From Plugins to Community: DAWn Audio's Evolution
- Eric Doades
- Apr 3
- 28 min read
Today Dmitri talks with the winners of the 2024 Music Tectonics Swimming with Narwals Competition, DAWn Audio. They discuss their innovative platform for music producers and artists as well as the recent pivot from a cross-DAW collaboration plugin, to a gamified network that rewards artists for their creative work. But first, Dmitri and Tristra share a quick take on the news headlines of the week.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
Dmitri: Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your regular host, Dmitri Viza, founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR and marketing firm that specializes in music innovation, and I am still. Energized and vibing from having been at South by Southwest. Got to meet a lot of you out there.
Our listeners, thanks to everyone who came up and told me you've been listening to the podcast and love the new format with the News Roundups, and it was great. Got a chance to catch up with our 2024 Swimming with Narwals Music Tectonics competition winners, Don. Audio. So today I am gonna bring you this catch up.
They're doing some really interesting pivots with the company that I can't wait to share with you. Everyone loved what they had to pitch at Music Tectonics, and I'm excited on this episode for you to hear what Diego and [00:01:00] Mandy from Don Audio are up to. So I've got that interview from directly from South by Southwest in Austin.
I wanna share that with you, but of course, uh, hey Tricia, is it time to do a, a news roundup? Yep. We're gonna get Tricia in here now to share some news with you.
Robot: Rock Paper scanner.
Tristra: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Rock Paper Scanner, which you should have in your inbox, and we're gonna run through the news from this past week. So Dmitri, what's been on your mind? What headlines caught your attention?
Dmitri: You know, several headlines I just wanna mention right off the top, and then we should dig into some of the things that, like we're really thinking about.
I, I don't know if you saw Napster got bought again, it's kind of hard to miss for some like 200, like $270 million that, that, that in itself, that headline caught my eye. But in particular, there was an article in Business [00:02:00] Insider called Napster. Is it 1999? Millennials React with Disbelief Belief at $207 million Sale, which I have to say.
You know, they're talking about doing 3D virtual spaces for concerts. Something I would love to see more of, whether it can exist on an independent space and whether Napster could relive be rebooted in that way. But what I'm really impressed by is the guy who's the CEO of Napster, John VAs. Lala, how do you say his name?
John V. I like to say John V. Good
Tristra: old John V. Yeah, John V from Roblox. John Roblox head
Dmitri: heading up. Yeah, he was heading up music there. We saw a lot happen at Roblox when he was there. So now that he's at Napster, now that this has happened, I'm like, wait a second. Maybe something is gonna happen there with Napster, which is really interesting to see.
Tristra: And honestly, I know the rest of the world probably doesn't think this way, but everyone who listens to this podcast is probably like, they bought it for the licenses. And probably for some other, for some other little, little bits and pieces that are, uh, and maybe that price makes sense if you think about, uh, the pain you'd have to go through to license certain things.
So,
Dmitri: great point. Good luck, Napster.
Tristra: I.
Dmitri: Yes. I mean, I, I, [00:03:00] I want to be in more virtual worlds with music. Another thing that caught my eye from Hypebot, I guess actually it was, uh, Bobby Osinski who does his own blog and podcast. Uh, Sam Ash music returns online as Sam Ash Direct. Wow. In the musical instrument world, there's only a handful of chains or national e-commerce spaces to sell stuff.
Super cool to see another much loved brand, just like Napster. Much loved brand coming back to play. Apple Music integration is now available on more DJ platforms. I grabbed that from Eng Gadget, although it was all over the news. Interesting to me. They're saying you can DJ with the a hundred million songs on Apple Music.
This is a huge breakthrough for the DJ scene. I don't know how the licensing works. I don't understand what happens to all the cool software companies that have emerged to provide this service separately from the regular. Listening, uh, streaming services, but it could be huge. One of the kind of smaller headline, but just made me, gave me a little tickle was from the conversation, well, $1 on your ticket helps save [00:04:00] Australian live music.
And referring also to a UK model that's also ambitious in this way, the idea that could we support grassroots and local venues with a little levy? Can't imagine it happening in America, but heck, if it can happen in Australia or the uk, would be awesome to see. The live scene grow in, in all those ways. So those were just some headlines I caught, but you caught some stuff.
I always love to hear. You're kind of always pushing a little bit further into the colossal futures. Yeah. What did you come up with?
Tristra: One really interesting thing I saw was from the Columbia Business School is you scholars in marketing. And I'm like, dang. They're like people with PhDs in marketing. I'm like, wow, that's, that's really interesting.
That's, but that's not what caught my eye. What caught my eye was they were doing a really interesting study of. Looking at how TikTok ban would affect small advertisers and large advertisers. And the conclusion they came to, and I'm gonna quote it just to be precise, but the greater shift by relatively larger advertisers suggests that meta platforms are a better substitute for them than for smaller ones.
This implies that a TikTok ban would [00:05:00] impose a disproportionate burden on small businesses. Mm-hmm. And I thought that was interesting because A, there are lots of music related small businesses that could find TikTok a great. Platform to advertise on and then would have to switch to something like Instagram and would probably face this burden.
Um, and it, it's just really interesting to think about the social media ad space and how that is all woven together with everything, like fan engagement, et cetera. So I wanted to throw that out there. I thought that was really, really interesting. And no one's kind of asking what, how the TikTok ban is gonna affect, uh, the whole advertising side, which is so essential to social media.
Dmitri: And it points to kind of the segmentation and diversification of different social media networks serving different audiences. Mm-hmm. Whether it's those business audiences or creators or fans or you know, fans, what do you call them? People, normies people who are ingesting all this randos stuff. I eyeballs, you know, because we think in terms of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok competing, but there's also different reasons to go to different.
Different platforms because of formats [00:06:00] or because of just culture? Reddit culture, for example. Yeah. Or Patreon culture, or Substack culture. You know, they're all a little different
Tristra: and in some ways I, I think an article like this points to the nature of the quote, unquote noise. We often say artists have to cut through, or that businesses have to cut through to get their message to the right audience.
And that, that makes me think Taylor Lawrence has been doing some interesting reporting on, in User mag on things like View, I think she calls it deflation. So there's this tendency for platforms to want to like, basically to inflate views and how that gets played out and who they choose to favor with.
This kind of algorithmic love is very interesting. So if you're not reading User Mag, if you're not following Taylor Lawrence and you're doing anything online. You should follow her. She's got a lot of really great stuff that she puts out herself in the really nice podcast as well. The other thing that caught my eye, and this is just me being a, a kind of a dork who loves really interesting stories that involve audio [00:07:00] and music, came from the very wonderful IEEE spectrum outlet that has a lot of great like science coverage that's written usually in a way that US Normies can understand.
So the. Piece that caught my eye is fiber optic network spots, spacecraft's return to earth. So basically you can use fiber optic networks as a distributed acoustic sensing network that lets you do things like study meteors. So lots and lots of meteors hit earth. As well as the spaceship that was tracked this time around by scientists.
But the fact that you can use like a fiber optic network is in a way, like a huge listening device. That to me is mind blowing. And I'm like, could it also be a really huge instrument of sorts? And I've actually heard of composers and conceptual artists using fiber optic networks to. Almost as a kind of instrument and using things like latency and delay and all sorts of other properties of fiber optics to make music in [00:08:00] unusual ways.
Um, you know, some of it was more listenable than others, as I recall, but there's, in some ways I wanna put this out there as inspo to all you music tech nerds, fellow nerds, like. Everything is music tech really. And so
Dmitri: well, Jim, Jim Griffin from the infamous FA Listserv and who's been on the podcast has been emailing me about quantum entanglement.
So if you want talk about sensors, long distance sensors for big sounds, check out some of the things that's emerging there. We'll have to have 'em on the guest and see. Yeah, if we can get some space age music going here for quantum, there's
Tristra: some quantum. Uh, sensors that are really developing in interesting ways to, um, basically the flaws in diamonds can be used as a kind of sensing that also involves quantum stuff.
I'm probably mangling this, but like, because it just blew my mind and now I can't remember it precisely. But Dmitri, what else is on your mind from this past week?
Dmitri: Well, something that we scan frequently is what media research is up to, and they posted an article, music subscriber Market shares 2024 for slow [00:09:00] down What?
Slow Down. And the point there is. Yes, the growth is a little bit slower. Record label streaming revenue growth slowed to 6% in 2024, but there was no such slowdown in subscriber growth. They wrote 85 million net new subscribers have been added in 2024, which is only 2 million less than 2023. So it's, it's smaller but not much smaller.
And what was interesting. Was Mark Mulligan pointed out that Spotify's market share 32% is around where it was in 2015 and remained relatively stable in all the intervening quarters during 2024. Spotify added 28 million subscribers in 2024. That's more than the combined total number of subscribers added by the second, third, and fourth largest DSPs, Tencent, apple, and Amazon.
And so just, it's a lot of work to. Keep market share as market grows if you're the, if you're the biggest one, 'cause you have to grow more than what everybody else is growing together. I picked up that Tencent is the second largest DSB globally with 120 million subscribers. [00:10:00] And um, I dunno, there's some other interesting things that came in.
Yeah. Through it. YouTube is making a, yeah, I love Mark's, oh, go ahead.
Tristra: Analysis of the global south. So he and his team have been looking very closely at what they call the global South, which is actually not US and Europe and I guess not Japan. I dunno. But looking at these big markets that have been traditionally slow to adopt subscriptions and he's saying this is where all the growth is happening right now.
That's right. And that's really fascinating and that the reason, there's a couple reasons why revenue isn't like keeping pace with subscriber growth in those markets, and that is in part because there's so much local content. So the big global majors aren't necessarily collecting in the same way. And that might also explain whether there's been so many acquisitions of, of labels and music companies in some of those markets, like India, for example.
Dmitri: Well, and in addition, you can't monetize in new markets the same way you can monetize in the longer, more mature markets as well. The, basically the subscriber growth in the global south, as he says, which [00:11:00] he said he means, any place that's not North America in Europe is the growth engine for, for the music industry and for streaming right now.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they're all paying the same subscriptions, of course, so that more users and so forth. But that'll be over time, that'll shift as well. So, yeah, that was a great one. Hey, before we go, Trisha, there's one more piece that hit my radar. Yeah. Jesse Kirschbaum from new agency does a quarterly kind of trend report.
It's very far reaching. It's quick little nuggets. I kind of wanna run a few of his trends by and just hear from you, yay or nay with maybe one commenter now. Okay. I don't think I showed this to you yet, so this is like a,
Tristra: it's a speed round.
Dmitri: Speed round last minute. This is, uh, he, he talked about a vibe shift.
This is all over the culture reports and my fellow trend lovers are feasting on it is this era called a dark shift, the boom boom, the era of the villain guy, the WWE era. We are hearing it all, but clearly 2020 fives vibe is different from the year I. B four. Agree, disagree. Yay nay.
Tristra: I agree there's a vibe shift, but blah.
Okay. [00:12:00] We deserve better.
Dmitri: I-R-L-I-R-L is the new luxury. Meeting up in person is the new glory. We are all very busy and thanks to social media, very distracted. Meeting up in person is the new luxury, whether it be at a retreat and event or even for coffee. If you look in someone's eyes and exchange rogue saliva, that's more flossy.
Okay, Jesse?
Tristra: Yeah.
Dmitri: What do you think on that one?
Tristra: Yeah. I mean, may save the saliva. Yeah,
Dmitri: exactly. Smaller purpose-driven communities. 2025 has been all about community. The desire for smaller, more intimate, specialized communities is undeniable. I.
Tristra: Yeah. That seems to, that, that, that sounds legit.
Dmitri: We are, we're digging this, Jesse.
Uh, let's see. I'll just, um, skip, spit to yourself, buddy. Here's a, here's a very tactical one, a EO. The clearest consumer use case for AI is enhancement. It gives search in 2025. We're asking our AI agents to tell us the answers which are opening the door to a new era. Answer, engine optimization is starting to eat SEO's lunch and is the next frontier for brand integration, offering a greater ability for users [00:13:00] to personalize their music experience.
Tristra: I don't know about personalizing music experiences, but I do think it is eating SEO's lunch or is becoming an extension of SEO. I mean, to separate those two things and put them in competition seems odd, but you know.
Dmitri: We've, there's a bunch more here. MM and A is starting to happen. IPOs are coming next.
Live albums are back in fashion, south by Southwest and CES are no longer where the trends begin. Jesse Kirschbaum, check 'em out from the new agency. I follow 'em on LinkedIn. Trita, that was fun. Thanks for doing this.
Tristra: That was super fun. That was super fun. So watch out for mes and enjoy the luxury of meeting someone in person.
AD: What makes news in music tech? Find out at our next Seismic Activity online event taking place April 23rd at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, 6:00 PM UK time. We'll be joined by expert journalists to go behind the scenes to understand how journalists and editors work, what gets their attention and what happens next.
Head on over to music [00:14:00] tectonics.com/online events. To register now and learn more about our free monthly online event series.
Dmitri: Hey, I am here at South by Southwest at the 2112. Creator House. Shout out to 2112. Our favorite landing pad when we're ever in Chicago. They have a great community, a creative community, kind of a hub coworking space. They do a lot of great events there. Rehearsal studios, recording studios. It's a great place, but they've brought a great event to so by Southwest this year, and I have the lucky opportunity to speak with the winners of the 2024 Music Tectonics Swimming with Narwals.
Competition, Don Audio, if you were there at the conference, they did an amazing pitch. They won over the hearts of both the jury and the Audience Choice award, which is awesome. [00:15:00] So I'm here with Diego Penzone, who's the CEO of Don Audio and Mandy Ortiz, who's the Chief Strategy officer. How you doing Diego?
Diego: What's going on y'all?
Dmitri: Mandy, good to see you.
Mandy: Great to be here.
Dmitri: So this is great because a lot of our listeners have been to the conference. It's about five months since you guys won the contest, so people will have a little bit of sense of who you are and it'd be great to hear like what you guys are up to.
Remind our listeners what Don Audio is.
Mandy: Yeah, so Dawn Audio, starting with daws Digital Audio Workstation, that's the software that producers use to make music. So originally we started as a plugin that enabled live cross DAW collaboration. So really tapping into that creative process that producers need and love to make music.
But recently we've had a little pivot. So what Dawn Audio is today is we are a network for producers and artists. We are a gamified platform that rewards artists for the time that they spend creating music. We [00:16:00] work with different hosts every month, different producers, and they sponsor basically month long calendar of different events.
So we have beat battles, master classes, someone on one time to get feedback on your work. Um, but yeah, we really are just a network for producers focused on the creative process.
Dmitri: That's awesome. Mandy, how did you get into music?
Mandy: Yeah, so I come from a very musical background. So my family, I'm Mexican and Puerto Rican.
So grew up listening to a lot of those kinds of sounds, but also coming into a new generation here in the us uh, that was thrown in with a lot of influences of rock and surprisingly classical music. So I have uncles who are in a Bando, Salgado is their name. Feel free. Free to look them up. My mom is a singer, she's incredible.
And so she really pushed my brother and I to sing. So I started joining a local choir. And from there, really music just took over my life. And my mom really wanted to make sure that that was a foundational part of who I was. I remember her having me sing Andrea [00:17:00] Belli to be able to, you know, go outside and hang out with my friends.
And so yeah, that was really the core foundation, uh, community in music.
Dmitri: Like you couldn't go out until you sang.
Mandy: No, truly. And even if I did sing, there was no guarantee I was going out, so,
Dmitri: wow. I don't know if that's, uh, the carrot or the stick, but it got you singing, so that's cool. Diego, how'd you get into music?
Diego: Yeah, I've been a drummer my whole life. Truly. My dad is a hundred percent of the reason why I love music the way I do. He, every time that he'd have, you know, 30 seconds free time would pick up the guitar and just start playing in the living room. So I always grew up around it. Played piano, played guitar early on.
Get got into drums, started doing jazz drum marching band, and then it wasn't until I was at Tulane in undergrad that I really got into music production. So now I'm more of a producer, audio engineer. Missed a live performance side of it. Can't say I was ever held hostage indoors until I performed some stuff, but always had a super supportive family around it.
And yeah, just kind of the way my family approaches music and I approach music is very much as that creative [00:18:00] process outlet. Less as a, I want to be, you know, the next rockstar kind of side of things. So.
Dmitri: So what, what's the origin story of Dawn Adia?
Diego: Yeah, so as the story goes, I was at Tulane, was studying computational engineering, needed to do an internship to graduate, and then Covid hit and internship got canceled, was already kind of working on this idea because I had started getting into music production and was fed up with the fact that I could be five feet away from a friend.
And because we were using different software, we still couldn't make music together. And so off of that, my professor. Gave us the opportunity to go through an incubator program. Uh, kind of developed this idea further. Started as a class project, fully thought we would graduate in May, move on, and then just had enough people telling us like, Hey, y'all are really building something cool.
Maybe you should consider, you know, doing it after you graduate team stuck around. And yeah, I've been building it ever since. So I was around 2021. Nice.
Dmitri: So you mentioned this pivot. I actually didn't know about that pivot until just now because I remember the kind of the cross da platform component, but you're still in the [00:19:00] collaboration space and that's really the emphasis and I guess the motivation for what you were just talking about, Diego, why is it so important that you guys focus on artists and producers collaborating?
Mandy: Because it really taps into that, the value behind the creative process, which is artists really being able to tap into individuality and expanding themselves. Outside of just commodification of what they make. So you look at it simply, and it's kind of like our artist goes through these different phases.
We call them the chapters to creation, but really starting with the ideation phase. And that's kind of what we're focusing on. How do we create an environment where artists don't feel stuck because they're thinking that the next thing they create has to be the next big hit, but they're really inspired by folks around them who really just have the same fundamental values that they do, which is that music is powerful.
Um, but looking at it from a market standpoint, right? Right now the doll market is about 3.3 billion, but it's projected to hit almost 6.6 billion, come 2032. So looking at that, outside of [00:20:00] even the context of the us, we see new emerging producers coming in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe, in. Just every continent.
And you're also seeing kind of just a new way that people are interacting with music. So schools now are introducing production camps and classes that younger and younger folks can take to learn about this new way to just understand how music is created. Um, and so I think that it's just important to create a network where folks who are starting this journey off feel like there are other people who are not just in the same boat as them, but are really seeing the value in what they are doing, encouraging them to keep going.
Dmitri: Can I ask a little bit about the pivot? Because it sounds like that's a, like the mission makes sense, like it all fits together with what we heard at Music Tectonics, but the. The product sounds very different. Can you say a little bit more about why and how you made that change?
Mandy: Yeah, so our team spent a lot of time after actually the pitch competition at Music Tectonics.
Really just thinking about why are we here and really the question [00:21:00] kept leading us. To the answer of the process. The process, the process. And we realized that we were really only hitting one point of the process with the plugin. So we still have that involved in the network that we are creating, but really just wanted to give something more than just a tool for artists, but really a place for them to call home.
And so yeah, what we're creating now isn't necessarily something different, but it's just a realized expansion that there is a need to just foster a place where artists are feeling encouraged to just. To not learn a new doll, but really push the boundaries of why and how we make music.
Dmitri: So the, is the plugin still a part of this network collaboration component that you're doing now?
Mandy: Yeah, so the plugin actually, we used to kind of help track the way that artists are working within their da. So the way that we're gamifying the DA network is really just giving sort of weekly wrap reports to the folks who are in our network so that way they can understand their habits. And really create some creative consistency.
And so through that we also reward them for the work. So because the way that the music [00:22:00] industry is shaped now really just pays artists once they have that final product, we realize that there's a white space to really reward artists for the time that they're spending. To create music. Again, we have some cash payouts for artists depending on, you know, where they rank in the list of all the folks in our networks.
But again, we work with different producers each month to host what we're calling seasons. And in those seasons, creators can wor earn exclusive skins, sample packs by the producer who's hosting that season and just points to unlock different rewards.
Dmitri: And do those seasons exist, like live in person or online or what?
Diego: Yeah, so, so our community's hosted on Discord, uh, entirely. And so kind of the realization was we've always been targeting this kind of aspiring professional next generation of music creators. There's millions of creators like that that are actively online every day on Discord on these platforms, but these tools were never built for creators, and so they have a ton of functionality, but they don't bridge to the actual music making.
We realized that white space kind of [00:23:00] filled it in, and so. Uh, yeah. Part of part of the idea is that these season takeovers, these events, while we still wanna have a very in-person physical presence, right? Hence coming out here to south by doing the beat battle today with beat stars, things like that. Um, we wanna build that kind of global network where really if you have 30 minutes of free time on a Saturday, you feel like you can log on.
Same way that a gamer might do on Xbox, for example. You can log on, know that someone's gonna be doing some challenge. You can be competing, you can be collaborating through the multiplayer tier. That's still the kind of collaboration tool of what we have. And yeah, kind of feeling like a, like a gamified video game like environment.
Dmitri: That sounds really fun. That sounds really awesome. Yeah. So how far into this are you with this kind of new version of Don Audio?
Diego: Yeah, so the pivot really happened kind of over the last three months. Uh, we launched the Creator Pass, we're calling it last month, and then this month is our first season takeover.
We're working with a producer out New Jersey, uh, chord maker, and they're sponsoring some different prizes, rewards our community's at about 200 people so [00:24:00] far and kind of growing it with some of these activations we have coming up. And yeah, that, that kind of pivot last month is really what launched the the new model.
Gotcha.
Dmitri: What types of collaborations have you seen occur as a result of Dawn?
Diego: Yeah, so we hosted kind of in our early beta testing and development phases. We were able to partner with some cool folks. Uh, so classic studios up in Chicago back in 2023. It must have been. Uh, we hosted our first, what we call don day.
Where we kind of went into the studio, got the engineers set up with the app, had them testing, using the product. Um, and then this past August we were able to, at the cutting edge conference in New Orleans, host the first cross state producer camp. So we had some producers in New Jersey, some artists down in New Orleans.
Uh, really the initial idea was, you know, let's, let's give them the technology, let them kind of play with it, mess around with it. And the next thing we realized, you know, four or five hours had passed, they wanted to keep working on more tracks. I think like you put it like. A core to our ethos is the fact that music making is fun [00:25:00] and really getting back to that fun aspect of it.
And it's great to see when people are using the technology, just how it does tap into a new flow that they haven't been able to reach without the technology and, and just how fun it is.
Dmitri: Man, it makes me think about my own dabbling around with music, especially like electric music, electronic music or producing and, and feeling like you're kind of alone.
A lot of time. You're kind of like sitting there like, how do you do this? Watching a YouTube video, looking for the steps to use whatever software or hardware and all that kind of stuff. And I could really see just like. Feeling way more motivated by like being with somebody else.
Diego: Yeah. Yeah. And I'll, you know, I'll speak for myself.
A huge part of what kept me making music, especially once I got into production, was that I got lucky. I was at undergrad and I had roommates that were also making music so we could be messing around every night. Whereas through the community that we're building, through other producer communities, I've met, there's producers that are out in Random City in the Midwest where they're like.
I don't have anyone in person that I could remotely even pretend to get connected [00:26:00] to. And that feeling of isolation, yeah, I think kills consistency, kills that motivation. Um, so really trying to tackle that from the community standpoint yeah. Is definitely key.
Dmitri: I'm actually really intrigued by this pivot.
At Music Tectonics, we see so many tech products and services and apps and platforms and things, and I feel like. Y this is clearly you. You look directly at the mission of what you were trying to do from the beginning. Instead of keep hacking, the hacking away at a physical or at a, a software product or so something like that.
You were more like, what do people need? Yeah.
Mandy: That's definitely, that's what it's about. Right? And I think that we've also learned so much working with young people. I mean. We're 25, so younger people. But yeah, a lot of our work we do with universities and university students, so even looking at cool collaborations we've seen beyond these larger partnerships, just seeing our students be able to hop on the platform or use our plugin and make music together is just so inspiring because they're the living case study, you know?
This is exactly the environment we're trying to foster, the people we're trying to bring in. And so, [00:27:00] yeah, it's inspiring and it keeps us going.
Dmitri: I feel like you may have already answered this question, but I'm curious beyond this pivot, what else has changed since you won the music Tectonics swimming with Narwals competition?
Are there other pieces of the business model, partnerships, anything like that that you can think about? Uh,
Diego: yeah, the big, the pivot has been really the biggest change. Yeah, I would say the team, thankfully is still around. Still the same team, still kicking. Yeah. We've started expanding our university network, so yeah, Mandy lead's point on our university programming, so we added a couple other ambassadors there.
The biggest way I would simplify the business model is. This new model just has a much more direct funnel. So before, the only value we were really providing you was if you were looking to collaborate live with somebody else. Whereas with this model, that's just one of the tiers, that's just a feature within the suite of what we offer.
So as Mandy mentioned, there's value for individual creators. You can join the community for free. So it's a lot more of a kind of explicit funnel driving you towards that multiplayer. And I think to your point about the being [00:28:00] so tied to the tech, like we've really found I think a lot of freedom and liberty in being.
Not as constrained to such a technically burdensome process and really being able to start building the community, start building some of these partnerships. We had laid a lot of the foundation over the past number of years, but really able to move a lot quicker. Now the community really is the value and the product.
The tech is just a feature within that.
Dmitri: Well, while we've got you here, I'm curious because we always like connecting the dots. You guys live in New Orleans. What's the music and tech scene like in New Orleans?
Diego: So the tech scene, definitely young, earlier stage. I would say based on what I've heard from other tech entrepreneurs in New Orleans, it's at this kind of pivot, accelerated growth stage where I wanna say three or four years ago now, we had lucid level set, a couple of really massive exits.
It was the first unicorn in New Orleans that brought in a lot of attention, a lot of funding, a lot of external venture capital startups moving into the city. Music tech, there isn't as much of a base and focus as [00:29:00] really there should be given how musical New Orleans is culturally, but there's some good great programming happening there to really build that up.
But I think I, I'll say candidly, like something that we would love to see and like we talk about a lot as a team is how do we. Bring music tech to New Orleans, but keep it New Orleans, you know what I mean? Not just make it la not just make it Austin, right? Like great cities, great tech scenes, but there's something unique about that New Orleans culture, about the way of being in New Orleans that, uh, we really try to embody and is integral to the DNA of Dawn.
That kind of humanistic process centric, uh, approach is very New Orleans. So
Dmitri: I love hearing about that. And every time I've been to New Orleans, I feel like I can feel the music everywhere and. All the influences from around, from the history of New Orleans, and it just feels like it's right there on the surface, which is awesome.
Now Mandy, you're from Chicago and we're here at the 2112 Creator House, 2112. As I mentioned, at the top is this amazing like cultural community for entrepreneurship and music [00:30:00] and film and the arts and stuff like that. What would you add about the kind of the Chicago scene for music and tech?
Mandy: So first things first, on the music side, both in New Orleans and Chicago.
The artists are hungry, the producers, the entrepreneurs, it both are such bottom up cities. So to really see people mobilize together and really redefine what organizing can look in an industry like this has been very powerful to see and be a part of. And in Chicago, similar to New Orleans, you see kind of a movement to really develop infrastructure around startups, specifically in music tech.
So the work 2112 is doing Think Chicago is another really great organization. We were able to go speak on a panel with them about. 20, 23, 2 years ago, just talking about creation and innovation within kind of these fields. And so you see a lot of folks doing that bottoms up work to bring in the infrastructure, to bring in the money, to really support these hungry folks who are just trying to build and create something new and different.
Dmitri: Yeah. Awesome. I really appreciate you guys giving insights into those hubs because you know, I [00:31:00] think in the music industry there's these New York LA kind of situation and there is something local that you can tap into and you can see. And I think when you guys were pitching at Music Tectonics, I feel like we were.
Feeling something a little bit different. There was a different kind of energy from where, you know, where you're based out of and the community that you've spring from, which is super cool. And I'm curious, how was the whole music tectonics experience for you?
Diego: Yeah, I mean, I will say, you know, we were joking about it.
I think going to these different conferences and business networking things a lot of times can be very draining. But it was. The first time I was in a room where it was like every single conversations I've, I've had felt super relevant, felt very organic actually. And it helped a ton that we were beach front most of the days.
I think the kind of to the whole point of the creativity, creative process, like getting into that mental state where you're able to do your best work, uh, I think is super key within music. And I think y'all embody that. You're the, the best I've seen embodying that in terms of a conference, so, [00:32:00]
Dmitri: wow, we're gonna use that.
That's amazing. You just made my day.
Mandy: Yeah, no, everything Diego said, I feel like it's the first conference where I left not feeling tired, but feeling inspired. And so, yeah, it was just so incredible to meet so many people. Just passionate, not just about the work, but again about really just redefining what the music industry is gonna look like over the next 10 years.
So being able to be part of those conversations also just felt like a privilege in itself.
Dmitri: Wow, you guys are really making my day. I mean, the, the kind of collaborative spirit that you're talking about with Dawn Adio feels like how I think about the conference. So it means a lot coming from you guys to be like, oh yeah, resting your eyes on the ocean, being among peers in the sun, in the breeze.
It's kind of part of the vibe. Like it's really not just the content, it's also the vibe, which is awesome. Um, what are the next challenges you are trying to solve for Dawn? Audio. What, what's, what's next? I.
Diego: Yeah. I think with this pivot, kind of really figuring out which of the strategies, messaging, like things that we had [00:33:00] built up really over the past few years still feel relevant versus which are we just kinda holding onto because this is what we were doing, this is what we were saying that we were doing.
I think it's been a really interesting process these last few months. Right now we are entirely in a kind of growth stage, so now that we've started getting some of our first like champions, super fans, people in the network that are in their daily loving it, kinda giving some really great candid feedback, like how do we capitalize on that?
Capitalize on some of the great collaboration partnership opportunities we're getting. Yeah. And I think do so in a way that feels very, I do a lot of organizing work and community organizing work, and I think how we wanna be building this network and community is very grassroots, right? Like bottom up, get the producers bought in, get the bedroom producers, the the people kind of on the ground level, and then kind of build up from there.
So yeah, I think, I think we're in a new stage where we haven't been at that part of the process before. And so just learning as first time founders what it means to really grow a community, I think is, is a challenge. Yeah.
Dmitri: I'll ask you one more and then [00:34:00] we'll wrap this up. What can the music tectonics audience, the attendee base, our jury members, our investors, the people who voted for you in the the startup competition, what can they do to help move dawn audio along?
What could they add to your next chapter?
Mandy: Yeah, so we're really just in a phase of testing our theory, right? Is what we think artists are looking for, really what they're looking for. Um, so like Diego had mentioned, our, our network is free to join. You can find it in the link in our bio dawn.audio on Instagram.
But yeah, really in the network there's an opportunity to give feedback. What features are artists and producers really looking for? What things are they enjoying? Who would they like to be brought into the space to learn from? And so really. What they could do is join the network and let us know how we can make it better.
Dmitri: Awesome. This has been great. Mandy. Thanks so much for joining us.
Mandy: Yeah, thank you so much for having us,
Dmitri: Diego. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, of course. Great to be here. Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please [00:35:00] subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week.
Did you know we do free monthly online events that you are lovely podcast listeners can join. Find out more@musictectonics.com. And while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the Earth's tectonic plates cause quakes, and make mountains connect with music.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
