Danny Newcomb Podcast Transcript
Danny Newcomb joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Danny Newcomb. Longtime Seattle musician and founding member of local bands Shadow, Goodness, and The Rockfords. Danny grew up playing guitar and writing songs with Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, and they founded their first band in the 80s. They grew up riding BMX bikes around the north end of the city, going to public school and graduating from Roosevelt High School.
Danny went to the Evergreen State College and escaped in 1991 with a degree in creative writing. In 2021, Danny began working with AI scientist, musician, and father of artificial general intelligence, Dr. Ben Goertzel, exploring possibilities for music platforms and publishing with AI. In fall of 2022, Danny began working with Incantio co-founder and Logitech architect Tiffany Larson on designing a new licensing platform that is non-exclusive and geared towards independent musicians and content creators that license music.
AI curates the music as it is uploaded and recommends new music to users of the site through a music-to-music search, not using hashtags. With a patented search filter that enables a city-by-city search for independent music, Incantio is engaging with local stories and artists and advertisers.
Well, good afternoon, Danny. Welcome to the show!
[00:01:27] Danny Newcomb: My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:30] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. So fun. I appreciate you jumping on and making the time you hailing out of a great city in America, Seattle, Washington. I spent some time in the eastern side of Washington, believe it or not, but Seattle has always been a fun place to visit.
And of course, we all know there’s some great music coming out of Seattle. So, Danny, we’re going to just jump right into the questions here. We want to talk about your career a little bit. Music is your big thing, right? You’re a writer, musician, and band member. Now you’re an entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Incantio. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:02:06] Danny Newcomb: Well, I was going to say that I think.
I was thinking about this last year when I started working on Incantio. I’ve been an entrepreneur basically all my life. I think most musicians these days are entrepreneurs. I’ve been performing since I was 10. Seattle, of course, was a, and still is, a booming music town. And I grew up with the Pearl Jam guys, started bands, put up flyers, self-promoted, self-booked did our own recordings, everything.
So, I think Pretty much everything I’ve done in my life, including building my own house and becoming a farmer at the ripe age of 40 has led me to do things myself and be of the entrepreneurial mindset. But music itself is a very, it’s a non-business and a vocation all rolled into one.
So that’s probably more room. It’s not exactly entrepreneurial in that sense.
[00:02:53] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I love it. We’re going to dive in a little bit more. But so, our audience can really understand more about who you are, where you came from your background, what you’re doing today. But that’s awesome. And I again, appreciate what you’re sharing.
Danny jumping in here to the next question. We just touched on your music career a little bit in the music industry, and what we’re seeing now in tech is how it’s being applied in all industries, right? You’re seeing it with the way the proliferation of AI, especially after the pandemic. Could you maybe share with us how you’re leveraging AI technology in the music industry and the potential benefits of combining AI tech with human creativity?
[00:03:28] Danny Newcomb: I think one of the reasons I started working with AI in the music field was it really excels AI machine learning, both Excel, going through large pieces of data and combing for patterns or recognizable features. One thing about the music business is that ever since file sharing and Napster, it’s basically become so decentralized, de-structured that there’s not much profit left in it.
And it’s hard for the people that create it to hold onto their ownership. I think. As we move into a world with this new tech songs can finally be tracked smaller, financial transactions can take place and be held to account. And most of all, you can do recommendation. You can actually have searches now that will find a song out of the 150, 000 that are released independently every day. It’s amazing.
[00:04:19] Brian Thomas: You’re absolutely right. We have to leverage some of this newer technology because humans just cannot keep up with the amount of data is being released daily, including music, as you mentioned. So, I appreciate you sharing that.
[00:04:31] Danny Newcomb: And that’s exactly right. I think there’s another thing too, that’s been built.
On human systems is that there’s a lot of human curation and a lot of gatekeeping that happens. Now you can call gatekeeping, most of the licensing platforms, most of the labels, have someone who’s decides what music they want to release, when they want to do it, how much they’re going to pay for it, et cetera, et cetera.
But I think as we move into a world where it’s so easy to, produce and release music, we need to have systems in it that are scalable to. At least hold some of that content and at least offer it up for people who are looking for new music. And so, I think we’re at a point where the models themselves are shifting because of this new technology.
[00:05:13] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is going to make it a lot easier for both the listeners, right? People, the consumers and musicians that are trying to do something different or maybe collaborate with other artists. So, appreciate that share Danny, obviously you’re In this tech world now with us all right, you’re obviously leveraging some of this new and emerging technologies in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with our audience today?
[00:05:38] Danny Newcomb: Well, one thing that has really been a joy to work with is some new AI technology that instead of using hashtags, which is the way most music is described, when you go to online catalogs there are now systems that match music so well and recommend new music so well through features that it becomes a music journey.
It’s not hashtags. It’s not doing visual searches of band names or artist names or looking for lengths of wave files, for people that work in sync or whatever. You’re talking about being able to take your favorite song and load it up. And the AI will recommend songs from Incantio’s catalog for you to license or just to play and we’ll give you a constant stream of music. It’s quite amazing.
[00:06:22] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I love that. And like I said, Danny and we speak to just about everybody across the tech spectrum here on this podcast, because we are a tech podcast, but the things that I’ve talked to many people like yourself, a lot of your peers out there that are CEOs leveraging some of this emerging tech I’m just amazed at what we’ve done just in the last three years. It’s just phenomenal. So, thank you for your sharing the insights on the music industry. Cause we don’t hardly get to cross over and touch in some of these verticals. So, I appreciate that.
[00:06:52] Danny Newcomb: There’s one other component I’d like to talk about, and that is, I think, these old models that we were talking about basically revolve around product or controlling distribution systems.
And so, when you bring in a system like AI, where you can provide a service, a direct delivery service for artists to people who want to license it, podcasters or film editors you’re creating a service, but not controlling the product or the mechanism. And so, it becomes a community and it becomes a new marketplace.
So really this new marketplace is what’s emerging. And I think it’s very exciting with the amount of autonomy that’s being created.
[00:07:32] Brian Thomas: Absolutely love it. And we’re seeing that more and more. One example is blockchain. And so, I appreciate you sharing the fact that we are a lot of the things that were coming out now, because that’s what people want, not what the corporations want or not, I can go on and on about that, but
[00:07:46] Danny Newcomb: I could too.
[00:07:47] Brian Thomas: Yep. Yes. From recording artists all the way up to our Federal Government. So, we’ll pass this to another podcast someday. How’s that? Last question of the evening, Danny, can you share something from your career experience that would be helpful for those listening this evening, looking to grow their career in either music or entrepreneurship?
[00:08:05] Danny Newcomb: I personally love to be engaged. I think a lot of people use the word inspired, but inspiration is definite, especially in a creative artistic sense. So, I think for me, just to be engaged, to be excited about something and to feel like you’re working on a problem, you’re building something.
Those things are very important. And I think it goes hand in hand with a mental idea of how things will be, how you’re going to get there. So, you have to make a map at the same time that you’re engaged in problem solving. I think that becomes the process. Over imagining how it’s going to feel when you’re successful, that engagement, that sort of problem solving, following that structure in your mind of, well, I’ll release this product.
And then if that does well, then I might change it a little bit, release another product, then I want to work in this market. You have this sort of structure in your head that keeps you going and focused on the work itself rather than daydreaming or being nonproductive, but it’s really that engagement I find to be inspiring.
[00:09:04] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And we see that as a general theme throughout a lot of these podcasts with entrepreneurs and finding that engagement, that inspiration, that drive, that kind of marries you with your passion and things just happen from there. And as you know, the world’s a better place because of it. Danny, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:09:25] Danny Newcomb: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:09:27] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Danny Newcomb Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
