Jason Davis, described by The 700 Club as “a music mogul,” has been in the music industry for more than two decades as an award-winning songwriter, author, president of a record label, executive TV producer, and entertainment consultant. Davis has worked with numerous worldwide stars, including Boyz ll Men, Sugar Ray, P. Diddy, Alabama, Lonestar, D…

The Portnoy Brothers (also known as PORTNOY) is an Israeli duo, Israel & Mendy, who recently released their new album called No Complaints. They successfully raised over $30,000 in an IndieGoGo campaign to fund the record. On this Music Growth Talks episode, The Portnoy Brothers reveal which tactics were most impactful for their crowdfunding succes…

Jonathan Stone is a highly regarded music-publishing professional and co-founder of Rocket Songs. Jonathan’s career highlights include executive positions at ATV Music, MCA Music, Quincy Jones Productions (where he handled A&R for the likes of Michael Jackson, Patty Austin, and James Ingram), and Windswept Pacific Music Publishing, a company that p…

This week’s Music Growth Talks guest – an artist, songwriter and producer Muyinza – shows how he has been using his creativity to overcome hard times and succeed in business. Muyinza’s family emigrated from Uganda to Canada in the mid-90s. After losing his mother to cancer in 2001, Muyinza and his family relocated to Boston, Massachusetts. Living i…

Bas Grasmayer is a digital strategist who has held various roles in music & tech over the last decade, most recently as Product Director at IDAGIO, a music streaming service dedicated to classical music. He’s the founder of the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE newsletter and the Music Tech Network community. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Bas talked abou…

Matt Bacon is a consultant, A&R man, and journalist specializing in the world of heavy metal. The founder of Dropout Media, Matt has worked with the likes of Phil Collen of Def Leppard, Coven, Exhorder as well as labels including Prophecy Productions, Artoffact Records and Ripple Music. Matt has also been dedicated to helping and developing young b…

Judah Holiday is a Miami-based singer/songwriter who delivers a timeless breed of pop music. He just released his first album, Feelings in My Head, and is already working on his next two, while performing across the US. In this episode of Music Growth talks, Judah talks about how his music calendar is planned out, shares the story of his drug addic…

Marcus Cobb is the CEO of Jammber, a company behind North America’s first self-serve, end-to-end royalty management platform called Jammber Splits. The app streamlines the process of metadata collection to help creatives receive proper credit and faster payment for their work. Jammber was founded in a Nashville's music tech accelerator, and has acq…

Vasja Veber is a co-founder of Viberate, the biggest live music network designed to bring artists, promoters and fans together. It makes performing acts’ life easier by giving them a better version of an EPK, or even a traditional website. Viberate features over a million profiles of musicians, venues, events and festivals and employs over 100 peop…

Andres Lauer is a former UMG exec who is now a co-founder of Five Vectors, alongside an esports/gaming expert Wasae Imran. They are building a technology that will enable independent artists and labels to engage with gaming communities in their native environment. In this episode of Music Growth Talks, Andres shares how music impacts people’s ident…

Nat Jay is a Canadian singer-songwriter who has a vast experience in sync licensing: getting her music placed in movies and TV shows. She recently released a 10-song album which saw her make a shift from folk-pop to electro-pop while working with a new producer. In this Music Growth Talks episode, Nat talks about how signing with a one-stop licensi…

Steve Jones is a musician and co-founder of Beatchain, an online music marketing platform that offers guidance and growth tools to up-and-coming musicians. Several years ago Steve became interested in creating a platform where his band could advertise their content without the help of a record label. This later turned into a bigger project that now…

D Grant Smith is a syndicated radio host, personal development coach and speaker. He has two decades of experience guiding artists and creatives to become the best version of themselves. D’s latest venture is the exciting world of publishing, and in his latest book, Be Solid: How To Go Through Hell & Come Out Whole, he shares tried and true advice …

David Wimble started The Indie Bible over 20 years ago as a way to help independent artists across genres get their music reviewed and promoted. Finding receptive resources and contacts that will actually make a difference for your music and give you the exposure you need can be tricky. The Indie Bible has your back with the directory of over 7,000…

Jordan Valeriote is a music producer and engineer who started selling online courses around 3 years ago. Since then, he's generated over $1.5M with his courses, and now teaches other musicpreneurs how to do the same thing. On this Music Growth Talks episode Jordan talks about the opportunity musicians have to supplement their income by teaching and…

Katie Zaccardi is a wellness and career coach for women in music, as well as host of The Out to Be podcast, focused around mental health & self-care in the music industry. She's also a songwriter, artist, and certified yoga instructor. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Katie shares her personal journey after being diagnosed with anxiety, and expl…

Ari Herstand is a musician and the man behind Ari's Take, a music business blog which became the go-to resource for independent musicians on how to run a successful music career. He's also the author of "How To Make It in the New Music Business," originally released in 2016. The second edition of the best-selling book is out this week, and Ari shar…

Steve Welty is a successful entrepreneur and singer-songwriter, who, as many of you, has to juggle a lot on a daily basis: from running a business and spending time with family to creating and promoting his music. The San Diego-based artist doesn't only practice healthy approach to living a balanced and fruitful life, he also shares his ongoing exp…

Bif Naked, called the “Princess of Punk” and the “Rock Goddess”, is a Canadian recording artist and author. Her career heights have taken her around the world on tour for twenty years, with numerous hits in 90s and 2000s, and, quite recently, her candid memoir called “I, Bificus”. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Bif talked about everything... f…

Michael Sloane is the CEO of Nashville-based Streaming Promotions, a company specializing in music placement in streaming platforms. They primarily focus on Spotify, which gives artists more ways to market their music than any other competitor on the streaming market as of today. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Michael covered some of the most …

Tommy Stalknecht is the founder of Single Music, a Nashville-based company offering a music distribution component to Shopify. Over the years Tommy has overseen the development and management of many high-profile websites, including Sam Hunt, Kenny Rogers, Josh Turner, Larry The Cable Guy, and The Americana Music Association, among others. On this …

JP Evangelista is Vevo’s Senior Vice President of Content, Programming & Marketing. His teams work with artists, managers, and record labels to secure and promote music videos, exclusive premieres, and live events across the Vevo platform. Over the course of the last 18 months, Vevo has been pushing original content creation and promotional strateg…

Amadea is the COO of Pex, an LA-based video and music search engine with a fingerprinting technology that identifies reused content – even if it's a half-second sample in a remix, a GIF, or your song's melody in a cover video – across the whole web. This enables rights holders to understand the virality of their content, and claim copyrighted mater…

Taishi Fukuyama is a co-founder and COO of Amadeus Code, an AI-powered songwriting assistant. The technology behind this mobile app breaks "centuries of melodies" down into constituent parts and transforms them into data, allowing the tool to generate an endless stream of melody. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Taishi, who's also a contributing…

Greg Wilnau is the founder of Musician Monster, where he teaches independent artists to succeed in the music business, with the focus on branding and earning sustainable income through live shows. In his second appearance on Music Growth Talks, Greg focused exclusively on branding. He listed three steps to defining a music brand, explained the impo…

After a decade of fighting for the rights to the .MUSIC top-level domain, alongside other applicants like Google and Amazon, DotMusic's application for the registry prevailed in April 2019. .MUSIC is now a community-based domain name extension, supported by thousands of the most influential music organizations worldwide, representing over 95% of gl…

Alexey Kochetkov is the CEO and founder of Mubert, an AI generative music app. Mubert's algorithm creates unique audio streams from samples and loops uploaded by various electronic music producers. Each such stream is an infinite 'live' track that is constantly changing in real time. Listeners of the mobile app can choose from channels based on gen…

Aaron Bethune, the author of “Musicpreneur: The Creative Approach to Making Money in Music” and founder of Play It Loud Music, Above the Noise and JAM, is back to Music Growth Talks. Listen to episodes #29 and #80 for more on Aaron. This episode starts with the discussion of a blog post Aaron wrote about last year's scandal around the LA metal band…

Matty Harris is a music producer, mixing and mastering engineer from Boston, now based in LA. After touring with bands as a drummer as early as at the age of 14, he studied Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music. Since then, he has worked on numerous records for Atlantic, RCA, WB, Sammy Adams, A$AP Rocky, and many more. He wor…

Elmo Lovano is a professional drummer, musical director, producer and founder of Jammcard, the invite-only music professionals network. Dubbed a "LinkedIn for musicians" by Forbes, Jammcard is currently available in Los Angeles, Nashville and Atlanta. Even if you don't have an account on the platform, there is a lot to learn from the educational co…

Darryl Ballantyne is the founder and CEO of LyricFind, the global leader in lyric licensing. The Toronto-based company handles the vetting, licensing, and royalty splits and payments when lyrics are displayed in Google Search, Apple Music, Amazon, Shazam, Pandora, Deezer, and many more platforms and services. LyricFind works with over 5,000 publish…

Rich Redmond is an influential drummer, having toured and recorded with the likes of Ludacris, Kelly Clarkson, Bryan Adams, Joe Perry, Chris Cornell, and dozens of others. As the drumming powerhouse behind Grammy-nominated Jason Aldean, Rich has recorded 23 #1 singles with sales over the 10 million mark. Also a successful entrepreneur, speaker, edu…

Stephen White, who served as the President at Gracenote from 2012-2014, is now the CEO of Dubset, an innovative music marketplace for DJs, artists, labels, publishers, and distributors. Dubset gets mixtapes, remixes and DJ sets the licenses they need to be distributed on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, and hence monetized. On this…

Mandy Aubry is a director of Global Business Development and Client Relations at Songtrust. Once named a "Top Music Startup" by Billboard, Songtrust now powers the publishing administration technology for over 150,000 songwriters and 20,000 music publishers worldwide, as well as more than 1 million copyrights. One out of every five new songwriters …

iLLvibe is an acclaimed hip hop artist from Toronto, Canada, who also runs a lyric video company, LyricVids.com. He came on our radar after speaking at Future Music Forum in Barcelona, where he hosted a session called "The Importance of Musicians/Artists Thinking Like Content Creators". As someone who creates a lot of high-quality content for himse…

Betsy McHugh is the Founder and Chief Product Officer at Hurdl, pioneering "the next generation of fan-based marketing" at live events (the statement which we endorse). Event attendees get an LED wristband upon entering a venue, which can then be activated via SMS to answer a short set of questions. Those who choose to answer survey in turn become …

Jesper Skibsby's life journey has taken him from working at a sea shipping company in Denmark to "shipping" a music tech startup, which is now the most accessible platform for tracking radio airplay. WARM, standing for World Airplay Radio Monitor, claims to be the first large-scale airplay monitoring service built specifically to serve individual m…

Kevin Breuner, CD Baby’s VP of Marketing, is back to the Music Growth Talks podcast to talk about this year's DIY Musician Conference, which took place in Nashville on August 24-26th 2018. On this episode, recorded a couple days after the event, Kevin explained what DIY means for a music artist nowadays, shared encouraging stats on musicians' royal…

As a musician and a record label executive, Chris Tanner has gone through the challenges all indie artists face when marketing their music online. Equipped with programming skills and frustrated by the lack of simple solutions for their promotional needs, Chris and his business partner Greg Ashburn started working on a set of scripts for their own …

Phillip Ryan Block has been involved in a range of jobs, from sales to investment consulting, prior to pursuing his dream and launching the Independent Ear record label. The imprint is a "testament of his abilities to analyze, predict, project, produce and then change it all up when one business model doesn’t fit the next," according to Mr. Block's…

Greg Wilnau is the founder of Musician Monster, where he teaches independent artists how to brand themselves and earn sustainable income through live shows, among other music marketing and business topics. Two years ago Greg and his wife sold their house in Florida to start travelling the world and working remotely full-time. On this Music Growth T…

Jamie New Johnson is a retired artist manager, author, and educator from Toronto, who started her music industry career planning educational workshops with some of North America’s top artist managers. She then moved on to manage internationally touring artists independently, before shifting her focus back to education and starting Smartist Universi…

Tom Sarig is a music business veteran of over two decades, who has helped a number of acclaimed music artists sell millions of records, either as their manager or as a label A&R, in genres ranging from electronic to rock, pop, and hip hop. Prior to launching the AntiFragile Music label, Tom has run Esther Creative Group, where he's managed the care…

Nathan Hanks is the Founder and CEO of Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a company whose mission is to connect brands and artists "to engage fans together". MAX has built a platform for brands to reach their target audiences through "breakthrough" artists, who have growing and loyal fanbases yet who may not be signed to a major label, or selling out s…

Danny Turner is a Global Senior Vice President of Creative Programming at Mood Media. Danny has over 25 years of experience in the industry, including helping launch XM Satellite Radio, or creating programs for the likes of Starbucks, MTV, VH1, United Airlines, and Oprah. At Mood Media (a company which acquired Muzak, the inventor of background mus…

Muzooka is a free app allowing artists and their teams to manage their media assets across various platforms, such as festival, venue, or ticketing websites (i.e. no more ancient photos and outdated bios), as well as to report setlists to performing rights organizations for proper distribution of live performance royalties. On this Music Growth Tal…

Elroy "Spoonface" Powell (Spoon) is a British voice artist, actor, music publisher and social entrepreneur. After achieving international success as the voice behind a Black Legend hit, "You See The Trouble With Me", he experienced all possible ups and downs the music industry has got to offer. He shares his experience in a new short book he wrote,…

Suz Paulinski is "a mindset coach for musicpreneurs", helping musicians and other music industry professionals reach their goals with custom time management solutions. Suz wrote and published The Rock/Star Life Planner, a tool for creatives to find focus in their daily lives. On this Music Growth Talks episode, Suz shares her journey from working a…

Cherie Hu is a music tech columnist for Billboard and Forbes, who also contributes to publications like Music Ally, Cuepoint, Inside Arts and the Harvard Political Review. A musician passionate about technology, Cherie has written numerous impactful pieces about technology in the music industry. Her work was acknowledged at the Reeperbahn Festival …

Alex Frecon is a hip hop artist and a media producer turned copywriter from Minneapolis. With many funny and experimental projects behind his back, the biggest one so far is a trip Alex made in March 2017... The trip was to North Korea. To play hockey against the North Korean Men's National Hockey Team. Alex brought his GoPro along for the ride, an…