When seasoned radio promotion veteran Rob Dalton noticed the music industry's manual data analysis generated more problems than solutions, he knew there had to be better way. Armed with an idea to automate the data, he called serial entrepreneur Lance Goodman. Goodman embraced Dalton's idea and then called on his favorite tech guy, Johnny Baird. Together, these three men developed Spintel.
So to start with, explain to me in layman's terms, for people who know nothing about the music industry, what exactly is Spintel?
Lance Goodman, Co-Founder & President: So what we're doing is we're taking music and all the ways that you can consume music and gathering the data on that and making that data actionable to every type of person in the music industry. From the artists themselves, to the labels, to the VPs of labels, to the management groups, to talent buyers, to venues. They all can use data to make data-driven business decisions. And we try to package that and give it to them in the most efficient way possible.
Rob Dalton, Founder & CEO: People use data more than ever to drive their decisions. And so they have mostly the raw data. We take that raw data and we sort it in ways that help you move the ball from A to B. We help you find actionable insights that allow you to... It points you where to go. "Where can I go to grow?" In many cases, that's the biggest question that someone who's navigating a song up the national charts. Digs through all this data just to find out what's my best opportunities for growth. It takes hours and hours and hours. We do it in a click.
Johnny Baird, CTO: Part of that process, too, was figuring out how to make people's lives easier and shave off time. And show them things that there's no way that they could manually do. It took all day for one song. And now for any song, you can do that same calculation in one click. Basically instantly. So a lot of it's time saving. A lot of it's things that you just wouldn't otherwise see. Really trying to give people features that help them visualize what they need to be doing as well.
Can this business intelligence/analytics platform be used in other industries or is it specifically for the music industry?
Lance: The mechanics can be used in other industries. Taking raw data and being able to deliver it on an interactive screen in real time where you can see exactly what you need to make decisions is applicable in every industry. They've got a lot of tools out there, but no one had built one customized for the music industry before. That's what we did. So it's a very unique paradigm, and there are all kinds of different data sources that we take the data from. It had to be customized completely. It couldn't have been a big Power BI solution or something like that. It was customized. It had to be done the hard way.
Todd DiBenedetto, Investor/Advisor: The concept of what they've developed can be used for any product. For widgets that are doing well in Cleveland. Can these widgets do well in Columbus? It's just a different product, but the thought process and the slicing and dicing of the data, I think, would be very similar.
Johnny: Absolutely. There's multiple different places within the music space and the entertainment space that it can be used as well. So like talent buyers and managers. There's a lot other than just the promotion departments. There's a lot of others that can really utilize this data. Radio stations themselves. And what we do too is we take this data and we do things like projecting or showing averages over time of what a station does. Stuff that was kind of hidden behind the veil before, now we kind of bring to light to let people figure out new avenues where they can get a little bit of space because it's so competitive. You're trying to get one or two extra spins on a radio station. But you might not have any clue where to go. But you got to get those two spins. This is giving them new ways to find those spins.
Lance: So to contextualize that too, artists and their teams need to know where their music's being consumed as fast as possible. And sometimes it's summary data. Sometimes it's market-driven data. And to go back to Johnny's point of all the different user types. Say you're a talent buyer or a venue. You're going to look at just the performance of an artist in that market over a period of time to see if you want to book them, to see if you have enough organic fan base to fill those seats at that venue for that particular artist at that particular price point. So every single one of these user types have different data that they're looking at, but they have to comb through this sea of data to try and find this. We give them what they need in the most efficient way possible.
Rob: We started in the radio promotion aspect, which does affect every area of the industry for terrestrial radio. But this platform, the roadmap is to have a functionality for every area within the music industry.
Is the industry just eating this up?
Lance: Well, it has taken four years and a lot of money to get it right. But we just launched our latest version of the product on January 1. And we've signed 19 out of 20 labels that we've gone to so far. And we're expanding to all formats now. So we started in Christian country because Nashville is home base there. Rob had been in the country format his whole career, so his knowledge and subject matter expertise is where we went to market first. And now we're expanding everywhere. And this is a problem that exists globally too. We do have a partnership, one of the first of its kind, with iHeartRadio MediaBase that owns all of the radio airplay data. We have all the published chart data within our platform. So it's the exact data that all the music industry lives and breathes off.
What are your backgrounds? How did you all come together?
Johnny: My background was always in tech, but kind of all over the place. I moved to Nashville and started a mastering studio in 2008, which was quite successful. I ended up selling my shares of that business, and Lance called me basically the next day asking my thoughts. Because I'd always been just in the tech space and music, interested in it. That's basically how I got started with this project. I think he had to call me about 30 times.
Rob: Lance had to work on Johnny because Johnny couldn't imagine that this didn't exist.
Johnny: Lance said, "No. It's not been done. No one is doing this." He probably called me 30 times and finally I was like, "Okay."
Todd: I had the same reaction.
Lance: I knew Johnny would be the perfect one to start this with us and be able to get us a product out the door. So my background is I'm a serial entrepreneur. I came out of school from an entrepreneurship program, and immediately started a real estate development company. It was really successful, and then 2008 occurred. I got some scars from that. I ended up traveling and being a professional poker player for a few years.
I made the final table in the Asian World Championship. That's how I started my real estate development company. I was a broke kid in college and started playing online poker and got enough money to put some deals together.
But I've always been into analytics and probability and statistics. And I started one of the first ever cryptocurrency hedge funds. That was also a disaster. I was a loss-leader in that.
I still had some money left and I invested in some kids out of Vanderbilt that were doing an app. And I started doing a little investing and also business development. And then I started a software development company where we were doing work-for-hire stuff. And I was incubating my own ideas, me and a couple of partners. And that's when I met Rob. And Rob had been in the industry for 30 years and had tremendous success.
I was like, 'Rob, how did you get all of this success over this many years and how'd you get a competitive advantage?' And that's when he told me how he was combing through this data manually. I said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. You're telling me all the billion dollar labels do it the same way you're doing it?' And he said, 'They're not even doing it the same way I'm doing it.' It was not even at that level. I replied, 'You've got to come to the office tomorrow. We've got to figure this out." And Rob pulled up in his '69 Camaro looking cooler than I ever could.
Why did you say no, Johnny, initially?
Johnny: It seemed too simple and very practical about most things. It just seemed way too simple. I've since found out it was not nearly as simple. But it just seemed like there's so much money that the music industry has thrown around over the years that there's no way somebody didn't already have this developed. And then I thought, "Well, surely the big labels have their own internal software to do this." Which some of them do. But as we found out, Spintel really still just wins. It just provides things that they don't have.
Todd, why were you interested in investing and how did you bring on Jay?
Todd: Yeah. I've been investing. I do some angel investing too, and some startups. That's just always been my thing. And through a common friend, a common acquaintance, we got introduced early on in the early rounds of fundraising. And I was just starting to spend time in Nashville. I'm separately friends with Jay and we do some other stuff together in the music space. And it just intrigued me and the team. I fell in love with the team, and after I became a believer. Because I, like Johnny, wasn't at first, either. I just didn't believe they were fumbling through papers every Monday morning.
Lance: So we went to meet with Jay and Jay said, "Whatever label does not have Spintel will be at a huge competitive disadvantage." And Jay's been on our advisory board for over three years now, and he came in. Todd facilitated that with his investment. It was perfect. Rascal Flatts has been the top performer over decades in radio and taking songs to radio. So it's really cool to have him.
Todd: He's been on both sides. He's been on the artist side, now on the label side. So he understands the industry in a unique way because of that.
And you also have Joe Galante and Clint Higham (Kenny Chesney's manager) on your advisory board?
Lance: Yes. Joe Galante is in the Hall of Fame. One of the only few label executives ever to get inducted into the Hall of Fame. And he was our biggest and earliest investor.
Rob: In the very beginning, one of the first people we talked to was Joe. Because I thought, "Man, if there's anybody that could shoot holes in this it'd be Joe. For me and for some of the other investors, that was huge. To have his opinion. He was on these calls. It was amazing to us the support and the belief that Joe had in the idea.
Lance: He shook our hand and said, "Congratulations, you just solved a huge problem."
Spintel.io
"Whatever label does not have Spintel will be at a huge competitive disadvantage." - Jay DeMarcus
"Artists and their teams need to know where their music's being consumed as fast as possible." -- Lance Goodman