Today Dmitri launches a new miniseries – How To Scale Up. These conversations are meant to work together with the How to Start Up episodes, and will attempt to answer the question of “How did you get from there…. to here….?” On this episode Dmitri talks with Darryl Ballantyne, the CEO and co-founder of LyricFind. LIsten in to find out how Darryl got his first investor, and what Microsoft, childhood bedrooms, outdated websites, and roller coasters have to do with anything. Come meet Darryl at the Music Tectonics Conference October 22-24.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
00:00 - intro
You're listening to Music Tectonics.
00:09 - Dmitri
How to scale up. Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR firm that specializes in music innovation and works with a variety of music innovation companies, music tech and so forth.
00:34
Our next guest, Lyricfind co-founder and CEO, Darryl Ballantyne, has been on the Music Tectonics podcast before, so for this episode I asked if we could use it to launch a new miniseries called How to Scale Up. This builds on our previous how to Start Up miniseries, where we talked with people like Vickie Nauman, Tracy Maddox, Bob Moz, Sun Jen Yung, all of whom will be speaking at this year's Music Tectonics Conference along with Darryl. LyricFind started in the era of unlicensed lyric websites and led to the charge in inventing licensing deals with thousands of publishers and creating a new revenue stream where words on paper I mean digital were then monetizable. The company went on to add many other Lyric-centric features beyond Lyric Display and Search to word-by-word synced display, lyric Translation, lyric Intelligence called Lyric IQ to help with things like parental controls, lyric video generation and B2B lyric transcription, among other things. Let's dig into their story from startup to scale up. Welcome back to the podcast, Darryl.
01:37 - Darryl
Thanks for having me back. It's good to see you and good to be a part of the Tectonics family once again.
01:45 - Dmitri
Yeah, you've been with us from the beginning supporting the conference, and being on the podcast brought some great information to the industry and I'm excited to see you in about a week when the conference happening.
01:56 - Darryl
Yeah, I can't wait. It's always such a highlight of the year for us, so we're really looking forward to it.
02:01 - Dmitri
Love. It All right, let's dive in. What was the original idea for starting Lyric Fine, and how did that transform into a business in the early days?
02:09 - Darryl
So it really started out with us trying to create a regular Lyric website ourselves and realizing that licensing was a nightmare and that it was such a fragmented industry with publishing rights and there was no centralized way to get it, and it being so difficult that we shut that down and then came back to it years later, ironically, when we got a phone call from Microsoft asking if we could provide lyric licensing, because they found our old website that had no lyrics on it but did have my phone number on it.
02:50
And in the perfect metaphor for launching a startup, I was literally at an amusement park outside of Toronto called Canada's Wonderland with my family and my phone rang when I was about to step onto a roller coaster. So one thing led to another and we decided that we could restart the business, but, instead of being a destination ourselves, that we could be an aggregator, we could make it easy enough for all the other services out there, whether it's Lyric websites or people like Microsoft, to use Lyric's content legally. And one thing led to another, and here we are now, 20 years later, and I still haven't gotten a real job.
03:41 - Dmitri
Relatable, Darryl, that's so interesting. So you literally felt like you kind of failed and then you got that phone call that just transformed everything. That's so cool and if I, and if I remember correctly, you had interned at a record label before that. I mean this you've been in business for a while now so you started kind of early and uh, and it's kind of interesting. As you tell that story, we've seen over many generations of music start music tech startups that not only did you have to learn to run the business and learn to build technology, but you had to learn all this new information about music rights and licensing. I'm curious, was that a surprise, and how did you get up to speed on all those issues?
04:29 - Darryl
a huge surprise. I had learned a lot when I first tried to get licenses for the consumer site and realized just what an administrative nightmare it was. And then, after that and through that initial process, I met Ted Cohen, who was at the time running digital at EMI, and convinced him to hire me as an intern before I graduated university and that was a very intense crash course in licensing and the digital world and how all of that worked. So after the call with Microsoft, my first call was to Mo, my co-founder and our CTO. But my second call was to Ted to figure out if it was even feasible now, if this was something that we could do to get licenses and be able to come back as an aggregator and if the industry had matured enough and he was able to convince people at the publishers that they should actually work with us and give us a shot and do it in a way that was cost effective because it was just found money for them.
05:36
At the time there was no existing lyrics licensing business, but the four months that I spent at EMI were very formative in being able to understand how the economics of the music industry and the digital music industry works and the politics around licensing and the politics around the industry of how to get the data, how to get all the different pieces that you need.
06:05
We didn't think at first that we would need a separate metadata provider. So we got our first batch of ownership data from EMI Publishing when and that was the first deal that we had done and it had song name and song writer information and no artist information, no album information, and that was a surprise to us that publishers didn't know who had recorded their songs. And you know obviously that's very apparent now, and that's an understanding of the way that the industry works and the way that rights work that people can do a cover song without even talking to the publisher, so of course, they don't know who has recorded everything, but we didn't know that at the time. So there were a lot of things like that that we really needed to to learn and understand, uh, to be able to structure the business properly.
07:02 - Dmitri
As we talk about going from a startup to a scale-up, it feels like this is one of the startup hard lessons. If you come from the tech field or from some other space, or maybe you're just young and getting started as an entrepreneur, you just haven't worked in the music industry yet. It's all these kind of intricacies about the industry, how the industry works, whether it's the metadata, whether it's the licensing, how royalties are paid, how splits work. You know the difference between a publisher and a record label. You know all those kinds of things like they make it so much harder to break into the music industry at all.
07:36
So you were faced with that from the beginning because you were tackling a space that required licensing but nobody had done a lot with it and clearly you had some traction. You had the Microsoft deal. I'm sure it grew from there with other kind of B2B relationships rather than a consumer facing website. What was the first time? Not the first edition of LyricFind that was just this Lyric website, but in the edition that became the real LyricFind, what was the first time that you might have success with the company?
08:03 - Darryl
I think early on we knew, because we understood from our brief foray into the regular Lyric website world, that the economics were there, that there was something. But for us to really hit any meaningful scale it took almost 10 years. And really the turning point for that was when we acquired Grace Notes Lyric Licensing business and kind of combined that together in 2013. Then we started to have the actual economies of scale, because neither one of us really had the right level of usage and royalties flowing through for it to be sustainable and growable and that combination flipped the switch on that for us to be able to grow. But that was nine years into our existence, so it took a long time and it took a lot of different processes along the way and changes in the industry.
09:09
In those nine years there was a big difference between what was going on in streaming, what was going on in just the use of digital music and digital life overall. Use of digital music and digital life overall, the growth of whether it was digital music that was legal or illegal, all contributed to the use of lyrics and the use of lyric websites. We had a great partnership with the NMPA to help license lyric websites and make them aware of the, the rights that they needed. That helped to to fuel our growth. But you know, really, the growth of digital music and streaming, and that was what showed us that it was here to stay and the demand for music was not. And the demand for music was not reducing, it was increasing, and the digitization of it was an unstoppable force and that meant that there was a place for lyrics in there and a place for us to expand all the different ways that lyrics could be used in the digital world.
10:24 - Dmitri
It strikes me that this first sign that you might have some success in the new version of LyricFind was nine years in. I mean, obviously there are other signs along the way. You always need these signs that keep you going to say, oh yep, this is working, this is working, this is working. But I think it's a great message in this how to Scale Up episode to recognize that sometimes, especially in music tech and music industry, there is a long runway to really flipping it from startup mode to scale up mode and to hear that what you you know you were trying a lot of different things.
10:55
I mean, even the failed consumer facing website was part of the lessons learned, right, that that was not going to be a business of itself. But there was still this other demand, as you're stepping onto a roller coaster two kinds of roller coasters at once, one in an amusement park and one back in business again that there is still demand for this. There's still a problem that needs to be solved and there's a big company out there that wants you to do that, and then you can start to replicate that. And then again with the GraceNote deal, where you were able to basically, it sounds like, maybe double the potential of what people needed because you were taking over their side of the business. I think one of the things that comes up for startups in this startup to scale up bridge is about well, how do you last, how do you grow during this time? At what points did you decide whether or not to take investment and how did that play out for you?
11:47 - Darryl
Well, that decision was kind of made for us. I mean, one of my worst skills as a founder and CEO was raising money. I tried to raise money but I went about it in completely the wrong way. I didn't have an organized process completely the wrong way. I didn't have an organized process, I didn't have a concentration on that as a task, I didn't have deadlines, I didn't have anything. So it was too easy for people to just sit on the sidelines and not have to make a decision. The only money that we raised when we were getting started was $50,000 Canadian from my mother and she made us personally guarantee it. So as much as I had wanted to raise money at the beginning, I sucked at it, I failed miserably at it, but in the end that was the best thing that could have happened to us because of that nine year timeline and that that timeline was there not necessarily because of stuff that we were doing, but because of the evolution of the music industry right.
12:57
Streaming needed to take off. Uh you. Digital music overall needed to get much, much bigger. The market needed to be a lot bigger than just lyric websites that were there and licensing them. If we had taken an institutional investment in those first couple years, we would have accelerated our, our costs to to grow the service faster than the industry was ready to support. We would have hit a point where we needed more money to continue supporting those expenses and had to raise more and give up more equity. We would have ended up hitting the end of the life cycle of those funds before we truly hit our stride and probably would have been forced into some sort of liquidity event. That would have been really bad for us relative to what we have now and we wouldn't have been able to have this 20-year run. We would have had five years, seven years, something like that, and we wouldn't have really had anything to show for it.
14:09
So it's really important, I think, to survive as long as possible without taking that money. Have people that are invested in you and partnering with you, that understand the vision and the long game and are willing to participate in it, like we have. You know those investors like my mother still owns her shares and has not cashed out, and it's been. It's been 20 years and we have, you know, people that have been with us and you know board members who have have stock that have been with us and board members who have stock that have been along for that ride the whole time and understood that this is part of the overall vision. It's not about necessarily getting that exit right away and getting the money out. It's important to understand what your timeline is and not get ahead of it. And personally, in hindsight, the years of startup and being as lean as possible sucked, but we're totally worth it and it means that we're in a much, much better position now than we would have been otherwise.
15:27 - Dmitri
Yeah. So that kind of investor, that long-term investor, sounds like friends and family and angel investment at best that is complimentary, or has another vested interest in seeing your vision succeed.
15:56 - Darryl
You know they don't necessarily need to have the the equity ROI right away. They want the business to succeed.
16:03 - Dmitri
Yeah, yeah, dare. I ask Darryl and if you don't want to answer, it's fine how did you survive in those lean years?
16:12 - Darryl
we continued living like students. Uh, we had. We started right after we graduated university. Uh, mo and I continued living with our parents for years afterwards, like, well, all of our friends were moving out and living on their own. We moved back home and home and lived in our childhood bedrooms and worked in our childhood bedrooms. Our first office was a spot that was owned by a company that my stepfather worked for and we basically made an agreement with them that we could use some of their excess office space if we acted as their in-house IT team. So whenever a printer wasn't working and there was a problem with a computer mower, I would fix it for them, and we did a lot of things like that to make non-cash deals. Or we had people that believed in us.
17:18
One of our early licensing deals was with HFA and that aggregated a lot of publishers for us and really gave us a critical mass of the publishing market as licensors to us. And we negotiated the whole deal and there was a blank that was in there. That was for the amount of the advance that we were going to have to pay, and I had avoided putting that number in forever. I knew that it was going to be a big issue putting that number in forever. I knew that it was going to be a big issue. I wanted to get it as close to the finish line as possible, before we had the financial negotiation where we were going to have to tell them that we didn't have any money to pay them.
18:03
And then because Lauren Apolito, who's still there today, believed in what we were doing and wanted us to succeed still there today, believed in what we were doing and wanted us to succeed. She filled in that number as like $5,000 or something like that, and we thought it was going to be $150,000, but she believed in us and she put that in and put in the most nominal amount possible for them to just go through the motions of making the deal function. And you know that was one of those moments that if she hadn't believed in us and it insisted on a big advance, which was totally common at the time would not have been out of place then. Who knows where we were now? But there's so many things along the way like that where people believed in us and wanted to see us succeed, so they did things to help as well and to make that possible.
19:00 - Dmitri
Wow, Darryl, I've talked to you a million times and I'm hearing new stories about your origin story that I've never heard before. This is great. We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, let's go from this beautiful foundation that you've built about where you came from and how you grew. From. There We'll be right back.
19:15 - Speaker 1
Hey Music Tectonics listeners. Shaylee, here again with another conference programming update. First, I want to share a little bit about one of our keynote conversations Bi-Fearification the presidential debate with Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Sarasano of Media Research. As election fever builds, music Tectonics brings you its very own music industry presidential debate. On one side, the traditional streaming-focused music business. On the other, the emerging fandom and creator-centered sector. Streaming and social go head-to-head. Media analysts will present the case for each side as they explain how, regardless of which side you may be backing, today's music business will become too.
20:01
This next panel is a favorite of mine each year because of how quickly the landscape is evolving the state of music and gaming, with panelists from Riot Games, epic Games, tune Global being moderated by industry expert Vicky Nauman. Music has a crush on the gaming industry and exciting things are developing that smash two of the most powerful culture industries together. Find out from leaders in gaming how music is staying core to the gamer experience and why so many labels and artists think of games as a growth opportunity. That's it for now. If you haven't secured your badge, head over to musictectonicscom to purchase yours now. See you soon.
20:46 - Dmitri
Okay, we're back, Darryl, with Lyric Fine. So this has been great getting this kind of this in-depth story of how you started up. And now let's get into the scale up piece. Once you became cashflow positive, what made you choose to diversify your offerings and what directions did you take?
21:02 - Darryl
first, Well, I think it was such a novel thing when we actually had stability and we could actually we could finally think about expanding the offering that it was a fun luxury to have. I mean, it took us a decade to be able to think about that kind of stuff, so we had a backlog of different ideas that we just hadn't been able to pursue because we needed to make sure that the core of the business was functional first. So we were able to look at all that and evaluate the different things and obviously things like expanding synchronization, expanding languages, expanding the global aspect of the nature was a pretty obvious first step because of DSPs that were becoming global in nature and the requirements there. But beyond that, we wanted to think about things as what are the Lyric adjacent markets that we can get into? What are the things that we're uniquely positioned to offer to the industry that we would have a competitive advantage to it? We didn't want to expand into additional metadata like cover art or artist information or things like that, because there were already a lot of great services that were providing that and we weren't really going to be able to add a unique element to it, and a lot of those services were then and are now our partners. So we didn't really want to compete with our partners or our clients. So that led us to things like Lyric merchandise. Could we legitimize that part of the business and do it in a way similar to how we had done that with unlicensed Lyric websites? And that part didn't work out. But that was the crux of the strategy that we tried going forward was what are things where we have a unique audience? So that led us to things like Lyric IQ.
23:09
Lyric IQ is a set of data about music that is driven off of the lyrics. So looking at emotion, sentiment, content filtration and subject matter analysis. To be able to do that analysis, you need a high-quality database of lyrics. So we were in a unique position to offer that, and now we have tons of clients using that data for all sorts of different purposes.
23:34
The next thing that we looked at was lyric videos, where Bill Wilson, who was at E1, which is now Monarch at the time, came to us and said you guys have accurate lyrics, synchronized data, I've got all these recordings and visuals.
23:54
Shouldn't you be able to automate this process and just make the words like hmm, you're right, we should be able to. So we built out the Lyric Video service because we could have a unique offering in there and a unique way to do it more efficiently than other providers of the content that were in the market, and that obviously led us to acquiring Rotor Videos last year to expand that offering Translations of lyrics. That's an obvious thing, that makes sense when we're already providing lyrics and licensing to provide the translations as well, and that obviously we had Robert Singerman as part of the team who has been pushing for lyrics translations, I think longer than I've been alive. So we always looked at it as what can we do? That's different. What do we have a unique competitive advantage for? We didn't want to get into a business that was already very crowded or commoditized in the industry unless there was something very different that we could do yeah, it sounds like all of these ideas were kind of well.
25:09 - Dmitri
Some of them were floating all along in the decade leading up to when you started to really diversify. But you got to critical mass and realized that you had some of these relationships in place. You could come up with these technological solutions to address some of these things. So there wasn't like a moment or a specific sign of its time, but you had just got grown to the point where you could offer it. I take it that LyricFind is one of the, say, 10% I don't know, maybe that's high of music tech startups that truly build a cashflow positive business. It might be 1%, I have no idea. I definitely don't want to. You know rain on my podcast listeners parade, but I know it's not everybody. At what point did you start thinking about the company as a scale up and how did that change how you ran the company? Is that, is that related to some of this diversification or what were some moments that, like things flipped in your head and you're like, oh, we can now think differently, act differently.
26:07 - Darryl
I think that there was a few moments, like, obviously, the point where we can actually start to think about product diversification and how can we scale the company as a result of that, the international side of it, and having subsidiaries and offices in places other than toronto yeah uh opens up a world of of different possibilities.
26:30
uh, when we started looking at acquisitions, what are the different possibilities of okay, we can either acquire a company or invest in a company as a strategic investor ourselves and looking at different options that are out there and realizing that we had the freedom to do that, and it really opens up a lot of doors. And the fact that we are really founder-owned where we haven't taken that institutional investment meant that we can look at those things from a strategic perspective rather than just a pure dollars and cents uh type of view. If we want to make a strategic investment in something because we think that that's going to help our business overall in the long term, if something uh exists, then we can do that. And it's really a conversation between, you know, our, the five people that are on the board of yeah, this, this makes sense and we're not worried about the exact ROI on it. It's just it logically flows from everything that we're trying to do, so it makes our life a lot easier in that perspective.
27:48 - Dmitri
It really feels like this keeps coming back to you. Guys really took the long view from the beginning and we're really willing to. I mean, people always talk about bootstrapping but, like you guys were really bootstrapping for a long time and that maybe there weren't any particular financial metrics that you were looking for to start to diversify, it was more, once you got your feet under you with a business, you could say, oh, all those things we talked about, yeah, let's not just like things we talked about. Yeah, let's not just say we ran the first race. Let's say, well, that was just one leg in a larger approach. So this is super valuable.
28:23
Just to think philosophically about how you guys have thought about it, you weren't looking for the quick win with the big VC investment and explosion and we're going to be rich when we're in our twenties, but really like no, we're just going to keep methodically building this where we really are dedicated to the mission of what we're trying to do here.
28:41
And we've got, you know, you've had the two personalities of you and your co-founder, mo with you know some some kind of entrepreneurial side and some technical, technological innovation side and and kind paired, which you know is a story of itself of having that kind of partnership. Um, but let's let's dig in a little more specifically on the whole scaling up component. Which of the following um do you think are the biggest challenges as you scale a business? I'm thinking of things like recruiting a team, paying for growth, leveling up customers in terms of like getting bigger customers, managing licenses, doing some of that legal stuff, doing those kinds of deals, or even keeping up your own energy as an entrepreneur which ones do you find the most challenging as you build the business?
29:26 - Darryl
I think it's team and timing.
29:30
You know, finding the right people on the team that you know that you can trust and delegate things to, is probably the most important aspect of of growth and being able to, especially as a as a founder, let go of things and and I'm not always great at that I generally want to know as much as possible about everything that's that's going on and all of the processes that are there.
30:00
But being able to know what you don't know and hire the people who do, and hire people that you know if you're the most valuable people to me and we have a lot of them in the company, thankfully are people that you can ask them to do something or to look after something and never have to think about it again, and those people can be really hard to find. But if you find that, it makes the whole process of growth and operating a company as it gets bigger so much easier and so much less stressful and it allows you as the founder, as the CEO or the CTO, to focus on the things that you want to focus on, and sometimes you have to focus on things that you don't want to focus on you want to focus on, and sometimes you have to focus on things that you don't want to focus on.
30:56
But growth is much easier with the right team and that's the most important part. The other key aspect of that is the timing of it. When is the right time to invest in growth? If you're creating a new product, being able to time the launch of that correctly, being able to understand how long it takes to develop something, how long it takes to build it and where will the market be when you're ready, and is something like?
31:27
We didn't get into any of the NFT stuff or things like that. If you talk to Mo or I at the time, we both didn't buy into it and we didn't want to have that as a squirrel that we were going to chase when it was blowing up. We also knew that the life cycle of the viability of that as a business was not long-term, so you don't want to invest in something like that only to launch an NFT product in 2024. Good luck, right, it's not the same as in 2021. So being able to have the proper timing of what you're doing and when you're doing it and what the market is going to be like for it is also incredibly important to focus on the right things to actually achieve scale terms of team, the tip is to look for people who you think will really take ownership of things once you hand them something off, and that that's kind of one of the most critical things in looking for a team member.
32:46 - Dmitri
Is that right?
32:47 - Darryl
Yeah, I think so. People that you know that you can trust and you know that they're going to do something the right way without having to learn the same thing over and over again. One of the examples that I always use when I'm talking to employees about this is Nick McLeod, who's our VP of publishing. He's been with us for 17 years now I think us for 17 years now, I think.
33:21
Nick started on our content team and eventually ran the content team and then moved over into the publishing side. He moved over to the publishing side knowing nothing about rights or licensing or contracts or things like that, and he's been there for a long time now. But I don't think Nick's ever asked me the same question twice about contracts or deal terms or things like that. And he is super organized way more organized than I am with stuff and he'll ask me a question about what we can do in a contract or how to phrase phrase a, uh, a clause in there, and then he knows it and uses it in future deals and and I never have to talk about the same thing with him again. So it's incredible. It's a great, great skill to have uh, and, and the ability of him to do. That makes my life so much easier. It means that if Nick's looking after something, I'm not thinking about it.
34:22 - Dmitri
Okay, we got to take one more break for an announcement when we come back. I want to bring this to a fractal conversation. We're talking about you guys as a startup and a scale-up, but LyricFind is kind of in the service of helping other startups as well, so when we get back.
34:41 - Speaker 4
I want to ask you about that. We'll be right back. Hi there, Trista here. Sorry to interrupt. I hope you're enjoying the show, but I have a little question for you. What do you want to hear next? Let us know at musictectonicscom slash podcast. Click the big pink button to fill out a quick survey. You can suggest future guests or other music innovation topics you want to hear for us, cover anything that's on your mind and that you think would be really fun to explore in a podcast, or just tell us how we're doing what you think that's at music tectonicscom slash podcast. Okay, back to the fun stuff.
35:17 - Dmitri
Darryl, I feel like this conversation is especially unique because Lyric Fine literally is in the business of helping other music tech companies. I think it's the reason you've supported Music Tectonics from the beginning, the reason you'll be doing a panel at the conference this year on how to scale up with people like Tracy Maddox and Sun Jen Young, who've been on the podcast before. How can startups engage with?
35:41 - Darryl
Lyric Fine to build better products or experiences. Just talk to us. You know you're absolutely right that it's a big part of our business being able to meet companies who are early stage and just in the process of fleshing out their product or figuring out what they want to do. And figuring out are there ways that we can help? Because there are ways to optimize your or your business by using other services like no, nobody needs to go out obviously in our case and do 50,000 publishing licenses to be able to use lyrics. They can just come to us and get everything and be done with it, and we can help them do it in a super cost-efficient way.
36:29
We work with a lot of startups on very, very low-cost deals to help give them runway to get going. We're not going to ask a startup for $150,000 in advance. We're taking our cue from Lauren when she helped us that we can pay that forward and we can help other startups by making it easy for them to get access to the content, get access to the other services and see if their business is viable. And if somebody has a business that becomes huge, we'll figure out what the right deal is for that when the time is right, but we don't want to do deals that are unsustainable. That's not good for us and it's not good for the client, because we want people who are going to be our partners for a long time.
37:28
We're not interested in just extracting the most money out of them on the first deal. We want something that's fair, sustainable and works for our client, works for us and works for the publishers and songwriters that we're representing, and we, I think, have a long track record of doing that. So it's the easiest way for anybody. If there's anything that we can do to help is just to reach out to us, whether that's because they want a lyrics, license or other products from us, or if they just want advice with another startup. That is just to talk about what they're doing and see if there's anything I can do to help them nudge it forward. In any way, we're always happy to lend our expertise. It doesn't have to be in the context of doing a deal.
38:32 - Dmitri
I can see now a streamline of startup founders coming your way at the Music Tectonics Conference, your panel how to scale up your startup. Again, I mentioned Tracy Maddox. Sunjen Young is on there. I think Liz Moody is also going to join you guys. The four of you, I think, is an amazing team.
38:50 - Darryl
Great, great set of people. I love them all and have done a lot of work with all of them, so I'm very excited about that panel.
39:00 - Dmitri
And then you guys will have a booth there too, so if people get caught behind the line to talk to you there, they can come by the booth and meet with you guys. You always have a great team of folks out there with you as well. What's next for LyricFind? As we wrap up here, Darryl, what should we look for coming down the road?
39:19 - Darryl
Well, what? What should we look for coming down the road? Well, I think we're focusing a lot uh of our growth area on the video side of the business. So we've we've done integrations into cd baby and we have a number of other distributors that are integrating the, the video platforms to create, whether it's not just lyric videos, but spotify, canvas, canvas videos, apple album, motion, motion art, other music videos, things like that, where we can provide a really automated and easy to use process to create that content that's super cost effective. So that's a big area of focus right now and, obviously, with the rotor acquisition, something that we're investing a lot into. So they've been a great part of the team to to have and it's fun to get to go to Belfast, uh yeah, maybe.
40:03 - Dmitri
maybe just explain what rotor is real quick, If anybody missed that.
40:06 - Darryl
Uh. So rotor videos is a self-serve video creation platform. You can go to rotor videoscom or you can find multiple links to it from uh Find website. But they enable any artist to come and just log in and create all of those different video types super easily. It takes a couple of clicks and have really professionally done great looking videos. Whether it's a lyric video, a music video, there's millions and millions of clips to choose from to add into the videos. It's a really, really great product and interface for making that stuff super easily and getting it distributed.
40:46 - Dmitri
Such a cool partnership too from you were. You know, told us about this Bill Wilson conversation that led to you guys wanting to figure out how to automate lyric videos for large catalog holders, like, like them and then to to be able to acquire a company that actually already has a ton of both video assets and technology for building those automated videos. Super cool. It also shows yeah, and it's part of this how to scale up story, like there's an opportunity with lyric videos, but now there's an opportunity in videos. So now you guys are are beyond just Lyric-oriented stuff with that product as well. So that's super cool.
41:19 - Darryl
Yeah, absolutely. If it wasn't for Bill, we never would have bought Rotor. You can draw a clear path from that, and Bill is actually doing a bunch of work for us now too, as part of the team to help us with those partnerships. So it really all comes around full circle partnerships. So it really all comes around a full circle. But there's uh, there's a lot of focus on the video side. Obviously.
41:44
We've done a lot of work on continuing to grow the content side with word by word synchronization and translation. So those, those products are really at critical mass now, which is great. So you're going to see a lot more implementations on DSPs using word by word, using lyric translations and making that experience better. We're continuing to improve on Lyric IQ, adding more language support for that and broader data sets in there, but then also always looking for what is the next Lyric adjacent thing that's out there. Is there something else, some other product or feature that can fit into our product suite that we can build or we can buy? With Rotor, they had already built what we had envisioned building, so we acquired them rather than than building it ourselves and then and then competing with them. Is there another company out there that's doing something that would be a great fit with us, that we could look at, at growth through acquisition. We had a great experience with Rotor, so the appetite is wet to see what else is is out there and what else would be a good fit.
42:58 - Dmitri
Fun. It'll be exciting to see what you guys come up with at music tectonics and in the in the years to come. I'm really excited to see you next week at music tectonics, Darryl. I think this has been a super valuable conversation. Really appreciate you sharing that expertise and kind of like opening the opening the cloak of Lyric Fine's kind of history, and how you know what helps you guys grow to where you are today. This has been a blast. Thanks so much, Darryl.
43:23 - Darryl
Thanks a lot for having me and really looking forward to the event next week and seeing everybody there.
43:30 - Dmitri
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please 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, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictectonics.com and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. 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 Tectonics on Twitter, instagram and LinkedIn. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me, Dmitri Vietze, if you can spell it. We'll be back again next week if not sooner.
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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.
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