Marketing your music: Don’t skip steps! w/ Patrick Ross

Patrick Ross (00:00)
Don't skip steps. And I think that's true across any artist's journey. I've managed a few artists in my time and always sort of stuck to that and saw that to be very true of like, you need to try and do as much. I know it's really hard and I know like constantly being on and creating content can be really, really hard. The worst marketing campaigns are always the ones.

where I feel like folks think this exists and maybe it does, but this idea that somebody just went into a room and said, don't worry, we've figured out the story behind this. And I think any artist we've ever worked with, it's like, there's a story and you help tell it. And better that you get at explaining your story, especially digitally, visually, like the kind of content that you create, that's only gonna help you to then go employ somebody or work with somebody that's gonna be able to do that.

Jimmy Mikaoui (00:53)
Welcome to the Music to Your Ears podcast. I'm Jimmy Mikaoui joined by my co-host. And today we have a very special guest, Patrick Ross, Chief Operating Officer of Music Ally, who's one of the most relevant and respected publication in the music industry, as well as in the event and education space. Patrick, welcome.

Danny Garcia (00:58)
Danny Garcia.

Patrick Ross (01:18)
Welcome. Welcoming myself. Yes, thank you for the big welcome and nice to be here, y'all. Thanks for the invite.

Jimmy Mikaoui (01:26)
It's an absolute pleasure to have you. I've been very excited about getting you on. ⁓ Obviously, we've worked in different capacities ⁓ through the year. ⁓ One thing we do share, the three of us, is kind of the music industry bug where ⁓ as we were studying and choosing a path in life, we knew that the music business was going to be the destination.

⁓ Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how it all started?

Patrick Ross (02:01)
Sure, we're going way back. ⁓ Probably a similar story to a lot of folks, but growing up in Atlanta, Georgia ⁓ in a band, because I like music and that sounded like a cool idea. ⁓

My father explained in no uncertain terms that that was great, but that I was going to need to get some sort of a business degree. So drove up to Nashville, Tennessee, where a buddy of mine was a year older than me and was going to be going to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, which I'd never heard of, never been to Nashville before. And yeah, we drove up there, drove up and down Music Row. ⁓

back in like 2002 or three or something like that. And it just baffled that all these companies from my compact discs or CDs for short had buildings. And it was like, my God, what the heck is this? There's this whole business. So that was where I kind of got the bug. Didn't really understand what it was all about. And then as most people that went to my university, to the mic.

Curb College of ⁓ Music and Entertainment Business. They had these college fairs that would come around to your local, your hometown or whatever. And the Belmont one had an electric guitar on it. I don't play the guitar, but it looked cool. And the amount of people that I met that first year of like, you come here because of the guitars? Yeah, man, like that seemed, and yeah, studied music business, which found out that was a thing. And that was my humble beginnings.

Jimmy Mikaoui (03:41)
I never looked back.

Patrick Ross (03:43)
Occasionally check the rear view, but yeah.

Jimmy Mikaoui (03:49)
consistently chipping away. ⁓ That's really cool. was marketing already something that ⁓ piqued your interest when you were studying music business or did it come later?

Patrick Ross (04:03)
Not at all. I was, ⁓ I mean, I digital sort of did, but I never ever thought that would have anything to do ⁓ with my career. On the side, like my side hustle was building websites for people, very basic websites and doing stuff like that. ⁓ And then, yeah, I had a few internships, landed one over in London where I found myself now. ⁓ And...

basically went in there and rattled off trying to find a job. weren't necessarily hiring, but it was like trying to explain what I could do. And I was like, yeah, I've got sort of decent working knowledge of ⁓ how copyright works. And I can explain that to you because I sat in classes and they're like, that's great, but what can you do? And I was like, okay. ⁓

Yeah, I understand. I understand a bit about international music business. I took some courses, basically rattled. I know what synchronization is. I took a course on that and it was like, great, fantastic. But what can you do? And then ⁓ kind of finally got around the, ⁓ I can make banners for like websites and things. And they're like, my gosh, digital marketing. ⁓ so didn't really even know it was a thing. And, ⁓ yeah, kind of stumbled into it for being a, I guess an early digital native and, ⁓

Yeah, it was a skill set outside of some book knowledge and ⁓ for the longest time I didn't even call it marketing. I had my own little agency and I called it Web Presence Management because I didn't like the word marketing. ⁓ I was much more of this idea that with music we don't need to market it, we just need to communicate and if it's good and it reaches the right audience. ⁓

Yeah, eventually got slapped with a marketing title, no, tripped, fell, stumbled, and put little bit of digital into marketing, and that's where I found myself.

Danny Garcia (05:55)
How has it evolved since then? Obviously, your role at Music Ally, you see a ton of different campaigns and success stories. What are some key differences from back then to now? You mentioned one, like banners. People still use banners, but I assume it's a lot less about that nowadays. What kind of differences have come about since then?

Patrick Ross (06:23)
I don't think it's changed at all. Everybody needs to get a good MySpace page, hire me and I'll put some banners on there and sell iTunes downloads and then you're set. No, I I spent a lot of my time working in distribution for a company called AWOL, which is where we met way back when, Jimmy, in one of the incarnations of AWOL. I was there a long time ago, but kind of ⁓ watched digital distribution go from

iTunes downloads to obviously the streaming era ⁓ and followed that along ⁓ as the consumption of music changed ⁓ and in the same way, the way people interacted online changed. And I guess those are the two biggest differences. Obviously we've gone from this idea that, know, well, we might actually be going back to it with them.

with some of the talk out there these days that, you know, purchasing is still pretty powerful with the tools like even and bandcamp. But yeah, I went away from this transactional marketing, which did make things a little easier for a while, you know, physical still around, sure. But even with the download, you knew, you kind of knew what you were doing. There was a, you had to get somebody somewhere once. And obviously now it's much more.

always on because, ⁓ yeah, leading someone to stream is a certainly not going to be, not going to be the end on be all and, ⁓ you know, getting them to actually transact interact, whether that is by sharing first party data and signing up to hear more, actually buying a ticket or some merch or whatever that is has, I guess, is becoming more important. I think for a while we lost sight and kind of thought that streaming and saved everything. And now I think we're

realizing it's part of the picture. yeah, biggest change I suppose is that how we have to interact with fans and a lot of that's down to the consumption model of streaming and then also the platforms themselves that we now live on and interact and follow our favorite art.

Danny Garcia (08:33)
It

makes total sense. I think, you I see all different types of approaches to it. Like you have these newer artists that are born in this era and they kind of are like, you said, like native to this new model. But I also talked to a lot of artists that are coming from the older model and trying to kind of figure out the new one. Do you have starting places or even just almost like crash tips for artists that are trying to kind of

stand out, cut through the noise right now, where should they kind of begin looking at? mean, you mentioned stream like, you know, it's not just about streams, right? It's streams are one piece of the pie. ⁓ You know, unpacking that a little bit. What should they be leading people towards? it, know, email list collection? I mean, you mentioned a few tools like even things like that. How do you approach that? And what are some kind of like tips for for starting artists or maybe an artist that is trying to

transfer into this new model.

Patrick Ross (09:33)
How, for this, this, this slightly more established artists, just give me an idea. How long have they been around? Like 10 years, 20 years? What are we talking about? There's a big difference here.

Danny Garcia (09:44)
Yeah, that's a good point. think I see a lot of artists that are they've they were big, let's say in the early 2000s, right? Or even semi like had a career and then kind of stopped and are coming back into the game. And they're just like completely lost because they're like, I didn't know what distributors are. didn't know what Spotify like, like in the, in the new sense. Right. So they're now saying, okay, I need to, you know, get on playlists. need to run Tik TOK campaigns. need to.

do all these different things that if you make one simple Google search, right, you'll get hit by a bunch of different articles, but it's hard to know where to start. Like what's, what's kind of like the starting place I bite into as an artist, whether I'm new and just getting started or kind of coming from, from it, from a different angle.

Patrick Ross (10:31)
Answer it in one way that ⁓ is probably, I think what I'm paying the most attention to now that sort of reawakened me ⁓ is getting that first party data. So we talk a lot about the super fan and I'm not going to talk too much about that because that kind of gets misinterpreted and it's, ⁓ more about just, just fans and giving them a place to connect. I mean, community, another really big buzzword, but.

buzzword for a reason. And for those artists that maybe have been around for a longer period of time and maybe went way back and built a decent MySpace following or a Facebook following or an Instagram following or whatever it was and have kind of seen platforms shift, change, audiences move on and realize that maybe they did a lot of work building up an audience in a place that's no longer relevant.

⁓ Those or active might be relevant again, but ⁓ those of us that have been around ⁓ will sometimes sit around good friend of mine at Domino Records. ⁓ We like to agree with each other because we've seen it all kind of not all, but we've seen a lot come and go and our advice tends to be to either side. You may have already seen this happen and lost everybody because the platform that you put everything into ⁓ no longer serves you for whatever reason.

And for a developing artist thinking, not having had that experience going, I'm putting everything into the discovery that I'm going to get on whichever algorithmic platform. And that discovery is great. And if you can, you know, ⁓ game those algorithms and create content to be discovered, that's fantastic. But yes, what you do with it and how you draw people in deeper. So first party data, whatever that looks like.

⁓ you know, ⁓ there, there is no one size fits all, which is, kind of think what's quite interesting. ⁓ if your fans are savvy enough to use discord, it could be discord. ⁓ we've seen artists now that have an older fan base using Facebook groups. ⁓ you know, WhatsApp groups, whatever, whatever it is that fits your audience, there's no one size fits all, which is I think really cool. ⁓ yeah, just making sure that people have a clear understanding of where to go next. ⁓

because anybody that's been, you know, dancing the dance for, you know, from the early 2000s, ⁓ it gets quite exhausting continuing to try and feed those algorithms. I see a lot of some of my favorite artists that get that exact kind of era of like, ⁓ early 2000s that are kind of back now, a little confused because things have changed. But at the same time, like they had some level and I can see some of them making me excited by ⁓

There's an artist that I've always liked called Ben Queller and he started getting really digital in like a super nice way. I think I there's some big news that broke and it was kind of like moving around and I saw in different networks. So I started following him was like, gosh, I haven't thought about this guy in years, but he's still here. And I think I liked his Instagram story or commented on a post and instantly I got a DM.

that was automated and was like, hey, it's me. This is totally automated. By the way, I really appreciate you doing that. So I don't have to keep hustling so much. Please respond here and ⁓ you'll sign up to my mailing list. I was like, yeah, fantastic. And so I think seeing artists like that realize that there's lapsed fans, people that maybe haven't thought about them in a few years, and actually using whatever they've got release-wise or news-wise going on to actually...

jump back into those places, but also make sure that we know well enough that we need to give them a bit of first party data so that they don't just disappear again and they can let us know if they ever take a hiatus and are ready to come back and give us an announcement.

Jimmy Mikaoui (14:29)
that that's fascinating. Thanks a lot, Patrick, because we, we talk a lot about the, the authenticity versus best practice when you're an artist and how to not lose yourself and your soul and trying to tick all the boxes that marketeers, advisors, managers recommend, ⁓ you follow, but you brought up a different perspective to the same problem.

which is really understanding your audiences and trying to connect in places that will make sense to them or will make ⁓ the experience enjoyable. Discord keeps coming back as this kind of new, pure platform for connecting, sharing ideas, sharing music sometimes, but ⁓ as a real community building tool. ⁓

versus TikTok where the algorithm is kind of king and you're just trying to tickle it and get lucky somehow.

Patrick Ross (15:35)
And I don't think Discord's for everyone. ⁓

don't think I understood it for a while until I actually started using it for gaming. And I play a very strange Marvel game on the Nintendo Switch that doesn't have community features. There's a bunch of us weird people that are still playing a 15-year-old game, and we connect on Discord. But that was the first time I actually kind of understood how it works. Like I said, I'm pretty digital native, but it was a little bit different. So I think that's why...

it isn't the one size fits all because I think there's a certain fan base that maybe doesn't understand because Discord is, it's not intuitive for a certain demographic of fan. They can probably figure it out, but it's a very different kind of platform. There's a lot of noise in there if you don't understand all these different servers that you're on, which is why we're also seeing, ⁓ you know, there's a million community platforms out there. ⁓ The first one that comes to mind, well, there's things like Chorus.

I really like one called Indie Riot and what they're doing is kind of very looks like Facebook, but it's all about owning your community. But again, it's not about one of these. It's about like understanding what your audience, how they already engage. Are they already on a platform or are they keen to download an app or go live somewhere else? What kind of interface would they like? You know, they ⁓ love the idea of a Discord with hundreds of threads that they can go through. Do they want it to be really simple with a feed?

Um, and I'd be able to have like DMS. I think that, um, yeah, it's one of, mean, I'll give, give credit where it's due, but, um, Aaron Bugucchi, uh, the big cookie himself, as somebody recently recently said, the more that we talk, there's always this, this like, like taking the time to actually get the data and understand the data, not meaning like a bunch of ones and zeros, but like, okay, who is this audience? And we've seen that. Um, I talk a lot about the,

The Glass Animals campaign that was very successful. That was a really cool one. And they did exactly that. The White Lies campaign that we've written about, they did exactly that. And there's a whole time of actually asking the fan, understanding, like, what do they like? What are they not like? Where would they like these things? And then whatever you build or wherever you go, you're kind of like destined for success because they've said that's what we want. That's what we would like. You know what I mean? And I think too much in the past, it's all been like,

crap, we need to go beyond fill in the blank with algorithmic social media platform because that's where everyone breaks now and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe, but just check out, is that actually where your audience wants to hear from you? If they do, cool, but you know, if not, maybe ask them where they're spending their time and don't drag them somewhere else.

Danny Garcia (18:15)
Completely. Yeah. It seems like just from hearing you talk, it's like, I'm bringing it back to an artist, looking at 2026, where to start and where to focus on community building is kind of the, I think, common denominator. And a lot of people say this as well. And I think it's a trend, but it's a trend for a reason because it works, like you're saying. And I think, you know, a question I had like zooming out, right? ⁓

with this idea of trends in terms of marketing trends looking, you know, I'm sure you interface with a lot of companies and teams. Where do you think indie teams are over-investing in, terms of marketing right now ⁓ or under-investing it? I think community is one that kind of comes up as maybe, maybe people are under-investing ⁓ specifically like in, at like an indie label or things like that. They may still be caught up in the streaming game or

⁓ you know, just chasing the vanity metrics. ⁓ do you see any areas where people might be over focusing on?

Patrick Ross (19:19)
I mean, from a community perspective, I think that's really the responsibility of manager and artist. you wouldn't, know, label can help. And I'm not saying they shouldn't, but, you know, at the end of the day, and maybe giving them access, but at end of the day, you know, the idea of community is something much, much bigger. And I guess one of the things that we're

Seeing as a bigger industry issue and the value of this community is, like around data ownership. Um, I know we're like a friendly Indy, um, because yeah, sure. All Indies are friendly. Um, but not all majors are evil. It's a, it's, it's some kind of, you know, this, data ownership thing, regardless is, is a big part of the conversation. So I would say that that one generally should really.

be something that the immediate team takes on board and then of course can give access to. Over-investing, mean, community shouldn't cost that much. Like we say, you can do it as simple as Discord or a Facebook group or even email is technically some sort of a two-way street. I don't know that I see people.

Jimmy Mikaoui (20:33)
you

⁓

Patrick Ross (20:34)
There's not much money to waste these days. You know, I mean, from what we write about at Music Ally, so over, well, on both of our websites, Music Ally Classic, musically.com, or Music Ally Pro, we've got a lot of campaigns and I spend a lot of time looking through those. And one of our favorite parts of that is, you know, looking at the budget lines and seeing what people did with very small amounts of money. Cause when you've got...

50,000 pounds and you did a pretty good job. It's like, well, I could have done that too. So I don't know in the indie space, I don't, I don't feel like I see a lot of people wasting too much. And ⁓ I think one of the interesting shifts, I guess that we're seeing right now, industry wise is kind of like the rise of the agency, you know, marketing agencies and people being able to pick their teams. So like, as a result of that, there's more accountability.

Danny Garcia (21:19)
Yeah.

Patrick Ross (21:28)
⁓ You know, there's more responsibility back onto the artist team, management team and all that, but there's also more accountability in terms of your kind of hiring folks out to do a job for you, if that makes sense.

Danny Garcia (21:40)
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I know with Music Ally, like you said, you look at so many campaigns and I'm sure, I mean, it's probably pretty telling. ⁓ Just baseline, like what percentage would you say are actually like successful campaigns of the ones you get, or do you just get successful campaigns? You don't look at the negative ones. ⁓ But I guess just...

percentage wise, I think it could help, right? Cause not every song is a winner, right? And I think that's something we see just from the digital side, right? Like certain songs with very similar creatives get, it's like two times better click through rates on Meta or get on like 20 times more playlists, right? So things like that, that just organically just makes sense. ⁓ Do you see that a lot in the campaigns that you evaluate and kind of cover on Music Alley?

Patrick Ross (22:38)
And so our campaigns come to us and in a couple of main ways. Number one is they tend to be submitted by the teams. So whether that's label agency management, they don't tend to, they don't tend to go, ⁓ my God, look how I screwed this one up. Which would be nice. And you know, we could maybe have that. ⁓

Jimmy Mikaoui (23:01)
We'll

send you a few if you need entertainment.

Patrick Ross (23:05)
⁓ On the other side, we track things internally. And part of the reason for that was not about the unsuccessful ones, like, you know, folks were, everyone, everyone loves to criticize, especially from their armchair, we're criticizing us that we weren't covering, I don't know, some of the biggest campaigns of a certain summer. And we're like, well, look, we maybe didn't get that submit, but we covered it. So we've been doing that as well to make sure that we're ⁓

But I guess even the stuff that we're looking for in our campaign tracking, we tend to follow what happened. And we can kind of see where things pivot, but I would say most of the campaigns that we've tended to follow are probably ended up being successful. That doesn't mean that there weren't like troubles along the way or...

I think mostly what we would see, I think that is the most interesting. It's not quite, it's, it's not failure, but it's actually seeing something was failing or not succeeding well enough. And then actually going back to the drawing board or having content plans. think that's one of the things we see a lot of like, I can't think of the campaign off the top of my head. It's somewhere in there. it was very much that they'd like, I don't even think I could do this thought so far ahead.

of like, if a happens, and then we've got B, which might lead to C. And they had like plans upon plans, if you know what I mean. And so as things were like going, they kind of, and then obviously some of these things didn't happen. Some of these things did. And then maybe something totally left field came and they had to kind of rejig, but this idea of like really thinking ahead and planning for contingencies, best case scenario, worst case scenario, ⁓ or then like complete unknown, but going, okay, we had thought of this and we've got this, you know, up our sleeve to be able to be.

to be reactive. think that's like, because you know from the outset exactly what's going to work. You'd like to hope that it all is, but I think that the being reactive aspect is where you see true success that could have been a failure if you didn't listen to what was happening or pay attention to the feedback that was coming back.

Jimmy Mikaoui (25:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, if I rephrase Danny's question instead of ⁓ successful versus unsuccessful campaigns, it's which ones achieved the goal they were set to achieve ⁓ versus those where there was a great effort and it led to wonderful things that weren't necessarily what the teams were planning in the first place.

Patrick Ross (25:42)
I will... So these are probably things we've not written about. I'm going to go back into some more of our personal, ⁓ let's call it more consultation experience, no names to be named. ⁓ yeah, some of the worst things that happen to folks and you can try and warn them ⁓ is when A, the artist doesn't really understand their own identity. It's a very important thing to sit down with any artist and actually... ⁓

ask them why they do this, what they represent, what success looks like to them, ask them to actually kind of try and explain themselves and have some sort of self-awareness. And some of the very worst ones are when, blame who you want, external marketing agency, a record label, somebody, external lawyer, somebody comes in and goes, I know exactly who you are and tries to put somebody into a box. You mentioned authenticity earlier.

⁓ And I think that's where we see some of the biggest failures and yeah, they don't get written about because they're their abject failures. But some some marketing dude comes along and tells you that ⁓ not to go deep into meta targeting, but this is exactly what you should be doing. And then all of a sudden, you have an audience that doesn't speak the language of the country that you're from, which is totally fine. But then it's like, do you really think they're there for the music or the fact that there's shots of you in your underwear? ⁓

which might have happened with somebody and it's like, ⁓ right. And it's like, no, it's cool. You've got a lot of them now, but are they going to be interested in your pop music? like, yeah, it's I think I think that, you know, people learn from that. But I the more artists I talked to that have been, you know, around the ringer, through around the houses are the ones that and some of them have survived and come back and been like, yeah, we just we didn't know who we were. We didn't take the time to do that. Somebody came in and ⁓ and and

put fancy coats on us and shot this crazy music video and then decided to target this audience. And yeah, the authenticity wasn't there.

Jimmy Mikaoui (27:44)
Um, that's really funny. Uh, to, go back to the point you raised about the, the rise of the marketing agency. Uh, I'm personally a big fan of those agencies. I think they have a very difficult challenge, um, that's linked to the cycle of engagement. Um, when you're management, when you're a team artist, to some extent, when you're the record label on a three album contract.

You can try things where there's a very long-term view or understand that some investments might justify themselves as it's just building blocks towards a much better future. ⁓ Agencies are thrown into that equation, ⁓ sometimes working on an EP cycle, a single cycle and expected to produce results.

Have you seen good ways for them to click into that environment or is it a constant point of friction in your opinion?

Patrick Ross (28:55)
I mean, some of the best agencies will be very clear that they don't take on anything. They don't take on everything. Which if you're comparing it to a record label and, you know, speaking from personal experience, being a digital marketer at a record label, have very little to no say over what comes across your desk for, you know, so that you just got to work it.

⁓ whereas I think agencies do, I'm not saying they all do this, but the better ones that I know out there will actually go, I'm sorry, we can't do this. Like for whatever reason, because we can't promise you success. So I think that's actually quite a healthy thing that they are, you know, not just going to take the work, ⁓ because it's, because it's paid as opposed to fortunately or unfortunately, if you're, you know, a label and it's, it's, you're contracted to do the marketing, there's, there's, there's no saying no.

I would like to think that, you know, within agencies, can also be, depending on who's contracting them, but they can also be thinking a little bit wider, you know, looking at the tour, looking at the merch, where, and I guess where we see a lot of these agencies stepping in is obviously the bigger companies are having less centralized marketing people, given the restructuring that's going on. But that, but there's

budgets coming out, right? There's funding that's coming out. That's how these agencies are able to be paid. And I think it, yeah, it is actually much more refreshing to be able to pick your team, especially like regionally. So having different strategies going on in different markets and ⁓ having a team that can hopefully think a little bit wider than just the EP, just the release, because I think, you know, the tick box marketing that ⁓ label marketers

can, not always, but we can get accused of is because of the idea that it's, you know, how long can you really pay attention, especially as like rosters are going through the roof in terms of like how many artists somebody has to actually look at. I mean, I've heard numbers like five, 10, 50, 60, 250. It's like, how are you supposed to do a good job? Whereas, you know, with an agency model that...

is actually saying no, taking on the right kind of work and trying to build on that, that hopefully there's more longevity.

Jimmy Mikaoui (31:24)
Thanks lot,

Patrick. For independent artists listening who get the message from this conversation that those marketing agencies are now a piece of the team in their own way and not just ⁓ the subcontractor of someone they have a relationship with, what would be your advice as to when to engage?

⁓ or try to find a marketing agency that will be the right partner when you're developing your career.

Patrick Ross (32:02)
I guess affordability is going to be the first one if you're depending on where how starting or starting out you are. I do think it's very important for this kind of this came to me from a friend called Devon Lando who works in live basically saying don't skip steps. And I think that's true across any artist's journey. So I've managed a few artists in my time and

always sort of stuck to that and saw that to be very true of like, you need to try and do as much. I know it's really hard and I know like constantly being on and creating content can be really, really hard, but it produced the most authentic stuff. also allowed us as a artist and manager to understand what we liked and what we didn't like. And you know, with anything in the music industry, having some level of understanding of how it works allows you to challenge the people that you're working with.

⁓ so I think first and foremost is, you know, do as much of this as you can, whether that's with friends without spending a lot of money, ⁓ and getting an idea of, yeah, of what kind of things you can create because the worst marketing campaigns are always the ones where, ⁓ I feel like folks thinks that they think this exists and maybe it does, but this, this idea that somebody just went into a room and said, don't worry, we figured out the story behind this.

And I think any artist we've ever worked with, it's like there's a story and you help tell it. And the better that you get at explaining your story, and especially digitally, visually, like the kind of content that you create, that's only gonna help you to then go employ somebody or work with somebody that's gonna be able to do that. So. ⁓

Hopefully that's a long roundabout answer. And then if you've got enough money to bring an agency on, fantastic. But that's a step that you're going to have to work your way up to.

Jimmy Mikaoui (34:02)
⁓ We're not meant to plug song tools on this podcast, but there is an alternative and many others as well.

Danny Garcia (34:10)
Yeah, yeah, no, and I think that the storytelling point there that you just said is huge because I think a lot of a lot of these independent artists are looking for like hacks. They're kind of like trying to find they think it's like a switch that you can turn or some something you can an agency you can hire but to your point if there's no good story or and you have it really

flesh that out and there's no authenticity. You could hire the best agency in the world. It's just, it's not going to work. Right. ⁓ and, you might have a good song. it's like that world building around, around the track and around the release overall that I think, like you're saying drives better, more engagement, better results and everything. ⁓ going, you know, looking ahead, I think I always like to ask is, you know, you must see a lot of different tools and tech.

What are you most excited about looking ahead in 2026 and beyond? mean, AI is definitely a topic that we can't not mention, but are there other tools? I know you mentioned other ones that perhaps in the community building side that people should be looking at or that you're most excited about.

Patrick Ross (35:22)
tools that I'm really excited about. Let me just think of things I've talked about lately. ⁓ I think there's people doing very interesting things on Substack. That's not the most out there. ⁓

Danny Garcia (35:36)
know, that's

not a lot of people think about it in the music industry context, though, I think. I think ⁓ for an artist, it could be really interesting.

Patrick Ross (35:46)
Yeah, story storytelling, we're watching, we're seeing a lot of folks, they're doing just mean, it's for writing, right. And it has a, you know, donate, like, it's got a Patreon model or whatever it's got, you know, that's built into it. And ⁓ yeah, I think we've seen some very interesting things where people, like are putting their behind the scenes on there and actually writing blogs about what they're creating and doing the storytelling and sub stack, which like is

quite natural, I think. That's a very interesting one. ⁓ Other tools wise, I mean, I guess just to kind of what we were talking a lot about at Music Ally and we keep talking about is gaming experiences, especially like UGC games, which hopefully folks know what those are, especially within like Roblox and Fortnite, ⁓ but not the...

Nothing, not the big kind of tent pole moment stuff. That's great when you can get there, but just like actually partnering with indie games companies. We, was, uh, when we bumped into each other in Atlanta, uh, Jimmy, I went out to see a video game studio called resurgence. That's a video game studio in Atlanta. Nice folks. And they built some interesting games and I brought a bunch of music industry folks and it was just, and I'm sure there's lots of games companies out there. It was really interesting to see how much they didn't.

No, like if you just talk to these guys, like, hey, we'd love to do some, you know, activations and things like, oh, that's so cool. Like there's real people out there doing UGC gaming. Um, and it doesn't have to be like, uh, so I think that's, it's kind of metaverse. So just like bringing people in, it's a, you know, uh, I think that's very exciting. And actually to stop on the gaming thing in a minute, but, um, we were, uh,

a recent conference that we had. I had some lovely panelists and we were all great, but most of us were sort of from the traditional music industry. And then we had ⁓ one person who basically built in Fortnite or worked within like ⁓ actually building Fortnite experiences. So we're all great talking about the traditional music industry tools and what kind of data we look at. then we kind of look over at this person and they, ⁓ the company had actually built ⁓ the twice like

was the first persistent game in Fortnite and in Roblox. And yeah, basically said something that was like a soundbite of, users in these games, they're behaving the music. kind of she corrected herself. was like, what did you just say? And we all know. And I was like, well, yeah, they don't go there just for the emote or the chat.

Obviously the music is playing while they're going around and they can buy the merch. But all of this is a totally different way. And I think that that kind of thing is extremely interesting. Behaving music, it's like, yeah, I want the whole experience, which yes, in a live.

concert we probably behaved some Grateful Dead before but like but they behave the music and I thought that was like a really cool concept of like much more immersive online experience that like ⁓ yeah is far bigger than just going to check out the track but that it's like the backing to where your friends meet up and that's that's pretty cool.

Jimmy Mikaoui (39:08)
Are you on that point? Are you seeing an opening in distribution or making music available? of like the bridge between the stingers of this world on one side and the one-to-one experience you had in Atlanta was a developer and a team of music executives that can hash out the partnership on the spot, but it wasn't necessarily pipes and agreements.

Patrick Ross (39:37)
Um, I know, um, what district kid distributes to two roadblocks now, right? Uh, yeah. Yeah. So I think there's going to be more of that. I'm not sure if that's actually monetized. Um, but there's hopefully going to be more of that. Um, but don't, uh, yeah. I mean, obviously Stinger's like quite on the nose of like, how do you get music into a game? You actually have someone walk around and buy, buy batteries to play music. Um,

No, I don't. haven't seen it being as widespread. think you do have to kind of invest in infrastructure. ⁓ Or, I mean, the Glass Animals example, to go back to that one again, where they actually built... They actually set their tracks free.

which was like one of the most interesting things about that campaign. There's a whole lot and I've been talking about it like a lot, but I just caught that angle of they actually just put their tracks in, they cleared everything and they put them into Roblox like freely streamable and they were streamed millions of times. But then they also built a widget that rewarded people for going out and playing them on Spotify. And I guess they just sort of like, I know licensing music, we need to be paid for everything, et cetera. But for them, it was like that we're building this experience and we can't

know, charged to actually have this music and just getting people here to listen back to the music, ⁓ hopefully would carry on which, yes, sure, everything could be tracked and licensed but I thought that was actually quite cool that they did let it go for a short time, be free and get a lot of people listening and loving the songs.

Danny Garcia (41:11)
Completely. I like to your point, it's, mean, I think back to the tracks that are the games that I used to play, like, you know, I mean, guitar hero is on the nose, right? But all of those songs have transcended like my whole generation, right? Like everyone knows these songs that were from like the sixties and seventies, which we probably shouldn't know, but you do. And, grand theft auto is probably another example where they've done a really amazing integration with music on the radio while you're driving and.

You know, there's been hits, resurge and deep cuts turn into hits through those different, ⁓ you know, games. And I don't, obviously those are licensed, but to your point as an indie artist, you can work with like an indie develop game developer and cut a deal with them to just kind of get that exposure early on. Right. And I think that's, that's a huge thing that a lot of people are overlooking.

Patrick Ross (42:04)
And there's, I guess there's also ⁓ thinking of other opportunities. It's more advertising focused, but ⁓ you you can actually do a lot more buying of ads and games. I think one way we're talking about was like a counter strike ⁓ where I don't play counter strike, but where you shoot a smoke screen to hide your character.

And this is an artist ⁓ actually booked out the smoke paid for an ad around the smoke screens. The smoke turned red through the color of his track. And when it came up, it actually played the song. And this was like a for this was not a like a license, if you know what mean? Because yes, the Tony Hawk's of the world and the guitar heroes, those are all great. Obviously, that took. But this is just there's there's more of those opportunities. I think that, ⁓ yeah, Roblox has just extended its its ad studio.

So can actually do like insertions and programmatic. So there is going to be more opportunity to actually put multimedia in front of people into these universes, albeit pay to play. like, they're, yeah, interesting, interesting ways of getting your music into a game, even if it's ad funded.

Danny Garcia (43:12)
Yeah, I mean, that's huge because it's just going to drive, I think, that discovery and that stickiness that it's hard to get, honestly, on streaming services and just the traditional consumption methods of music right now. It's hard to get that type of stickiness. yeah, mean, Jimmy, do you think we should kind of, how are we looking on time right now? ⁓

Jimmy Mikaoui (43:37)
I think it's time for your favorite question, Danny.

Danny Garcia (43:40)
Yeah. Yeah. I would love to ask you Patrick, we end on this question always. What's the best piece of advice that you've received ⁓ in your career or beyond that you'd love to impart to our listeners?

Patrick Ross (43:53)
What is the best piece of advice that I've received?

Danny Garcia (44:03)
kind of a bomb. always catch people off guard. This is So, so sorry for that.

Patrick Ross (44:10)
The

only first one that's come into my mind is perhaps you've heard this one before. My mother liked to always remind me that I've got two ears and one mouth for a reason. There you go. Which I do actually think professionally works out of sometimes just listen to folks and ⁓ take the time to take things in, which I could use that advice generally in life. So thank you, mother.

you

Danny Garcia (44:41)
I love that man. I need more of that as well. Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Ross (44:45)
think we are high-willed here.

Jimmy Mikaoui (44:48)
We'll

build the same here. Patrick, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. This was the Music to Your Ears podcast, and we'll see you guys soon.

Danny Garcia (45:02)
Thanks Patrick.

Patrick Ross (45:03)
Cheers y'all.