 2019. So, this is an ongoing and quickly growing concern. Quite honestly, needs cash. We need an infusion to start making the marketing part is the most expensive. We need to start making great videos and get our music out there. And the first one will be right after the summer.

Ryan: It’s hard to find projects that will honestly tell you how they’re working, how they’re looking to make money, even that they need money to actually move to the next phase. A lot of them just show that we’ve already got this and that, it’s a lot of lies and… and there are vague reasons why they need the money, with the silent partnerships, which I’m gonna be reading about all night to discover more about it because I haven’t seen anything like that before, I…

Adam: I don’t know why this hasn’t been done before. It seemed like such a slam dunk. We did have to search around to find the right structure, but then once we really looked out and said, Yeah, this, this is the way to go, and it’s legal, the US-EU law which is the most important for us. I’m pretty sure almost every country allows this as long as it’s completely transparent, and I think we’ve done a good job at setting ourselves up for success.

Ryan: There’s a lot of people who are seeing your list of influencers and celebrities in your team, but really you’re building a team to last and one that’s not only got the connections, but the wherewithal in this sector knowledge to get the job done. If I… I’ve interviewed a lot of ICOS from different industries and here at the ICO Alert podcast, we’ve talked to tons of people, from every niche in every business from financial services, to health care. And if you’re gonna do a healthcare ICO or token sale, you better have the sector experts. They’d better have some sort of reputation, they better have some connections, and a business savvy and emotional intelligence to get the job done, and in a new industry, like block chain I’m sure you have some sort of new upcoming announcements or existing partnerships you want to highlight.

So anything you want to announce at this moment?

Adam: Well, so the whitelist period, actually starts on the 15th, so we’re just getting started. So this interview is at a perfect time for us and the main, what we’re focusing on now or after the summer is of course, we believe that the Chris Brown, special will really put us on the map, the music business, just like everything else is changing it, it takes time. Podcasting

that they took ten years before her pod casting, maybe eight before podcasting really took off. I mean, sometimes these things go a little bit slower, it depends on market conditions, but this is, if you even look at right now. In the US Congress, there is a new proposal for how publishing royalties flow and perhaps new statutory rates. There’s a lot of things going on with the music business, as we speak, so we wanna keep it simple, we wanna big name artist with our production team and our DJs. That’s what we start with right off the bat. I can’t announce any strategic partnerships, we have just yet, with blockchain distribution of music. Because I feel, is just a little too immature, but that is what will be the next thing obviously, because again, we want to be the company that’s ready for it. We understand how the traditional music business works, We understand it very well, we see how things are changing, we’re nimble, we don’t need to talk to 15 lawyers and have lunch, we can just go and do stuff. And that’s our trajectory for now. Chris Brown and then all over other releases but the strategic partnerships with distribution, how we to launch a retail platform which we hope to do with some pretty big surprises with some big names that will probably be in the first quarter of 2019.

Ryan: Chris Brown. I actually grew up listening to Chris Brown.

Adam: 51 number one hits. It’s an outrageous career that he’s had.

Ryan: I don’t think there’s anybody with as much talent as him in the music industry. I’ll just put that out there and leave it there. So a very impressive connection. We have seen some ICOS with stars and celebrity endorsements back fly, or even get subpoenaed by the SEC.

Can you highlight any of the challenges you’ve had working with a Chris Brown, or having it profile stars involved and how you’re overcoming them?

Adam: Well, working with talent is always it’s an art form to a degree, but Chris is very smart, he understands and he runs his own empire already. And again, it’s the days of, you work for Motown of This is what you do and you sit in the studio all day record tracks and we’ll give you a Cadillac, those days are over. Chris Brown is completely in control, he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t wanna do. So when we played the track for him, he said… yeah, I like it. I’m gonna put some layers to it. And you already heard the result of that.

So, it’s a very amicable type of situation. It’s like we both want the same thing, in the music business it’s always been you’ve got to want the other guy to also be successful. Otherwise, nothing ever happens, but I think a lot of great music has been suppressed, and probably never made it to market because there were so many shady business dealings going on in the background. There are too many agendas, and here is very simple.

Chris Brown, his talent, his lyrics, our guys, their music, their talent and that’s it. You put it together, everything else just flows from there. We still have to do the music video, so that’s always when a star or looks at their image. And how they want that portrayed? So we have a number of different proposals in front of Chris and his team as to how we think this would be a great way to portray this particular song, which is at about a special girl and we have some thoughts about that. And so far, the feedback has been really positive, but for sure when you’re dealing with stars, you always have to think about their image first.

Ryan: Switching gears here a little bit, right? A friend of mine is actually produced a Chris Brown record before, and it’s one he sang on with Remy Ma. And it’s charting all over the place right now and just you know, not giving up to many details, but some of his… somebody will write this part somebody will write that part, and then with every song it’s hard to see who’s getting credit at that creation standpoint for the songwriting, especially where it’s like… Well, I gave you this idea, and I came up with this chorus. That’ss always become kind of crazy, so I love that your team wants to allow users and their talent content to be reviewed by experienced producers and to see that kind of process behind the scenes go down. So how are you guys planning to work out this system where music can actually be reviewed by your team? And that whole process can be surveyed and advised over by experts?

Adam: So that’ll be part of our retail plan, we’re just calling our retail platform. I think we’ll have a little sexier name when we launch it. And we believe that again, that that’s where the value network comes in. It should be us, it should be our experts, but also the the value network that we are a part of, and then these enthusiasts and fans and professionals will also be a part of… so we think that it’s probably even better if we don’t just review, but we also have the network review, so I think that’s what you’re going to see a much more interactive collaborative process for people who just have an idea, a thought. I’ve always wanted to try something and that will really open that up,

Ryan: That’s great. I think the entire transparency is exciting. I saw your studio sessions, all over your Twitter and the dense music studio, you mention the Jack packers. And I saw Mowoka, and I was jamming out. I gotta be honest, I was pleased, playing this tweet maybe for me five times in a row. And so, how often will users or investors, or the general public be able to see Dench’s studio or exclusive songs and video previews before release ’cause we’re used to the music industry being secretive. So this is new for us. How, how much are you gonna do this?

Adam: So yeah, absolutely right. We love doing that. And honestly, Instagram is our friend in that regard, we love showing what’s going on, who’s hanging out. And I think that the “secretive-ness of what the artists are doing is kind of a thing of the past. They no longer so protected. I mean, just look at Chris Brown on Instagram. And you can see you know how much of themselves, they put out there but we’re very proud of our studios. We have two… we have one in Amsterdam and one in London, which is we call the garden of Amsterdam, and we love if it’s appropriate for the artist usually they’re okay with it

to show what’s going on, to have little pieces of music. We’ve been doing what we call the Dench music drops where we play a little piece of a track to get people get people ready for it.

It’s just a… I probably have about twenty that we’ve put out on Twitter or Instagram for people to listen to and also gives feedback. It gives… the feedback loop is invaluable. As you know just where radio used to be. You can take your one phone call and some will say what they think but when you’re doing podcasts there’s so many different ways the feedback loop comes back to you and the same goes for artists. So, Hey, we got this thing going on and before you know it, everyone digs it, and we got a vibe. Let’s put it in let’s keep it… let’s add to it.

So, we just want to facilitate, we really want to facilitate, and we continue to do that for both our artists and for the fans who want to see more of them

Ryan: Well beware shady characters in the music industry, the transparency facilitation is coming. I’m really excited and I really love that you guys are showing more of the stuff going on and you’re even actively trying to push that for the fans to get value. And you guys have been talking about in your white paper and perusing some of your channels that you guys are gonna amalgamate a lot of these experiences, through Star auctions meet and greet launch parties. Dinner with music stars. So can you talk to me about your strategy to include VIP events and preview parties for Dench Music, over time, how that’s gonna work?

Adam: Well, so we already talked about the transparency aspect of it, where we come from media mainly media and music so we understand to entertainment, we understand what people like and often you’ll see, in the older music business where there’s ideas of what people… yeah, they’ll love it, to back.

Yeah, it’s okay,

we want some more but we really want more personalized experiences. Last night on television, although I’m old enough to appreciate it, to me, and the red ruby, slippers from the words of the visits. Like, yeah, okay, that’s a great little item. But it’s not something that Chris Brown, worn his music video.

So you, the established media still looking at stuff like that. And we see that a cameo in the video would be very interesting. Why can’t that be done why can’t I? And normally it’s impossible or used to be impossible because these organizations are not set up to do this kind of stuff. That’s why you have labels and publishers and A&R And all these buckets of things, and promotion independent promoters…very convoluted where you can just make it much easier if you’re dealing with a couple of people and so you and you can start to offer things of real value. And I think music videos are gonna be a big part of it. I come from the music video world and know how important they are. I know how they stick in people’s memories, they become not just the soundtrack in a way. Also, the movie of our lives is very, very critically important things that happened in music videos. So to be a part of it or have a piece of it becomes really a big deal for people

Ryan: Just talking music, talking music videos. I mean, you see how YouTube has changed the music industry, so much as well. And where are these budgets for music videos, it’s actually starting to come back. It kinda started out like, Well we really didn’t know what they looked like when you were VJing. The videos were really exciting but still very new like blockchain. And then you got to a point where I remember Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson did a music video. I think it was worth seven million dollars in production. And now you see those big budgets kind of going away and… and then things are changing with YouTube, because the music video might be the whole experience and people are starting to get back into making those movies and I really, really am excited about where that’s gonna go where fans can play a role and even social media influencers or regular people are being… their stories are being put in these videos where you see artists like Drake including somebody like Shiggy who popularized a dance for his most popular song on his new album, right?

And now that guy is on tour with him all over the world.

Ryan: It’s so exciting, and I love to see that you guys have your eyes right on the prize and you’re thinking about the people who are really loving this experience the most it’s really refreshing.

And I wanna get into a little bit about how these the blockchain is going to work because from the side of the music industry, I’m really excited about what you guys are doing. But from the blockchain, we have seen some issues with people who are trying to scale on Ethererum and how as a platform grows, they might want to be blockchain agnostic, maybe you wanna move in a different platform. How is your team looking to do that to one to make sure that these processes and you have these planned out profit-sharing experiences that are gonna go on for six years, will any of that be perturbed if you guys switch block chains or you move, what does your team have planned for that?

Adam: Well, the investment stands as the investment that you can calculate that in a, in any currency you wish. We’ll be dealing in euros in profit, and that profit will be transferred in the equivalent in crypto. So that’s just a mechanism for us we again the… we will have a value network, I just call it the Dench value network will be represented by the MIC token. Nice thing about crypto and the tokens based on ERC-20’s is you can put smart contracts in there. And as we were talking earlier about ownership versus access in one thing you see with streaming video in particular, is sharing of passwords a big problem for not just for Netflix and Amazon and Hulu… where there may be five, six, seven people on one account that’s also a problem for payment because it’s technically not fair and I’ve always paid for my entertainment. I think it’s incredibly important, and I don’t care if you give something away, you still have ownership of it. So in order to have the right to access that’s where Blockchain becomes incredibly useful.

And you can give up that right, you can give that to somebody else. A transfer of a token. I mean that’s where I see the tokenization of value networks going is, for me, it’s really, I see it as pure utility, sort of to be able to encode something in there or to integrate into another blockchain, I think would be not just technically feasible, but, so it might be desirable but that would only work. And again, this is why we’re set up to be open to that. That would only work if a number of criteria are met, but we intend to stick with the… with our own token, obviously, but I’d love to see integration and I’m predicting it now, you’ll see integrations of block chain how that will work. Exactly, I’m not sure, but you can already see companies thinking about it.

Ryan: Let’s settle the debate right now is it mick token or Mike token?

Adam: Yeah, we just say, Mike, I know as a broadcaster, you look at it you go, Yeah, M-I-C. that’s the abbreviation for the money. Used to have it on my little cassette player, even remember the single cassette player was record at the same time. Yeah, but we just say Mick token it just fits for us, so we’re cool with that, and it was a similar was available, we liked it and so we just were staying with that with Mick.

So, yes, but it is JIFF. (GIF) I have to say that

Ryan: I agree with you! Yeah, I love that. Okay, so how does the Dench Music MIC token function within the platform and why is it needed for users?

Adam: So for us again when we have our retail first of all, people who invest will receive them for us, it will be a measurement of the value of our network, but also it will be what we use to transact within our value network. Whether it’s from person to person, so, peer-to-peer or whether it’s with Dench Music or whether it’s with our artists or whether it’s with the retail platform it is just a pure method of exchange.

Will it have value? It should… We believe our network has value. So I know I’m harping on this, but I think it’s incredibly important. We’ll see these networks and the tokenization of them translating into the actual value of a network. By the way, as an investor, that’s a pretty damn cool thing.

Ryan: As a non-Dench Music question, we like to ask for unique predictions for the ICO, and cryptocurrency space in the future, and if you can please share any of your dreams in the next two to five years, for the crypto space as well as the music industry and where you want it to be if you guys are extremely successful everything goes well. What does it look like?

Adam: I think it looks like initially, a lot of farmers markets, here and I live in Austin, Texas, and we have a farmer, we have a number of them, we have a farmer’s market on Saturday and you can walk into the Farmer’s Market and you can pay with cash, or you can buy their wooden tokens. They literally made of wood, and they represent a one-to-one value with the US dollar and it’s desirable for these farmers, it’s not a bull crap millennial. Sorry if I offended anybody. It’s not a bull crap Farmers Market is actual farmers who come in and have their stuff there for sale at reasonable prices and for them to have the money within their network and stay there, it’s much of this has been done many times over their entire little towns that have on their own version of money, that is not the US dollar is perfectly legal too, by the way, that keeps the money within the network. So I hope to see a lot more of that. It’s obviously anyone who was following the ICO space just knows the story, sees the scams, and I am flabbergasted why anyone would jump into anything that based upon just a white paper and a couple of stock photo images even though they’re typically reasonably well-written and they explain a technological problem, we’re doing something different, which, I hope we’ll see a lot more of us saying, “Okay here’s what we stand for, Here’s the product that we produce, we want to create and scale the value of our organization and everybody who was a part of it.

That is where it will have to go. So in my mind, I’m always ten years early, see podcasting in my mind, the big networks, the mergers and acquisitions won’t be Wall Street anymore. It’ll be these networks either cooperating or integrating with their token as the main representation of what their network is. So I don’t mind having tons of crypto because it’s just transparency as that’s the beautiful part of it and it’s kind of scary to a lot of people. We’re really gonna put everything out there, we’re gonna show what we’re worth, we’re gonna show our value. Real companies that… and I think the silent partnership way, is even better way to go where you have your investors invested upfront on a pay-out profit schedule, this is going to be a new way of doing business. Again, we’re…we got a lot to go through, but I’m okay. It’s we have a lot of music to do in the meantime Cole. Well, while this is happening, we’ll be ready to move and pivot in any direction, whatever we encounter in our path. W

Ryan: While you’re dancing to the music you literally moving and grooving in the industry that’s awesome. So, for a company like us is… while we’re pivoting to where going from the only comprehensive and trusted list for ICOS, to now becoming, because just no one else is doing it, part of a consortium that is policing the ICO industry and trying to help the other arms like the SEC, and novice investors to expert investors, see beyond the bull crap for a lack of a better term…so from your opinion, What are some other things that you think that we could be doing or what do you like that we’re doing that we could really improve upon?

Adam: Well, organically you’re doing exactly the right thing. In my opinion, when podcasting first came out, it was basically me doing a podcast and a bunch of developers creating what we called pod catchers, and the whole idea behind and it’s relevant to what you’re saying, the whole idea behind what the first show was The Daily Source Code and I called it that because if you’re developing a podcast application and you’ve never done it before, the space is new, you need content and you need an RSS feed to be able to test against.

And I know, developers work in source code, so every day I’ll give you some source code which means I’m talking about what you’re doing and feeding back to you and it’s also content at the same time. When Steve Jobs could podcasting to iTunes and eventually in the podcast app, how much, how the challenge was, what do we listen to? And you might recall is all NPR podcasts, in the beginning? So, that was kind, it was great that it was in there and you could find stuff, but it wasn’t being highlighted. And what I did is I went to see our exam which is just another radio channel, I call it, and we cut a deal and I did the Daily pod show, which featured what I thought were interesting podcasts from a broad range. It would just be little snippets and little bits, but kind of a sample. And in a way, what you call policing, I wasn’t really policing but saying,

“Hey yeah, we’ve got NPR over here but look at all this other stuff.” So to have by the way, the people who are aware of ICO Alert’s podcast is quite astronomical. So you’ve become an authority, and asking the questions that you do probing the way you do, and then the full not being a promoter of bull crap is what gives you the reputation and why people will continue to come to you and the policing is yes in a way it’s right, but you’re really guiding. You’re leading and your you’re beating a path to show, Okay, this is what you get over here, this is what’s over here, here. The new things on the horizon, and out there is where we’re going and with the frequency of the show and the audience that you’ve scaled, I think it’s a very important guiding light in the entire space, so please keep that up.

Ryan: Much appreciated, pure wisdom. So what is your current user base look like? Who is your user? And when I speak to people who are the people that I should say, “Hey you don’t wanna look at Dench Music.”

Adam: Right now, for obvious reasons, we’re focusing on people who are interested in investing in the future of music and entertainment. So that is our current user base we’re building an entire following through social media and our value network itself expands through the networks that our artists and producers bring to the table. So we’re really focusing on showing they were different, something new is happening, and we have opportunity.

We’re open for business, there’s a lot of things anybody can do. That was the part of the promise of the internet. A democratization of all things.

Now, it’s been 22 years, Ryan? We thought that’s gonna be great, and we’re still going through enormous growing pains. See, today, the conversation about social media in Washington DC. We have a lot of things to learn as human beings. Just how do you interact and how do you… how do you play online with other people? And we still have tail bones. This was a shock for us. We’re not quite ready to actually understand what people think of each other. So there’s a lot of growing that has to be done, but without a doubt

this is where, it’s just information is going to flow, it’ll be consumed shared purchased sold all online and this is our piece of it. We want to be as influential as possible to as many people who are interested in popular music, and Gee I hope we one day can expand to other forms of music that would be great but we’ll start with this.

Ryan: Love it. Where can we find you? What shall we look forward to next and what should we follow to keep up with Dench Music, and Chris Brown and Adam Curry as the year goes forward into 2019, 2020.

Adam: For the ICO DenchMusic.io. You can look at our other websites Dench music dot com. Of course, we’ve got all the Telegram channels and our Instagram is DenchMusic. I’m Adam curry on Twitter. I’m usually, if there’s something going on, I’ll mention it as well, but definitely, if people want to follow us subscribe to the Instagram and if you want or are interested in the ICO, Dench music dot io.

And if anyone has any questions, they can certainly reach out to me directly, Adam@denchmusic.com or AdamCurry.com, and be happy to see if I can help. But maybe someone has ideas or maybe even a proposal. So we’re interested in anything and everything.

Ryan: Yes, and like I said, I’m gonna study this silent partnership thing, as I know you’re a government legislation analyst, and you really study the things that are going on. I appreciate that, because with companies or arms of the government watching us and everybody with their eyes on us, we appreciate people who take the time to be conscientious about things.

You’re definitely considered the forefather of podcasting. And I’m actually subscribed to your blog now, I’ll be following that too, so thank you so much. He’s Adam Curry, he’s a star in the game and now he’s entered the blockchain world to help us all bring transparency to the music industry and the experiences we have. Adam, thank you so much for being on the show. Any parting words for us?

Adam: Well, my pleasure, right, thank you very much and thank you for what you guys do. Because as I said, you really are providing a path for a lot of people. I look forward to hearing more about ICOs that have a profit-sharing agreement hopefully that there’ll be more who will follow suit. I think it’s a good development. And again thank you.

Ryan: Adam, thank you so much peace and love best of luck to you in your project. And we were gonna check on you soon maybe I have you back on sons in time, so sound good?

Adam: At any time you just let me know.

Ryan: Alright, thank you so much for joining us again and please feel free to subscribe to the ICO Alert Podcast, for more interviews like this with superstars and honestly, people who are working really hard in the blockchain space and even bringing in new industries to the forefront of transparency, which is something that’s been sorely lacking around the world from music to financial services. Feel free to check out our blog.ICOalert.com. And as always, I’m Ryan Dennis with the ICO Alert podcast, have the best day ever.