Daniel Ray - Ultimate Innovator
This special extended summer edition of the MTF podcast explores Daniel’s life, work and philosophy of innovation - and how that can be applied right across all industry sectors.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
idea, create, music, people, thought, guitar, commercial, company, musicians, paper, ended, hackathons, bassoon, programme, mtf, ultimate, evolution, labs, arts, digital
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Daniel Ray
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And this is the MTF podcast. This week, Daniel Ray is the head of innovation. For ultimate guitar, you may well have their tabs app on your phone. His is a fascinating story that brings to its logical conclusion, a legacy of three generations in computer science for the US military and NASA, to a groundbreaking music notation company in Russia, with a user base roughly in the same ballpark as Spotify. His current main project is to create 1 billion musicians in the world that’s billion with a B. As part of that quest, Daniel joined us at the MTF Labs in Frankfurt, where I took him aside for an in depth chat about his life and work, why the arts are fundamental to innovation across all industry sectors, and the difference between evolution and revolution. innovation from MTF Frankfurt. This is Daniel Ray. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast Glad
Daniel Ray
Glad to be here.
Andrew Dubber
You kind of made for MTF really your life is like a recipe for MTF,
Daniel Ray
something like that. I’ve had a weird, weird path here, you know. So I had a very untraditional, I always actually thought I was going to be just a musician. but ended up in technology, when through an entire path where I was focused on areas of technology completely unrelated to music, and then started to get back into areas where I could combine music and technology,
Andrew Dubber
right. And you’re managing innovation for ultimate
Daniel Ray
for ultimate guitar. Yeah. And then, and I think, you know, a lot of people might or might not be familiar with ultimate guitar, but in if you play guitar, you know, ultimate guitar, because it’s, it’s the largest site out there for pretty much any type of printed music, it’s over. One point something million tabs out there. In addition to just guitar tabs, they have full transcriptions of a wide number of pieces, backing tracks, all that sort of thing. hundred million users, which puts ultimate guitar into a category beyond the music industry within those types of levels, but into all types of other social networks. I mean, it puts it into a category along with social networks, we’ve made some acquisitions of a number of other companies, new score, most significantly, and most recently, which is a community for music sheet music sharing, paired with a free open source music notation editor. And, you know, as we move forward, the future, I mean, we will continue to go into other areas that makes sense, we have this crazy goal to create 1 billion musicians in the world.
Andrew Dubber
So that’s a fairly significant percentage of the population. Yeah,
Daniel Ray
one in six, one in six. And unless, you know, unless people keep continuing to populate,
Andrew Dubber
or there’s some sort of global catastrophe. Yeah. Which
Daniel Ray
would make it easier. And we are we are actually, we are considering global catastrophe. I mean, we have as a strategy is a strategy to to to reach that goal. Fantastic. It
Andrew Dubber
seems like so I have to admit, I’m one of these many, many users myself, but I’m a bad guitarist. And every now and then, after a couple of drinks, somebody brings out a guitar and we do a single one of songs that I’m that I don’t bring out, ordinarily, but I know them and I know and of course, to be able to look at the the music
Daniel Ray
of your Katy Perry song list, I’m sure
Andrew Dubber
yeah, absolutely. And, and occasionally the horse with no name. And that’s, that’s my kind of repertoire. But But what it does is it kind of opens up the idea, and it’s one that I’m really, really super keen on, is that music doesn’t have to be your job. And that they’re, you can not not that I would identify myself as a musician, but I’m somebody who can play musical instrument, right. And I really love this idea. Because I mean, I think there are probably, like thousands, if not millions of people in the world, who used to be in a band. And when their band didn’t take off if they stopped being musicians, right, yeah, they kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater. And my take on this has always been you know, you can do this for fun, you know. And that was kind of one of my my big regrets, I guess in life is that it’s yours to work that out. But But you’re enabling that and I guess my question is, how much of the strategy of ultimate guitar is, is this kind of non pro? This can be for fun. This can just be with your friends or your family.
Daniel Ray
Well, it’s in the DNA. And what I mean by that is, I think we should back up and kind of tell just briefly about the origin of ultimate guitar and what that story is because that’s kind of Cool, crazy story. Sure. So started by a guy in University. He he’s wanting to learn Guns and Roses tabs only only issue here is he’s in Russia, in the middle of, you know, strange little place in Russia, Kaliningrad, Russia. And you can’t just go down to guitar centre or something by book of tabs. He wants to learn Guns and Roses tab. So what is it? What is it? What do you do, he sits in his room, and he listens to the records over and over and over and over again, and punking out the tabs and transcribing them. Really proud of his work, he creates a web page because it’s 1998. And that’s what you do, and puts them up there on a web page and shares it with his friends and his friends, you know, start actually adding to that sharing their songs. And then, you know, goes from Guns and Roses to other bands. And pretty soon This has the snowball effect. And what ended up happening also, there’s, you know, not only this sort of Indra Nooyi that got us started, but there’s just the circumstances of the music industry as a whole are also part of that origin origin story in the sense that music industry has been really slow to adopt new technologies. And this is the recording side of it with Napster and all these things they were behind. And that that led to an area where there was a lot of losses in the music industry until they figured it out. You know, after Napster, they went, Oh, we need to do this, and then ended up with iTunes and streaming came about and so on. And the music industry is really healthy now really vibrant. So the the short story is basically the publisher started coming after sites that were sharing. And that was easy for them to do that in countries like US, UK, rest of Europe. But Russia is kind of an enigma for some of these publishers and not really knowing how the system works. Yeah, it became one of the last on their list of priorities. And so as it happened, they, you know, finally ended up being able to to approach ultimate guitar and say, guys, you know, what’s up? By that time, the, you know, the founder of the company, really, really brilliant guy. He knew what was coming. And rather than going and spending all that money and things, he saved it to be able to turn around and cut a deal with the publishers and say, Hey, guys, what if we made it legit? Yeah, right, the how Spotify went and made legit. And now ultimate guitar is one of the largest licensees for some of the major music publishers. And then, you know, this these types of relationships and that expertise was kind of also what naturally led to the acquisition of music or really making sense. It’s the same thing, just a little bit broader. And so on. I mean, that’s so that’s, that’s kind of the the background of kind of where that comes from.
Andrew Dubber
And where do you come into the story.
Daniel Ray
I come into the story, I had created a company that was basically what we were doing is we were doing multitrack video recording for musicians where you just could casually create videos, yeah, and mash them up. And it was we saw some really cool things with the video synchronisation and so on. I was in Texas, at South by Southwest, was introduced to these guys at someone, you know, hey, these guys want to meet you, and really hit it off. And then a few days later, they gave an offer to company say, Well, what if what if you, you know, join ultimate guitar and they were in my office of my company is six days later. And when was this when we talked almost two years ago. Okay, so and I, I moved there not also knowing what was in store, you know, I’d never been to Kaliningrad I had no idea what it was. I also didn’t know what was in store in terms of the full roadmap of where the company was going until I’d already been on board. And that’s that’s actually a testament to them and saying like, if I already jumped on then not knowing also that where things were going with new score and so on. And so that kind of there was this. Let’s say very quick evolution to me transitioning into a role, looking at music or looking the education things and then very quickly, transitioning into the labs, you know what looking at at across all the company or the products of the company. Where is it that we should be headed? months out and one thing it’s actually been really awesome. A major contributing factor to the success of ultimate guitar is that they really focus, laser focus on the now. You know, they’re thinking just barely straight ahead and thinking about how we can generate revenue now. And that’s been a great thing for them. And they’ll continue to do that. But they also had this realisation that we need to be thinking about the soon to be now and then not so soon to be now, Ryan. And that’s what I do. I think about the not so soon to be Now, a couple years out, five years out and work backwards from there
Andrew Dubber
and run the innovation labs with that in mind.
Daniel Ray
Yep, yep, exactly.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, so let’s backpedal a way back. What do parents do? And how does that affect where you’ve ended up?
Daniel Ray
Oh, that’s interesting. Well, we can actually, here’s a, we should start, firstly, with what my grandparents did. So because it’s it’s all it’s all connected. So my grandfather was at Bell Labs. And so he was a very early pioneer of computer science, and working on very massive systems for the military. And so a lot of stuff he was doing with computers was quite secretive. My, I think my grandma still, you know, until much later on, thought he was working like repairing Coca Cola machines or something, something with machines like and all that her they were all the same, but he was actually building computers for the Navy. And that was being used for everything related to the military, atomic weapons programmes and things like that. So he’d be gone for quite some time off on ships in the Pacific. So they had a replica of the computer, also on the ship, like a copy, let’s say, and he will be gone doing that, and then come come back. So he did that. My father was also a pioneer on computer science. He was for a while working with Morton Thiokol, with NASA, doing machine control systems, so doing ignition timing and fuel mixtures for rocket launchers. And that was, at the time where it was it was split between missiles. It was a system that was had missiles like MX missile and the Atlas or Hercules. So it was he’s working on technology that had dual purpose of military and civilian. So we lived in, in inside a military base for a while, which is kind of why. But then he went and left that and started doing automation of manufacturing plants. So he did Philip Morris, he did RJ Reynolds, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nabisco, Ford Motor, US Steel, that kind of stuff. And then got back into software. In terms of pure commercial software, because a couple of his buddies that he had, from his earlier days in university, he knew some guys that had started a company, which was WordPerfect. So he joined WordPerfect. From there so soft, I was always around software, I
Andrew Dubber
was gonna say, so how on earth did you end up in the technology industry?
Daniel Ray
It’s a mystery to me. I have no idea to this day. Have you like, have you
Andrew Dubber
come up with a way of weaponizing guitar tabs yet? Is that is that part of the roadmap?
Daniel Ray
I think they’re already weaponized to dissolve is that here, that’s the beginner tips. Fantastic.
Andrew Dubber
So when you were a kid, and you’re growing up in this environment, what are you doing? What’s kind of what’s your passion? What are you really into? Or is this just part of your environment? You’re not really kind of focused on it.
Daniel Ray
It was I thought it was normal. I just thought this is what every kid did. I mean, we had a terminal in our house. I remember. We had a PDP 11 in the house when I was growing up in for, like, that’s an ancient kind of thing. And that’s a a massive mainframe computer that was connected to a bunch of terminals. And so I would spend my time there was a game on on one of these terminals was called dungeon. And I love to play it and it was actually every installation of everything everywhere my dad did, he would one of the things he would do is kind of an Easter egg and just kind of a fun thing. You would always instal this game dungeon. And so
Andrew Dubber
was the text game. Yes, it was. Yeah.
Daniel Ray
And you would go and you’d create maps. And there’s a whole community of people that were like drawing all their maps and things like this. And it was it was cool thing because it was a game that was really kind of living and growing and the mazes would get bigger, the territory would get bigger. Yeah. And I was really into that. And so we had a terminal at home. And I ended up I was maybe about 14 years old, and I was home sick from school. And we no longer had a we moved and my dad had switched companies we know why had this mainframe system in our house. You know, we had I was actually that time was a rainbow 100 computer a few of these, these crazy things. So I knew that Every installation that my dad did he would instal this on and so I figured out how I you know, if I wanted to play this game, I could just instal just log into one of my dad’s installations. at this particular time, he was doing a project for US Steel. And I just, I logged in to the system they he actually was pretty clever and he he developed some because it was government stuff, some intrusion detection systems and okay detected I wasn’t him. And so we had the FBI at our house. So this is within, literally to their credit within about a half an hour.
Andrew Dubber
Like Matthew Matthew Broderick, at this point,
Daniel Ray
wargames, it was actually the the guy, the guy who from the FBI, he’s like, this isn’t wargames this isn’t, you know, this, and I was like, I was just homesick. And I was bored. And so I actually was banned from from touching a computer for four was two years. Wow. Yeah. So so that’s and then I was completely away from it. And then I got into music and into girls and all that stuff. And so I was
Andrew Dubber
gonna say, How did the music thing came into it? But it makes perfect sense. Now, you’re no longer allowed to play with computers?
Daniel Ray
Yes, so actually, I picked up a bassoon. Oh, yeah. That was my first instruments bassoon, because, I mean, it’s a little the women of course, the bassoon groupies are I mean, I thought automatically, you’re gonna get the girls. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
And how did that work out for you?
Daniel Ray
Oh, you know, they they’re they’re a little bit stalkery. You know, there was bassoon groupies, all all? All two of them? Of course. Yeah, it was he still play? Yeah. To this day. I mean, I have right in the other room, I brought my reads out here to this show, because I’m testing out some new instruments fantastic.
Andrew Dubber
Unfortunately, we’ve already had a cello and trombone recital at MTF Frankfurt. So you don’t
Daniel Ray
want a bassoon recital? You definitely don’t? You know,
Andrew Dubber
we’ll we’ll plug it into something. Ready to go? For? Sure. For sure. So, so you’re kind of music passion, you’ve, you’ve been able to bring that together with the technology? Did that always seem like a logical thing to do? No, absolutely not.
Daniel Ray
I, it was interesting, because when I when I studied in university, you know, I’m studying composition. And we were not allowed to use computers at all, like at all. And so everything we did with composition was on pen and paper. And we had to pretty rigorous rigorous programme and with the professor’s there that would we take apart, and we’d have a part, you know, then he would, he would take the page from us, and then put a blank page in front of it and say, write, you know, write the part to see if, you know, if we really had this in our head, and the whole idea was that you compose in the head, and putting on paper is just a formality. So it’s finished already in your head. Right. And that’s a different, you know, with software, now, you compose kind of a combination of that. And the thinking that was in that, which is not the correct thinking, you know, in my opinion, is that you should finish it first, and then put it on paper, but with the type of fantastic play playback, and all these other things you can do and the different types of exploration, virtual illustrations and things you can do. You know, you should compose, you know, in your head, compose in the software compose, in collaborative in things, there’s, there’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not a static thing anymore, you know,
Andrew Dubber
and, and to an extent, I don’t think it ever was I mean, I’m I do writing, I do a lot of writing. And I will say, you know, how could I possibly know what I think until I see what I’ve written? Exactly, you know, and and so the actual kind of, you know, putting it into some sort of tangible form, or at least sort of visible form is part of how you work things out.
Daniel Ray
Absolutely. And it’s, it’s also these these old school purists who there were so much more focused on the process than the result, you know, and that’s that, you know, I think about how many great composers have gone on to other careers, or potentially great composers have gone off to other careers or other paths, because the process didn’t fit them, you know, they could create a great result, the process didn’t offend them. And so that takes a lot of things coming back into musescore. I mean, we take a lot of that experience into this and say, you know, how do we support the workflow? How do we support the process? And how do we support the different levels, the needs of the different levels, or the different types of outcomes that people want? Not everyone that wants to create is a professional composer. And not everyone should be, you know, but everyone should have the ability to create and to have tools that that help them create at the minimum to their current level. Ideally, the tools should allow them to exceed their natural abilities.
Andrew Dubber
Tell me that the lab is what happens
Daniel Ray
What do we do actually is, we don’t really produce something tangible. Like what we do is we have a process where we create ideas, we create concepts, some of those concepts based upon timing of things, other things are going on with the existing products, we take and bring it into maybe a we explore the products of the projects or the concepts, ideas a little bit further. we validate them, we do research, we do validation, and then we might get it to mockups, and then to maybe a prototype or proof of concept. And with these MVPs, you know, the minimum viable product that we might create, then we do some sort of market validation. And then if it moves to the market validation sort of successfully in that, then the process it passes to become a feature of another product, it becomes another product itself within the company, or it could even potentially become another company.
Andrew Dubber
So you’re now here at MTF Labs, you kind of see, I guess, what we do is somewhat different to what you do in your labs. What are you think that’s kind of interesting?
Daniel Ray
Well, it’s, it’s what is interesting, the most interesting thing is, we try to do something that has at least some sort of commercial purpose. You know, that’s, that’s what’s really different here. And the things that here, you’re, you’re not thinking of things from a commercial perspective, right. And so you just, it’s wide, wide open, and you do it, just because it’s cool, you know, and when I look at these things, immediately, I’m seeing, well, they’re not trying to be commercial, and they’re not trying to do stuff. But oh, man, I see some commercial opportunities right now, already. So I mean, looking even just today, spending some time with some of these projects and seeing what they’re doing. Even if there’s not a commercial intent, I see an immediate commercial opportunity for for several of these things. And, and I want to be, I want to be kind of cautious about how I say this, because I think when in the sense that everyone gets a kind of on edge, when you talk about commercial opportunities in anything in the arts, whether it’s music, or dance, or visual arts or anything like that, and they say, Oh, well, that, that’s, that’s diluting it, that’s destroying it assists. And, and I don’t believe that, because I don’t think it’s a choice, either. Or, I think you can have some wildly creative and wildly free and very commercial, viable products that you can create that that are artistic, and, and it’s just imagine it’s just about how your imagination is, you know, in terms of how you can imagine ways to do that, that don’t entirely dilute the intent or dilute the purpose, right. You know, if I look at the idea of in people always use the, this metaphor of Oh, well, you know, you’re commoditizing and it’s making a McDonald’s out of you know, that McDonald’s music is like, sometimes McDonald’s is pretty good. You know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You know, there are scenarios, I mean, everything has its own purpose and its own way. And the, the, the great thing is that the very commercially successful things are what allow the ability to support the more artistic endeavours. And a lot of times, the broader market is introduced to the ability to create, and their own ability, their own personal ability to create or perform through things that are very commercial, because that’s how the commercial things are what gets the exposure. And through that, they start to learn more and more and more, and they dive into deeper into the less commercial things. So the more commercial things and more commercial efforts are essential to non commercial art.
Andrew Dubber
And I think the inverse reply applies as well, which is kind of what you seen, I think, is if you don’t put all right, I want you guys to make something that will make a fortune as kind of the goal of this, what you do get you put creativity at the centre and the ideas that spring out of that, obviously, you’re seeing Oh my God, I could, you know, I can do that. But that is part of the intention of what we’re doing is not you know, how can we kind of create businesses but but how can the ideas that start here go on to have a life beyond it and not just kind of be left on the floor and everybody goes home and congratulate themselves. So the idea of sustainability of the endeavour is something that’s quite important to us here. So that it’s no surprise to us that actually when you put when you put creativity in the centre of it, and people can have these wild and crazy ideas in your head and go You know what, inside that is something that’s really potentially commercially valuable, you could sort of make you could, this could be your job now. And actually, to me, that’s a, that’s a really great outcome, particularly because it’s not putting the cart before the horse and going. Alright, so to start with, how can I make the most possible money and then trying to invent something around? Because all you’re ever going to get that way is kind of incremental innovation? Yeah,
Daniel Ray
absolutely. And this is what we deal with all we talk about incremental innovation, we very much deal with the evolution versus revolution. And the product teams inside the company are dealing with evolution. And they’re, I mean, fantastic. And they’re, the evolution is a very rapid pace and some of these things, and whereas what the labs does is deals with revolution in that. But bringing it back to the MTF Labs here. If you had people from the standpoint here, starting out saying, Hey, you know, make something commercially viable, they’re going to have in their head already ideas of, within the parameters, or close to the parameters of something that’s already in the market, it’s going to be evolution, right? Not evolutionary, not revolutionary. And so when you say, hey, do it for art, you’re gonna just do what’s cool and what feels good. But you’re going to stumble into some things that are going to be truly viable, you know, and maybe not in the initial inquiry, incarnation. But it’s going to start a chain reaction of something that that, if they keep at it, there will be ways that that’s what you are going to be able to attempt to make a solid living from. And yeah,
Andrew Dubber
that and that really kind of simple version of that is, if you make something just because you want to see it exist in the world, chances are there are going to be other people who want it. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So that’s kind of interesting. face. So, Kay, take me from your, you know, your bassoon hero to where you are now, what sort of what’s what am I missing in between those things,
Daniel Ray
in between those things. So what ended up happening is, this is the time when the internet just started really taking off. And we saw people that didn’t understand it. And they’re like, it’s, it might have might as well have been to them, like, just a moon launch or something like that, you know, and particularly large companies. And I said, Well, okay, I should look at this and see what the, you know, see how this stuff works. So this is the end days of, you know, the NCSA Mosaic browser, you know, still it spit in from the university that you are bad champagne or something like that. And so before even Netscape came out, yeah. And I was like, okay, like, I see what this is about. And so I got a book to learn HTML. And I’m just like, that’s it. Really. That’s it? All right, cool. And it’s even felt kind of, we decided that there was a commercial opportunity here, people thought it was like this crazy, difficult thing. And it was actually pretty, like, yeah, this is pretty easy. And then, and you’ll pay me money for this too. And it felt a little bit weird, even taking their money, like I was cheating them or something. But they didn’t know, you know how to do this. We knew how to do it. And so we started, I started a consulting firm that was doing simple web development that became more and more complex. Then the evolution of that ended up being getting into other opportunities as mobile technologies emerged, and being able to, for the first time to combine my interests in competition with technology, and things that were you know, roughly related to the internet and that sort of thing with ringtones. Alright, so when you had these MIDI monophonic ring tones and stuff, we were, we were making them and we made the the ring tones, and we also made the infrastructure for being able to deliver those to the phones, it was originally the Nokia infrastructure and being able to send those out there. And that also got me in to the understanding the music licencing business with ring tones and how all that worked. And because the commercial opportunities that continue to evolve, the companies that we were dealing with doing the ringtones how it how it actually started is it there was a brand that we were working with that wanted to soft drink brand that wanted to work with us to deliver as a part of a campaign for on they would have on top of the the screw top cap, a code that you could enter and you could get a ringtone for free and the That set us down a path of doing mobile marketing solutions. And so we started working with large, multinational brands with mobile marketing, which was Kraft, Nestle, Coca Cola, all these big brands we moved into dealing from that a larger, a larger number of activities that we had, you know, in terms of not just mobile getting in the mobile web getting into, then we end up doing camp full campaign life cycles and and tracking you, we create a campaign management software from that, that would track them across different campaigns, we were doing it for HP for Dell, we did it for 711. And then retailers like Costco and officemax, and so on. So we built that company up, and then ended up selling that company. And after selling that company, started looking at what are the next things to do, and I had time to, and kind of freedom to be able to think about that, you know, not really a sense of urgency and started to look at ways to combine music, and technology together again, and utilising the other experiences that I had with mobile, and all that stuff. And that’s how we ended up moving into that path.
Andrew Dubber
And video was your sort of combination. That was your first idea or a few things that
Daniel Ray
we started on an early path of exploring concepts for taking the same thing that we were doing with campaign management, which was essentially managing relationships and interaction. It’s kind of a really advanced CRM type of solution that could also do tracking across multiple types of things. And he said, okay, musicians, and music industry as a whole is really bad at being organised. You know, what areas we could we could start with him and organising was a passion sort of project that we created that was managing school music programmes, software for school music programmes, and how the video thing came about is we had some music educators that were saying, hey, I want to have my students, can your platform, have my students on their mobile phone, be able to record a performance of their piece, and I can see it, and to be able to see their progress and give them feedback? And that’s where we said, okay, well, let’s we’ll see it, and then they the requests got more complicated. Well, can it can it be with an accompaniment, or maybe a duet together? And we like, Okay, well, maybe. And so we understood from that, that there was a much broader commercial opportunity beyond just the music education segment for that. But even even to more casual users, and users that were kind of very aligned with ultimate guitar, right, and that’s how, that’s how that ended up, you know, ended up happening. I mean, that’s a lot of times, it just, you know, things like that just kind of naturally evolve.
Andrew Dubber
And so now at ultimate guitar, you’re doing hackathons on the basis.
Daniel Ray
So I spend a lot of time personally, going to some of these things sometimes not not really related to music related to general activities and technology. And, you know, a lot of the Startup Weekend type of things, the things that are done with tech stars in different places, and I’ve done that in a number of places I did with the USA ID. Also for a while, going to developing economies, to where there’d be a programme created an initiative to, to kind of open source the idea of the information that that that young entrepreneurs should have access to. So if I kind of went back and said, Okay, we’re all the mistakes that I made, and what are all the things that I wish I would have known starting out and then asked that same thing of other entrepreneurs that I knew and we tried to, to, to organise and categorise this information and open source it and then localise it and got the idea of the point was there you know I saw some articles and about one of the biggest challenges in developing economies were was the issue of brain drain right in the best and brightest were going there and and how could you create initiatives to to get them to stay and that led me to, by chance to some other relationships which ended up connecting with me with USA ID and then USA ID sponsored this programme, and I ended up Kazakhstan and Kosovo and Moldova and all these countries that I probably never would have thought to visit and Had some fantastic experiences and then would spend time in these countries where the problems were funded by USA ID. And I made a sort of a deal with them is if I go to these countries, I would have equal time that I spend with the entrepreneurs, as well as young musicians in the countries. And so I was doing master classes at the Philharmonia in Almaty, Kazakhstan, I was doing music school for, you know, young, elementary school kids in in Moldova, and so on, and getting opportunities to do that kind of stuff. And because I think it’s important, and this, this comes back to innovation in general, and everyone focuses so much on the idea of innovation is driven by engineering. And it’s driven by math, and it’s driven by science. But it’s not. It’s driven by all those things, plus a combination of the arts. Because if you don’t have the arts in there, you don’t have the creative thinking and this type of very abstract problem solving. And the idea of doing stuff just because you like it, because you love it. That’s, that’s what innovation truly is. So it’s innovation is a combination of these things. And everyone’s talking about buzzwords and how those things are, they’re steaming. Exactly. And, you know, adding the A in there, and that’s okay. If that gets the job done, that gets the job done. Right, you know, but I think that it’s, it is essential, you know, in the arts are absolutely essential to to innovation. And you see that in cultures that do have strong emphasis on engineering, but do not have the same emphasis on the arts. Those are cultures where they’re very good at cloning. Not so good at innovating. Right. Right. And so that’s, and I think that it’s that’s starting to people starting to figure that out.
Andrew Dubber
Do you think that that whole thing, globally speaking is getting better?
Daniel Ray
Yes, no question. Yeah, it’s getting different. But it’s also getting better. I mean, the idea. And this comes back to the whole mission of things with ultimate guitar with Muse score, and so on this idea of 1 billion musicians, the internet opens up the ability to have access to information that is globally and equally available. Right. You could be in rural Pakistan, and you have access to the exact same set of information someone in midtown Manhattan has. Exactly. I think
Andrew Dubber
it’s one thing to solve the information gap, it’s probably another thing to convince people to practice.
Daniel Ray
So Well, actually, you know, it’s strange that you brought that up, because the point of it is, is that’s actually one product that we have now. It’s called melodic, M E L O D I Q. And it’s a video game based practice app. Right? And it basically, it starts it right sizing available for guitar right now. And it is making practice fun, right? It’s chocolate covered broccoli, right? You know, it is it is it is it’s your you are getting all the benefits of the broccoli, but it’s still chocolate. So the I it’s fun, it’s engaging. And it’s it’s not quite as simple as you know, the buzzword of everything. Everyone’s saying gamify this or gamify that it is, it’s saying, Here is something how do we think about the idea of how we can completely transform how to develop this, this process, you know, the skills development process, make it a game, where you accidentally develop those skills, by you know, the purpose of the game is not to develop those skills, the divot skills are developed as an outcome of the game,
Andrew Dubber
right? You’re basically tricking people into becoming better musicians. chocolate covered broccoli. Yeah. antastic So what’s your what’s your outcome here? Now that you’re at Music Tech Fest, you’re involved in the labs? How do you walk away from this guy? Well, that was worthwhile.
Daniel Ray
I already have, from the same point of I already have it because I have I have ideas of things I’ve Oh, also some some guys that are here developing some things. I will continue to connect with him after this and do this. So it’s already been valuable. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. And it was really kind of ambiguous, you know, the the definition of of this and I think that’s by design, as well. I mean, it’s, it’s designed to to have that sense of freedom. But what I see here is also what’s interesting is, is there is no specific when you go to like an ela hackathons, they put people into boxes or channels, okay, you are UX designer, you’re a marketing person, you are the back end the front end of this here, it’s like your human. What do you want to do? How are you going to contribute? You know, and and you see that people are contributing in very, very different ways that you wouldn’t see in a normal hackathon. And also, the motivations I think, are very, very different. In a lot of these hackathons, people are, are they have a personal, commercial intent in it there, they are either wanting to make relationships that will get them to, to transfer to a new job, or that sort of thing, or they want to build a startup company that will be viable. And they’re not focused on doing it just for the love of doing it. And I think we lose a lot of of that, particularly in American culture, I’d say, we don’t do enough of stuff just to do it. Just because we love it. Right? It always has to have a reason not everything has to have a reason. Do you like it? Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
Welcome to my world.
Daniel Ray
Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Dubber
I mean, I was a, I was a judge on the South by Southwest hackathon this year. Yeah. And one of the criteria that we were given was, you know, the commercial viability of this idea. Hang on, I’ve only thought of this in the last last 24 hours or 12 hours, give it a chance.
Daniel Ray
Exactly. And I mean, it’s interesting you bring that up, is there was you know, when you go through, some of these things went on the side of these judges and the lenses that they look through things. And, and it was something of my South by Southwest, you have a number of people that all have random, different opinions on stuff when when you’re judging those things in it, the results come out to be just an average of the the opinions. And so when I look at some of the things that are that have come out of that that one that I scratch my head, yeah. But we’ve actually acquired we we recently acquired a company that came out of that, yeah, out of out of one of those had the Haskell hackathons at South by Southwest, right? You know, they were there. And they didn’t win. I don’t think they were in the top five, right. But we won. So I think they’re the top one on our list. So investing,
Andrew Dubber
well, CJ, who’s here at MTF, Frankfurt, was in the winning team of the South by Southwest. And, and one of my concerns during the judging because of seven judges, because it was a real kind of satirical, almost kind of performance art element to what CJ was doing even met CJ. So you can kind of imagine this. But what I was worried was these other judges aren’t going to get this because this is this is basically a critique of, essentially this kind of thing. And I thought, so he’s probably, I mean, I’m scoring a really highly, because I think that’s amazing. Yeah. But I’m, you know, maybe they’re not going to score him as highly because they might not, you know, quite get it from, you don’t get it from a particular, you know, exactly from the different major record labels or from, you know, big broadcasting companies. So they kind of looking at it from particular lens. And what was really interesting is they scored it as highly as I did, and they didn’t get it, which, which is really amazing. So they actually saw the commercial potential in the thing that was actually satirical of the things with commercial potential.
Daniel Ray
So we, you know, and one thing to kind of bring up after also having conversations with him, you know, directly and about an individual. It’s also in some of these cases, it’s you, you, you may not see the commercial intent, or the commercial potential of that particular idea. But you do see a particular commercial intent, or potential of that person. Sure. And an entrepreneur, as an entrepreneur, as an entrepreneur, whatever. You know, if if an entrepreneur tells you they’re gonna retire, that’s funny, you know, it’s not gonna I mean, it’s never gonna happen, because if you have one idea, you have 1000 ideas.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, as we speak to VCs, they go just back the rider. Yeah, you know, yeah. And it’s, it might not be the right horse, but the back the rider,
Daniel Ray
right, because you’re gonna you can switch horses. Yeah, you can, you can absolutely switch horses, switching jockeys, much more difficult, you know, so, and, you know, I think that’s the opportunity, you know, I’ve been through that, on both sides of that, from the venture capital side of it, and I, you know, raising money with the original idea that we raise money on was not what we ended up, you know, we have some form of variation, you know, and the idea of, you know, sticking to a heart Fast business plan have something that you just like from a hackathon, or something you did. That’s like, that’s like getting married from on the first Tinder date. You know? I mean, that’s crazy. So you kind of need to feel things out and see where they go. And the other thing is that the market is not static, either. Sure, the markets changing. I mean, all these people who I mean, all these companies, you know, say that they were out there that had the best incredible physical keyboard. At the time the iPhone came out.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, you know, Blackberry? Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel Ray
Blackberry, I mean, the iPhone, the concept of Blackberry, which was so well loved. When you compare it to an iPhone, it just seems archaic. And
Andrew Dubber
also, likewise, from the opposite direction. Had you asked people if they want a screen without buttons, they would thought you’re crazy.
Daniel Ray
Exactly. I thought you were completely crazy. But that goes back to this idea of evolution versus revolution. And you need activities where you’re free to fail, or you’re free to explore, you’re free to create for just the purpose of doing it. To to arrive at these revolutionary ideas. And without that freedom, you’re just gonna have a constant evolution, you know, and constant evolution is not necessarily a good thing. I mean, we have the platypus. You know, how did that happen?
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. Because on paper, that’s not a great idea. It’s not
Daniel Ray
a great idea. Like I just I would have never, I mean, that’s like pickles and peanut butter. Why? How would that how would that ever happen?
Andrew Dubber
So now that you’re here, and you’re here for the 24 hours of the of the kind of the, I guess, the sort of the stripped down MTF Labs, because normally, this is a multi day event. But here at music mass in Frankfurt, we’re doing the sort of 24 hour version of the MTF Labs, you’re making yourself useful. You What are you working on?
Daniel Ray
what I’ve been doing right now is actually, I mean, how I feel like I’m making myself most useful. And I hope it’s, it’s I’ve used to some of these guys is going around to really get an understanding of what each each of these teams are doing. And not only what the teams are doing, but what the individuals are doing, like, what excites them, what’s what’s interesting to them, and one of the guys I was talking to about a particular project he was working on. He said, you know, he’s showing me some code from something and he says, oh, but that’s from another thing. And he showed me another thing he was doing, he was like, Wow, that’s really good. Yeah, but that’s from another thing, you know, it’s part of this other thing, and, and I just like, hold on stop. And I said, What’s your GitHub, and I just went and sat and spent, you know, some time on his GitHub, and it was fantastic. He’s got a lot of great projects. And so that also brings it back to that idea, if you have one idea, you have, you have 1000 ideas. And so I think the thing that I’m getting out of it is, is getting to know these individuals, getting to know the teams and hopefully giving them some at least some sort of feedback on on, you know, some of the things that they’re doing, and seeing if it’s just from the random, weird things that I’ve run across, that might spark an idea in them, or, you know, get them to to maybe, you know, jump some gaps. And so the things they’re working on,
Andrew Dubber
what’s the roadmap for you personally, what what are you looking forward to, or developing next, and you’re sort of career path, because it seems like it has rapid jumps of you. So the next thing, next thing, next thing? What Yes, thing,
Daniel Ray
this is, this is the next thing, I mean, this is this is this is I think this is, this is where I’m at. And it’s one of those things where I get, I get to do the coolest things every day. And the structure, the freedom that I have to do this is it’s really idea driven. And so there’s not the pressure of, of being, you know, tied to timelines, or getting a product out. I don’t have that stress of an entrepreneur, thinking about how to make payroll, how to do this, I get to do the fun parts, like I get to, can I get to to eat all the ice cream? You know, and I have? That’s, that’s the stuff I’m doing right now. I mean, the main things I’m working on right now, and for the next little bit that are really, really cool. Completely, you know, reimagining what Muse score can be, you know, in some from the experience, you know, and and so, from creation, to distribution to consumption, looking at the fantastic things we have now. And by the way, this has also been a really interesting thing to dive into the open source world because I prior to this, I had no I had No real connection to the open source world. And I already had some prejudices about it without spending the time there because I was just thinking, Well, why do that? Because there’s not this commercial viability
Andrew Dubber
really extrinsic.
Daniel Ray
Yeah, and you don’t own the source code. And you can’t do this as like, but it’s got me to really rethink some of those things and think, Well, actually, there’s really some fantastic ways to make, you know, to make revenue and open source, it’s not direct, you know, but they’re indirect ways. And you have a type of development and type of customer relationship that’s very, very different. You know, it’s like, everyone, it’s when, when someone says, like, what if? And then if it’s followed by? I can, you know, that’s the thing, what if you can write what if you can you want to do it, you know, if users ask for features or request features, it’s just like, awesome, do it, you know, and it’s a very different sort of interaction, you meet a lot of really great and really passionate people. So that’s a, that’s been a new thing. And so it also has a new set of challenges. So how, how do you as a company, how do you manage the expectations and manage the relationships of the really very important, very valuable, very amazing contributors very generous with their time and their expertise, and getting to understand and know their motivations for why they do it. And it’s, it goes back to doing you know, the everything we’ve been talking here, that’s, that’s also the open source community, the open source community is doing it for the love of it, doing it for they want to see if they can do that, how that can happen. There’s each individual has different set of motivations. But you know, the idea here is saying, Okay, what, what do we have now? What are the raw materials that we have? Where do we want to be in five years? in three years? And what are the steps to take in and work towards that, you know, from moving back backwards? And the other thing is, what are entirely new product categories? We can come up with? What are entirely new things, we can come up with what, what does actual digital music mean? Because digital music creation in terms of notation, everyone is still stuck in the idea of paper. And every software stuck in this idea of this paper paradigm. And even if they’re doing digital distribution, they’re distributing digital paper. Right? It’s PDF. And it’s like, we’re not taking advantage of digital. It’s a thick work. We’re creating for a fixed a fixed format.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, yeah. And not using the affordances of the medium.
Daniel Ray
Yeah. And digital is truly a theory. It doesn’t have, you don’t have to assign it a format. And so the idea, you know, when I was in the, these meetings today, this other discussion with the WC three, music notation, community group, and they’re talking about this new standard in the new future, I was like, Guys, guys, stop stop. You’re trying to create, it’s like you’re trying to create a new digital format for cassette tape. You know, okay, how are we going to a new digital encoding format for cassette tape? Forget that cassette tape again, exists every other medium out there, that is a digital format doesn’t have any concept of fixed format. Right? You don’t have mp3 keys that are designed to Oh, well, this mp3 format will sit on an LP, right, you know, okay, well, what does that matter in? And I think it’s a failure of the companies that are producing the consumption side, we have to solve the consumption problem.
Andrew Dubber
It’s like a digital album that has signed to Yeah,
Daniel Ray
it is, flip your phone over, you know. So the problem that we have is, as a consumer, it’s, we’re we have not solved the consumption problem in a way that is truly digital native. So because of that problem, because those solutions are not compelling enough. We are still we still creating for these older fixed formats, and a metaphor that comes to mind here in this and it also, you know, something to learn from this idea is that so my brother, if you talk about the family, and how all these impacts are in the family, so my brother, he was at Microsoft for 12 years, and he is a UX designer. And, you know, he is One of the things we talk about evolution versus revolution, sometimes revolution is hard. Because those are not ready for that revolution, don’t get it. And they want something familiar,
Andrew Dubber
right? Actually their resistances to relations
Daniel Ray
in other spheres as well. And I get it, I get it. Because also, I mean, like, I grew up skiing, right. And I like to ski and I decided to try, I’m gonna try snowboarding. And I had new pain, I wasn’t good at it, I wasn’t in control, I was like, I don’t have a limited, I have a limited time to do this. This sucks, I want to go back to skiing. So that’s the same idea here, right. But I’ve had I started out on snowboard. And I went through the initial pain on snowboard, I probably love snowboarding. So the point is, is so he designed windows eight. So right, all those little squares and those boxes in the metro interface. That’s his, that’s his baby. So he did that. Like, he’s the sole inventor on the patent and all that. And they had this idea that they would test it on kids. And it’s so easy that all this three year old can just go in, and they can sit in front of it. And intuitively in a matter of seconds. They understand how it works, and they can operate it. But you put a three year old kid with a mouse and you have to click and you have to read and toys, and they’re not gonna, they’re not going to arrive at that point. And so they tested it all on kids. And they said, Look at how amazing it is a kid can understand it in a second. What they didn’t test it on adults. And it was the problem was, the adults didn’t get it. And the adults wanted to go back, they wanted to ski again, they don’t want to snowboard, they want the Start button, and they want to go back to that and listen to words that pop up. That’s what they wanted, they want to read, they want it you know, they want a they want a more cumbersome, awkward interface that that you know, that they understand. And so it that’s a really, really interesting you know, metaphor there. And he actually after that, that was his his his last thing there. And he went on to, to go on to now he’s at Google. And he’s been there there for a while. But it’s an interesting idea. So when we look at the digital native formats, we look at paper and I had had a discussion with some of the publishers while I was here at this event and talking with him and their papers never gonna die. Papers never gonna die. And I was like, You know what, you’re gonna die, you’re really gonna die. And that’s fine. Because as I said, here’s the point, when you’re gonna die, you know in this at all, all you’re gonna die, but we’re gonna be replaced by something. And we’re not like, we’re not immediately replaced by something, you know, completely mature as we die, but meaning that, that we should focus on these new interfaces on newer generations, the digital natives, these new interfaces, new new concepts. Okay, cool. Paper. Awesome. Show it you stay with it?
Andrew Dubber
Yes. This isn’t 100 years from now on new people.
Daniel Ray
Yeah, we’re gonna have all we already have all new people. We have new people we don’t need, you know, you stay with paper, when you die. Paper dies with you. Right? That’s fine. That’s cool. We’re gonna phase it out. But that’s the point is when we who do we create for are we creating for the whole entire audience and people that have their fixed ways? If here’s the thing if windows would have if they had said, Okay, you know what, here’s this interface. And this interface here is for everyone under 25. And here’s the interface, it’s the same software, it’s compatible, does everything and here’s for everyone over 25 it would have worked and actually tried that, that hybrid thing for a while, okay, but the idea of with what I see the opportunity with us, and what we’re creating is to say, Hey, we’re not going to design these interfaces for these guys that are all caring about paper in this bed paper metaphor. And these things, we’re gonna design for this next generation, and they’re going to grow with us, you know, and they’re gonna evolve with us, and we’re gonna design for them. And with music, we’re 67% of our users are under the age of 24. Wow. Which is wild. That’s insane. It’s insane. 12 million users, and 7000 new downloads per day. And we really haven’t gotten into the education segment in a meaningful way. As we do that. I see ICS, pushing 80% of our users being under that age, and that’s what we’re going to create for. And that’s going to give us opportunities to explore new paradigms for this digital native. And I think that also becomes an interesting idea of you can take revolutionary versus evolutionary risks when you have the ability that your market would potentially go along with you. And if these guys with paper if that’s not really our market, right when stats tell us that that’s not
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, we don’t
Daniel Ray
care love paper, all you want to do origami, we don’t care. You know, Cuz that’s not you’re not our audience. And that’s a weird thing to do when you get into, you know, these discussions with guys that are creating for composers to distribute for paper. And they’re in that world, because when you
Andrew Dubber
think of sheet music, you think of classical musicians, you think of paper, paper.
Daniel Ray
Yeah. But what if she music is streaming? Yeah. Like, why does it? I mean, like, think about the concept of music streaming. That’s the next evolution past the mp3, right? Well, sheet music exists in time and space. But right now, our concept of sheet music just exists in space, that doesn’t exist in time. And if you think about it, there’s all these symbols and all these these things in music notation, that are about compromises between the idea of time and space, right? If you have limited space, and unlimited time, well, you add in repeat symbols and jumps. And all these things will, if you have unlimited time, and unlimited space, well, that can’t you don’t need those anymore, right? The process becomes simplified. And the idea of the level of knowledge that you need to create notated music also changes because as you create smarter systems, so let’s say the idea of paper goes away. So paper goes away. Well, all these rules about engraving and how placement of things are, and there’s this, there’s really a cult, like a serious religion, around music notation engraving. And the reality is that algorithms are a lot better at that than humans, and a lot more efficient. And watching humans, waste their time, their energy and intellectual capacity on that, when they could spend their time creating more music. Who is like, Who thinks about Oh, man, I did the best engraving today. Oh, engravers. engravers do. Yeah. But anyone beyond that doesn’t like like, wow, this is beautifully engraved pieces. And when you have digital format, it becomes fluid. You know, because it’s, you have a mobile phone, and you have your music on your mobile phone, you have music on a computer or a tablet on this. It’s going to be different for each format, it’s going to be optimised for each individual, the constraints of each individual device. And that’s, these are the fun challenges when you go back to bring you back to what I get to do all day. Yeah. Is imagine the world where it can be not necessarily where it currently is. Right? And you get to break shit along the way.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, so now that you’ve come here, to an empty if you had a taste of it, can we get you back? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Daniel, thanks so much for your time. All right. Take care. Cheers. That’s Daniel Ray, head of innovation for ultimate guitar. And that’s the MTF podcast. If there was anything in there that’s of interest to you, and you think you might want to get involved in what we do. You can sign up at the MTF website, just go to Music Tech fest.net slash register. And if there was anything in there that might be of interest to someone, you know, make sure you share it with them. That’s it for now. Have a great week, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
