Cemoh 132: Build Your Fans One At A Time with Daniel "Martian" Cooper

Simon Dell (00:01.088) So welcome to the CMO Marketing Podcast. It has been a long time since I've done one of these, but I'm trying to get back into them now. So if this is the first time here, you can check out our business, cmo .com. You can also track me down on LinkedIn, Simon Dell, I'm pretty easy to find. We talk about all things marketing and business and advertising and anything sort of in that space. And the reason

prompted me for kind of getting this back up and started again was a TikTok video that I watched probably about a couple of months ago by a gentleman who's joined us today by the name of Daniel Cooper, who also goes by the artist name of Martian. So welcome to the show, Dan. Or do I, am I calling you Martian or am calling Dan? Okay.

Martian (00:46.99) Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it. Either or, it's all good.

Simon Dell (00:52.566) Cool, cool, Look, tell us a little bit about yourself. You're a music artist. Give us a bit of an overview about your background and the type of music you create.

Martian (01:00.878) For sure. So I grew up learning piano and then I taught myself a few instruments and was playing in like heavy metal and death metal bands for a long time. Then when I found out about music producing, like making music on the computer, it kind of blew my mind. I started creating all my own songs instead of going to recording studios and paying thousands of dollars. We didn't have to do it. My, you can make it yourself. Cool. So I kind of started this journey of learning how to do everything myself from the production to the graphic design, to the video editing.

And I've sort of moved a lot more into like the pop hip hop industry now, but I've established myself as an artist that kind of does everything. And along the way it's taught me a lot of the skills and like industry know -how to cover all topics. So I've created a bit of a universal hub to try and educate other artists on how to do the same and tackle the music industry independently, which is something that everyone needs, but no one's talking about at the

Simon Dell (01:58.068) Yeah. Yeah. They've been trying to do that for a long time. It's, you know, and there's obviously, you know, you, you would have seen, you know, massive shifts in the music industry in the last, it's kind of like it almost, it's always keep shifting. It's like constantly shifting. There's constantly something else happening and another model, another streaming service. Did, do you feel that way?

Martian (02:15.898) Yep. Yeah, it's, been pretty fluid for the last decade, last 15 years. Um, it's moving at an alarming rate. And I think we're sort of getting this push and pull where the industry is moving further and further away from the artist and working with the artist and benefiting the artist. But the cause and effect of that is the artist is moving further away from the labels and more towards the fans.

So we're getting this push and pull where industry is getting further away from everybody, but artists and fans are starting to get closer together and building real networks and relationships and communities. And I think pretty soon we're going to see another pretty drastic change where the industry gets left behind for the most part. And we have a whole generation of subcultures and sub communities direct from artists to fan base.

Simon Dell (03:10.164) Yeah, I want to make sure we talk right at the end about AI and its sort of impact on that, on the music space, because I'm sure you've got an opinion on that. Just before we get any further into it, where can people find your stuff? Where do you, where do you want to drive them to?

Martian (03:22.646) Absolutely. So people that are interested in the music can look me up on Spotify, Martian. I'm on the boy Martian on all my other socials, TikTok, Instagram, but for the music education and the marketing stuff, which doesn't just apply to music. think it applies to anyone who wants to be a content creator or a personality. I've got a page called think different. It'll be under think different AU on Instagram, but it's where I'm posting a lot of free education and just idea think tank stuff for how to grow brand and market yourself.

Simon Dell (03:52.21) I'll try and make sure we get all those links. If you send them to me, we'll get them in the show notes as well for everybody. And of course, I have to ask the other two questions. Where did the name Martian come from?

Martian (03:56.922) Absolutely.

Martian (04:02.692) for sure. So when I was a kid, I would always been obsessed with music, but my other obsession was space and the universe on like a scientific level, a spiritual level, like I'm just fascinated by it. So it's always been there. And even when I had other artists names, there was always underlying themes in my music of just space, universe, astronaut kind of stuff. So I finally did this name change because my old name, my last name's Cooper, I had an older brother, I used to be called Mini Coop. And then I realized

After a while, I started picking up momentum and then people were trying to type me into Google and the cars coming up. I'm just like, I'm going to run into legal issues pretty soon here. and I just can't get discovered. So I did this big rebrand and went full into the space theme.

Simon Dell (04:45.76) Cool, love it, love it. And no more death metal and heavy metal? Because I grew up in the heavy metal, that was my thing. But I like everything now, dance and hip hop and all that sort of stuff.

Martian (04:49.654) I love it.

Martian (04:58.392) Yeah, I still love it. I still listen to it all the time. I still make a lot of like pop punk music with some of my old bandmates and stuff. But I'm just not making it myself anymore. I'm trying to incorporate band elements into my music. Like I got a lot of grunge and rock and like entwined with a lot of my hip hop. But yeah, I miss drumming. That's for sure.

Simon Dell (05:18.812) I always thought, I'm going off a complete tangent here, with nothing to do about this, but I always thought one of the biggest untapped reserves of really good songwriting was the 80s metal. I always thought there was some great bands writing some great songs there, because of the Leichner and the big hair and things like that, people never quite look back on them and go that they were great songwriters or they were cool or things like that. know, people still look at the jam and the velvet underground and all those, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s bands and punk bands and things like that. I they're cool, but I just, feel, I feel the, the, the heavy metal of the 80s gets a bit, it's a bit underrated.

Martian (06:02.33) Yeah, it takes a little while to get that acceptance. It almost comes like a decade or two too late. And then once the acceptance is there, then the appreciation's there, but it doesn't help. It doesn't help them 20 years ago, does

Simon Dell (06:11.284) Yeah. Anyway, so look, the reason for this conversation or a couple of reasons for this conversation, but the main one was I watched that TikTok video of yours where you spoke about building how you built a network and you sort of that you were reaching out to individual people with your your music. So I might have got that I've paraphrased that I may have got that bit wrong. So just just talk me through that, because that really kind of hit home for me because it's a lesson I try and teach to business owners as well. So talk to me about your sort of your strategy

Martian (06:46.522) Yeah, for sure. I found that like everybody on social media is trying to reach the masses in large and that's great. But the thing that's drawing people into influences, content creators, musicians, isn't accessibility anymore. I think every type of content out there is very easily accessible. So there's no reason for people to dive in and be a real supporter until you create some kind of personal personal reference or something that people can connect with. So I found that, I find that while trying to reach the masses is great and hoping that your content reaches far and wide is really, really good. The thing that was converting passive listeners and passive engages into real followers is to make it personal and develop real interactions and real connections with these people. So when I was trying to look for play listing, I was going door to door and finding the owners of these playlists and I was starting real conversations with them and I was trying to connect and offer something in return. Hey, can I share your playlist to my thousands of followers? I'd love for you to check me out. Not even trying to get anything off them, just trying to build a relationship and a friendship with these people because they get thousands of people week in, week out, just trying to leverage something off them. And I felt it was the same with the fans as well. Fans can get music anywhere. It's free.

There's a completely over saturated scene on every social media platform where they're just scrolling and they're saying mediocre song after mediocre song. But if you have someone talking about a real issue or if you have a fan engaging with you and you take the time to really engage back on a personal level, their level of appreciation is so much larger and you almost ensure that you're going to guarantee some kind of continued conversation with

Simon Dell (08:31.03) Hmm. And that sounds, that sounds sensible, right? But it's also sounds counter to everything that, you know, lot of marketing strategies and, know, straight, just sales strategies talk, talk about is, you know, presenting, you know, yourself out to these thousands of people and then getting, you know, a few people in the top of the funnel and things like that. that one -to -one interaction,

Again, you know, big brands talk about customization of, of their, you know, their products and their services specifically for people, but it's nothing like what you're suggesting because you're suggesting just that actual direct one -on -one conversation almost. Eye to eye and saying, Hey, this is what I do. I think you'd be interested. Can you help me and I'll help you. It feels very, you know, it feels like you scratch my back. I'll scratch yours and that then sort of grows into something bigger.

Martian (09:32.696) Yeah. And I think, especially when it comes to fans as well, like they already have a connection with you and they already getting some value from you. But when I stopped and looked at why I was on social media and why a lot of these people are on social media, they're not on there to discover your product. They're there for either dopamine because they're bored or they're sad. They're there for a connection because we are still tribal and we want to belong and we want to feel connected with other people.

They're there because they're bored and they're there for entertainment. So when you think about that and how anti -social social media has become, no one's really talking to each other on these platforms anymore. Everyone's just scrolling for their own little source of entertainment and not engaging. When you sort of break that cycle and really start engaging and reaching out first, instead of putting out this beacon and saying, I hope they all come, I'm going to start engaging with all of my fans. I'm going to start engaging with all these other people in my field.

all these other industry people, playlisters, fans, whoever, I'm going to be the person who reaches out and engages and build some kind of personal connection. All of a sudden you've provided extra value. You've provided something for them to connect to. And I've found that when I was watching entertainers that were doing a really good job, and I use Twitch streamers a lot as an example for this, the best Twitch streamers in the world aren't the people that are best at the video game they're playing.

They're the people that are most entertaining and most charismatic and the ones talking the most with the people that are like viewing them. You know, the best gamers in the world are sitting there focused and quiet and they're shredding that they're destroying the game, but their followers are getting dwarfed by the entertainers out there who are having real conversations with their followers and being engaging.

Simon Dell (11:23.143) And I, know, a couple of things from that. mean, you only have to look at someone like, you know, someone like the growth of Mr. Beast, who's, know, and whether you let, know, it's hard to hate him, but you know, but there are people that don't like him. But, you know, most of people sit and they the guy's just, the guy's doing things of value. He's creating entertainment. You know, it's not about him. It's about the things that he's doing that sort of drives those eyeballs. And there was something else that you said, you know, rather than just sort of

it's that kind of that spray and pray tactic. just sort of had a flashback to the Wayne's world, you know, build it and they will come. And it's and it's not that anymore. It's not build it and they will come it's now build it. Go and talk to people about what you've built individually one to one explain to them what you're doing, build a relationship with it with them and then they will come. Does that sort of feel feel what you know what it's

Martian (12:16.334) Yeah, I love the saying, aim small, miss small. know, a lot of people are trying to put their content out there and hope it reaches a million people. But you're reaching far and wide, vast array of demographics, ages, people with different interests. Whereas if you target a hundred people that you know in your demographic and the interest sector that you're choosing, and you go out of your way to talk to them and provide them free value, provide them free entertainment, provide them a free connection where they don't have to put in the legwork with someone they don't know and don't care about to see whether they're worth following, engaging, watching all their content, and then reaching out and building more of a relationship with. You give them that for free, and then you've given them so much extra reason to come in and give you a proper look instead of just scroll past you through all the other sea of mindless content.

Simon Dell (13:08.886) Yeah. And look, and I would love to say, I'd love to say your theory is an original theory. mean, I like the, I love the way that you framed it, you know, but, um, I think it was about, it's a good 15 years ago. was a guy called Kevin Kelly, who was the editor of Wired. Uh, he wrote an essay about a thousand true fans. Um, and it's very similar to what you're saying. He said that, you know, he's, mean, and this was 15 years ago before, before Twitch, before Tik Tok, before any of these things.

And he was saying that a good artist, a strong artist could live off a thousand true fans. You know, if a thousand fans were spending a hundred dollars on, you know, Martian content every, every year, that's a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket. You only need, you only need a thousand fans, you know, to, to, to, have a, have a base income to sort of build your life around. So, and then I think Seth Godin kind of.

twisted it a bit. think he's got a hundred fan theory, it's really nice to, know, theories are all well and good and essays are all well and good, but it's really nice to actually be able to see somebody who is doing it and it's working for them. What's been the challenges though? Obviously it sounds a great idea, but what are the challenges that people need to be aware of if they're going to sort of take that tactic forward?

Martian (14:21.422) Yeah, I

Martian (14:31.566) that it's always going to be the slowest way forward. It's always going to be the like the hardest push uphill until you get to the top of the hill and it starts to snowball. Everybody is side eyeing and watching the competition and they're seeing people jump on trends and get views, you know? And it's really, really, really difficult at the start because most like most fields it's oversaturated and people aren't there. The other thing that I talk about a lot is confirmation bias.

which is huge on social media. When you see a post and it's got four likes and two comments, whether the content's good or not, you've already subconsciously graded it and you're probably gonna scroll past. Whereas the same exact piece of content that's got 300 likes and 58 comments and 20 shares, you're sit there and watch it longer. And this is very, very true. I'm sure it's true universally, but it's so true in the artist space where you're seeing a lot of mediocre artists with heaps of attention.

Simon Dell (15:02.976) Hmm.

Martian (15:30.67) and everyone's getting on board and going, my God, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you see these incredible artists. They haven't quite figured out how to market or brand themselves yet, or they just haven't been, you know, had their skin in the game long enough. They're not getting that level of attention. So people are seeing them and just scrolling straight past. And I think the hardest thing to combat is the confirmation bias. And the only way through that is to realize that when it comes to music discovery or brand discovery, it's often not about the product. The product is...

used to be the first thing people would come to and judge you on. And now it's the last. Now it's how many followers do you have? Do I like this person? Are they charismatic? Are other people engaging with them? Do they have sponsors, brand deals, all this kind of thing, before they decide, you know what, I'm gonna actually look into this person and have a look at their product, and then decide whether it's good or not. It's really hard to overcome, but the only thing you can really do to combat that is be authentic and original.

Simon Dell (16:18.004) Yeah.

Martian (16:25.602) If you're trying to copy someone else's brand strategy, if you're trying to copy someone else's content or their image, there's already someone out there bigger than you doing it better than you. So you have to find a way to cultivate an original and authentic identity through your product. And then you're the only one doing that. it gives, then you will find your people as you go through your journey of putting content out

Simon Dell (16:46.535) And

I want to take what you've said and apply it to sort of more of my world, which is that small business growth world. I think the confirmation bias is something I've just written that down because I'm like, that happens in a, in a small business world with a confirmation bias isn't necessarily the customer. It's themself. It's they're sort of going, Hey, that customer wasn't interested in what we did. So therefore no one's going to be interested in what we did. It's, kind of creates that negative spiral of, you know, and the reality is.

the same for you is that, you know, to get a fan, to get a true fan, it might take 20 conversations before you actually reach one person that really kind of, you know, engages with what you're doing. And I think what you said at the beginning that this is, it is the longest path by far. It's, it's, it's, it's a hard slog and you must have, well, I guess that's the question I have there is that there must be times when you thought, well,

You know, fuck this, this is not worth it, right?

Martian (17:49.496) Yes, but I think the people that are truly going to make it are the people that would do it, whether they have one follower or a million followers, because you have to really love what you do to really pursue it properly. In my opinion, I think when it comes to being a sole trader, your own business or a creative, I do this with zero followers and I did for years, you know, and once the followers start coming in, the industry sort of twists you into...

looking at analytics and data and numbers. For music, it's the stream count. But like you were talking about before, what those theories of you only need a hundred or a thousand fans to survive. I've taken, for artists, we all got caught up in the streams because that's where our opportunity comes from. The industry is still the one providing opportunity. And when it's festivals, collabs, record, it's how many streams you're getting, you know, how many sales are you getting? How many tickets sales are you getting? Whereas success for us truly

Simon Dell (18:43.38) Yeah.

Martian (18:48.92) how many real fans you have. Once you start bringing it back to people and real life things, then that's when the mind frame shifts and real conversion starts happening because it's about your relationship with your audience and not your toxic relationship with numbers on the internet.

Simon Dell (18:50.996) Yeah.

Simon Dell (19:07.922) That's a great observation. love that. And again, just to sort of echo back to what I mentioned earlier, when you look at the numbers that Mr. Beast had early on, know, he's had a 10 year career, but I think if you look at the first three or four years in terms of the numbers of followers he had, he had fuck all. Nobody was watching him, but he was still doing what he was passionate about and creating content. And eventually that came.

Martian (19:33.53) But what was crazy for him was when he had a thousand subscribers on YouTube or less, he posted a YouTube video and left it in his drafts for when I hit a hundred million subscribers or when I hit 10 million subscribers or something like that, way back in the day when he had zero followers. So he always had that love and that self belief for it. And I think that's a crucial thing for us to build. And as creatives, it's almost the hardest thing to get because we're conditioned to

Simon Dell (19:50.371) Yeah, fuck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Dell (19:57.376) Mm.

Martian (20:03.684) have a lack of self confidence and we're conditioned to look at where we're at negatively and that impacts our self esteem in this in this in these industries so much that you almost need to go to work with a sense of delusion about your potential for success. You know, if you really love what you do, and you believe in it, you have to have delusion about where you're at right now. So you can work towards where you believe you're going to get

Simon Dell (20:29.086) Yeah. And I have to say to you, it is not just creatives, right? It's I mean, you're coming from a creative background, but this is an actual, you know, this is an actual story. I mentored somebody yesterday morning. She's up in North Queensland and her and her husband run a roofing business and they're barely getting by. You know, he does guttering, cleaning, roofing repairs, new roofs and all those kinds of things. You know, two kids that, you know,

They're renting, know, she's 45, he's 50. And I said to her, I took the same approach that you've took. She's going, should we be spending money on Google ads or should we be spending money on, she was talking about getting, you know, a radio station on board and stuff like that. I said, no. I said, get in your car and go and knock on the doors of real estate agents.

You know, ones that deal with rental properties that need gutters clean, that need roofs repaired and things like that. And just go and have that one -to -one conversation and keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it. And eventually, like you just said, it will snowball. You know, people will be sick of not necessarily sick of seeing you, but your fit, your start to get more and more confident with what you're selling and what you're talking about and what you're capable of producing.

you know, and for you, it's music and for them, it's cleaning a fucking gutter, you know, two different ends of the spectrum, but building those individual relationships with people that then can become your fans. And for you, it's about them streaming your music for real estate agents. It's about, I need a gutter cleaned the dynamics. The dynamics are exactly the same, but completely different industries.

Martian (22:06.618) But

Martian (22:10.678) Exactly. And to take that personal approach, because like I do coach artists a bit on social media as well. I think I like there's a whole genre on TikTok of people doing exactly this when it comes to roof cleaning and gutter cleaning. Like, there's a whole sub there's a whole subsection. And I think if they take the personal approach and not just reach out to real estate agents, but go around their block and knock on every every person's door and hand out business cards. And once a week do a free roof clean.

there's a whole viral trend of people that go around and say, Hey, do you want me to clean up? Like they, I'll, mow your lawn and clean up your garden for free. And they, and they build their entire thing of content on that huge exposure because they're doing it for free. They're really helping somebody out. And then their business is growing at the exact same time. And it's just like, if you get everybody, you know, probably like 300 houses on their block, you go hand out knock on 300 doors over the next month and say, Hey, this is what we do. You know, offer a free one here and there.

Simon Dell (22:47.732) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've watched him, yeah.

Simon Dell (22:58.485) Yeah,

Martian (23:10.306) I guarantee you, you're going to get somebody, you know, somebody on that block calling you next week saying, you know what, actually we do need you to come and, you know, clean our

Simon Dell (23:17.878) Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's it. Like, even if there's 20, 30 houses in the road and you go in and work on one of them and just say, Hey, look, I did it. We did a free job for these guys down the road. Um, go and have a look at our work. Um, you know, look, you know, I think there's, there's, there's so many, there's so many ways that that one to one marketing strategy or sales strategy can be applied. Um, it's just, again,

As you said, in the music industry, you've all been conditioned by numbers and tracking numbers. And I think in the small business industry, they've all been conditioned by agencies selling Google ads or agencies selling Facebook ads or meta selling Facebook ads, because that's who really benefits out of that, right? You know, you've got these two global giants that saying, you know, Google can help you reach more customers and meta can help you reach more customers. And, you

And I'm sort of sitting there, go no, no, fuck it. Let's just do a complete U -turn here. Let's not spend that kind of money in, you know, giving it to a global giant who at best you might succeed or, you know, but it might take six months before you've realized you're wasting your money. Go and talk to those customers.

Martian (24:29.434) We'll think about a roof cleaning business, you know, like if you, if you think about a roof cleaning business, if you pay Google to put your ads up, how many people from your 20 kilometer radius do you expect to be on Google looking, looking for you? Whereas if you just go around and talk to them, they're not only going to go, Oh, I've seen and spoken with that person face to face, but they're also a neighbor. Like they live in my, they live in my community. Of course they're going to give the business to you instead of some random, you know, some random Google ad. And I think

Simon Dell (24:49.236) Yeah. Yeah.

Martian (24:57.262) with most businesses, it applies the same way. The fast food chains and restaurants that I go to are the ones that I build personal friendships with because the service is good. Not the one that I booked up on Google. Same with my hairdressers. It's kind of a universal law that nobody really acknowledges until you look at it on like a audience psychology type of level. It's just like we build.

Simon Dell (25:15.028) Yeah.

Martian (25:25.124) personal relationships with the brands we love until you get to that ultra -dry level where it's all online and it's all tech mobile stuff, but real small businesses that are ones we build personal relationships with, not necessarily the ones that have the most ad spend.

Simon Dell (25:41.462) And my last point today, last question to you is then I have a theory that in the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever you want to call it, since the advent of social media and that's growth is that our capacity to build social relationships is starting to wane because certainly Gen Z, know, that sort of age demographic is not used to building

You know, one -to -one social relations. mean, I'm Gen X. That was what we did at weekends. You know, we went and hung about in someone's house and, know, drunk alcohol when we weren't old enough to drink alcohol, but you build relationships with people and, know, you, you learn, you learn to talk to people who you've never met before. I wonder, you know, I wonder whether the generations coming through are losing the skill of being able to create those one -to -one relationships because there's been so much reliance

Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. What do you think around

Martian (26:46.18) think three to five years ago, I would have agreed. think everyone was becoming really antisocial and living their whole lives online. But I think we've seen a little bit of a pullback towards humanity. I think we've seen the younger generations start to actually care about like humanitarian trends. I shouldn't say trends, humanitarian issues a lot more than previous generations did. And that sort of brought them back to real person to person discussion.

you know, whether they're going to protest or whether they're talking about issues or politics and stuff like that. I think it's brought discussion back to their lives. I think social media is continuing to be a place that is becoming less and less social and more and more an advertising space for agenda and big tech. So I think the way everyone's going to be moving forward, especially in entertainment, is building your own communities and platforms and subscriber -based audiences.

Everyone's going to have their own channel, you know, even even individuals who aren't trying to push a brand, you know, because you can't reach your audience anymore without giving some big tech company, your whole budget. have, I have on my on my music Instagram, it's not massive, I have 5000 followers, and I reach 5 % of them when I post and my engagement is not

Simon Dell (28:05.504) Yeah.

Martian (28:07.554) So the fact that they squash your reach down that much shows that they don't want you talking to each other unless you're giving them lots of money. I think, you

Simon Dell (28:15.382) Yeah. And that's, you know, and that's why I say to people, you know, absolutely spot on if you have your own channel and the best channel for me is having someone's email address, because if you send someone an email and they're a genuine fan, they'll open it, you'll get a 60, 70 % open rate and people will be interested in what you're, what you're posting. You know, I think there's a power now in WhatsApp groups, you know, getting people

in a WhatsApp group that are collectively interested in one thing, because they see everything that's going on. The whole conversation is happening in there. Facebook or Meta or whatever aren't nerfing that conversation for want of a better word. I think that's a great comment to build a community where you can talk to everyone essentially.

Martian (29:11.288) Yeah. And, and, and keep it authentic and keep it you, because there's no point in trying to build a community based on someone else's model, someone else's brand, someone else's personality. It might get you a couple of clicks and views at the start, but it doesn't lead you down the road you want to go when the real world you want to go down. It's building yourself up. And I've been telling everybody for the longest time that whatever your product is, isn't the brand. It's the person or the message behind that. So I think

You are the brand and what you're offering is the product of that brand. But when you're trying to build, you want to build the brand. You don't want to just shove the product in people's faces and say, look at it, look at it, buy it, buy it. You want to give them a reason to connect to it and build a relationship with who's behind that product and who's behind that message.

Simon Dell (29:59.91) I promise at the start we touch on AI as the last thing. Nearly every industry is convinced that AI is gonna make vast amounts of people redundant and replace people and things like that. I'm a writer, I write science fiction. I discovered a tool yesterday called pseudo -write, S -U -D -O.

And I had a look at it and I was just fucking blown away, like absolutely by what it could do. Talk to me about how you think AI is going to impact the music industry.

Martian (30:43.736) It's pretty scary. I started off with a quote I saw, which is, I thought was brilliant is that, it was, want AI to do my, do my washing of my dishes so I could pursue art and make music, not make my music and art for me so I can just do dishes, you know? And it's, it's getting really scary for the music industry because while AI is going to be like a really powerful tool to help people with their mixing and their production,

Simon Dell (30:59.2) Yeah.

Martian (31:11.31) We're starting to see big business already looking at it as a means of replacement. Spotify has on the low been putting AI artists in their playlists so they can ramp up the passive streams and keep the income for themselves instead of having to pay it out to the original artists that are on those playlists. And if they start, and when you think about what...

the majority of people are on Spotify for everybody at work, everybody on job sites. There's a lot of passive listening going on. There's a lot of playlists on shuffle going on. And if half of the artists on that playlist become AI, that's taking away valuable, not just income, but exposure from millions and millions of artists out there. So I think that there needs, I think there's gonna be a really.

Simon Dell (31:52.852) Yeah.

Martian (31:58.68) big teething process where it just gets used and abused to the max and a lot of people are going to be out of the job. And then there needs to be some serious regulation put in place because the second you start replacing real art or real artists, the whole industry's died and the movie industry is sort of trying to crack down on it as well. Studios are trying to say, we want to take these celebrities likeness and, you know, buy them out so we can do whatever we want with their faces.

Simon Dell (32:20.511) Mm.

Martian (32:28.79) And it's just terrifying because you kind of kill the creative process. And for the passive listeners and the passive viewers, it's not that big a deal, but the whole purpose of art and the whole purpose of music is to reach and connect and to inspire. And when you change someone's mood, change someone's life, you know, big their day up, you know, and, and really impact people. When you take that away, then it becomes personal. It loses all personal.

feeling an attachment and now people don't have a reason to really listen to music

Simon Dell (33:03.434) Look, I, I, I agree with you and I disagree with you. And I have a slightly different theory behind it because, I, there's, there's a quote that I can never quite remember, but it was by, Billy Corgan smashing pumpkins, you know, and he was asked a similar question about how he thought AI was going to affect it. And he said, he said something, and I completely paraphrasing this. he said, he said it wasn't going to affect it as much as everybody thought he goes, because at the end of the day,

music is about taste. And his point was AI, people will always listen to what they like, right? They always listen to

things that they find tasteful or they enjoy and things like that. And they will talk about that to their friends. The likelihood of me recommending an AI artist to somebody else is very slim. You're right in the sense that the background music might change. I think about supermarkets and department stores and the music playing in there. There's no reason that that needs to be licensed from an artist anymore. It could just be AI generated music playing in the back, you know.

And to a degree you go, okay, yeah, that does sound bad. But at the end of the day, how much did artists really earn from that in the first place?

Martian (34:22.778) Where we take it to another level though is when you get TV, movies, all the sync licensing and stuff like that. When that becomes, and that's a huge source of income and exposure for artists. There's no reason why that couldn't all be AI now today. And it's looking like it's gonna head that way, but it's not just the income thing because we don't earn a crazy amount on Spotify. It's the exposure thing as well. And if you populate an artist with 10 real artists and 50 AI artists, the passive listener is not gonna know.

Simon Dell (34:28.394) Totally, totally.

Simon Dell (34:37.512) Yeah.

Simon Dell (34:43.826) No.

Martian (34:52.836) This is gonna go, this is cool. I'm gonna add it to my playlist.

Simon Dell (34:53.247) No.

But think of the other benefits. Again, I don't disagree with you and I completely understand that. But I also think about the other benefits from, let's say me as a writer, right? If I sit there and go, hey, I've written a book. I think it would make a great film. I cannot explain to anyone who's not in the film industry or the production industry, how fucking hard it is actually to make a film or even a TV shoot or even a fucking piece of short animation, right? From scratch.

from me who knows nothing about making a film or animation or all those kinds of things. If I could get the tool, if I could get the tools as a, you know, middle -aged white man versus let's say, you know, you know, kids, 16 year old kids living in an urban area can sit and start creating music, video, animation, art online when they don't have the skills.

Is that a benefit as well? whilst that's getting, whilst there's the challenges, there's also the opportunity for people who are uneducated, unskilled in certain areas to start creating beautiful things.

Martian (36:08.634) 100%. And this is where I couldn't agree more. Like the goal with AI should be to create equal opportunity and an extra opportunity that we couldn't get before. Like when it comes to graphic design, filmmaking, like special effects and the same with music. When it comes to music production, it was very much a, you had to spend years and years and years gaining the technical skills and then thousands and thousands of dollars to get all the equipment needed to make a professional mix. And now the better technology gets people are able to do it on

mid budget laptop at home in their bedroom. And it's like, that's brilliant because music or art or creativity shouldn't be limited to people in a high socioeconomic standing, you know? So I think that AI presents the entire world with like the incredible opportunity to create. There just needs to be some kind of regulation with backbone that stops big business from completely taking everybody, the real person out of the equation and making sure

All things going to TV is AI created. All things going to Spotify is AI created because then it's just, keep all the ad revenue and we keep all the money and we take having to deal with the annoying creators out of it. There's that's where the issue lies. But the fact that everyone's going to be able to create freely, we have to go down that road no matter what. We can't just block AI out and say, no, no, no, because the risks are too high. We have to go down this AI road because of the potential.

Simon Dell (37:26.048) Yeah.

Simon Dell (37:32.318) I look at what you've said about Spotify blows my mind and I never even considered that until you've actually said it. I'm like, fuck yeah, that from a Spotify business model, from a business model and paying back their investors, that makes sense. But the moment they start to do that, I think that then opens the door for someone to go, hey, we're like Spotify, but we don't have AI artists.

people who like music, people who want to spend money on music will say, well, I'm going to go and listen to that because I want to see real music made by real people. Even if they're using AI in the production of the music, I want someone behind that. I want to feel someone's creativity in the music I'm listening to.

Martian (38:10.638) Yeah.

Martian (38:15.994) The hardest thing with that conversation is the battle of convenience versus support. You have to, and this is the thing that Spotify has taken away from 99 % of the music listeners is the appreciation for music discovery. Because music discovery is now free, easy to access and social media has this oversaturated platform where everyone's trying to be a musician, whether they're great or fucking horrible.

It's devalued music discovery because it's just like, I can see it everywhere. I can get it everywhere. So we've got this platform where. There's no value in finding a good song anymore because it's all playlisted and algorithm and all that kind of thing. So fans have gotten used to music is free. Music should be free and I've got easy access to it, which I agree with music should be free, but we still need to revive support culture.

you know, from fans to artists, hey, if you really like the artist, if you really like the songs, they've given you something, they give value to your day, to your life, consider supporting the artist kind of thing. And I put this, I put this idea in this campaign out, there's a website called buy me a coffee. And it's basically just a little one page or platform where you can donate five bucks to buy someone a coffee. And I've said, hey, if you listen to music on your drive to work and helps you get through traffic without road rage,

Simon Dell (39:22.058) Yeah.

Yeah.

Martian (39:43.61) If you go dancing on the weekends at the clubs, think about what that would be like with no music. Music in your cafes, music in your TV shows, your movies, music in your commercials. Like you're getting at the gym, have a listener's friend talking about his bicep curls for 40 minutes with no music, you know, and then tell me you don't want your playlist on. If you can't find music to be worth $1 .25 a week or five bucks a month for a cup of coffee, when you're

Simon Dell (40:08.821) Yeah.

Martian (40:10.906) 12 bucks a week for your Netflix subscription, 12 bucks a month for your Spotify subscription that's going to tech giants and not the artist kind of thing. If we all artist tomorrow said, hey, here's a buy me a coffee link in my bio, five bucks a month, you know, and you're get exclusive content, behind the scenes content and access to all my music. That's a much more interpersonal connection where here's the value and here's the fans getting direct access to their favorite artists.

And it's tangible and it's trackable instead of going, okay, a hundred thousand streams at 0 .003 cent per stream gets me X amount. It's, oh, a hundred fans, real fans giving me five bucks a month. There's 500 bucks. If I can grow that to a thousand, that's five grand a month. There's my livable wage kind of thing. And it's, it takes out all the AI. takes out all the, like the, the middle men and the bullshit. And it's just, here's a real relationship of support and connection with artists and fans.

Simon Dell (40:54.74) Yeah.

Martian (41:07.97) I think the subscription based model is where everyone's going to be moving to over the next five years.

Simon Dell (41:12.983) Mate, thank you very much for your time. If let's just remind everyone where they can find you. So it's Daniel Cooper, but the the Martian is the artist's name. And most of your handles are what was it the boy Martian or? Okay.

Martian (41:28.142) the boy martian, but when it comes to all the marketing and the just the think tank stuff about how to grow your brand, I've got my own business called Think Different, and different spelled D, F, R, T. But we'll make sure we've got all the links out there because there's a lot of interesting stuff that's tailored around music, but I think it's applicable to pretty much anyone who wants to build a brand or be a personality.

Simon Dell (41:49.15) Yeah, I do too, I do too. Mate, thank you very much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Martian (41:54.072) No worries, thank you so much for having me.