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Nick Malster
1.9k Plays1 year ago
Nick Malster is the co-founder of Fountain, a podcast app that helps creators get discovered, build a community and get paid for their work.
Recorded between Albany, Oregon and London, England.
We talk Podcasting 2.0, the movement, bitcoin, sats, value for value (v4v), direct support for podcasts and musical artists, art, creativity, the Fountain app and the podcasting industry at present.
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Transcript
Ken's Experience with 'Buoyant' by Susie Deville
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, this is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. I want to tell you about a realization I had working with Susie Deville in her book, Boyant.
00:00:13
Speaker
I myself hadn't been to art school or taken many art classes in my life and there were a lot of super simple but profound activities in Susie Deville's book and her class. I was able to illustrate in different ways than I had, even a simple exercise of drawing
00:00:34
Speaker
an image upside down actually helped me to discoveries on how I could illustrate. I'm still in the infancy of that, but really good breakthroughs and simple and profound. Have a hearty personal recommendation for Susie DeVille's buoyant
00:00:53
Speaker
and her classes, which are really geared towards artists and start from moving you from where you are. If it feels like a grind to some other type of place in your business, in your life and your art. So Susie Deville is buoyant. Highly recommended. Get yourself a copy now.
00:01:17
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing.
Introduction to Fountain App and Nick Malster
00:01:21
Speaker
Creator and host Ken Volante. Editor and producer Peter Bauer.
00:01:32
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Ken Vellante. I'm going to special episode here with Nick Malster, co-founder of Fountain. Fountain is an incredible app that allows users, listeners to engage in value for value processes supporting
00:01:54
Speaker
a podcast that they love and art. Nick, I could talk a whole bunch about Fountain and let you speak to the audience in 20 minutes, but I'm going to skip the whole process. Nick, great to see you. We've talked before. Great, great to see you and talk to you and tell us what's up. What are you up to? Yeah, thanks for
How Does Fountain Use Bitcoin for Podcasts?
00:02:13
Speaker
having me on, Ken. Yeah. So I'm Nick. I'm the co-founder of Fountain. Like Ken said, Fountain is a podcast app that has integrated payments into the experience.
00:02:23
Speaker
And what this allows is the delivery of, I guess it's a concept, value for value, which is you receive value from content from creators that you really enjoy. And you wanna send some content back to show your appreciation and support the artist, support the creator. And Fountains payments all run on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. So the reason we do that is because it allows us to
00:02:51
Speaker
program money in different ways that are just not possible when you're working with PayPal, Visa, anything else, right? So you can actually stream money for every minute you listen to the creator. And you can send a boost, which is like a payment with a comment. And yeah, I think what's what's, you know, where value value started was just that. And then what we didn't realize when we were getting into this is that actually,
00:03:17
Speaker
The act of sending someone money is an amazing signal of value for other people in the community. So we started surfacing the boost in an activity feed. So you can follow your friends on Fountain, follow other listeners of the shows you enjoy. And you can discover new episodes, things you wouldn't have heard before that are sort of based on their interests and click through and go and listen. And we also have clips as well. So you can create short clips of the best moments in podcasts.
00:03:45
Speaker
Again, you can just find amazing clips in your feed, go and check out some stuff you wouldn't have heard before. And yeah, so really what the promise is for the creator is discovery, getting their content discovered and finding their audience, finding their fans.
Community and Engagement Features in Fountain
00:04:01
Speaker
It's the community that you get that doesn't really exist on other apps like Spotify or Apple Podcast because you've got the booths, you've got replies, you've got
00:04:11
Speaker
full on conversations and commentary on the things you're hearing in the episodes and people discussing them. And then you've got the monetization as well. So that's really what fountain does in a nutshell.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, well, and thanks for the nutshell. There's a lot in there. And I think what you said is true about Fountain, something rather than nothing podcast. I've been doing it for four years. And with podcasts, you want to be everywhere. But I'm also particularly sensitive to the ecosystems that exist, if you think of.
00:04:48
Speaker
I have social media apps, not necessarily players, but in players themselves. It's like, everybody's like, what can I do with this? Like, what can I do? Like, can I talk? Can I request an episode? Can I connect to the creator? Can I...
00:05:04
Speaker
Find out what you know, like there's this energy when people listen to podcasts and one of the things about the eco I keep saying because that that's within fountain is that it's geared towards engagement, but the other piece which is just Utterly unique is the tendency for people who listen to create clips
00:05:27
Speaker
for the show for for for for people it's not a behaviors like i'm interested in behavior is a philosophy show i'm interested in behavior there's a behavior here with people you would not even come in contact with with no necessarily over if it's a popular clip you know that could be rewarded as well that's awesome that's incentivized but at the none of it it seems like there's just a
00:05:49
Speaker
I don't know, a nice action that people are taking on behalf of creators. It's super noticeable. You don't find it anywhere else, both in maybe the ability but the propensity for users to do that. It's very conspicuous in Fountain and it makes a creator
00:06:08
Speaker
Excited. I'm like shit. Okay. I know what somebody liked out there There's a clip of this 15 seconds and isn't what my brain thought was important. So really dig on that piece Nick Yeah, well, there's that famous quote Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes, right? I don't know who said that maybe it was that guy Charlie Munger, you know the guy that looks like I like that Yeah, you know whoever said that they were onto something and if you think about
00:06:38
Speaker
If you think about a creator, like, you know, your primary job is just to create content of value to your audience. But in this modern day and age with the platforms that we use, you're actually required to become a good marketer first, you know, you have to learn how to master the YouTube algorithms, create the perfect thumbnails, you know, find sponsors, like all these different things.
Challenges and Opportunities for Creators
00:07:01
Speaker
And it's actually a lot more than the creators bargain for. And
00:07:04
Speaker
The build it and they will come approach just is not going to get you there. And we think that the best way to achieve those outcomes of getting discovered, building the community, being able to earn a living off your work, off your art, is to essentially outsource it to your fans. But you can only really do that if the incentives are right. And that's why when you send a boost on Fountain and someone else sees it, they can like that boost, the comment that you said, and they can tip you for it.
00:07:34
Speaker
And if you create a clip and someone else liked your clip, you know, you can earn some some Bitcoin for the clip you made. So actually, we've kind of given this community the tools to be able to go and share. Yeah. Take them to new places because they're actually being rewarded for it. And I think that's why it works. And I think the other cool thing as well.
00:07:57
Speaker
It's just about the general sense of positivity you get from being on Fountain, the type of comments there. If you go on YouTube and you look in the comments, it's a riot in there. It's digging each other out. It's not very friendly. I think with Fountain, because you have to pay to send a comment, you're not just going to like... Put your money where your mouth is. Exactly, right.
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the other thing as well. Like, you know, if you, you know, if you go on an episode page, let's say this episode, when it, when it comes out, all the booths on the episode page are organized by value. So the ones with the most amount of money attached to them will show at the top. So if you really want to dig someone out, you've got to like pay more than everyone else. So if you look at like, would you like, it's not, um, it's not financially viable.
00:08:54
Speaker
for a bot to be going and spamming all of the episode pages. It just doesn't work. And that's why I think we have a really good-natured community there who are talking about the content and nothing else. That's really the focus. And I think that's also what separates us from Twitter. If you posted an episode link on Twitter, you're not going to get loads of replies to that tweet about the content, because people aren't going to watch an hour-long episode on Twitter. But if you had the conversation in the place
00:09:24
Speaker
they're going to listen to it. Same thing like YouTube. All the commentary in the conversation is really about the content. Yeah. No, I really... In thinking about, like you said, started the podcast about four years ago on July 2019.
00:09:44
Speaker
Um all the questions that come up as a creator come up as they come up as you encounter them You don't know you don't know to begin with what you need to look for and uh, yeah, you got to figure out all those type of things there's something different about the community there and and look
00:10:01
Speaker
part of this too in the conversation, you know, no communities of panacea. But I think the way that it's set up, right, it's like for me, I'm a, I'm an organizer, I work for labor, you get to set things up the right way, you have to, you have to have things the right way to begin with, because otherwise, you'll get the unintended consequences or intended consequences of a system that doesn't work. So it's integrated in the sense we're
00:10:28
Speaker
You got to pay small amounts of money, too. And we could talk a little bit about that. I mean, they could be larger, but they're recognized in that system. And there's something really cool. When you mentioned to me, we talked a little bit before in talking about the idea with music within it, too. There's something about the podcast or a music where there's something fun about a hit.
00:10:56
Speaker
Right. Like we're all suckers for it. Like every almost every human is a sucker for a hit. Right. And it's like, hey, do you hear the song? You hear this song. And there's a piece of that within fountain that that's really cool. Like a comments, a hit or somebody describes something like really well, or did you hear about.
00:11:14
Speaker
like this Event and people use it maybe as a source and be like a whole bunch of other people like it too And it becomes like this kind of hit you can kind of jump in it and there's downsides to that But heck we love a hit right like I want to look at a hit or listen to it and um The system sets it up for that. So you notice it. But what about um, you the you mentioned before on the idea of
Fountain's Role in Music and Podcasting 2.0
00:11:43
Speaker
What's going on with that idea because when I say hit, I also think music. Yeah, so music can be published to an RSS feed. In fact, any audio content can.
00:11:58
Speaker
Um, and there's lots of music that's already out there, uh, but we don't currently recognize it in fountain as an album or a track. It's just called a show or an episode. And that the reason for that, and this kind of gets into podcasting 2.0 in the namespace is that the RSS protocol doesn't really have a, you know, until now a global standard for recognizing the actual medium of a piece of content in an RSS feed. Um,
00:12:25
Speaker
But the namespace that Adam and David podcasting 2.0 are developing allows developers to specify in a way that's recognizable across different apps what the type of content is. And of course, there's a load of other tags and features that supported within the namespace. For example, if you've uploaded chapters to your podcast, you can make sure those podcast chapters are seen in the same way in all the other apps as well. It's one system that's united.
00:12:55
Speaker
So yeah, just going back to the music thing, we're going to be supporting the content medium tag, which means that any music that's published through an RSS feed and is specified as music, you'll be able to find in Fountain. And I think what's really cool about this is that, you know, value for value, we've already proven that there's something that just makes it a great fit in podcasting, but it can also work in other mediums as well.
00:13:21
Speaker
And I think this is probably a more commonly established narrative for people broadly, which is that artists struggle to get paid for their music. If you look at Spotify, the royalty system, it's just broken and it really exists to serve the few and not the many. For example, like here in the UK,
00:13:43
Speaker
There's a bunch of people paying for Spotify Premium and they also sell a bunch of advertising in the UK. That gives you a pot of royalties. I think about 33% of that goes to Spotify straight off the bat and the rest of it gets put in a pot and based on the total number of plays or streams that a track gets,
00:14:03
Speaker
money gets equally divided across everyone else. And that is a system that means that really the bigger artists are getting paid. But also what it means is that if I've spent all month listening to, you know, the tracks that I love on Spotify, it means that people like Taylor Swift, who I haven't even listened to are getting paid out of my $10 a month, 10 pounds a month I paid for my subscription.
00:14:27
Speaker
So there's no transparency in the money flows in the music industry. And there's also the issue of, you know, royalties and rights, because I suppose the music industry is more complex because you have labels, you have distributors, you know, in a band, you could have like seven or eight people playing different roles and
00:14:47
Speaker
that's that's complicated. And it's also it takes a lot of time, you know, the money has to go to the distributor and that's then eventually paid to the label who then pays the artist and that could be months later. And if you apply value for value to that problem, it means that the listener can support the artist directly as they're listening, it goes to them immediately. And the artist can also choose, hey, I'm going to split the money evenly with my bass player, my
00:15:14
Speaker
keys player, my guitarist, my drummer. So that's really exciting. So I don't know when this podcast is going out, but I imagine that by the time it does, we will have that new feature included in the app. So you'll be able to find music in the app and add it to your library, to stream stats, to boost
00:15:35
Speaker
Pretty exciting incredible and in incredible. Yeah, we'll have this show out be July 2023 here and talk with Nick Malster and I've always enjoyed talking to Nick talked a couple times and Congrats on you know on on your work With fountain is co as co-founder and you know and also chatting about it I think here's the thing. Um, yeah, so I on my show I got a lot of Everybody's an artist, right?
00:16:04
Speaker
And I got musicians. And the musician's problem, as you laid it out in the aggregate, is the problem. I might have this wrong, but I think there's an easy position right now on those who wish to make money off musical artists is they're creating tons of stuff. They have access to tons of stuff.
00:16:34
Speaker
It's tough to get paid for so long, particularly in the main way that folks listen to music now digitally. But I think about the value for value in the Fountain app, and for folks and listeners, there's just
Payment Solutions and Decentralized Indexing
00:16:51
Speaker
a basic setup where you can split if somebody's going to send sats, which are a derivative of Bitcoin. We'll talk a little bit more about that, but the sats.
00:17:04
Speaker
to you for an episode or say a track that could be split. So if I have an episode with Sarah Hardin, New Orleans painter, and they're on fountain, I can have the splits go directly right that like you set it up exactly the way that you would like to have it go directly.
00:17:27
Speaker
And I don't know of another connection or a system that's just so direct and quick and set up by the person who's putting the thing out. That is that mechanism right there makes a ton of sense when you're talking about how does the drummer get his fucking money? You know, so I really like that component, that that component of it. Nick, how'd you get into podcasting?
00:17:57
Speaker
I've always just been interested in podcasts. I think it's an amazing medium for telling stories. The relationship you can have with the podcast host is like no other. It's funny because it's a relationship with someone that you've never met, that you've listened to thousands of times, but you feel like you know them, but you're not able to speak to them.
00:18:23
Speaker
And I think that's kind of what really appealed to me about building fountain is just giving that direct feedback loop between the audience and the creator is so important. And it's not something that other podcast apps have been able to achieve. So if I've got a question.
00:18:40
Speaker
for you or I've got a comment or a quest about who I want to see on the next episode or anything like that, I can just boost you and you'll see it. Because there's money attached to it, I know you're probably going to look at it. I'll notice you. I'll notice you. I guarantee I'm going to notice it. I'll notice the request for sure. My co-founder, Oscar, when we originally started talking about fountain, we weren't actually talking about a podcast app.
00:19:09
Speaker
at the time I was working in another job he had just sold a previous business of his which was like an app studio and he'd been playing around with this prototype of I guess just like a social audio platform where you could record short snippets and share them with other people and you could see you know what other people had to say and I think that we realized quite quickly that
00:19:34
Speaker
you know, having to build up that content library was going to take a lot of time because you have to onboard the users, you have to convince them to be able to record things. That takes time. And, you know, we just thought, well, let's just make a podcast that we both love podcasts. And there's a whole library out there we can just tap into, bring into the app, and then
00:19:54
Speaker
suddenly you have the content. Now you just need the functionality that allows you to engage with it in the way we want to. And it was, it was actually, it was lucky because, you know, podcast things have been around, I think 20 years, I think Sunday, the 12, uh, seven, just the anniversary 20 years. It's 20 years. And, uh, it's just amazing how little it's progressed. If you think about it, um, since podcasts were put in the iPod,
00:20:22
Speaker
really the same functionality is there, or at least that that was the case a few years ago. And, you know, we kind of cottoned on to what Adam Curry and Dave Jones were doing with with the podcast index. And Adam Curry, just to explain to your listeners, he was one of the original pioneers behind podcasting. He was working with Steve Jobs and a group of talented developers to put podcasts into iTunes and onto the iPod. And
00:20:52
Speaker
He had his own show. Originally, the first show he had was the Daily Source Code. And then I guess a few years later, he started No Agenda with John Dvorak. And they have employed this value for value ethos right from the very beginning. But they've taken it to the extreme, to the point where even the people, the fans who create artwork for the show can get rewarded.
00:21:18
Speaker
for, you know, creating artwork or the person who does chapters for them. They give them a split of the income from every episode. So they've always pursued value for value. And it was traditionally done through sending checks in the post or you know, when people
00:21:35
Speaker
sending money on PayPal. And yeah, Bitcoin was was just a solution for that to make that thing instant. But I think the other thing besides the payments is just the decentralized nature of the version of podcasting that they envisioned.
00:21:51
Speaker
When podcasting first came about into the world, it was all based on Apple's own centralized index of podcasts. And that was fine to begin with, you know, there were many apps, podcast apps that started who could just use Apple's podcast library and then the new app they built suddenly has all the latest episodes in it. But it all started going wrong when Apple started
00:22:13
Speaker
I guess, enforcing their content policy on what we think is acceptable content and what's not or what's hate speech or what don't we agree with. And if we don't agree with it, we're just going to take it down. And then suddenly all the other podcast apps realize, oh, hey, why is this show or these episodes gone missing? It's because we're using this index that Apple controls. So I think that was the thing that really motivated and inspired
00:22:36
Speaker
Adam Curry to like try and regain some control and give, you know, have a decentralized index that basically no one could fuck with. So the podcast index came first, that was the first part of the project of podcasting 2.0. And the second part was the namespace, which was, yeah, like I mentioned, the sort of the
00:22:57
Speaker
the common language that allows app developers to use the RSS feed to adopt features that can be used universally across different apps. And yeah, value for value, the specification using Bitcoin to send payments directly to the podcast, it was one of those first features. And it's just amazing how far it's come since then. There's over now, I think 12,000 podcasts that are on the Lightning network that can receive payments in this way.
00:23:27
Speaker
and that number is growing like rapidly. And as well, I think, you know, thanks to fountain and the other podcasting 2.0 apps out there, you know, the listeners are getting involved now as well, it kind of started out as I suppose, more of an experiment, it was people who were just interested in this new technology to see what it do. Now we know what it can do. And we're finding the ways to
00:23:49
Speaker
really deliver it in the best way and in the most accessible way so that even someone without any Bitcoin or any knowledge of this whole ecosystem can start using it straight away and start supporting podcasts.
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can you can press and listen. You can access all the podcasts that you want. OK, tell me, Nick. So I'm I'm I'm I'm just as I get the I'm just this bloke likes podcasts. Right. I heard about this fountain app. I have a few extra dollars. Right. I'm like, all right. I'm looking at fountain and OK, what is this set?
Impact of Bitcoin and Global Trends
00:24:28
Speaker
Tell me, tell me, tell me what's tell me what's going on for somebody
00:24:31
Speaker
like what did they do? What's this thing look like? Most people used to PayPal or whatever. So I want to get in on this. What's it look like for me? So yeah, as a new listener, you know, where it started was you actually had to have Bitcoin first on a wallet somewhere and then move that Bitcoin from your wallet over to Fountain.
00:24:53
Speaker
which you can still do, and it's really easy. You just scan an invoice, pay it, and then the money moves from one wallet to your fountain wallet, and you can start supporting.
00:25:04
Speaker
But I think that for value to have mainstream adoption, we need to reduce some of these, I guess, obstacles in the way, because not all of us believe in Bitcoin yet. There's still a lot of skepticism broadly about crypto, and for good reason, because I suppose crypto more generally has been tarnished by a lot of these shitcoins, a lot of these scams, like people getting rug pulled,
00:25:32
Speaker
And the general population is just not really quite there yet. So how can we move all those distractions out the way and give them confidence? That's really why we launched Listen to Earn last summer. So as a listener, you can just start listening to podcasts on fountain and you could earn some Bitcoin straight away, which means that you don't have to top up or have any Bitcoin to be able to start supporting. You just
00:25:57
Speaker
have some Bitcoin in your wallet and you can go. I think at the same time, we also launched the ability to buy Bitcoin in the app. So you can just put in your bank card, pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, whatever, and then you've got some Bitcoin in your wallet and you can start supporting. And that's definitely, it's moved us forward a lot, but we're still not quite there yet. I think that really we have to get to the point where
00:26:24
Speaker
you don't have to actually interact with Bitcoin at any point in the process. So you log in, you see, okay, which currency do you want to see? Do you want to see currencies in Bitcoin? Or do you want to see dollars, pounds, yen, euros, whatever, whatever you fancy. And you can start transacting and start paying, you know, supporting podcasts, you can top up your wallet, but you never actually have to see the word Bitcoin. It will always be Bitcoin has a payment rail underneath that experience. But by
00:26:55
Speaker
By kind of removing that, putting it in the background and giving people a front end UI that people feel comfortable with, they can just pay in dollars. I think that's going to be the thing that brings in a broader audience. And then on the podcaster side, as a new podcaster, what do you do? Well, your podcast is, if it's in podcast index, which is the index of podcasts that we use, your show is already going to be on fountain. So what you've got to do is find your show, claim it, put in your email address that's in your RSS feed. We can then verify you're the owner of the feed.
00:27:25
Speaker
and then you can start receiving payments. So yeah, it's definitely got much easier to get set up, but we're still a long way from being universally accessible for a mass market audience.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, thanks for that, too. I mean, of course, it's going to be one of the main things. I mean, not even to mention, right, even the idea that there's very small to large monetization of things that folks do in other apps. It's the free aspect. It's a really interesting question regarding behavior, right? Like, do we engage in, like,
00:28:06
Speaker
free behavior that we wouldn't normally do just because we can completely freely do it or the money where your mouth is, you tie a few cents or whatever and be like, heck, I'm not just going to waste my time and money ragging on somebody. I'm like, this is cool. Here's a boost.
00:28:28
Speaker
It's a great thing. I've even done it as a user on Fountain myself. You hear something and you like. It's this podcast who knows where it's from. Just ran into it.
00:28:42
Speaker
send something that, I don't know, it sticks out, but it isn't like a billion dollars, you know, it sticks out. It's a good feeling. It's a good dynamic that goes on there. And thanks for mentioning too, just as far as, you know, what's been going on and the accessibility to get into the app. And the fact is,
00:29:04
Speaker
One of the things I wanted to just mention, Nick, too, and for the listeners, I don't do too many in art and creativity. I think you and I are talking about the whole within podcasting as a whole. Podcasting is different, which is why I wanted to talk to you about it and the fact that I use and really enjoy
00:29:26
Speaker
The fountain app and see what it can do for podcasters So it's unmitigated my desire to talk to you about it and say like this is this is a cool spot There's cool stuff going on over there. I had a question just just different I'm over here in the States you over there in London um just generally speaking is there is there a
00:29:52
Speaker
difference of where the idea is taken off or rate where you're Situated you see things in the US that that are different of course. It's a worldwide app I'm not just making it like that, but you see in different things as far as Adoption coming in contact with fountain is it a London thing or what's going on?
00:30:13
Speaker
It's a really good question. I think that if you look more broadly at Bitcoin adoption around the world, the US is ahead of everyone else. Typically, we see that most of our users are in the US, both thinking about the community of listeners, but also the podcasters who've taken initiative to claim their show, start receiving payments on fountain, and start investing their time in that as a platform.
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think that what's really interesting too is that if you look at some of the currencies around the world, it's not a funny thing, but some of the currencies are fucked. If you look at economies in Latin America, they're just crippled by hyperinflation.
00:30:57
Speaker
Bitcoin is a way out for them. And if only their governments would adopt it as a standard, it could be a way out for the whole country and their economy. So we actually do see a lot of users in Argentina, in Brazil, in South and Central America, because they see the value of just being able to earn Bitcoin for something they were going to do already.
00:31:22
Speaker
which I think is really interesting. In Europe, I'd say that the thing that's held us back in Europe is the, I suppose the red tape around crypto more broadly. It's more tightly controlled. It's why you don't see apps like Cash App and Strike in places like the UK yet. So I think we've definitely got some catching up to do. But I guess as well what's interesting is looking at the adoption of podcasting around the world too.
00:31:50
Speaker
America is for sure far ahead in terms of podcasting adoption. But again, countries like Argentina are catching up really, really fast. I think that it's actually the fastest growing population for adoption of podcasting. So yeah, I guess we'll see where it goes. I think the beautiful thing about Fountain is that it's a global audience. We have listeners and podcasters in over 100 countries around the world.
00:32:19
Speaker
And it's always amazing to see like a new, oh, someone in a new country has just signed up to the app. You always kind of wonder like, yeah, what's their what's their motives? I wonder how they found it. And so, yeah, we hope we're going to continue to see that grow. Yeah, I'm still waiting for my my podcast listener from Greenland. That's the tough one. That's the
00:32:44
Speaker
that's that's the holy grail i don't know how to do that but you know it's it is fun and and the the fact you know with with it being international coming in contact which of course the web and social media can do as well but maybe a little bit more of a um uh different folks you might come in contact with like you said uh
00:33:05
Speaker
South in South America or some some other type of listeners like, you know, really, really digging on the app. It's I got to I got to I got to ask you one of the questions of the the show, Nick, as as a creator, I got to give you one of the big philosophy questions I wanted to ask you what you think art is.
Art, Meaning, and Future Developments in Fountain
00:33:34
Speaker
It's a big question. It's a big question. Yeah, I think, to be honest, I think art is
00:33:44
Speaker
It's one of the things that helps us add meaning to life. Art is legacy. It's things that live on beyond our own existence. And yeah, I think it helps give people purpose to create something that wasn't there before that can be enjoyed by anyone. And I think the anyone is important as well. Art or content or whatever the format is, it shouldn't be restricted. It shouldn't be behind the paywall.
00:34:11
Speaker
It has to be free and openly available to everyone. That's how it's going to inspire the widest audience possible. You know, so it's a hard one because there's also the argument that, you know, it shouldn't be free. You should have to pay to get into a museum or, you know, if you want to subscribe to a podcast that has content behind a paywall that you should have to pay for it. I guess value for value goes against that. You know, we believe that information should be free.
00:34:41
Speaker
There's an amazing article for anyone who hasn't read it by Gigi, who is one of the pioneers of value for value, has worked very closely with Adam. It's called, what is it called?
00:34:54
Speaker
I'll have to follow up and send you a link to put it in the show notes. I think it's called the freedom of value, I think. The freedom of value or the value of freedom. And it goes back to that idea of scarcity. If you make something scarce, it actually loses its value. To make it free and available to everyone is the best way to release it and information and art wants to be free.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Nick. Yeah. I, you know, it's such a, such a, you know, like interviewing artists and, and, and, you know, just, just seeing like, well, you know, how is it they put some, one of the thing is with artists and, you know, in the work you do, Nick, I mean, you could see when you talk to folks the amount of hours, you know, they don't,
00:35:40
Speaker
They might not even talk about it at 11, 11.30, 2 in the morning, all those type of things. But it's there. It's there. And I think always thinking about a way to be appreciated through money for your time, recognition, boosts or comments, likes. It's the way the world is. And there's an affirmation. Artists need affirmation.
00:36:09
Speaker
You gotta keep going somehow. Nick, it's been a great pleasure to talk to you. Can you just drop in or let you go tell folks how to find the app, some things they're gonna be seeing. We're in July, 2023, you had mentioned the music functionality, but just some basics as far as how to pop on and what folks might be seeing in the near future.
00:36:38
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, if you haven't got a fountain already, in fact, if you're listening to this podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, think about getting Fountain. You can just find us in the App Store, Google Play Store. Our website is fountain.fm. You can also find us on Twitter, fountain underscore app. That's the best way to find out about all the latest developments in Fountain and new features we're releasing. And yeah, as for some of those new features, just to give you a quick teaser,
00:37:10
Speaker
We really see the value of being heavily creator focused and we're investing a lot of time in building new tools and technology for creators to help, you know, help them access this new ecosystem and start to use fountain. So we're releasing a podcast, a dashboard, which will allow you to manage everything to do with your show.
00:37:31
Speaker
You can like and reply to all the comments you get. You can actually promote your show, so you can stream stats to your listeners. All these features exist already in the app, but actually putting it in the browser window to make it more accessible for them and give them more control.
00:37:47
Speaker
But yeah, the music stuff I mentioned is coming late this month or early August, which will be really exciting to see. One cool thing as well is that you can actually set up a music podcast now. So let's say if you wanted to do an hour-long episode and just play some of your favorite music,
00:38:06
Speaker
the splits that we were talking about earlier Ken, you can actually have them automate so that when I'm playing a certain track, the splits will be, you know, the money gets diverted to the artist. So you can essentially set up a radio station where all the artists get, you know, fairly paid, which is really cool.
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff coming. We're also doing some major UX and UI updates just to really make the best out of what we have and the features because I think we're still really early. A lot of the stuff we've made has just been pulled together quickly ourselves or just put straight into code and getting it to really sing and to be something that as a new user, you could just pick up and be like, cool, I know what's going on here. I can get started straight away.
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah, lots of really exciting stuff to come.
Conclusion and Future of Podcasting with Fountain
00:38:58
Speaker
And yeah, if you haven't got fountain already, go check it out.
00:39:02
Speaker
Yeah, I love the accessibility. I love the, the, the access for folks. I was just reading this, uh, an article. I didn't finish the article. I could only just come in contact with, there was, uh, some Royals podcast through Spotify. And it was, I think they were supposed to do 10 episodes. They only had time to finish seven. They got paid a million per. And I'm like, well, there's different realities in podcasts than going on right now. We have folks who.
00:39:32
Speaker
they get the time put in their half hour an hour and put in the show get their million dollars but they don't have the time for it and there's everybody else just you know doing their things and getting the stuff out there it's it's it's it's no shade on success I was talking about hit records no shade on hit records some shade on royalty whatever I don't know but it's like
00:39:57
Speaker
That's a different reality of what we're talking about. And I just want to tell you, Nick, for everybody who listens to something rather than nothing, there's a lot of folks who work on podcasts, a lot of folks who work on podcast movement, of value for value, of podcast 2.0. There's a lot of work to make podcasts, keep podcasts accessible, to not have them gobbled up.
00:40:22
Speaker
to not have tons of paywalls. And I just don't want to run over that point. I just want to just, I appreciate the work that you do, Nick. And for podcast listeners, there's a lot of folks out there making sure
00:40:36
Speaker
that podcast and the way that we enjoy podcasts goes forward. And it's a movement, it's a movement. And I appreciate you talking about those elements, Nick, and for your hard work and success and what you do at Fountain, both for creators and listeners. I wanted to thank you for your time and I'm excited. I don't get excited about apps, but I'm excited for the hard work that I see you all doing.
00:41:03
Speaker
Just really want to thank you for popping on the show and chat, Nick. No, awesome, man. Thanks a lot for having me, Ken. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, great pleasure, and best of luck with Fountain, and I'll see you on the app. Thanks. Thanks a lot. This is something rather than nothing.