I sit down with Sam Means, founder of lightning.store and Wavlake for a fascinating conversation about the future of the music industry!
Here are a few topics we discuss:
- The genesis of lightning.store
- Parallels between Bitcoin and the punk/DIY scenes
- Max’s dad - indie artist who made some cool trippy nostr shirts (which Max is wearing during interview)
- Sam’s NOFX Nostr shirt (which Max wears frequently)
- How Sam decides what shirts to make
- Making Jack’s favorite shirt, seeing it on the Super Bowl, and stress testing Sam’s Lightning node + btcpayserver setup
- Sam needs a Lightning Shopify app that works (opportunity for listeners!)
- Sam got started making a first website and forum for the Weezer fan club
- Sam is the consummate entrepreneur: he just does the things that need to be done
- Sam’s education was coming up in bands and working venues
- Pinkerton - the Weezer album changed the course of Sam’s life
- Can a band be big and not suck?
- Why the music biz generally sucks for bands
- The magic of finding a new band that “flips your lid” (Sam’s new favorite phrase)
- The magic of David Bowie and artists who can reinvent themselves
- Finding the weirdest 10cc record in Japan
- A history of the interplay between music and technology from pre Internet to p2p file sharing to streaming to what’s coming next
- Scott Joplin and piano rolls (artists were getting screwed from day 0)
- Lars from Metallica will forever be known as the guy who wants to put 12 yo music fans in jail
- Music Like Water (2005, Forbes) - early article explaining how to charge for music like a utility
- The monthly subscription fee for everything was the first step to a new idea
- ~97% of artists on Spotify make approximately nothing. If this market can make anything somewhere else they’re likely to try it
- Bitcoin is the real occupy Wall Street; Wavlake is the real occupy Spotify
- Even though big artists are making money, they’re still leaving a lot on the table with all the middlemen
- Wavlake is changing incentives so super fans can give uncapped support for the value they receive
- We jumped into the internet super fast. Now Nostr is helping us rearchitect the web by letting people travel through the Internet and bring their social graph with them
- Now Wavlake and Value4Value is doing this for Music; the industry was almost completely uprooted in the last wave, but ultimately failed; now we have another shot
- The role of the curator in the new more p2p internet world
- Wavlake’s grand plan: it’s not a music player with zaps, but rather an open music catalogue that disrupts all of music distribution -Bandcamp and SoundCloud are examples of building a new library from the ground up
- Wavlake is following their example with the key difference that their library is not confined to one app but open to anyone (e.g. Fountain)
- How does Wavlake compete with Spotify - they don’t
- The magic of interoperable networks and instant payments (good clip around 1:10)
- Artist still only had to upload track once but the potential for where that track can live and get monetized is unlimited
- The negotiations between all parties is transparent unlike current opaque set of deals
- We’re making podcasting for music (another good clip around 1:14)
- Wavlake’s open music catalogue is inspired by thePodcasting 2.0 spec
- Developer splits incentivizes developers to try adding and monetizing music in new ways
- Now music can live in all kinds of different experiences (good clip around 1:16)
- Interoperability means your social graph and comments follow you to any app you use! A comment in Wavlake shows up in Fountain
- LN Beats and RSS Blue also working interoperably
- Sam is not afraid of competition, in fact he’s paying to incentivize it
- One artist monetizing via bitcoin and value4value will start the tsunami
- Check out the Forbes article on Value4Value
- Ainsley Costello might already be the first big artist. She had made about $750 over years across Spotify 60+ other services. In one year, she’s made >$12k on Wavlake, Fountain, and other Lightning V4V apps. She was the first artist to earn >1M sats
- If 97% of artists can make enough to do music full time in value4value land, it’s game over for traditional music industry. And if they can do well, imagine how well the big artists can eventually do when they cut out the middle men
- Superstars like Kanye, Snoop Dogg, and James Blake are just as pissed about the current state of extractive music industry
- Average people may not understand exactly how they’re getting fucked, but they know they’re getting fucked with the current monetary and business system - largely because every system lacks transparency
- In an open world, companies like Wavlake will need to add valuable services (e.g. licensing) on top of their library to compete and win
- ASCAP (what a name lol) fails to live up to their promise to monitor song uage and pay artist royalties
- Max's ideas for nostr business models: #1 remix economy - stemstr for everything and #2 rise of the curator or DJs for everything - getting curators paid for their good taste
- Wavlake’s plan to build split marketplaces for music and live radio shows where hosts get paid
- Value4Value music podcasts are taking off on Wavlake and Fountain
- Sam owns several successful businesses around the music industry (lightning.store, merch, label, venue, zine, wavlake). Each business feeds into this growing indie empire
- Wastoids is crazy cool video zine; Sam and his colleagues interview cool indie bands like People Under the Stairs and Red Cross
- Check out his pods like Click Vortex, a crazy show called Midnight Music Review in the Attic with an Argentinian dude dressed like a wolf presenting new music in his attic, and a Friday music show inspired by MTV News
- Sam starts experiments that could feed into each other and scales them as they work
- His buddy works at Aquarium Drunkard and gets major indie darlings to come on show -Goal is for Wavlake to become one of the channels on DistroKid that will catch artists’ attention when they wonder why they made $700 on Wavlake and only 9 cents everywhere else; Wavlake already has simple onboarding for artists, now just needs a simple onboarding for fans -Open library is already 10k+ tracks and growing, that’ll just keep getting better -Sam’s team of 28 pitches in all over his indie music empire -Sam’s secret: he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he just does what needs to be done! His intent was never to run a business, he just wanted to be in a band haha -Sam’s been doing Value4Value at HelloMerch for 17 years. He doesn’t make a penny until something sells; Wavlake will scale in a similar fashion