Senior Vice President of
Partnerships & Communications, Muso.AI
Years with Company: 3
Address: Los Angeles, CA
Web: muso.ai
Email: [email protected]
Clients: Music creators, labels, publishers, studios and distributors
BACKGROUND
Making sure creative people receive credit for their contributions to musical works has become increasingly difficult. Helping solve this problem is Muso.AI. The slick platform is making it easier for anyone to track, correct and share their discographies, not just for artists but also those behind the scenes.
Birth of an Entrepreneur
Ten years ago, I moved to L.A. to study fashion design. One year into fashion school, I realized everyone was drinking Red Bull. And I was like, what’s going on? This is going to kill everyone. So at 18 years old, I raised money to launch a healthy energy drink. This is where the entrepreneurial Nina began.
Being Fwrd
Then, I worked with Randy Jackson as his marketing director for a company that didn’t happen due to COVID. From the connections I made working with Randy, I started my own marketing agency, [FWRD Media.] I was working with international clients from the U.S., Mexico, all the way to China.
Having Something to Market
A couple years later, I was introduced to Jay [Baumgardner] through a friend. Jay’s a great guy, so we kept in touch. In 2017, he was telling me this idea of launching a company that would solve the issue with credits. And I was like, “Reach out to me when you have a product.”
In 2018, he reaches out. “It’s going to be a beautiful app.” And I’m like, “Jay, if it’s not on shelves, it’s not going to do any good to spend money on marketing.” I didn’t want to take advantage of him. Fast forward to 2021. Jay and Kyran [de Keijzer,] his other cofounder, called me and said, “All right, now we’re ready.”
Viral Marketing
I did a grassroots campaign; I didn’t do any ads. Basically, the idea was to do something that would become viral. All our users get a tile they can share from our app. It basically gives you a snapshot of their careers. I started sharing their tiles on our social media and they started reposting. Big artists and producers started sharing their stats on Instagram.
Joining the Fold
That’s when Jay said, “Would you join us as head of marketing?” Besides all the engineers who developed the platform, I was the first hire. I joined as head of marketing in February ’22. After that, I transitioned into a completely different role. Now, I’m more in the [role of forming] partnerships.
Automatic Discographies
In a short time, Muso has become the industry’s go-to platform for credits and analytics. If you have credits anywhere, our platform has already done the work. If someone like Mike Dean downloads the platform and searches his name, he would already find a profile that’s populated with his information. All he has to do is claim it.
We give anything from streaming numbers to social views to how many times a track has been Shazamed. For the first time ever, someone like Vinnie Colaiuta can download the app and see all his credits.
Switching Tactics
Initially, the plan was to capture credits at the moment of creation. We realized that you can’t say, “Hey, everyone. Start using Muso to capture credits.” That’s never going to work. That’s when we switched to the model of putting all their data in one place and making them claim it.
Correcting Errors
When they claim their profiles, they’re able to look through their catalogs and say, “Hey, I have a producer credit that isn’t here. Let me add it.” So if Mike Dean sees he doesn’t have a credit, he can submit it and it will go through a verification funnel. There’s a little bit of AI that will flag if something looks incorrect. We may say, “We need more details. Submit more paperwork so we can verify this as a legitimate claim.” To date, we’ve modified over three million post-distribution credits.
Analytics
We give everyone the same data. They can see how many streams they have across their entire catalog. They can filter by time periods, so they can see streaming numbers over the past seven days, month, year or lifetime. You can also see credits by role, so you can see which album has been streamed the most.
In regards to socials, you can see on TikTok and YouTube Shorts how many videos have been created with the song that you worked on. And we show you the videos. If we look at the song “Cuff It” by Beyoncé, you can see that Kevin Hart posted a video that has 20 million views with the song. So it’s a lot of discovery.
Hidden Revenue
Recently, we heard from deadmau5. His manager reached out and said, “Using your data, we were able to see that an older song was getting a lot of streams. We traced it back to something viral on TikTok.” So they were able to collect money that they weren’t collecting on.
Even Jay had a song he worked on with Evanescence as a producer. He was able to see that “Bring Me to Life” has this amount of streams and then there’s a spike, then it goes down, then a massive spike. He recovered a check of like $100,000.
Using Artificial Intelligence
The third founder is Aaron Kaufman. We tried to go with Muso.com and it was taken. But Muso.AI was available. Aaron said, “I think A.I.’s going to be huge in the next couple years. And I have some ideas of how we can incorporate it.” That’s how we ended up with Muso.AI.
Amazon Meets LinkedIn
Something that’s next is working with retailers. We’re going to allow someone to say, “These are the synthesizers I use.” If someone finds a credit on a song, they can go to the person’s profile and see that he’s sponsored by X company.
Then, they can purchase directly.
Also, A&Rs are using our platform. By end of this year, we want everyone to be able to communicate. So if you want to reach out to someone, that’s going to be available. For all the business profiles, we’re going to start listing who works [there]. It’s going to be like a LinkedIn on steroids, where you can also purchase.
The Hispanic Connection
Coming from a Mexican background, my first language is Spanish. We’ve onboarded so many companies in Latin America. It’s exciting for me, because I pushed hard to make our platform available in Spanish. I was like, “I can be part of this. I’ll make sure it’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Creators First
Muso is completely self-funded. We haven’t gotten any outside money. And we saw all these companies were boasting about all these deals and doing so much press. I said, “We’re going to go the other way. We’re going to make sure we get all the people at the bottom on board. They’re going to create the buzz for us that’s going to be heard at the top.” This is exactly what’s happening.
