10. Music Meets Blockchain w/Josh Giunta (Love Science Music)

In this episode, the host dives into an in-depth conversation with Josh Giunta, also known as Love Science Music, an accomplished producer, artist, and studio engineer. 

Josh discusses his approach to feeling in control both in life and career, emphasizing the importance of knowledge and intuition. He shares insights about his latest projects, including collaborations and plans for new releases in 2021. Josh also explores the fascinating potential of blockchain technology for transforming the music industry, from real-time royalty payments to more direct artist-to-fan interactions. 

He candidly addresses the current challenges of blockchain adoption, particularly concerning music copyrights. The episode wraps up with Josh's invitation to explore his music and engage with him on various platforms.

Transcript

Hey, music executives. The music you're hearing right now is called Incense and Crystals by Love, science, music featuring Melanie Charles, today's guest, love Science Music, also known as Josh Junta, is an amazing producer, artist, and studio engineer. And I wanna ask you, Josh. When do you feel most in control?

Uh, in general, in, in life or in, in career, in your, in your life? I'd say when I feel relaxed and kind of going with the flow and intuitive, I'd say relaxed and intuitive. Well, don't you think that applied to your, your career as well? In a lot of ways, definitely. Yeah. I mean. Also I, I wanna add, helping me feeling in control has to do with like, just like a knowledge base, like knowing what I'm doing.

It's all those things, you know? So for my career, yes, I have to like know what I'm doing to feel comfortable if I don't know what I'm doing, and I've been certainly been in those situations over the years where I, I was, there was something about what I was doing that I was in over my head on. That can be, that can be not a comfortable and, and in control situation.

Um, yeah, so, so once you know what you're doing, if you feel. Relaxed and, and, and you can just think and react intuitively, I'd say that's when I feel. Most comfortable and in control. So I can actually co-sign with that. Like when I know what the heck is going on. That's what I feel like I'm in control.

It's a simple, it's a simple ask, you know? Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, I'm so excited about this episode because I had to do a lot of research just to figure out what questions to ask today, so, so before we start diving into some of the topics for today, tell us about some of your latest projects and a little bit about yourself.

So I'm a music producer that goes by my moniker as the producer is love science music. I've been releasing records for about on and off for like about eight years, and in the past two years I've been releasing a lot of music. So in 2020 I released a meditation ep and also eight singles with different artists.

Then that led me into this year 2021. And my goal for this year is to do more deeper collaborations with like one artist at a time. So I'm, I'm gonna do a series of EPS with, with a few different artists. And also I wanna make an album by the end of the year. So right now what I'm working on is, um, doing a three song EP with an amazing vocalist and a good friend of mine named Monica Dogra.

And we have two outta three songs done. We're still working on that. Then later in the year, hopefully I have plans to make an EP with the artist from the song you just played. Incense and crystals. Melanie Charles. Hopefully we can make that happen this year. I know she's got a lot going on in, in her creative world.

So that's the plan. And I'd also like to release, uh, a full length album by the end of the year. So those are kind like, you know, if I can do that plus maybe a few singles interspersed, then that would be. A huge accomplishment. So Nice. That's, that's kind of the project goal for the year. Okay. And y'all, we put the music at the beginning of the episode because it's one thing for someone to say, I'm a producer, but it's another thing to listen to the music and then then be like, I produce that.

So that's, that's the name of the game. So tell me about, you got all these projects right? How are you releasing them? Because that is half of the battle really making the project and then giving it to an audience in a way that they'll receive it. So talk to us about that. For one thing, it's hard enough to make music consistently and completely to actually complete music.

That was like the first obstacle I wanted to complete, like, and that was my goal for 2020, was to just release as much music as I could and. Just get that ball really rolling. Then once you do that, you're kind of faced with the second giant question of like, okay, now I'm making music and I'm putting it out.

Like how do I get more people to hear it, you know, make this thing have a life outside of like my own just creations, you know, existing by themselves. So the first wave of music I've put out through, you know, the same, the same ways that most people are putting out music now through all the digital streaming services, and that was through the studio I work at in New York, GSI studios.

We have a record label at the studio as well. The record label has a distribution deal, um, with a company called Soul Spasm. So that was kind of our channel to getting our records to all the digital streaming services and to get our stuff pitched for like playlists and, and opportunities like that. So I did that and continued to do that with my next batch of music, because that's kind of like where the most eyes are focused now, what the most ears are focused for, for new music.

You know, those are the. The popular channels right now. Something piqued my interest in the past couple years, and at first it came on my radar. You know what I'm talking about is, is blockchain and cryptocurrency. So I first became aware of it basically through Bitcoin, and I was just interested in this as like, you know, a potential way to separate people from being tied to like the central banking system and the Federal Reserve.

On like a economic level, there's just so many benefits to it. If, if that system can keep evolving and, and keep spreading on a worldwide scale. And then, so I was just interested in that general technology and then within the past year I started hearing about applications of that same technology to the creative industries and other ways to use the blockchain for things that are totally apart from finance and money.

And there's actually a bunch of amazing applications for. Releasing music direct through like a blockchain, which basically means the big promise of like this, this technology is that it could essentially, if it's built out a certain way, and if design software and, and apps that are artist friendly, which it, that's kind of like the promise of it is that it can be a way for artists to release music without the middleman of like.

A gatekeeper streaming platform or a gatekeeper record label. And we we're already past the gatekeeper record label stage. That's kinda like what the internet introduced to, you know, to, to creators. But basically like, imagine there, there's, there's, uh, platforms popping up now, like imagine SoundCloud, the same type of platform as SoundCloud, where artists are just posting direct to this, this platform.

Except imagine that plus the added layer of like getting paid for your royalties. As they stream, like you can get paid. That technology exists through block Blockchain to get paid like in real time. Like you, you know, I listen to your track and then you get paid like at that moment, you know, and it, and it goes So with blockchain, wait, hold on a second.

With blockchain, let me just make sure I heard you right. I wanna make sure the audience heard you right and that I heard you right, so you can get paid in real time. Um, is what you're saying, that's what you're telling me right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. And it's crazy 'cause like that's, to me, that's the future I want to see and Right.

What's cool about it is like that already exists like that. There's already sites that do that, but they're just, you know, there's such small fish at the moment compared to something like Spotify and like. Spotify is built on the systems that have existed in the music industry for decades as far as like the path that money has to travel to go from the music being consumed in various ways to like actually paying out to.

The, the people who own the copyrights and the creators of the music. So yeah, I'm viewing this as like, this could hopefully be the next evolution of a lot of the arts industries, you know, using and music industry. So like, that's where I wanna see things go. 'cause I think there's so much sentiment of like, artists just being just kind of over the, you know, I, I worked so hard and like my music got streamed even like my music got streamed a million times and it still didn't pay me shit.

Yeah. Oh, I can swear. It's okay. You're good. So, you know, I noticed that this year, particularly when like all these artists were posting, you know, their annual number tallies from Spotify, how many plays they got, how many followers listens, and I saw so many posts of like backlash of like artists, musicians being like, yeah, I got some plays, but like, I have nothing to show for it as far as, you know, we should be getting paid more than this.

You know, you know, it shouldn't be out of our control. Like, if we have a fan base, we should be able to steer that fan base directly to, um, we wanna have them consume on platforms that treat us really well. That's, that's the goal, you know, so, so that's what, you know, I'm kind of researching how to, how to start putting in music in those avenues.

And, and it's so early in that, in, in like blockchain, like really being a, a viable place to release music for, for artists and consumers. It's like totally in its infancy. So. So right now it's like super niche and, but, but my hope is to like start using it and, and just be a part of that movement. You know, essentially be, be early on that, that movement.

So, yeah. So apart. So wow. That was, that was a beautiful, beautiful, uh, amount of information that, uh, I had to search hours for Google for, so thank you. I mean, I only know it because I spent the same hours doing the same thing. No, but my question is, apart from being a small fish right now, what, if any, cons do you see to these blockchain music companies?

And how they can develop, should they say a small fish? Is it better that they're small fish? What do you think? Well, I mean the main con I'm seeing right now is that there's some weirdness around copyrights because the thing that's great about blockchain of why it's very useful is be, is that when some piece of data goes on the, the blockchain, which basically means a piece of data going into servers that are, instead of the servers being held by one company, like in one Google warehouse, somewhere on, on computer servers.

When you upload to the blockchain, you're uploading to a, a cloud network that's basically backed up on millions of computers around the world owned by anybody who wants to back up that data. So in that way, it actually makes it more secure because you can't really hack information that's like copied all over the world on, on, you know, thousands or, or millions of different computers that.

Is that if you, it's somewhat permanent when you upload something to the blockchain. So that's why it's great for like certain legal contracts. It's great for financial transactions to record afin a financial transaction. Like there's no need to change that after the fact. Like if, if a transaction happened, it's a little bit of an issue for copyright.

Like, so if I make a song that has an uncleared sample on it. If I sample like a, uh, let's say a Marvin Gaye song because that, that was hot in the news for getting sampled a few years ago. If I sample Marvin Gay No, you went, I don't remember that. I'm kidding. Go ahead. You couldn't hear enough it, right. So if I do that and like put it out through a streaming service on the blockchain, and then that file is distributed on a bunch of computers and then, you know, Marvin Gays Estate says, Hey, you, you know, that's, that's copyright infringement.

You should take that down. As of right now, it's actually difficult to take that down because it's like a file that is decentralized. It's not an decentralized location on a server. It's decentralized. It's on, it's on many, many servers. So, so that, that's clearly a problem when it comes to music. 'cause you can't, because copyrights exist for a reason and copyrights are how creators get paid for their work or, and that's how their work is documented.

So, so I can't see how that could move forward existing in that same way. If, if you can't, I mean, music copyright has to be acknowledged, so that's, that's a big conduit at the moment. I'm not sure how that's gonna play out. How they can kind of get around that. So another question that I have is, as far as data privacy and data, what's the consensus on how they're approaching privacy and data?

And a lot of it, for example, with Spotify, there's geography where you can see who's streaming, what countries are streaming, the demographics of the people streaming your music. So how are these blockchain music companies approaching data? Well, I've actually heard people speaking about this where the goal of it is that as an artist you would actually.

You would actually know who, who is listening to music. Because I think if right now on Spotify, when I put a record on Spotify spot, Spotify certainly knows who's listening to my music. You know, they probably can, can, you know, they're tracing the IP addresses, I'm sure, and like they have the data on who the consumers are.

But as an artist, you don't have the access to any of that. And that's kind of to the artist's detriment, because you know, if I put a song on Spotify and it gets like 10,000 plays. I don't know who those people are. So when it comes to, like me building my career, that data is actually being held by Spotify.

So an alternative system would, would give me access to that if the listener wanted me to have access to it. You know, like if you listen to my song and I, I saw that you and like all these other people listen to my song, then that would actually be good for the artist because then you can communicate more directly to those people who are actually listening to the music.

That's, you know, on Instagram, it's, it's maybe different, like if someone's liking and. On your photos, obviously you know who it is, so that's a little more direct, but that the data behind it is not obviously, you know, available to the consumer. Just more like general statistics. Okay, gotcha. Now I follow.

Wow. And to the audience, this is a live stream. Just kidding. It's not. So you can't ask, but if the audience has specific questions about this or just wanna get in touch with you, 'cause you give lessons on production, um, I know they're gonna be impressed with the production that they've heard. Um, where can they follow you?

I'm on all the platforms as love, science, music, so Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I'm on Clubhouse LinkedIn and my website love science music.com. So it's easy to find you. Well, is there anything else you wanna share, uh, with the audience? I mean, I know I just went down the rabbit hole of like the tech side of, of music, but, you know, I'm, I'm about, I'm a music maker first and foremost.

Please have a listen to love science music on the streaming platforms for now. Yeah, that's it. It's just, you know, I, I love for people to hear my art so. Beautiful. Your art is beautiful. Thank you for making it. We appreciate you. Thank you and thank you. Thank you for this podcast and thanks for having me on as a guest.

Sure thing, music executives, peace out. See you on the next episode. Don't forget to leave a rating of the show. Helps to make us better. Thanks so much y'all. Take care.