Creative Collaboration Makes Us More Human (Andrew McCluskey from musicto)
Also available on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Andrew McCluskey, founder of musicto, shares how he left a successful career to become a musician and eventually build a global community around collaboration. We discuss why creativity requires time, how values guide difficult pivots, and how music can help strangers form real human connections.
Key Takeaways
A failed business model does not automatically mean the mission failed. musicto changed its structure several times while preserving its underlying purpose of supporting artists and creating connections.
Developing creative ability requires real time and repetition. Access to better tools can make production easier, but it cannot replace the hours needed to improve your instincts, judgment, and craft.
You do not have to be the front person to make an impact. Andrew found his strength as an accompanist, creating space for other people to succeed rather than always needing to be the star.
Values become most important when money or growth creates pressure. Knowing what you will not compromise makes it easier to evaluate opportunities and build something you still believe in years later.
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Transcript:
Mike: Andrew, how’s it going?
Andrew: Yeah, it’s going super good, Mike. How are you doing?
Mike: Doing great. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really do appreciate it. It’s such an honor to consider you a friend after so many years, to see how much progress has been made, and to talk about what you’re currently doing with musicto.
One of the things I noticed was a through line throughout our entire relationship, and that is the word “human.” I want to know what that word means to you.
Andrew: A small question to start with, Mike.
Mike: I know. I like to throw my guests right into the fire.
Andrew: I’m thinking a lot about this right now. We are repositioning musicto.com, and we’ll get into that. We’re really repositioning around artists.
Matt, our mutual acquaintance, and I were in an ideation session, and he provocatively asked, “Why do we support artists anyway?”
I was pissed. I was like, “What do you mean by that?”
But then you take a beat, sit with it, and work out, “Okay, I’m going to make the case for artists.”
I’m in the process of writing two essays at the moment. One is more internal, and one is more forward-facing for musicto.com.
To me, it speaks directly to the question, “What is human?” I think it’s feelings. The thing that resonates is emotion. I don’t think machines feel. I know there are plenty of large language model architects trying to bring emotional aspects into them.
But the bottom line, whether it’s the soul or whatever religious framing or construct you want to apply to it, is that we have these emotions and feelings. They’re there because they solve something, whatever that may be.
When we talk about the work I do, it’s through feeling that things happen. It’s the connections through emotions that make us human.
Some animals have feelings too. I’m a huge dog lover, and I know what my dog feels at times. But there’s something about emotions and feelings that makes us human. That’s what I think.
Mike: I think it’s also the complexity of feelings. Animals have feelings as well, but not to anywhere near the degree humans have.
I’ll include machines in that as well. Machines can emulate feelings, but feelings are far more complex than that.
It reminds me of the Pixar film Inside Out and the mixing of feelings. You can have a memory that gives you sadness and happiness at the exact same time. Why is that the case?
I think that’s what makes it interesting. One common thread among all of us is that our emotions are very complex.
Andrew: Insanely complex.
While writing this essay, I’ve been trying to structure the case. We developed this frontal cortex and neocortex. Why did we do that? Why don’t other animals have it to the same extent? It’s connected to emotion.
There’s this big chunk at the top of our heads that is basically there so we can understand and express ourselves in a way the majority of species cannot.
To me, that’s fascinating. It’s unmappable and unknowable, but it’s a damn good journey to go on and try to understand it.
Mike: Did you always have that feeling throughout your life, as far as wanting to help humans? Was that always something that drove you?
Andrew: I’ve been reflecting on this because I think the bottom line comes down to connection.
I didn’t have a typical upbringing. I was a military kid, so I was born in Singapore. In the military, you move around. My parents were stable, but they sent my brother, my sister, and me to a boarding school. That was the thinking at the time.
I don’t have what is commonly known as a home. Even the home my parents retired to, I never lived there as a child. I don’t have a secure grounding in terms of saying, “I come from this place.”
I’m Scottish, but I sound English because I went to an English boarding school. I don’t have this deep sense of connection to a place.
What I do have is a connection to music. Music has been this red thread running through my life, from playing piano at three to being in bands when I was 12.
When I was in my corporate career, I was the guy at the piano in the bar during the evening. Somebody would ask, “Can you play ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or ‘American Pie?’”
I’d say, “Yes, I can, and yes, I will have another pint.”
What I got from that was that every time music comes in, there’s a connection.
You can connect to somebody because you come from the same village or town. You have things in common. I didn’t have a lot in common with people, but when I was working with, playing with, or surrounded by music, that connection deeply made sense to me.
I think that’s the thing that has run all the way through. Even when I’ve gone on various tangents, whether it was corporate retail or nonprofit management, music pulls me back.
Of course, now I’m doing nonprofit music management, so it’s finally aligned.
I think it’s the connection. It comes from a different space and recognizing that there’s this thing that delivers something you may not have had, if that makes any sense.
Mike: It does. I find it interesting that you mentioned how music keeps pulling you back.
You worked in the corporate retail world at Marks & Spencer as a store manager, and then you decided to take a break and join a band across the pond in Los Angeles. You later got into the nonprofit space, which seems like a complete 180 compared with what you were doing.
Andrew: I can only speak for myself. You’re born to your parents, whatever your situation is, and I got dealt a really good hand. I had unconditional love, parents who were together, and a brother and sister.
When you haven’t had a lot of challenges in your life, you sometimes tick along the path because everything is fine. I think that was very much me.
I have a natural musical and piano ability. My family has it. I thought I wanted to do music while growing up, but I ended up focusing on academics. I didn’t do terribly well, completed a psychology degree, and then fell into recruitment.
I got a temporary job in the recruitment department at the Marks & Spencer head office. The head of the department looked at me and asked, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
I went through their management training, and it was fantastic. It was the top-rated management training program in the UK at the time.
When you got the position, they put you on the sales floor. They gave you a rack of shirts and said, “Make that make money.”
Then they gave you two racks. Then they gave you a human. Then they gave you a whole department and two humans. Eventually, you got a supervisor.
They taught you how to manage and grow from the ground up. It was amazing.
I ended up running a food hall with about 100 people at its peak. Then I was pulled into the head office and became a buyer.
That was super cool because I was working with high-performance teams, amazing selectors, and technologists. I was the buyer, and I flew around Europe. It wasn’t the best job I ever had, but it was an amazing job.
I had gotten married and had a 300-year-old cottage outside London. That was what life was going to be, and I hadn’t really thought about it.
Then, because I didn’t know who I was, my marriage broke down. I was sitting there thinking, “Okay, I have to get my act together.”
My brother was already in Los Angeles, and he had a rock band. He and I had always played music together. We were in bands when we were 12, 13, 14, and 15.
I flew over, and I was this corporate guy with short hair. I had a flat on Abbey Road and had sold the cottage.
They were recording their first album, and I thought, “Oh, cool.”
My brother Richard asked, “Dude, do you want to come and play the piano part on this track?”
I said, “Yeah, dude.”
I went into the studio and played it. He sat me down. I was about 29, and he asked, “Dude, what are you doing with your life?”
I remember sitting on the plane flying back to the UK and thinking, “What am I doing with my life? Wouldn’t it be fun to do music for a living?”
It wasn’t quite that straightforward, but I resigned from my job, sold everything, flew to Los Angeles about a year and a half later, and joined the band.
I lived in a studio in Los Angeles, washed in the ocean, and lived and breathed music. It was the act of becoming a musician.
That roll of the dice changes your life. I look back at that and think, “Once you’ve done it once, you can do it again.”
The amount of energy required to break the inertia of habit is huge. I was at a position in my life where we didn’t have kids, I was divorced, and the future was open.
You roll the dice and change everything. That’s what took me to Los Angeles and into music.
Mike: That’s not an easy decision to make, especially when you’re getting into your late twenties.
I don’t want to say you’re supposed to have everything figured out by then, but you had a comfortable lifestyle, even though you didn’t feel satisfied.
Giving that up to chase something you’re passionate about is not an easy decision.
Andrew: It was nuts.
You join a band that has been rehearsing three nights a week for years, and my ears weren’t there yet. I can sing with my brother beautifully, but this was a classic five-piece band, and they played just slightly behind the one.
Unless you’ve spent time with a band, it’s very hard to hear. You arrive, you’re practicing, and you have to learn to practice with the band.
If you’re a player coming into a tight group and you’re not a professional musician yet, it can be soul-destroying. Not only can you not hear it, but they can hear you not hearing it.
That comes down to time.
I eventually left the band because life does its thing. I had met my wife, Wendy, who is amazing. We were living in Venice Beach at the time.
I couldn’t work because I didn’t have a green card, and she had recently been in a car accident, so she was off work.
We had this extended honeymoon in Venice Beach, living in a small one-bedroom apartment.
Every morning, I would play for three or four hours, initially recording onto cassette tape. This was the 1990s.
Then I would listen to what I had played that morning while walking along the beach and boardwalk in the afternoon. Eventually, we transitioned to CDs.
It’s hours on your instrument. I could hear my ears changing, and my musicianship started to change.
When you’re in a band in Los Angeles, you can pick up gigs acting as the band for other talent or doing independent gigs.
[Shadowman, unclear spelling] was a company connected to Kelly [Liddell, unclear spelling]. Her father was a country singer who had a hit with “Primrose Lane,” and she had this great country voice.
She was looking to mix up her style, so they brought in my brother’s band, Sterling [Brigg, unclear spelling]. Kelly and I immediately synced. We had something between us as a creative partnership.
They called and asked, “Do you want to work with Kelly in a writing role?”
By that point, my musicianship had developed enough for me to say, “Yes, I do.”
That was my first proper paid gig, and it was almost the best gig of my life.
I took the Amtrak from Union Station in Los Angeles to San Clemente, got picked up in a Rolls-Royce, and was driven to the house.
We had a whiteboard, a keyboard, a guitar, and a four-hour writing session every Wednesday for two years. The goal was to write a song.
People talk about creativity, but creativity is something you work at. We wrote 78 songs.
That was becoming a musician. It’s time. You can’t fake it, and you can’t cheat it.
When you go into a studio and you’re on the other side of the glass, with an engineer, producer, talent, and the person paying for all of it, you have to be able to find the part. It sorts out who is who very quickly.
I love the studio. It’s one of my favorite places to be.
Mike: When you founded musicto, you moved to the other side.
Instead of being in the studio making and performing the music, you created a platform supporting other artists. Why did you make that decision?
Andrew: You have to work out who you are as a human, artist, or musician.
I know I’m an accompanist, although I can barely say the word.
I had piano lessons from the age of three until 12, and I hated them. I was 12 years old, playing Chopin and Mozart badly, and I didn’t want to do it anymore.
I was going to give up the piano, but my brother said, “There’s a music teacher. Why don’t you go and see him?”
There was this amazing teacher named Phil Nash. During our first lesson, he said, “Great, let’s work together. We’re not going to do classical music. We’re going to do more modern music.”
He gave me a blues scale and said, “Go and learn this. I’ll see you next week.”
Of course, as a 12-year-old kid, I didn’t learn it. I came into the next lesson and tried to bluff my way through it.
He got up and said, “If you’re going to waste my time, we’re not going to do this. I’ll see you at this time next week, and if you haven’t learned it, we’re done.”
It was the first time I’d experienced anything like that. I worked at it, and it’s amazing how things come together when you work at them.
He turned me into an accompanist. He taught me how a pianist should work behind another person.
If you’re accompanying someone, you’re not the star. Your job is to make them the star.
I was 12 or 13, and that was going into my head.
You can play anything you want on the piano, but if you learn every chord, inversion, and augmented chord, you can play everything without moving your hands all over the keyboard. You create space for the vocalist to move.
I think that has been my role all the way through.
I’m happiest when I’m sitting in a space and watching joy shine out of somebody else’s eyes.
It is altruistic, but that’s what I love to do. I’m not a front person. I’m a keyboard player.
I can lead. I’ve been a CEO, and I’ve run things. But for me, it’s much more fun and powerful to work collaboratively with people than to be in the star role.
When I was writing with Kelly, she was the talent. We were clear about who the talent was, and I fit into that.
We wrote equitably, but you need to have a vector in that relationship, unless you’re Lennon and McCartney or Keith and Mick.
That works well for me.
Later, I was working at a foundation and making good money. It was all business plans and figuring out how to transform a foundation.
I was still playing music every evening for two or three years. It was long-form piano music.
I would play it and then listen to it while getting into a flow state and writing business plans.
Then the penny dropped. I thought, “Hang on. This is music to work to. That sounds good. Maybe I should trademark that.”
I created music2work2.com in 2006. It was cool. It was the beginning of the internet, and that was a potential path I could have gone down, but certain things happened.
Scroll forward to 2015. I was at a point where I wanted to recommit to Music to Work To.
I tried to trademark the name, and the US government said I couldn’t because it evoked a verb or common phrase.
I was bummed because that had been my brand for a decade.
I was searching online, and musicto.com, spelled M-U-S-I-C-T-O, was available. I thought, “That’s it,” and bought it.
My initial year working with musicto.com was about promoting my own Music to Work To compositions, and it wasn’t working.
We could have an entire discussion about music marketing and how it changed with Spotify and the arrival of playlists.
The condensed version is that I recognized I couldn’t do it on my own, and I didn’t have enough resources to pay people.
But if I could show people a vision, get other human beings to buy into it, and align our energy and intent, we could probably go much further. That’s pretty much what I did.
Mike: I appreciate you being honest about the backstory because people don’t always realize that reaching the point of founding a company can be ten years in the making.
That was the case for you. It took about ten years to reach the point where you were developing musicto, and then nearly another ten years to reach where you are now.
These things sometimes take a long time to figure out, especially when you’re passionate about them.
It takes time to find what you love to do and find other people who support that passion.
I’m not only talking about people who work for you. I’m talking about finding customers, clients, fans, or other people who share the same joy and passion you want to put into the world.
Andrew: It’s absolutely true, but it’s quite nuts how it works.
In 2015, I bought the domain. I figured out the business model by the end of 2016. Now it’s 2026, so we’ve been doing this for ten years and are on a completely different business model.
There’s an important point to reflect on.
I was looking through episodes of the podcast earlier, and there’s a general thread among the people you interview. They talk about perseverance and staying the course.
Particularly nowadays with music, you have to be a little bit wrong if you want to pursue it as a career.
It’s a stupidly, ridiculously difficult thing from which to make a living.
The idea of music hasn’t been devalued, but the monetization of music is changing.
Yet if you know this is what you’re here to do, and if you can’t not do it, perseverance helps you find a way.
It’s not, “Hey, it’s great. Come on in, kids.”
You have to be prepared not to have many of the things your friends and peers have.
Mike: You’ve been in it for a while, so you understand that it’s a different type of challenge now.
In my lifetime, music has never been as accessible as it is today. I’m talking about accessibility on two fronts: production and distribution.
When you were starting a band, you still had to go to a recording studio, which was costly.
Depending on the project, you may still need a recording studio, but there are many things you can now do on your own in addition to being in a studio session.
Back then, it was mostly the studio or nothing if you wanted something that sounded commercially viable.
Getting it out and distributing it was also difficult. Some people went rogue and did it themselves, but most had to go through a record label, management company, or somebody who could get them on the radio or television.
Only a select few had those opportunities.
Now, literally anybody can make music, hit a button, and have it sent through a distribution network to the entire planet.
The challenge is that because it’s so accessible, more music is being released than ever before.
There’s so much being put out and so many things competing for people’s attention that you have to figure out how to make people pay attention to you.
That has always been the case, but it’s more pronounced now.
Anybody has access, but because everybody has access, you have to figure out how to stand out. That’s where perseverance comes in.
Andrew: There are a couple of points that bounce off that.
One of the essays I’m working on looks at the first law of thermodynamics because, obviously, we’re going to talk about that. There’s only a finite amount of energy.
There’s a parallel in the book publishing world.
vivaellipsis, the agency I work with, works with human beings, thought leaders, authors, and speakers who want to change the paradigm at scale.
If you look at how people have done that over time, the distribution mechanism for an idea was the book.
You had books, print, television, and public relations. Public relations could largely gatekeep television and books.
Either you got into a publisher and received distribution, or you didn’t.
The energy required to get your book out was spent getting the publishing deal. I think that’s analogous to music.
The energy was focused on getting the deal and getting into the studio. When we recorded our album in 1999, we recorded it on tape.
Mike: In the 1990s, almost everything was still recorded on tape.
Andrew: It was amazing.
Now, there’s less energy required to record, write, and produce something in a distributable format. It’s the same in text as it is in audio. Distribution is seamless.
The challenge is getting people to listen or read.
That’s where the opportunity comes for the person who is driven by it.
It’s funny how these worlds cross and collide. Music was partly driven by, “I want to be a rock star.” It’s an ego play up to a point, and everything is an ego play at some point in your life.
But then it gets hard, and you think, “This is really hard, and I want to eat.”
I was fed quarters by my girlfriend, who is now my wife, because I had no money. That’s nuts, but you do it because that’s what you’re doing.
You have to really want to do this.
If you really want to do it, I think you become authentic.
“Authentic” is a word that has been hijacked and abused, but at its core, it means, “This is who I am. This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m here for, and I’m not doing it for any other reason except that I can’t not do it.”
That’s where perseverance comes in.
The playing field is flatter now. You don’t necessarily need the nepotistic introduction to get a publishing deal. You don’t need to be cute, pretty, or have your parents’ money.
When that gets flattened, it comes down to connecting with another human being.
How do you win that human being’s attention so they listen to your music, read your book, or look at your nonprofit?
That’s cool. Now this is interesting.
The platforms are distributed equitably, and we have access to all of them. This is where I think the fun is coming back. It’s about creativity, and that’s right in your wheelhouse.
Mike: Absolutely.
It’s interesting because this brings us full circle to authenticity and how often that word gets thrown around. We talk about authenticity quite a bit on this podcast.
I like where we were earlier when we discussed being human. I feel like those two things converge.
To be authentic is to be human. It’s about the complexity of emotions, and that’s where authenticity comes through.
You can tell if somebody only presents one emotional tone. We’re all guilty of that at times, but showing only one tone is not as authentic as showing the complexity of emotions.
It’s hard to be vulnerable.
I’m not always vulnerable on social media because I want people to feel welcomed and join the conversation.
Even during interviews, though, we sometimes discuss difficult topics. We admit our failures and struggles.
That’s where authenticity comes into play.
It’s not only about being honest about your passions, excitement, joy, and desires. It’s also about being open about your vulnerabilities.
Everyone has their own comfort level. I’m not saying you have to publish everything you think is wrong with you.
But it’s important to reflect and understand that it’s sometimes okay to be vulnerable. That may be what connects you with more people because everybody has some degree of insecurity.
Andrew: It keeps coming back to connection for me.
You get your time on the planet. Depending on your beliefs, whatever happens after you’re off the planet happens.
Matt would shoot me if I didn’t say “zeitgeist” on the podcast.
The last 26 years have been amazing.
I moved to Los Angeles at the end of 1999. Before that, I had been accessing the internet with a friend through an AOL dial-up modem.
When we arrived in 2000, we recorded the album on tape.
I would go to the post office in Playa del Rey and send physical CDs to magazines in South Africa and Holland. You could find all the cool independent magazines through IRC chat.
It was still very analog, and then everything changed.
I remember the engineer we were working with being blown away that we could send him an audio file as an MP3. It was still so nascent.
Now, 25 or 26 years later, the world is so much more connected, but it isn’t.
COVID was an amazing cultural construct in terms of what it accelerated. It accelerated isolation.
At first, the internet created this bell curve of, “We’re online, so we’re all becoming really connected.”
Then the curve came down because we realized those weren’t necessarily real connections. They were connections we could hide behind.
That has opened the door for true connection.
Going back to your point and Brené Brown’s work around vulnerability, I think it took off because people were desperate for human connection.
We don’t always show vulnerability, but when somebody shows a little bit, people think, “Oh my gosh, I feel seen. I see myself in there.”
We had the short-term soda pop of connectivity through the internet. These things take decades. This isn’t something that happens in a year.
We’re learning that there’s a hunger for real connection.
I think artists will drive that, and nonprofits will drive that.
It will be different from being buddies in a chat room, friends on Facebook, or following somebody on Instagram. We know that isn’t feeding the need we have.
Mike: I completely agree.
I want to talk about where musicto is now. We touched on this a little bit, but when it officially launched in 2015 or 2016, it was a playlist ecosystem.
That’s how we were introduced, and I really liked that model.
It wasn’t simply an end-to-end pitch. It was, “This is some really cool music. Is there anybody within this ecosystem who also likes it?”
The platform made it straightforward to provide enough information while also filtering toward the people most likely to appreciate that particular music.
There was somebody on the other end who was actually listening and deciding whether it was a good fit for what they were curating.
I always appreciated the human element throughout the process.
I feel like that spirit is still present today, although it’s now in a very different form.
Andrew: There’s nothing like time to test a hypothesis, find out whether it’s right or wrong, and decide what to do next.
musicto started as a commercial play.
The vision was to build audiences, monetize the audiences, and reward the artists. That was it, and you could do that in 2016 and 2017.
It was a basic search strategy. A playlist was essentially a blog on musicto.com.
We asked playlist curators to add one track a week to their playlists. They would publish the track on Spotify, and there would also be a dedicated write-up about it.
You effectively had a unique blog post published on musicto.com that linked to Spotify.
We also taught the playlist curators how to use social media. They linked to Facebook, Instagram, and another platform I can’t remember.
We created videos showing them how to use hashtags and when to post.
In 2017 and 2018, music discovery was about getting onto Discover Weekly.
If you could get onto Discover Weekly, Spotify’s algorithm understood that the track had momentum. That was the last-mile gap, and it was difficult for independent artists to solve.
Labels could solve it because they had relationships.
The data suggested that if you could get something like 10,000 organic streams in one day, while avoiding bot farms, that could be enough to trigger the track to the next level.
You could potentially break an artist.
The algorithm wasn’t only looking at Spotify followers. It was also taking in data from websites and social media.
That was the entire play, and it was working.
At one point, we had 75 curators. Not everybody published every week, but we were putting approximately 50 new tracks onto the website.
I was doing nothing but publishing blog posts across the different playlists.
musicto.com started growing dramatically in visibility. Google recognized it as a music discovery site.
We still rank highly for searches related to free Apple Music and Spotify playlist submissions.
I had a playlist called Music to Write an Essay To. I could put a track at the top of the list and generate about 1,000 streams in a day.
If we had continued that trajectory, we could have broken an artist.
We developed a nascent contract where musicto would take ten percent of an artist’s revenue.
We made a deal with a distributor where we could manage the contract and interface. musicto would receive ten percent, and the streaming revenue from the remaining track would be divided equally between the curator and artist.
The artist could share streaming revenue with the curator who helped break them, retain their publishing, and then allow the rest of their tracks to benefit after they reached Discover Weekly.
It was working, and that was the vision I sold to the curators.
Then, in late summer 2018, Spotify rebranded its app and started prioritizing Spotify-branded playlists over the independent playlist curators who had helped build the ecosystem.
It was essentially, “Thank you very much for the traffic. Goodbye.”
At that point, you could no longer grow in the same way.
The core key performance indicator for the artist was the number of Spotify streams, but you needed all of this infrastructure to make that happen.
I estimated that if you worked on one track a week for three years, you might be able to break an artist.
After Spotify changed, it might take five or six years. At that point, curators would fall away because the future was too far away.
That was the first business model that failed.
It didn’t exactly fail. The world changed.
Mike: Things changed.
Andrew: Then COVID came, but we had built this community. We had people all over the world and artists submitting tracks.
I was sitting there thinking, “What do we do? That model isn’t going to work.”
We doubled down on supporting artists.
There was an argument in the online community between two people who passionately cared about musicto. They were arguing about the direction we should take, and it became heated.
We stepped in and moderated. It was agreed that the two of them should make a playlist together.
We had done some trading where people looked after somebody else’s playlist, but we hadn’t really explored collaborative playlists.
They made a playlist together, and by the end of the process, they were friends.
We looked at that and thought, “There’s something here.”
Within a few months, collaborative playlists became our North Star metric.
If we couldn’t monetize this thing, we would grow the community and see what community could do.
That became the magic.
We established a process. It would be a 22-track playlist, and each person traded tracks one at a time.
They created the playlist, published it, and shared it with the artists who appeared on it.
It was super cool.
The result was that all these connections started growing.
Matt and I became closer by making these random playlists together. You get to know somebody in a way you never would have otherwise.
I made playlists with young women in the Philippines, young men in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and people in Colombia, Argentina, and other places.
I was listening to some of the best music of my life, not because an algorithm fed it to me while trying to monetize my attention.
It was because somebody in Panama heard the Doors track I shared and thought of a Cat Stevens track.
I never would have put those songs together, but it was amazing.
That became the core aspect of what musicto was evolving into: the power of creative collaboration.
Creative collaboration has two outputs.
It has a tangible output that we can see, publish, and share with the world. That becomes a record of the collaboration.
But it also changes the relationship between the two humans.
It’s loose and easy, but it’s also profound.
I can’t think of another form of collaborative creation that requires so little muscle memory.
You don’t need to play piano, paint, draw, or drive a car together.
All you need to do is love music and be curious. You create something bigger than the sum of both of you.
That is one of the fundamental things we discovered, and we discovered it because two people had an argument.
Mike: That’s where some of the best ideas come from.
Andrew: It came totally out of left field.
To fast-forward through it, the community didn’t sustain itself in the way we expected.
We had to take a long, hard look at that.
When you think about a community, the assumed goal is growth. You want everybody to remain in the community forever while it continues growing.
But humans have a lifecycle through communities, depending on what the community is designed to do.
People came in, loved the idea, and made a collaborative playlist. They might make a second and a third.
By the time they reached the fourth, they often had other things happening in their lives.
We had architected the community around continuous growth, but over time, people would come in, stay for a wee while, and leave.
We had architected it incorrectly.
This was the second phase of musicto.
We had moved from the commercial playlist and audience model, where I thought we might eventually sell to Warner or Universal, to saying, “We’re not going to make money from this, but let’s grow a community.”
Then we realized the community wasn’t necessarily going to grow continuously. We might serve somebody for five or six months, and then they would go do something else.
That model wasn’t going to work either.
At the same time, the costs of operating it kept increasing. We were paying people to do community work.
We looked at different models.
Four or five years ago, we looked at tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations. We even architected tokenomics for musicto based on behaviors.
We considered creating a musicto token. We had the infrastructure, but I never pulled the trigger. I’m glad we didn’t.
We looked at all the models and eventually asked, “What is this thing? Why does it deserve to exist?”
It kept going back to connection.
You couldn’t deny that these human beings were happier as a result of participating.
We weren’t going to make money from it, but it had to pay for itself somehow.
The only thing that made sense was treating it as a social good.
At that point, we decided to become a 501(c)(3). That takes a long time because you have to put the financial plumbing and infrastructure into place.
The foundation website finally goes live tomorrow, so that’s good.
Mike: Congratulations.
By the time this recording comes out, the site will be live, and we’ll make sure it’s included in the show notes.
That’s exciting because, as you said, it’s not easy to receive nonprofit status.
I appreciate you walking through the thought process: this worked then, but it doesn’t work now. What are the core values of this organization, and how can it adapt to what is needed now?
If you look at longevity on any front, whether you’re a business owner, artist, or content creator, society changes.
Technology changes, but society itself also changes. When society changes, the needs of that society change with it.
There are some core needs that will always be present. We need healthcare, food, beverages, and water.
But the ways we consume music and entertainment change over time. You have to adapt.
Otherwise, something suddenly stops working.
If you keep trying the same thing, it might fail even harder than it would have if you had pivoted at the right moment.
Most things that achieve longevity change with the times. They try something new that provides value to their clients, audiences, or communities.
Andrew: One hundred percent.
What underpins all of it is your values. What do you choose to do?
We spent a lot of time establishing the values of musicto. They’re on the new foundation site.
They include listening, kindness, empathy, sharing, publishing, creation, and collaboration.
One of the experiences that shaped me as a musician was seeing how many people are willing to take money from musicians at an early stage.
It’s mining the miners.
During the Gold Rush, the people who made the most money were often selling shovels, not finding gold.
I’ve been a broke musician who wanted to submit to an online magazine but couldn’t because there was a paywall. I simply didn’t have the money.
How do you solve for that?
We have always been clear that the last thing we will do before folding up shop is take money from artists. We simply won’t do it. Enough people are already doing that.
We were offered money several times over the last ten years because we had grown a large platform with visibility.
People wanted to pay us to review their music and publish it.
But that was out of integrity with what we were doing.
It basically said that if you had money, you could circumvent the system. That’s how payola and much of the world work.
There’s an argument, particularly in America, that if you have money, you must have been successful, and therefore money is a good gatekeeper.
I don’t believe that.
Art can come from anywhere. It doesn’t matter what family you were born into.
Putting an economic barrier between somebody and their expression is anathema to me. I don’t want to do it, and I’m not going to do it.
That shapes our decisions.
When somebody asks, “Can we buy your influence?” the answer is no.
You cannot buy our influence or shortcut the system because you have money. It’s a level playing field.
We might look dumb or stupid for turning that money down, but we aren’t dumb or stupid. We’re ethically aligned.
We have turned down money many times, and that paid off in the long run because we now have active foundation programs that couldn’t exist if we had taken the short-term money.
Mike: Let’s be honest. If you have money to invest in your endeavors or projects, you definitely have opportunities you can leverage.
Money gives you opportunities. That’s the bottom line.
But they’re only opportunities. There’s no guarantee.
We have seen repeatedly that having money to spend doesn’t guarantee success.
It gives you opportunities, but are they the right opportunities? Are those opportunities going to lead to something?
You also have to return to your core values.
I wouldn’t judge somebody who said, “We believe in what we’re creating, and if you want to pay us to provide these opportunities, that’s awesome.”
If they believe in the value and it genuinely provides value to people, that’s fantastic.
But I also respect that this is not what you wanted to create. You wanted to make something different.
It comes back to being human and authentic. It’s about creating something you believe in, however you see fit.
This is what you believe the platform has evolved into, and you’re standing your ground regarding what you want it to represent.
For your own sake, it’s important to have something in place that you truly believe in and want to provide to the rest of the world.
Andrew: One hundred percent.
The economics of a thing are interesting. Being a broke, penniless artist is a life-forming experience.
You don’t have enough money to feed yourself, but this is what you do. You’re a musician.
Society has removed the vast majority of ways art can be created. This is not the best time on the planet for that, unless you’re in parts of Europe where the arts are still subsidized and funded.
I’m not against commercial submission platforms.
There’s a company out of South Africa where you pay to submit your track. They carefully curate their curators, and they’re good at what they do.
You pay for what you get. There’s no nepotism. Everybody is on the same playing field, and you pay to access the curators’ ears.
We looked at that model, but it already existed. Artists could go to them.
Mike: Right.
Andrew: The role we’re playing addresses a different last-mile gap.
There’s an entire infrastructure, and algorithms are pretty good nowadays.
If you can get onto Discover Weekly, similar to what happens with YouTube, and you have good content, the artificial intelligence is becoming good at moving it to the next level.
But you still need that first step up.
I’m not against making money. Hell no.
But ethically, a nonprofit model says to society, “We only exist if we’re doing good, and you give us money to support that.”
That’s the argument.
It’s different from, “I have a product. Buy it because it will solve a problem or make you feel good.”
We are making the case to grant holders and larger foundations that they should give us money because we can do this work.
When you look at the foundation now, we have four programs.
Currently, musicto.com is the wrong hybrid blend of what it will become. It has a lot of foundation material on it that we need to pull out.
We’re going to reorient musicto.com to be much more artist-focused over the next couple of months.
But what is the purpose of the foundation?
We now have that language: we work with music to solve big human problems.
What kind of problem are we working on?
Right now, we’re working on othering.
We have lost the ability to disagree. Politicians say that the opposite side isn’t simply wrong, but stupid or evil.
We fundamentally disagree with that behavior, so we’re going to work on the problem of othering.
How are we going to do that?
Our first program is musicto.com. This is where we connect people through the collaborative playlist project.
We’ve completed approximately 650 playlists in dozens of countries, and real relationships form through them.
Because the site exists, thousands of artists visit musicto.com and submit tracks to be reviewed by our curator community.
When they submit a track, we ask them a question.
There was a psychologist named Robert Plutchik who identified a group of core human emotions, including fear.
We asked artists, “What are you afraid of, and why?”
We received approximately 3,500 responses. The data was amazing.
We have all that data sitting in a white paper. If we can raise money, we can turn it into a publication or social media distribution.
We cross-sectioned the responses by generation and continent, and some of the insights were stunning.
That project is now wrapped.
We’re currently asking people, “What are you surprised by?”
We’ve received approximately 2,500 responses and will continue until we reach 5,000. Then we’ll move to another emotion, such as disgust.
Because we built the brand around legitimacy, artists come to us knowing we aren’t trying to sell them something or take their money.
They give us their time and attention, allowing us to create a global dataset about what it feels like to be human.
That is our second program.
The third program is our Substack.
Artists give us their email addresses, and we have thousands of creatives around the world who want to hear from musicto. It grows by approximately 500 email addresses each month.
We can distribute insights back to the creatives who contributed to the project.
We can also bring in experts.
vivaellipsis works with amazing people. Dr. Tamsen Webster is working on rapid perception transformation and how an idea moves through society. She’s wicked smart and is defending her PhD this year.
She could write an article for global creatives about how ideas move.
That’s the type of content I would read within the context of musicto because we’ve never been here to sell to you. We’re here to give you good material.
Those three programs feed into one another and raise visibility.
The fourth program is in real life. We’ll sponsor bands and bring people together.
We’re developing that program this year and want to run one event in Scotland and one in the Philippines by the end of the year.
It all comes from where we started.
Mike: That’s incredible. I can’t wait to see it launched.
By the time this interview is released, it will be live, and I look forward to seeing everything come to fruition.
I think this is a good point to wrap things up.
You mentioned listening to previous episodes, which really means a lot to me. You probably know which questions are coming next if you were paying attention to the end of the interviews.
What was the first concert you ever attended?
Andrew: Katrina and the Waves. I saw them perform “Walking on Sunshine.” They were brilliant.
Mike: That’s amazing.
It’s always fun because almost everyone has a different first-concert experience. There may have been a few similar answers, but for the most part, everybody’s is different. It’s wonderful to hear.
Andrew: It was so cool.
They came on as a four or five-piece rock band. Then a horn section suddenly stood up from behind the drum riser.
I remember thinking, “That’s pretty cool.”
I was super young as well.
Mike: You love listening to all kinds of new music. Is there a particular artist you’re listening to right now that you want to give a shout-out?
Andrew: There are two.
I fell down a Sam Fender rabbit hole this year. Sam Fender is amazing as a lyricist and as a human being.
His latest album, People Watching, won the Mercury Prize.
If you don’t know Sam Fender, and you’re old like me and enjoy guitar music, it’s like a cross between Springsteen, Dylan, and something that’s simply cool.
I think he’s a great example of what artists are here to do. He also seems like an awesome person.
For a newer artist, I’m fortunate to discover a lot of music.
There’s a five-piece band out of Brighton called SLAG. The keyboard player wears shades. I was a keyboard player who wore shades too, although I looked ridiculous and he looks cool.
They’re smart musicians. They’re tight, use interesting time signatures, and use dynamics well. Lyrically, they’re very dialed in.
There’s a great independent outlet called [Lunch With, unclear spelling]. They have a performance on YouTube.
It’s almost like a Sofar Sounds or KEXP performance, but on a smaller scale. The audio and engineering are great.
The band is called SLAG. They’re cool, and I hope they do well.
Mike: I’ll definitely check them out.
If you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would it be?
Andrew: Have rich parents?
Mike: That may be the most honest answer I’ve ever heard.
But if somebody doesn’t have rich parents, what would you say?
Andrew: There’s context.
Derek Sivers is an amazing human being who has walked the walk.
Mike: For anybody who doesn’t know, he founded CD Baby, right?
Andrew: Yes.
He sold CD Baby and gave most of the proceeds away to support musicians, artists, and charitable work. He’s a dude.
He said the happiest musicians and artists he knows are the ones who have a day job and create their art on the side.
I find that frustrating, inspiring, and difficult.
If you’re an artist or creator listening to that, you might think, “Well, shit. I don’t want to do that.”
My advice is that if you are a creative or an artist and you want to do this, don’t let anybody tell you not to do it.
So many people have told me that what I’m doing is dumb or stupid and that I won’t have certain things.
They were right. I don’t have the things some of my peers have.
But I’ve never questioned why I’m on the planet.
Since I changed my life, I’ve known why I’m here and what I’m here to do.
The only time I’m ever down is when I don’t think I’ll realize the dream.
But when it comes to the existential question of why I’m here as a human, I know exactly why I’m here, and I will pursue that.
Mike: That’s amazing. I couldn’t agree more.
Thank you so much for being on the show. This has been an absolute blast, and I really appreciate it.
We’ll have more information about musicto in the show notes. If you love music or are a musician yourself, please check it out.
I’ve known Andrew for quite a long time, and I love the people who have been part of the platform.
I also want to give a quick shout-out to Matt Jennion, who has been on the podcast before. You mentioned vivaellipsis, and Matt is a good friend as well.
It’s always inspiring to talk with all of you.
Thank you for being on the show. It means a lot.
I seriously wish you the best of luck with these endeavors. We need more people who are authentic, human, and committed to doing something good for everybody else.
Thank you for all of that too.
Andrew: Mike, thank you very much for having me.