Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Protecting the Artist's IP in the Digital World with Lionel Lodge
12 Plays7 months ago
“With over 40 years in the entertainment industry, I have been involved with a diverse spectrum of the industry. The key, in my view, is enthusiasm paired with detailed focus. Through this I have been very fortunate to a part of many team focused and creative experiences.
Forever positive, seeing obstacles as challenges to over-come. Thinking outside the box with the perspective that, if no one else has done it yet, that does not gauge its probability for success. Just makes the climb a little steeper.” - Lionel Lodge
Lionel has worked in the entertainment industry for all his adult life, as a creative as well as a business manager. He founded and managed a live music venue while in his early 20's (Lionel's, London, Ontario, Canada 1984-1986), founded and managed a live music booking agency with a team of 10 agents booking hundreds of artists all over the UK (UK Bookings, Stroud, Glos. UK 1992-1995), held the position of Senior Editor and Co-Publisher of a UK based entertainment magazine with a circulation of 40,000 per month and a team of over 50 people (Now Magazine UK, Stroud, Glos, UK 1995-1997) and until recently (until the realization that the award-winning SyncLodge was needed to be built) was the founder and managing director of a sync licensing agency (Vienna Calling Music Network, Vienna, Austria 2014 - 2017). On the creative side Lionel has written hundreds of songs and co-written many more. He has produced albums, engineered recordings, arranged music, and has 12 albums released under his name.
Lionel has always had the entrepreneur's heart and mind. As a child, he was on the quest for independent ways of making money, from shoveling snow to newspaper routes. By the age of 11, he started his first business, a wholesale and manufacturing business making decorative flower pot hangers and selling them to flower shops in the city of London Ontario.
Connect with Lionel directly on Linked-in
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to Otterly Positive Talks. We are going to talk about one of my favorite topics today and that is music. We have Lionel Lodge on today from Sink Lodge. Lionel is a long time touring artist. He's been in the music industry for years. There's nobody more knowledgeable about what happens behind the scenes within the music industry. And he's got his company Sink Lodge which has got these really cool tools
00:00:38
Speaker
for artists and musicians to take ownership of their own destiny and then to enable them with the tools they need to be successful. So welcome to the show, Lionel, and I'm super excited to talk music with you. Hi, Jeff. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. Looking forward to this too. Cool.
Lionel Lodge's Background and Influence
00:01:02
Speaker
Now,
00:01:04
Speaker
Now we've talked a bit offline about St. Lodge and I think some background on what got you into this space would kind of set the framework by which we can have a really interesting discussion. So maybe share with us a little bit your history of how you got into the music industry and ultimately ended up at St. Lodge.
00:01:28
Speaker
OK, OK, cool. So my father was in the music industry in the UK. He was one of the head DJs and program director of a thing called Radio Caroline, which decided to be one of the instigators of the British music invasion, as they called it, in the 60s. And I grew up in that. It was just sort of a natural place for me to go as far as what I was going to do with my life. I started as a musician, played many different instruments, and then songwriting.
00:01:58
Speaker
And I played like thousands of shows in many different countries. I've written hundreds of songs, co-written many more. And I've released like 12 albums under my own name and recorded being on many others. So over the years, one of the things that I, when I was a kid, I studied the arts, but I also really enjoyed studying business. And I was sort of a funny kid. I liked bookkeeping. I liked maths and bookkeeping. Plus I love playing the saxophone.
00:02:27
Speaker
and being in theater arts. So I have these two sets of friends. One set was considered really cool, the other set was considered nerdy. I found the nerdy kids to be very, very interesting. Very good friends and very interesting people. So anyway, so as I went through my creative side of my career, every now and then I would see something that just didn't make sense to me. Why are they doing it that way? Well, there seems to be something seriously missing here. And I would have done it a few times where I would set up a company
00:02:56
Speaker
And I would just endeavor to fix that, what I saw as a missing element or a problem. And some of these companies have been fairly successful. And some were just painful learning experiences, which was always a good thing. Not at the time, but in hindsight. In
Creation and Purpose of Sync Lodge
00:03:15
Speaker
the early 2000s, I was quite happily living off my music, playing shows, writing, recording.
00:03:23
Speaker
And I started seeing on the horizon the demise of the CD sales. Physical sales were because of technology were on the way out. I could see that. And a friend of my father's actually suggested sync licensing to me, which is the usage of music in visual productions like TV shows and films, video games and advertising.
00:03:47
Speaker
And so I started investigating that. I got into it. I started to go into conferences and networking and building up a very good network in the industry. I started getting placements. Then other artists asked me to do it for them. And a few independent labels asked me to do it for them. And next thing I knew, I had this boutique single licensing agency.
00:04:10
Speaker
With that, I gained quite a perspective on the industry, on the synthesizing side of the industry, and realized that there was a lot of administrative work. There was a lot of frustrations and frictions. There was a lot of barriers to entry for the music creators. And I thought, OK, well, why is it that they're working in this way? This is not the 1980s anymore. Why are they not utilizing the tech that's potentially available?
00:04:38
Speaker
So I thought for sure that there would be somebody smarter than me that had already figured that one out. And so I went looking for the tech and I didn't find it. So I put together a company called it Sync Lodge. And what we do is we empower on both sides the visual creatives and also the music creatives to really easily manage the whole element of sync licensing. And so we built tools for the music side, we built tools for them to manage everything,
00:05:09
Speaker
And I do like to point out that there are a lot of libraries out there. There are a lot of platforms where music supervisors can go on.
00:05:20
Speaker
And they have a catalog, a curated catalog of music, and they can choose from that. We are not that. We do not curate anything. So we access all the world's music through streaming platforms. So if it's publicly released, we can access it. And we believe
Opportunities in Sync Licensing
00:05:37
Speaker
that if the music is appropriate for the usage, then it should be considered, regardless if you're living in Taiwan or living in Bogota, Colombia.
00:05:45
Speaker
that should be considered and we do not get in between the deal. So we believe in empowering creatives to build their own networks, to have a future where there isn't a middleman that is holding the gateway.
00:06:05
Speaker
One of the things about, you know, there are libraries out there that do, I've got nothing against libraries. A lot of them do very good work, some better than others. But the thing is, if you put your music on a music library for sync licensing, your tracks might be one of a few million on there.
00:06:22
Speaker
And it's a bit of a lottery of whether or not you are going to get your music placed. And when it does get placed, you do not have contact with the people that are licensing it. The library does. They're building their contacts. And I believe that the creatives need to build their contacts for a long-term future. And the beauty of sync licensing is, and this is one of the things that I absolutely love about it,
00:06:46
Speaker
is there's no type of music that is better for sync licensing than other types of music. There's nothing that is typical, oh, there's a sync licensing track. I can hear it. It really depends on the visual production, what the producer of the visual production, the director, what they are wanting, what they're looking for, for the scene, the mood, the instrumentation. So it's great that way.
00:07:11
Speaker
When the question has come up, and I've heard this quite a few times, to music supervisors, how do I produce and write for sync licensing? They say, don't. Don't write or produce for sync licensing. Write your own stuff. Authenticity is what counts, what really moves the scene the best. If it's authentic communication, then this really empowers the scene. And so just write what you want to write. Put the sounds, the production,
00:07:38
Speaker
to write the songs, produce it the way you want it to be done. And as long as you're happy with that and you feel it's true to you, then that will work for single licensing. And I just love that element of it, you know, creative freedom. Yeah, just for someone who's like, I'm a I'm a music fan, but it's actually something I never really thought about much until recent years, primarily because of AI. But just before we were probably going to touch on that,
00:08:08
Speaker
for sure. But just for the listeners and for myself, is it two different animals, people who are striving to be recording artists and touring artists and people who love making music but want to just do it from a sync licensing kind of way? Are they typically two different beasts?
00:08:36
Speaker
Or are they one in the same? There is a gray area. There is a gray area in between. There are quite a few people that just produce for sync placement. Some of this does come off as being a little generic. There are artists that are producing, I know a lot of really talented artists, and they write their songs, they have their band, they produce their recordings.
00:09:04
Speaker
And then they're playing in their local scene. They don't have the ability to go and tour because that takes promotion, that takes their profile outside of their territory to be recognized. And so they are producing this stuff, they're playing for their local scene.
00:09:26
Speaker
They're getting a sync placement is like a very exciting thing for them, not only financially, but also lifts them up as far as the rest of the world recognizing who they are. But they're I see the music industry as being more divided up into people that are in it to become famous and to become wealthy.
00:09:49
Speaker
And people that are in it to be authentic artists, they have a communication, they have something that they want to share. If they feel it in their gut, the song idea or the arrangement idea, and they are passionate about actually producing this. And then a lot of times with most artists, and you can go back hundreds of years on this, that after the art is created,
00:10:17
Speaker
They are not thinking about how to monetize it, how to promote it. They are just thinking about the next creation. They've got that song done. OK, that's great. There it is now. I've got this other idea. And that process, and it's a great process of creative evolution for the individual, the more you do it, the better you get at it. The better you get at communicating your thoughts and your feelings. But there are a lot that
00:10:46
Speaker
It's not, you know, they would like to, but it's not their main ambition. And I find the artists that their main ambition is to create authentic communication, to be the most intriguing, the most moving. And I find the artists that make music to become famous and rich to be incredibly boring. And I say that without any reservation. And I do tell people, if all you want to do is make money, music industry is not an easy place to do it. Come up with a new salty snack.
00:11:16
Speaker
and sell that, that's a lot easier way to make money. Yeah, that's true. And I,
Impact of Streaming on Legacy Artists
00:11:24
Speaker
like I have strong feelings about it as well, because I'm such a music fan and many of my favorite bands would not even get listened to today. Like if you, if you, if you listen to a top 20 greatest bands of all time list,
00:11:45
Speaker
probably 15 of those bands wouldn't have a chance today. Like, you know, like bands like Pink Floyd and, yeah, like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, none of those would even get a look. Bob Dylan. Exactly. Right. Bob Dylan came out today as a young guy who wouldn't have a chance. Some people might argue and debate that with me, which I would be very interested to do.
00:12:12
Speaker
or debate whether or not Bob Dylan would have a chance of a 19-year-old in this market. But one of the things that the only, there are some good things to this whole streaming thing, audio streaming platforms, but one of the things that has been amazing for is legacy artists. There's people finding these artists that go back, like you mentioned, Pink Floyd, people fighting this stuff, young people, and going, wow, right? And going, you know, Aretha Franklin.
00:12:41
Speaker
People finding her music and going, wow, this is amazing. The money that's being generated for legacy artists is quite incredible now. They were dying out. When it was just CDs, young people weren't buying legacy artists CDs, but with streaming platforms, they can actually just, they can find it and then they can dig deep into it and find associated artists and other things and get into a whole different world. I think that was
The Lost Art of Albums and Lyric Sheets
00:13:05
Speaker
wonderful. Yes. Even for myself, last year,
00:13:11
Speaker
and I'm continuing this year, but last year, my New Year's resolution was to listen to full albums again. I went back and I started looking for albums where I just knew the name or I just knew one song by an artist. That's great. I wouldn't have done that in a record shop when I was younger because it's too expensive. Listening to full albums is a wonderful thing and it's something that
00:13:39
Speaker
A lot of people, I'm totally with you on that. A lot of people, one song gets out, one song makes it big, people hear that one song. But the album is an art piece on its own, from beginning to end, the sequencing of the song.
00:13:55
Speaker
The whole story, when I do an album, it is like a book. You don't just open the book and read one or two pages out of the middle of it. You start at the beginning, you go through, and it is this sort of journey that you take people on. I was fortunate when I was a kid, when my dad being a DJ, we had an influx of releases all the time. We read what they were called DJ copies with a white label, extra thick vinyl,
00:14:23
Speaker
And these were coming to the house all the time. And so before it was released to the public, we were listening to classic albums. I could spend an hour listening to all the classic albums that came through. And I used to just love listening to it from beginning of side A to the end of side B. That was like a world for me. It was like an escapism world. It was fantastic. One thing that was fantastic was
00:14:51
Speaker
You'd get the album and it had all the album liner and you put it on and you listen start to finish and you read all the lyrics and you looked at all the, because there was no MTV or music channels or anything or videos. And so you got a little bit of a sense what the bands looked like, but you actually, yeah, just I'm a big lyric fan, but I'm horrid and picking it up when I listened to the song.
00:15:20
Speaker
So it was wonderful to have the album liner so you could read the songs. Yeah. That's one of the things that the digital transition actually lost because you don't have all that information and you're listening to the song and you have a little bit of information and you can click on Spotify, you can click on credits.
00:15:44
Speaker
And a lot of times it has almost no credits. It says who the artist was and who produced it, or who wrote it maybe. It doesn't have who played on it. Who played that saxophone part? It doesn't have that on it. And the lyrics. My mother, she says this to me when I release a new album, I send her a copy. And she always says, there's going to be lyrics with it. Is there? And I say, yeah, of course, Mom. There's a lyric book with it.
00:16:14
Speaker
She goes, OK, because I like reading that along to listening, so I really understand what it's saying. And this is the interaction of human to music interaction is it is an amazing thing that I see it as being the purest, most empowering, most wonderful form of communication humans have ever come up with.
00:16:40
Speaker
and to really absorb what the artist is saying. And like you
AI in Music: Challenges and Limitations
00:16:47
Speaker
say, I used to do that too. You sit there listening to it with the headphones on, looking at the cover. If it opened up and there was extra pictures, looking at the extra pictures and sort of getting a feel of who these people are and reading the lyrics, that sort of interactive side of it. There are companies that are trying to figure out how to solve that. And there are sort of ways, but it's still very cumbersome
00:17:10
Speaker
But one of the things that those records had was what's called metadata. And so on the sleeve it told you who engineered it, who produced it, who played on it, what their roles were, who wrote all the songs, if there was cuts on each song who wrote it.
00:17:30
Speaker
And nowadays that is a big issue in the music industry, making sure that it is complete, concise and clear. And this is something that stops a lot of revenue flow and it's something that we are working on fixing. We've actually built some tools that help with that and we have some more coming. Oh, that's super cool. And the, which leads me to one question, I think I'd be amiss if I didn't ask you, and that is,
00:17:58
Speaker
forget everything else, but within the production of music and the rightful ownership of for the creators and just protecting IP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Does AI make you nervous or does it make you excited? Well, AI, AI, I see it as being another tool like a tractor, right? It has the potential to make it so people can get more leverage in their workflow.
00:18:26
Speaker
There is a problem with the question of if AI produces music, spits out, writes a song and produces it and spits out a finished recording, who owns that? There is the big question. It has been some ways and steps resolved by the American Congress and British Parliament, but then there's still questions that need to be answered. There's still battles that are going on. So the scenario is,
00:18:55
Speaker
I'm a tech guy. I've got this AI system, and I'm going to feed it five million tracks. And I'm telling it that when I feed it what these tracks are. This is hip hop. This is blues. This is rock. This is a female vocal. That's a piano. I'm teaching it all along this, right? With five million tracks dumped into it. OK. When that computer spits out the song and the recording, the question is, who owns it?
00:19:25
Speaker
And under American law, you cannot be a machine. You cannot be a machine and own an intellectual property. So there lies the difference. And the person that actually did the coding, they do not own it either. So it actually is owned by the music that the AI was taught on, what it learned on.
00:19:49
Speaker
In the early stages of doing this, the technicians that were feeding the songs into the machine learning system were not logging into it what songs. They didn't log in all the metadata. They just dumped in the songs and told them what were the genres and the instrumentation. And what songs out of that five million did it use to produce this one song? So if it's used all five million,
00:20:18
Speaker
then and on an average say each of those songs have 10 copyright holders that's 50 million copyright holders that need to be paid for this one song becoming a top 10 hit okay so everybody gets half a peanut each great excellent that does not work right that just doesn't work so if they actually take it so they say they put in a whole bunch of Led Zeppelin music
00:20:45
Speaker
And they say, okay, we want to produce music like Led Zeppelin. Okay. Then they have to get clearance from Led Zeppelin to be able to do that. They have to come up with an agreement with Led Zeppelin. What happens when we put out this music and Led Zeppelin actually allows it in the first place, right? The fans like Pink Floyd wouldn't allow it. I'm sure they're not allowing singles and all this sort of stuff. Very precious with their creations. But if Led Zeppelin was to allow it, they'd have to be a license fee on using it.
00:21:14
Speaker
And then when the song was created and put out, Led Zeppelin would own it, right? The person that's working with the computer system, they don't own it. They didn't create it. And the computer itself doesn't own it. So then the question is, why would you do that? Where is the money for the person that's running the AI system doing all that work? Why would you do it? Because you are not going to own it.
00:21:41
Speaker
Now, the only place that I see it becoming workable is for in visual productions for background music, you know, like a score, like some sort of mood thing where you got strings and it's sort of a bit of piano and there's tension in it. Okay. They can produce the studio, the visual production studio can actually produce that with AI.
00:22:07
Speaker
But they still have to recognize who the AI was taught from. It could be a lot of them have their own catalog. So a lot of visual production companies, they do a movie, they have a composer come in to write the score for it. They pay the composer and the visual production company owns the score. So then they built up these libraries of music. They can use that and then they can get the AI to
00:22:36
Speaker
basically replace the composer on the next production. Okay? That will happen on the lower levels, on the more independent, the lower levels of production. But then the question is, will they be able to afford to be able to, will they have the catalog? Will they be able to afford to do the AI? The higher end stuff will still want an authentic composer because
00:23:00
Speaker
It just works better. It's a human they can deal with. They can bounce off ideas and it also gives it some sort of authenticity to it. You know, everybody wants to know who in the industry itself, but maybe maybe fans of the film are interested in who the composer was. And if they had the composer being XW3ZY, then that's not very sexy at all.
00:23:26
Speaker
The money that they spend on a composer is not very much compared to what the potential revenue for the visual production is. So I don't see that being a big thing either. There's a lot of hoopla about it. Oh, my God, they all get replaced. I don't see it. Last year, there was the screenwriters strike in the States. All the writers went on strike for quite a long time.
00:23:55
Speaker
And one of the questions was, we want something in our contract where we can't be replaced by AI. OK. Well, I don't think that they've actually really tried to write a script with AI. I don't think they've tested. I have. I've tested things like that. And it comes out pretty flat. It's not really. Like the human ingenuity, the human
00:24:20
Speaker
delivery on a great scriptwriter is that scriptwriters can use it as a OK, I want the person to do go from here to here. Can you just fill in the technical things, camera angles and stuff like that? OK, yeah. OK, great. Now I don't have to write that. OK, I see it being something like that, but I really don't see it being. Yeah, I don't either. And actually, as far as scriptwriters go, because because so many
00:24:47
Speaker
movies and TV shows are just cookie cutters of each other now. If I was a screenwriter, I may be sitting there going, yeah, no, I'll just use AI when nobody's looking, write 80% of this script and then I'll just put a little personal touch on it and save myself a lot of time. Yeah, maybe first stage and then I go through it myself and on the color. Just recently,
00:25:17
Speaker
Um, we did a promo video for a guitar challenge event that we're, we're, we're holding. And I was working with a company and we were trying to find a voiceover and we just thought, well, we'll just use AI. And we kept going back and forth going, nah, it's just, there's no energy in that. There's no, it's not right. Like I, I can see where they're going with it, but it's just not right. It's just not right. Then I finally just went.
00:25:47
Speaker
I'm just going to look on Fiverr and I found this absolute gun voiceover guy and he charged me $16 Australian. So I assumed that meant it's probably was $10 US and he was in the US and had a great voice. It took him all of about 15 minutes to record a perfect voiceover. And I just went, why did we spend hours?
00:26:17
Speaker
searching through all of these AI voices, when for 10 bucks, I got a perfect human. So I still think I'm with you. I don't think I think we're a long way away. Yeah. I really like reading books, but I also now because of computers, I like them to be read to me. And you can go, you know, Amazon has these things where the author has actually read the book.
00:26:44
Speaker
And that is a wonderful experience when you hear the author reading the book and the inflections and all the evidence they put into it and the storytelling, because that's quite an argument itself. A lot of times I just get my computer to read it to me and it is so flat. It is so just, you know, I, oh God, sometimes I just got to shut it off. I can't listen to that voice anymore. And I think that's going to, I think we're a long way away from, with music.
00:27:14
Speaker
I remember a while back, I had a girlfriend who was a harp player and quite well known in the classic music world in Europe, as far as a harp player goes. She played with a lot of famous musicians. And we were living, where I met her, I met her in Korea. And one thing like Korean musicians are absolutely fantastic and well trained and
00:27:43
Speaker
well-schooled, but when I would ask my girlfriend, I said, what are they like to play with? And she would say, and this is painting a wide brush, like I've met a lot of Koreans that are like amazing musicians, but one thing just kind of, this is a wide brush comment, but she would say like so many of them could hit any note at incredible speed and play every song
00:28:12
Speaker
note for note perfect, metronomic timing, but somewhere there was a missing bit of emotion of just knowing when to ebb and flow just that little bit. And I think that's where we're a long way with AI is reproducing that ability to just feel where music's supposed to go. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we're on the,
00:28:42
Speaker
music and visual production, that is its whole tool. That is the reason why music is in there, is to give you emotional pushes, emotional, let you know when there's two people looking at each other, the score underneath tells you what they're feeling, right? That emotional communication is so, so important. I have this with, there's a lot of music where I listen to
00:29:10
Speaker
And I do get sent quite a bit of music, which I enjoy, even though they misunderstand what Synclage is, because they don't have to send me your music. And there's quite a bit of stuff that I just think, I don't believe you.
00:29:22
Speaker
You're singing that you love somebody? I don't believe you. I think you're reading the words off a piece of paper in front of a microphone. I can picture that in the studio. I don't believe you. And I still do it a bit, but I have done quite a bit of voice training and teaching people how to use their voice. And one of the points I asked them, why do you think Michael Stipe and Bono became so big?
00:29:49
Speaker
Why do you think those two singers became so big? And they came from like indie stuff, right? And they became to be the biggest bands in the world at times because the singers were believable, because they were they really, you really felt they met what they were singing. Right. And they might not have been the most perfect singers of the time, even though I think highly of both of them. But
00:30:13
Speaker
You believed them. Their emotional content was there. You went through into your brain, into your subconscious, into your nervous system, and your whole system reacted to it. And I used to have a teacher in high school that taught me auto mechanics. And he was a wonderful guy. I really liked him. And in the shop, he was great. But in the classroom, he used to put me to sleep.
00:30:39
Speaker
And I used to have to physically put me to sleep. I used to fall asleep and I used to have to apologize to him. And it was the tone of his voice that he had a monotone way of speaking in the classroom. I think, I think we might, we might have the same teacher because when they, but when they were in the shop, they put you asleep in the classroom, but in the shop, the passion and love of, of woodworking would just come out. And it made me want to woodwork, which is something I have no interest in. Yeah.
00:31:07
Speaker
And it's the passion. And it's like, let me tell somebody, if they're passionate about something, then it's interesting. Then it's like, you get this energy from them. I was reading this report on stress and human stress and how human stress is actually physically
00:31:28
Speaker
we transfer it physically through our body, through, I don't, I forget what they were called, but we actually put out this chemical out of our body and if somebody is close to us, without consciously thinking this person is stressed, I could be smiling and being, everything's okay and be charming, but I'm stressed, they get stressed. And they've been tested, they've been done on that, but the communication with humans is so incredible that way.
00:31:57
Speaker
So you take that on a joyful level, on an excited level, that this communication is not only in the words and our facial expressions, it's physically in our bodies.
00:32:09
Speaker
And so having that, and that transfers through the music. There's the thing about AI that I had a discussion with somebody with, and I'm a big fan of old Stax Volt recordings. And there was Motown and there was Stax Volt, and they were doing this 1960s, early 70s R&B stuff. And the way the musicians played together, as a musician, what's called the push and the pull, where you lean forward on this note, and you lean back a little in the timing on this note,
00:32:39
Speaker
Right. And that sort of groove of it, that groove between musicians is what brings it a whole emotional level to listen to and what makes it so you just want to dance to it. Right. I don't think AI can do that. I don't think you can train it for once. I a hundred percent agree with that because, um, there there's in the, in the drumming community is all about like, can you play to a metronome?
00:33:07
Speaker
but where the really good drummers are the ones that know when to slow down a little bit and when to speed up. And it's just a natural feel. And I don't think that's a human thing because it's, it's not natural to play like a robot. It's natural to ebb and flow and feel the room and feel the other musicians. And just like going back to your saying about bringing that emotion, like I've been a, I'm a long time metal fan.
00:33:37
Speaker
And I've been all over this world and I've got to the point where I made a point of different countries I went into. I always try to find the local metal bar. And it doesn't matter what country I was in or what language was being spoken, the energy in those rooms and that shared camaraderie around the love of this music.
00:34:07
Speaker
I don't believe you can recreate that. I don't believe that if you had an artificially created song being played in front of 500,000 screaming fans at Rock and Rio, would you get the same emotion coming out of that crowd as Iron Maiden or Pantera or Slayers does?
00:34:36
Speaker
Because there's something that's deeper in music than just these are the notes to play at this time signature and this speed per minute or this many beats per minute. There's something a lot deeper and a lot more human and a lot more wonderful.
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah,
Evolution of Music Production Technology
00:34:58
Speaker
sure, sure. And we, you know, the idea of, I was having a discussion the other evening with somebody about AI and how, well, okay, it's not going to be, it's, you know, it is limited to what we teach it, right? And there are certain things about creation that we can't teach. We can't, we don't really understand it. We can put some words to it, but to actually teach some, some machine
00:35:21
Speaker
understand what human creation is, I don't think we understand it enough ourselves to be able to teach that. And I think I can pick out out of a group of songs, which ones were really authentically inspired to be produced and which ones were sort of cookie cutter. OK, there's these songs in the top 10. We're going to make one like that. We're going to get a singer in that sounds like that. And we're going to write lyrics like that.
00:35:47
Speaker
And those, you know, I can pick out from a mile away, right? And it's really, really boring stuff. And then you look at what they call legacy artists, especially 60s and 70s stuff. That stuff was created for the reason of creation. The majority of the legacy, all the legacy artists were.
00:36:09
Speaker
in my beliefs. And that translates for generations. People listen to that stuff and they go, oh, yeah, man, that's great. That's great. You know, I've lived in quite a few countries. And by that, I mean I have actually lived there for long periods of time. I've moved from one country to another on musical exploration. And one of the things I found myself quite a few times was I was in a country
00:36:37
Speaker
I didn't speak their language. They spoke just a little bit of English, but we had music. And I would meet musicians, and we'd put together a band, and we could play. And they would have different... Their initial ways of dealing with harmony and melody were very different from mine, right? Your cultural side, or learning side, or experience side.
00:37:04
Speaker
And they would put these other elements into my music, into my songs. And it was so exciting to hear it and to have these personalities, musical personalities come out through their instruments. I've been very blessed that way to have to experience that quite a few times in different countries.
00:37:26
Speaker
I can take a computer from Japan and plug it in with a computer from the States and they're not going to have any cultural, you know, it's not going to be anything like that. Again, I see AI as being a wonderful thing for medicine, for science in ways, for industry, figuring things out. And I do think quite a few people will lose their jobs, but other jobs will come up.
00:37:54
Speaker
And we will have this transition, but on the creative side, the other thing about that, Jeff, is things happen in waves and peaks. It goes up, it goes up, it levels off, it goes back down. And another thing comes back up. And so if we end up with a situation where there's a lot of AI-created music being produced and pushed out to the public, eventually that is going to become
00:38:19
Speaker
something people don't want, and there's going to be something else that comes up that's authentic. And I was having a discussion with somebody else about this, and they were saying, well, how do you know that? And I said, well, look what happened in the 70s.
00:38:32
Speaker
And you had bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And yes, these highly efficient, proficient musicians, experts on their instruments, playing this very intellectual music, over-orchestrated, over-arranged. And look how great I am on this instrument. That was a big thing about what they were saying, is look how great I am.
00:38:56
Speaker
And then you had all of a sudden this whole explosion of young people with three chord songs and two guitars, bass and drums yelling into a microphone that was far more exciting and far better to engaging people with. And it was a reaction from this other stuff.
00:39:13
Speaker
There's a classic thing of Sid Vicious walking down a street in London, and he had a Pink Floyd shirt on. And I love Pink Floyd, so I have nothing against them. I don't want anybody to think that. But he had a Pink Floyd shirt on, and above it he had written in a magic marker, I hate.
00:39:30
Speaker
And it was that sort of thing. This stuff is so repulsive to me. I think we always seem to swing back to just human nature and our core instincts, which is just hardwired into us for so many millenniums that
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think it's, I think it'll have its spot. Um, it'll be used in the, maybe to create efficiency in the stuff that doesn't need to be creative, but they'll always be a space for people to be creative. And, um, it just right now we're in an era where uniqueness and ingenuity
00:40:30
Speaker
is maybe a little harder to get to the surface because there's just so much noise. But on the flip side of that, there are a lot more opportunity for niche creativity to create their own communities. So in fairness, there's a good chance that there's a lot of really creative stuff that I don't know about just because I just don't run in those circles. But when you, when you dig a little deeper,
00:40:59
Speaker
You find all sorts of communities that have niche ways to explore their creativity and they may not be mainstream, but they still have millions and millions of people within that community. I think Comic-Con and things like that are excellent examples of things that probably started off a little bit fringe, but now are just massive industries.
00:41:29
Speaker
where, yeah, but now it's, you know, there's some of the biggest conventions in the world are based around those kind of niche, like there's millions of people showing their creativity through that. So yeah, so that's exciting for sure. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the basic things of humans is we are
00:41:50
Speaker
uniquely creative. Now, some people argue with that, okay, birds are creative too, yes, okay, yes, yes, bird song is a creative thing, but humans do have this thing where, and it doesn't have to be in the arts, right? It can be in mechanics of building a new machine and having the creative idea of how that machine should actually be better to work. I wanted to do this function.
00:42:17
Speaker
You know, we have something that we call a lawnmower, right? And this is pretty standard. If you have a lawn, you have a lawnmower. And it's a pretty standard piece of mechanics, right? And it cuts the lawn. OK, great. That was actually come out of an area of England where they were making the felt for pool tables.
00:42:41
Speaker
And they had a machine that had these flat paddle blades, and it spun, and it gave this really smooth surface for the felt. And they ran it over the felt. And there was one guy that had the really creative idea. Actually, if I was to put those paddles on a bit more of an angle, put a sharp blade on, I could actually cut my lawn with it. Right? That creative idea, right?
00:43:09
Speaker
And we do that all the time. I'm sitting in front of a laptop, which is amazing. I used to work decades ago. I worked as a house engineer in a big recording studio in Toronto.
00:43:24
Speaker
It was a big studio. It was two 24-track machines and all this outboard gear, compressors and reverbs and all this sort of stuff. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, big mixing console, soundproof rooms, all of this sort of stuff. I now have that on my laptop. I have this amazing thing in my laptop. I have one that's just for doing music on.
00:43:50
Speaker
I have pianos in there. I have drums in there. I've got all this kind of stuff. It's quite incredible. I can change microphones in there. And, you know, that is an amazing, amazing progression for technology. But the other side of it is there is always a but, right? There's always a yin to the yang. There's always a push to the pull.
00:44:09
Speaker
There is that now it's so simple for people to create music that there is not this barrier for you have to get up to the certain level of proficiency of understanding of production before you actually put out your music. So there's a lot of music that's coming out that isn't, the people do not understand arranging, they do not understand mic technique, they do not understand certain elements of the art of arranging and producing the recording.
00:44:39
Speaker
So they might have a great song and some ideas, but then they record it on their laptop and they don't really understand what that process is. And they put something out and it's mediocre at best. You probably know this, but right now they say it's about 130, maybe more thousand tracks per day get released. And back in the 80s, I think it was around 30,000 a year.
00:45:09
Speaker
So the difference in output is huge because of the technology. I can buy for 700 bucks. I can buy a laptop, go sit in my bedroom and make my song. But you're not learning the process through actually having to build yourself up through the ranks and find yourself in a position where somebody's willing to pay for the studio for you because you're that good. I guess the third but is who cares?
00:45:35
Speaker
If it, if depending on what the motivation for that person who's releasing that song is, is it, if they want to be famous, well, and they want to make a lot of money from their song, well, they probably need to improve their skills. But if they, if their sole goal is just to see if they could do it and it sounds good for themselves and maybe their mum likes it. And they had fun during the process. A couple of years ago, I wrote a movie script and
00:46:02
Speaker
I was learning while I did it and stuff and I sent it off and I got some feedback and I knew it wasn't going to be, you know, the next blockbuster right off the bat. But boy, did I enjoy the process. And, and yeah, and it's like when I get together with my mates and we jam and we, we only do our original stuff. None of it is like we recorded on an iPhone just so we can hear it. And, and, but the whole process is the fun.
00:46:31
Speaker
So it really depends on what's the motivation of the artist. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. The motivation and why are you doing and the process of creation is a wonderful thing. It's probably something that so many of us as adults ignore. Like I actually, I try to be funny and stuff when I write emails. Like there is a mate of mine who's a journalist and he's a professor.
00:47:01
Speaker
We write texts to each other. Neither one of us really likes texting except to each other because we actually use it as a creative outlet. So yeah, it's just, I think a lot of people, if they can tap into their creativity, it's a wonderful thing. And it, and it,
Sync Lodge Business Model and Invitation
00:47:20
Speaker
and we're not encouraged unless you go into the arts, every other discipline, you're, you know, you're not supposed to be creative and funny or entertaining or whatever.
00:47:31
Speaker
like just do your job. Yeah. Yeah. I love that point. I love that point of yours, what you just said now, because there is something that incredibly engaging and pulls you in when somebody is sort of charming or fun or playful in what they're doing. And what they're doing could be just talking about accounting.
00:47:54
Speaker
and the company's accounts. But, you know, you want them to be on the mark with it. But when they are, when you have this human relationship that's on a, we shouldn't use the word entertaining, but engaging level, that can be so, so. Yeah. And it's where that line is. Cause you know, I have the, one of the favorite topics of all my mates when we're sitting around having a beer or sitting around a campfire and beer is,
00:48:24
Speaker
We debate, you know, albums and artists and writers and where is that line of, you know, you know, like you said, like, is it, is it yes way on the one extreme or is it, um, you know, Lady Gaga on the other extreme or something like that where it's she actually, she's a bad example, but you know what I mean? Like it's, um, where is that line? Yeah. Um, I think quite whole line.
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was just going to say that's not a wonderful thing to do that I can debate creativity and to discuss amongst friends. Yeah. I think we're about to go down another rabbit hole. But I think for now, we'll stop it here. But I think we're going to have to have you on again and continue this conversation. It's been fantastic talking to you. I knew it would be. I'd love to.
00:49:22
Speaker
Maybe next time we could go a bit more into what I'm supposed to be promoting in that Sync Lodge. Well, I got a better option here. Everybody who's been listening and really wants to learn about Sync Lodge, why don't you reach out to Lionel? Where can they find you? Well, the easiest best place is on LinkedIn. And as you know, you can send me an email and a contact request.
00:49:49
Speaker
I am the only Lionel Lodge on the internet, which is funny thing to say, but it seems to be true. So I'm quite easy to find. I am on Facebook, but that's usually just for personal. I just keep that to for family and close friends. Sync Lodge is synclodge.com. S-Y-N-C-L-O-D-G-E.com. And you can reach out to us there. I do like to point out that Sync Lodge is being built for no barrier of entry, which means that there is no membership or sign up fees.
00:50:17
Speaker
And we will never charge membership or sign up fees. Our business model is that if you're a music creator and you get a sync placement, we charge you 2% of the license fee and we don't touch anything on the back end royalties. So it's very altruistic in that way. And so it's no reason not to sign up, just sign up. We will check you out, make sure that you properly register with your music. And if you're not, then we'll guide you on that.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah. Then you can be on the site and when somebody finds your music and they want to use it, they'll get in touch with you directly. Sounds fantastic.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:50:55
Speaker
Um, thanks again for being on the show and thanks for everybody for listening and for all of you, um, make sure you go to the laughing otter.com, which is just the laughing otter.com. You can find us on Instagram, Tik TOK, uh, Facebook, Twitter, August is now called X.
00:51:17
Speaker
Um, and I'm Jeff Bogenberger. You can, I'm thinking I'm the only one on the internet as a Jeff Bogenberger. So you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Thanks again for listening everyone. And remember, we all deserve to be having a lot more fun. Yes, we all do.