Jeremy Weisz 15:24
I guess to me, it seems pretty straightforward, but I don’t know. So we have that on the kind of independent side, but then we have the agency side, and we’re looking here at some of the case studies. What was a great, when you remember a good story of how you actually got because you said it takes traction for people to get to know you, and it’s word of mouth. What was a favorite story of how you actually got one of these labels or artists that’s fun for you to look back on?
Dalton Piche 16:00
Yeah, I mean, so on the independent side, Oscar med K is probably one of the more exciting ones, if not, maybe Baddies, only down low there. So these two are very similar situations. We spent a good amount of time and funds on advertising, or these tracks, and you can see a bit of information there on how many conversions we delivered, our average cost per conversion, and just where the song is at today. This song, I believe, is not mistaken. It’s over 60 or 70 million streams in under two years. And really, it’s done really well, and it really all kicked off from it’s an Adele bootleg Set Fire to the Rain, so familiar vocals, which definitely helped.
But this was like a really, really pristine example of what paid advertising can do. If you get the right people in front of a song at a high volume early on, it’ll work magic for the algorithm. And that’s that again, that Facebook and Instagram ad service that we offer, that’s what we really pride ourselves on, is a strong understanding of the algorithm on Spotify and like this. This is just a really good case study to highlight that. And I thought we had pictures of the actual streaming scale, but I guess we don’t on this one.
Jeremy Weisz 17:20
How did they find you?
Dalton Piche 17:21
That one was a referral from a referral from someone who found us and wanted something small. I don’t actually recall the exact I remember who brought us the client, but how we got that person and the person before that was just kind of a long-winded rail of referrals.
Jeremy Weisz 17:46
That’s probably how it happens. And then on the agency side, talk about you helped a country artist. Talk about that.
Dalton Piche 17:57
Yeah, super proud of this one country artist named Max now, and he’s been blowing up. He’s from Oregon, based in Nashville. Now, if you do is in the country, we don’t actually have one here, but he do as a country. You may have heard some of his latest work, a lot more free has been, been doing some big numbers. It’s, I think, done over 100 million streams in the last year across all stream platforms. And, I mean, he’s just, he’s a phenomenal artist. He’s literally just getting started. He’s going to be a huge star. But Bram, I think it was really cool on the agency side. On the agency side, it’s a lot of fun because, you know, generally, you know, we’re working with slightly larger budgets. The quality of music and quality of artists is quite high.
So it’s hard to take much credit for the work we do for Max. But if we had to take credit, we will, but on some of this stuff, just because, I think there’s some things that he just does phenomenally, like his live performances are just phenomenal. So for us, it was all right, what’s already working well, what are people already consuming when it comes to his content, or the way his music is being promoted? And how do we just pour gas on that? And that was really the main thing with Max is, on the TikTok front, we can get just a lot more in the weeds for agency clients and saying, like, Okay, your live performance is doing really well. Should we do a reaction campaign where we take that piece of content that’s already performing well and get it in front of many, many, many more people. How do we do that? And finding ways to execute that has been a lot of fun. Yeah. I mean, there’s no limit as to what can happen on the agency side, which is exciting. And anytime we get a client who trusts us and really wants our input to give it all we got,
Jeremy Weisz 19:53
I love hearing, Dalton about your journey. When I think of, you know, innovation comes from outside industry. And so if someone’s listening, I’m not in the music industry or whatever. It doesn’t matter, right? I love hearing how you think about things, how you’ve done things, how you’ve structured offers, how you work with people, because it can apply to any industry. What made you decide to finally go out and be like, I’m going to start a business, right? Because I know you’ve worked for companies throughout the years, and what was that decision that you decided to make a leap?
Dalton Piche 20:30
Well it wasn’t the first business I tried to build by any means. But I mean, for the last I don’t know, well, into eight years prior to launching this, had tried a lot of different things, and this was, I think, a unique one, because COVID had just happened and always loved music, loved making music, but at a certain point, started to realize, okay, maybe I’m not good enough for that, but what am I good at? I’ve learned a lot in my previous roles. I’d say I’m pretty well versed on the business side of things, scaling up, operation, sales, etc. And it was just, I mean, it was the right time for me and my family. It took a lot of convincing, for sure, but once I had enough going on. I think it was really easy to make the transition, and I hadn’t looked back.
Jeremy Weisz 21:26
What was something you tried that didn’t work? I find sometimes I learned the most from things that didn’t work out. And I took a piece of that and took a piece from everything. What do you remember you started that didn’t work, and maybe something you learned from it that you brought into Members Media?
Dalton Piche 21:45
There’s so many failures that I can’t even like, it’s so hard to even, even in the business now, it’s still just, I mean, every day is just trying so many new things, almost to a fault, like that’s one thing that people on the team to save Obi is it just, it’s just never-ending, the new ideas and new things that we’re trying to do. But I don’t, I mean, previously, I think I definitely learned most at that my previous role company called Canada Drives, and with that, I mean, it was, I think there was some really great leadership there, and a lot just about kind of building a business that, you know, again, didn’t really matter what industry it was in. It was a lot of work ethic stuff, and a lot of just like, thinking about value first. How do we actually provide value? Once you provide value, everything just comes together. And I think that mentality has been key. I don’t know that any specific failures have really stuck out as a big eye-opener, because every day, there’s something learned. And yeah, hope, I hope that’s not a bad answer.
Jeremy Weisz 22:57
You’ve repressed it. You’re like, I’m not even thinking of all these things. But no, I like what you said about Canada Drives you. You’re there for almost eight years. And I love the provide value first mentality. And it just seems to be that way with at least, when I perceive that in some of your offerings, on your website, right, you’re sharing at least the value that someone’s getting out of it. Building a team is not easy but you’ve had to build a team. You’ve gone from one to 18 plus. Talk about the evolution of you, and then the hiring.
Dalton Piche 23:43
Yeah, happy to, that’s probably another good thing to talk about Canada Drives. You know, I manage a team, a very large team, and it changed over the years. But that skill was probably one, and even to this day, I think of as one of the most valuable, is the interviewing process, the hiring process, the management process. And I’m by no means a perfect manager, but I’ve been managed, and I’ve managed enough to know a few things. And even just being a good judge of character in the interview process, I think, just pays an infinite amount of dividends. For our team, every hire has been so, I mean, we barely I’m thinking about skill set as much as I’m thinking about fit and work ethic. And who is this person? Where do they want to go, who they want to be? I mean, skills definitely, I’m not to discredit that, but a super skilled team, but it’s definitely not the only thing on my mind, a lot of things can be trained, but you can’t. You can’t rewrite person’s code necessarily.
Jeremy Weisz 24:56
for managing a team. What did you learn either CANADA DRIVES or Members Media? What are some of the things that you do that you look back on, maybe something that you learned from being managed that you would never do, or maybe something from a manager that you really liked and you continue to do?
Dalton Piche 25:13
Yeah, lots I learned about from management that I would and would not do, and these are things I still think about often and trying to be the best I can. But I think, like things that I’ve enjoyed about management pass is, like the motivation side of things, you know what, what are we working towards? Like, let’s go, get on the same page, and let’s, let’s have some kind of big goals that we’re all thinking about and all working in tandem on. So I think about that a lot. What’s the next year? What’s the next two years look like, not just for the business, but for every single member of the team? And I think that’s important. We really try to not use fear or micromanagement. I mean, that’s like, you know, some things learned a lot when there’s a Canada Drives, there was some of that happening, which, you know, in some cases, was necessary, but I think in most cases, if you’re if you’re getting the right people on the bus, you really don’t need to micromanage. And I think that’s something that we take a lot of pride in, is the freedom and the autonomy that we try to get to team members.
Jeremy Weisz 26:23
I don’t know if there are certain hiring questions or processes that you find to be valuable, because going from one to 18 in a very compressed time frame is not easy. I mean, it’s not even easy over a longer time frame. So are there certain hiring questions or process that be valuable for people to think about?
Dalton Piche 26:47
Yeah, maybe not so much questions. But I think that, step one always trying to figure out is this, does this person feel like the right fit? But then I think an even more important step two is almost trying to, like, convince them out of the job in a way. When we hire we don’t want, I don’t want someone to quit ever. That’s like, so if I can, really paint the pictures like, yes, this is the job. It may sound exciting. Yes, you’re working in the music industry. Yes, there’s some fun stuff involved. But you might send 400 emails a day. You might have some days where you hate me, where you hate what you’re doing, like that’s very much a reality. You’re working at home. It can be lonely. Our entire team works from home still, there’s a lot of downsides to what we do. And I just, I like to hate those pictures as clear as possible. I don’t want someone who’s going to come in half-interested or half into this. The value of the music industry is a lot of people want to work in it, so I think we have that as an advantage, and we don’t need to just kind of take the first people who show some interest, because there’s just so much in it. But rather, yeah, focused on who’s in this for the long haul, who really wants to do this, and is, yeah, willing to just, like, commit fully to it, because they just want it that badly.
Jeremy Weisz 28:10
No, I like that on a lot of levels, share the tough stuff so that they don’t find out. They’re gonna find out later. There’s some find out eventually. What it is, I think that applies. It’s a personal relationships as well. Like just kind of share, here’s what you get. I like that, what kind of positions. And so it’s just you doing everything, and then what positions were you hiring for?
Dalton Piche 28:41
Yeah, I think the first role was someone to run our playlisting campaigns, and the second role, think about this. I can fast forward a little bit more. So we’ve got a team of three on playlisting, a team of four on TikTok and Instagram team of two on paid social media, so direct ads on Facebook, Instagram team of three on the catalog side of the business, and then some miscellaneous roles in between. But coming back to actually what you said before about showing the tough stuff. Transparency is one of our core values, I would say probably the number one. And in music marketing, I think that’s like a big piece. And why we’ve thought that way is I don’t want to have to sell anyone ever. I don’t want to have to ever convince so I want what the work we’ve done, I want that the data that the things that we’ve created that should do the selling right? I shouldn’t have to explain stuff or unexplained stuff, or convince someone to work with all these different kind of ways of thinking of it.
Again, we take a very, very transparent approach to hiring, to our services, to everything, we’ll talk to a client who says, Hey, I’d like to put, X amount of money towards this TikTok campaign, and we’ll very straight up say you should not do that, or playlist saying, hey, that’s a bad idea in this case. We’ll turn down money left, right and center, because it just doesn’t make sense. Because ultimately, we’re not if we’re not servicing them, or we’re not serving them something that we believe in, or something that is of value, based on what we know, oh, it’s gonna end up hurting us in the end. This isn’t even a personal like France. This is just a more of a business thing than anything. It’s just, we know that it’s gonna come back, and I don’t have the energy to deal with that when it does come back, so I’d rather just deal with it upfront.
Jeremy Weisz 30:37
Talk about the label side, so I could see the marketing side, the independent, you have the kind of, the larger enterprise labels, but then you have a catalog and labels, how do you determine what kind of bands or independents you take on as far as the label catalog goes?
Dalton Piche 31:00
Yeah, that’s been a huge thing for us in the last year. We think, I mean, they are quite separate. So, we might get a ton of different music from great artists on the marketing side who are independent, and the catalog team, may never hear that music, and we hope to bridge that gap. But our focus on the music side has been taking the marketing services that we’ve created and finding the most lucrative ones in there. And some examples, we build playlists for some of our clients, so we’ll actually run the ads to build the playlist from scratch for them, and we’ve had a lot of success with that. So we found ways to build our own playlists and acquire music that works on those playlists, and just kind of keep building it from there. Yeah, we want to get a lot more involved in more traditional music, but I’d say our focus has been more functional side of things, so Lo Fi and Ambient type stuff and all these more like purpose-driven things, which makes sense for us.
Jeremy Weisz 32:06
What are people using this for? Like, the purpose-driven like, are they promoted to? Like, Yoga people who are yoga fanatics or things like that, or what are they using?
Dalton Piche 32:16
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on the Ambient and Lo-Fi stuff, a lot of study, sleep, yoga, meditation, massage therapists, you name it. And even on like, we think about music as kind of servicing some or adding something to your day, as opposed to, oh, look at this song. It’s no look at this song that you can use while you do X, Y, Z, that’s a big part of our marketing. And so even if it’s, you know, a popular dance song, it’s like, all right, well, what purpose is that serving? Is it a good driving song, a good workout song? Like, where does that actually fit? And then how do we build a community around this more purpose or this need that we’re trying to fulfill, opposed to look at me, I’m an artist. Be a fan of me, if that makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 33:04
Totally it was a random, you know, actually, interview I did with a guy who I don’t know the science behind it, Dalton, maybe you do, but he was the founder of Whole Tones, and it was music therapy. It was at a certain frequency. Again, I don’t know it was like that sounds like a similar kind of genre, and it was very popular. I don’t know how many they sold, but since it was functional, like you said, it was serving a purpose for people, from like, a healing perspective. So that was super interesting. It sounds like that. How do you choose that type of song or musician or band when it comes to that type of music?
Dalton Piche 33:57
Good question, and I may not even be the right guy to answer that. We have head of our catalogs. Ian, great musician. He had a great year for this stuff. So he is involved in, I think, 100% of the music that we’re acquiring or signing. So that’s been a big piece, too. Is everyone that works for us, even though 90-95% have never worked in the music industry before, they all love music. And that’s I’d say, an essential piece of joining the team is, you got to have an ear for music, not necessarily be this hardcore critic, but you got to be willing to say whether you like or don’t like something, and maybe be able to explain it a little bit, and Ian’s as good as it gets with that stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 34:44
So what about resources or mentors? So it could be like, obviously you had a mentor from a business perspective, or maybe it’s a distant mentor, maybe a book or someone that you learned from that you don’t know, personally?
Dalton Piche 35:04
That’s a good question. I’ve always kind of steered clear of the whole mentor communication, or the way I just that verbiage. But I mean, I did have, I worked directly for someone, obviously, at my last company, and they were a huge mentor for me for many years. I wouldn’t have called it that. They were my boss, but I learned a lot. Outside of that I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of great books that kind of like helped and turning points for me in my life. Atomic Habits was a big one.
Jeremy Weisz 35:39
Yeah, that’s a really good one. Any others?
Dalton Piche 35:42
Hitmakers has been great, more so for like the music and just the way we think about music specifically, and just the science of popularity and all that Dr Cialdini Influence. That was a good one.
Jeremy Weisz 35:56
That’s one of my favorites. I love that one.
Dalton Piche 35:58
I think about that one often. Yeah, those are the biggest ones that stick out in my mind for books.
Jeremy Weisz 36:07
No thanks for sharing that. Those are all good ones. I have one last question Dalton, before I ask it, I want to point people to check out members.media to learn more. If you know someone in the music industry, send this to them. I’d love to hear which bands, labels do you want to work with that you haven’t? Who are some of your favorites out there?
Dalton Piche 36:37
That’s a good question. It’s funny when we got started, when we started we started, like, doing this, working with some bigger names. I got to work with some of, like, my favorite artists, and, like, directly, because a lot of music marketing, or a lot of just the industry in general, is, you’re working with the label or the manager another agency, and you’re never actually connecting with the artist, which is fine, but yeah, we got to, like, connect with some and it wasn’t what I thought it would be. I was excited about it, and it never lived up to the expectation. So I actually haven’t thought about it in that way in some time. I almost prefer keeping it a little bit separate. I listen to a lot of, you know, indie folk, indie rock, type I mean, I listen to do a ton of different stuff, but I’ve never felt like, oh, I’d love to do some marketing for this person before. It just feels different to me. It’s like, I’d prefer to just, like, stay a fan and, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a great answer.
Jeremy Weisz 37:35
I just figured it’s interesting, because, at least for like, let’s say a product or software or something. I mean, just a huge fan of I just want to, like, tell everyone. And basically, you’re telling everyone, at scale, through your services. You’re like, hey, we could tell everyone. We could tell 10,000 people, or whatever it is. So I just was curious, some of your favorites in different genres.
Dalton Piche 38:01
Yeah. I mean, this is like, to be honest, I think a big goal of ours is to just get closer to the music too. So less about who we’re working with, and more so just working closer with them. So Max is a great example. He came to Vancouver, we went to show get to meet him, hang out for what it’s just like. It was just nice. You know, want to be able to connect with something that you’re so involved in, whereas a lot of what we do is quite disconnected, as I mentioned, working with the labels or the managers or just team members who are handling all of the marketing or the business decisions for that artist. So for us, yeah, it’s more. So you know what? I love to work with some of my favorite artists, definitely. What would I want it to be with that artist and not with their team? Absolutely, I’d love to get invested, not only emotionally, into it. I think that would be a lot of fun. Some of my favorite names right now, Damian Rice, huge fan, Ben Howard, Turmock, Kennedy, Bear, Stan Ellen, Raymond, kind of in that space, I’d say would be my exciting stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 39:06
Yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing, because, you know, people work so hard on their craft, and their craft may not be marketing, right? And so that’s where you come in. I remember I had Greg roulette on. I was talking before we hit record, who had opened for Bone Thugs and Harmony at one point, and he had a band he was just trying to get traction, just learn marketing. And then he realized, okay, I think I’m just gonna follow this marketing path and not the music path. And we need people like you to just help amplify the hard work of all these artists. So thanks for what you do. I want to encourage people to check out members.media and check out more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Dalton, thanks so much.
Dalton Piche 39:32
Thank you as well. Thanks Jeremy.
