How Remote Collaboration Translates to the World of Music

Everybody. Welcome back to Pro AV today. I am your host, Ben Thomas. You know, one of the things that I love most about this show is that because we don't sell sponsorships and people can't beat can't pay to be on this show. I get to have a lot of conversations with people and about things that interest me specifically. And and that includes a lot of specific new technologies and innovations. And today we get to do that. One of the things that really jumped out to me at a show I was at recently was a tool called Loop Fish. And if you're not familiar with who Loopfish is, I'll give you just some quick context. So one of the challenges, in the world of music for for a long time, especially in the world of remote collaboration, is being able to bring musicians from different places into one place at the same time to collaborate, to rehearse, to try new things, and they really stood out to me because they created a solution that was able to do that. So I wanna talk a little bit more about some of the nitty gritty today and talk more about some of the applications and specifics because, like, again, I really, really enjoyed, getting to meet these folks in person. So I wanted to bring them on the show today. Without further, I do wanted to introduce our two guests for today. We've got Patrick Finn and Rocky Malek both from the loot fish team. It's fantastic, to have you both on. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Glad to meet you. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. Well, thank you as well for coming on. And Patrick, I wanna start with you real quick. You know, I I mentioned a little bit off the top about some of the frustrations and challenges, especially post COVID that musicians have had, just being able to collaborate. Right? You know, you've seen tools like Zoom and teams and all sorts of different things that really empower I would say the meeting side of things, which I can talk to somebody in real time, but playing with somebody in real time and and and be accurate you know, collaboration isn't something that really has been achieved, to my knowledge up until recently by you guys, talk to me a little bit about the inspiration by behind why you guys actually created the tool and and some of the reasons and some of the solutions that you guys are solving for the musician community specifically. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. As you alluded to the the pandemic really really exposed a bit of this need and it and it shifted our culture in a pretty significant way. We we went from everybody in an office all day to the opportunity to actually work remotely in a in a meaningful and widespread way. And it's it's shifted our entire world and we're still talking about it as people leave their house less frequently, are out and about. And, you know, that's definitely something that's still lingering from the pandemic. And most certainly expose how difficult it is to play music online together in real time. So if you try playing, you know, over over the internet on something like a zoom, you're gonna experience almost a second of delay between when you actually make a sound and when the other person hears it, And that pretty much kills the ability to keep in rhythm with somebody as you're trying to play music. We, we we are comprised of a bunch of musicians ourselves and experienced a challenge acutely as we wanted to make music and weren't really weren't really able to in that time. So we were we were just thinking is there is there a way we can do this? Is there a way we can dig in and and you know prioritize audio transmission and get the the Transmission time or the latency low enough that you could actually keep the beat and meaningfully make music. We're we're we, you know, took took a lot took a lot of work to, to come up with sort of how and and and fine tune it and the parameters in which it works and doesn't work. But we were, you know, really excited about being able to start to bring this to market and, all the solutions that it can potentially solve. So not just, you know, the fact that we don't leave our houses anymore, but opening up the opportunity to make to let people make music more often and more meaningfully with new people. You know, with, with people across town or across the state, that they otherwise wouldn't have any opportunity to collaborate with. So it's a it's a super exciting thing and we're we're thrilled to be bringing it out. Well, Patrick, one of the things really that this solves, and obviously, we're talking about the world of virtual collaboration and and and, you know, people being able to be large distance apart. But that that doesn't always have to be the case. Right? Convenience is a reason that somebody might wanna do this or say I'm I'm with a local house to worship and I need to rehearse You know, and Rocky wanted to ask you as well, what are some of the challenges even from a, a musician standpoint that that this helps really kind of solve? Yeah. No. That's that's a great question, Ben. So as Patrick mentioned, you know, we have a team, that is comprised of musicians, but we wanted to really understand and corroborate, you know, our understanding of musician challenges. So We talked to a lot of musicians outside of our our company, and then we also interviewed and surveyed thousands of musicians to uncover, you know, some of the biggest challenges that musicians are facing when they're trying to make music with each other. And what we found was there are three big challenges. They'll it's people, it's place, and it's time. So if you imagine, you know, musicians are looking to find other musicians to play music with, but then they want musicians who play at a similar ability, similar experience level, and similar interest in the type of music that they want to play. So we're addressing those hurdles with the networking platform that comes as part of Lutefish. So that it's very intuitive, very easy for musicians to find people who play a certain type of instrument, they are like minded in their interest in music, the genre of music. The second hurdle was finding a suitable place for musicians to play. That's large enough to accommodate the whole band. So many homes don't have large enough spaces. And if you imagined renting of private spaces can be expensive as well. So with loot for stream, we eliminate that pain point by allowing up to fifty musicians to play together online. They can rehearse, they can jam online, and play music without worrying about, hey, how do I find a space that can that can fit fifty people together in one space. And then last, but not the least, I would say the time is one one of the biggest hurdles. In fact, seventy percent of the musicians we surveyed were spending thirty minutes to an hour commuting to meet their bandmates. So imagine the amount of time it takes to pack up all the music equipment travel to meet your bandmates, set up your equipment, jam rehearse, and then pack everything up and travel home. So very challenging to find large chunks of time in their busy schedules, which means that they're not playing music as often that they would have preferred to. So I would say these are the three biggest challenges that we found musicians were facing, you know, people, place, and time. Well, Rocky, I wanna follow-up on that too and really ask, you know, I think that that a lot of people focus on really the ability. Yeah. It's it's nice to be able to rehearse and practice and things like this, but you talked about it being kind of a networking platform and of the things that really stands out to me is when you talk about networking and collaboration, that empowers a lot of creativity. How how does the creativity side of things play into the technology, even as much as just the real time collaboration. Yeah. We believe that when musicians are able to play music, with other musicians. That's when the most inspiring music is made. So that's a great question, Ben. And lag and latency in the past has been a hindrance preventing musicians from being able to connect online musically. And now with Lootfish technology, you know, we're minimizing that, that delay in audio transmission. So that allows musicians to play with each other in real time. They can record their music. They can collaborate in real time, and they can even stream their music to their friends or our audiences. So it is much more of an authentic an instantaneous connection, which helps sort of fosters that creative process. They can meet new musicians and, use our platform for vibe checks before they actually meet somebody in in person. You know, you can do a vibe check on loopfish and make sure that that's somebody that you want to continue play music with. We also see this platform enabling, you know, less seasoned musicians to seek mentorship and and guidance for musicians who are more seasoned. We also see this as a way for musicians to explore new forms of music because Loofresh really lowers the bar to entry. So we see this platform opens up the opportunity for a lot of musical magic Well, I love to hear a little bit more about how the the technology empowers creativity. Right? And I think it's such a cool feature, but You know, Patrick, I gotta ask. The show is called Pro EV today. We love talking technology. We love getting into the granular nitty gritty sometimes. So I've gotta ask. Right? You know, what are some of the technological hurdles that pop up typically when you're when you're putting something like this together? Right? I mean, obviously, we're we're largely familiar with platforms like Team and Zoom and things like that. And, you know, the idea of WebRTC and NDI and all these these different network, you know, video and audio protocols are very familiar. But what specific challenges pop up when it comes to actual, beat, accurate, real time collaboration? Yeah. I'd I'd say that the number one challenge that we fight every day is just the, the general infrastructure of the United States internet system and the global internet system as well. You know, don't be all. I indeed, right? As as as we all freeze on, on, on teams and and zoom. That's really the the probably the biggest challenge and and ensuring before, before you commit to to starting to use the loopfish platform that you have a stable and strong connection is is really one of one of the critical components, you know, a good cable internet or fiber connection with, with at least ten megabytes of upload speed. Is is a really important piece because if you if you are on a slower connection that doesn't have as much bandwidth or if you're on something like a five g, which has a lot of throughput, but not a not a great latency level. It's going to give you some challenges that, that you probably won't be able to overcome, given, given just that connection. So that's the hardest piece is is really making sure we help people understand upfront what you need in order to to use this and make it work. In addition to the good connection, we wanna want people to be relatively close to each other, so that they can, have a good connection. At some point, the transmission speed between New York and Los Angeles is a little too much to be able to, to keep up with it. We're, we're we're dealing with the speed of light at a certain point, the time it takes light in a fiber optic cable. To travel from one place to another and add in the time it takes every time it hits a little network switch and the the milli and microseconds that those add adds up to meaningful time. So we are working on solving for the speed of light, but I think we have a couple more years of R and D before we can disprove Einstein. So we'll we'll keep you posted on that one. Look, if you if you end up disproving Einstein, I think you've got a much, much larger product I mean, I think that's that's incredible, but Or or the world's just gonna melt down. But, yeah, no, agree. There'll be a lot of challenges outside of that. Well, be messing with gravity too at the same time. But, you know, Patrick, I I wanna ask. Right? We've spent a little bit of time on the technology, really focusing on the the I would say the video and the audio collaboration side of things. I wanna talk about the networking side of things a little bit. So, you know, when you you think about platforms and you think about being able to share things in real time, a massive part of that is being able to share annotations and real time on music. It's it's sourcing and finding different musicians. Talk to me a little bit more about kind of the networking and sharing and social side of the platform, in in in in relation to kind of the those music folks. Sure. Yeah. We we see the networking side of the the platform as sort of the complimentary piece to the to the the loopfish collaboration piece. So, the networking site is entirely free. For for anybody to use. We're launching in a beta format right now. So, it's invitation only and you can head to our website and sign up for the wait list help us build this community and build this site in the way that it works for, for musicians. And that's at lukefish dot com. But if, as we ramp this up and as as the devices, hit the market, in, in early summer, we really see that networking piece feeding the funnel for being able to make music with more people as Rocky said and with maybe unexpected people but also just to to keep you in contact with your musician contacts, you know, as we talked to musicians about what their needs were and in finding musicians you know, Facebook was a little too broad and Craig's list was a little too creepy and it just didn't, it it it did there wasn't a place for musicians to go and find sort of their place, their home of this is where I go and express myself as a musician as well as network with other musicians. In in that sort of connections type way. So we're really hoping that we can build that out and almost and serve the musician community so that they have a have a place to to be Well, that's such a cool lens, and I love that you said that it it's about serving the musician community. Right? And and the musician community really you know, for for better, for worse, they're always changing. They're always demanding new things, trying new things. It's bit literally is what drives the industry forward. So Rocky, I wanna ask a little bit kind of about the the future and maybe even the roadmap a little bit. You know, what are some of the things that as musicians continue to evolve? Loop Fish is gonna try and stay ahead of the time zone. Is it new features? Is it new networking opportunities? What are some of the things uh-uh in the future? So with Lootfish, we are pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and we're just getting started. We see a future where we're continually embracing, the needs. Of musicians, and we are continuing to evolve based on what we are hearing from our community. So we already have a pipeline of new features just based on our own knowledge based on all the research that we've done with musicians. We had had a lot of different needs at the Nam Show. We're working on those. And as we get more and more users on a platform, we have an easy, button to provide feedback to our team that we will be leveraging. And we'll be intently listening to what our musician users need on our platform so that we continue to create something that's meaningful. That's real for them. And we see it as a community that would thrive, as a musical community and become a musical ecosystem for musicians globally. And we enable musicians to share in that joy of making music together. So that's how I see it. Well, and that that vision, I think, is what will continue to to drive the company forward. And, you know, What's interesting, you guys, you and I had a chance to talk a little bit kind of before, this interview, talk about kind of the vision in the core market. And I love that you focus on really the the the prosumer kind of style musicians. Obviously, some of the the traditional consumers as well, but You know, I think and I never talk about pricing on the show or anything like that. But I think it's important because the communities that you're looking to serve are are having to have those conversations about price and they're familiar with plug in pricing and subscriptions and things like that. So even though I don't normally ask about it, Patrick, I wanna ask, you know, what What can folks expect once this thing starts to launch to the public? From a pricing standpoint, is there is there a date? Is there, you know, or are there different business models? What does that kinda look like for the end user? Yeah. We're we're gonna start with, with sort of one core, collaboration product, our stream, device. It's gonna have, two quarter inch XLR combo inputs with, gain adjustments. It'll have your network connectivity, the ability to change toggle between line and instruments, the, the volume adjustment for your headphones And that'll retail at around three hundred dollars. And we have a road map for future, future products as well, but, we're gonna start with the, the, The one model is our as our primary one. And then, a ten to twelve dollar a month subscription depending on, or to just, you know, cover the cost of server cost connectivity and all of those things. And then that's that's the piece that gets you into the collaboration, capabilities. And it's really that device that's the core piece of technology that, from our view enables that low latency performance to really happen. As I mentioned, the vast majority of the latency that you see in any sort of connectivity happens outside of your own home. It happens when the signals are being routed from your place to, to with with whoever who, whomever you're collaborating with. So that's the bulk of it. We have to minimize to an absolute maximum or minimum degree. What the latency is that we're in parting from our device. And by having the standalone device, we can prioritize the audio transmission over all all other things. Whereas if you were to load this onto, you know, your Windows computer, the Windows computer has other things that it's, it's working on and it's gonna prioritize or you need to go into, you know, buyouts to edit things to give yourself, to give priorities to to things. We wanted to make something that absolutely minimizes that latency out of the box and simply plug it in, click the connect button and you're on, and you're making music. Because, you know, that's really what it's all about. We were here to enable musicians to to make music. I, I think I've said this before, but, you know, I'm I'm a personal I'm personally affected in all this. I've got a a a guitarist over here, a trombone over here. And I went to school for music, and I used to play all the time, all the way through college, and I got out of college, and, started a career, and it just, it fell off. My musician community and friends, it weren't weren't around in the same area or even the ones who were were were were were across town in a forty minute commute and now that I have two two young kids, I put them to bed and I, am thrilled to a to a future where instead of, heading downstairs and watching another Netflix I don't care about. I can actually pull out the guitar and, call up a friend and we can, hang out and and enjoy our evening, making something, not just, not just sitting there. So Well, hey, I I don't know. Maybe we should get rid of the term garage band and start saying office band or bedroom band or whatever. Maybe maybe you've accidentally made the the garage band obsolete, but I wanna ask, you know, Patrick, you've got users. You've got kind of the beta happening right now. What are some of the stories? What are some of the feedback that you're hearing from folks as they're trying this out for the first time? Yeah. So, great feedback so far, you know, having site that's really designed for that musician networking. I I we are launching this from the ground up and we're We we went to the the Nam conference this year and told people about this for the first time had a had a great group of people come by express interest sign up and we're really looking to get people into the site who can help us build it and make it better for them. You know, it's we we are we wanna build the community that really resonates and serves the the musician world out there. So you know, getting getting people who to sign up who are interested in helping us say, you know what? It'd be great if this product could do this if this if we could have this feature. So that we can build that into the pipeline and make a better solution both on the networking and on the collaboration side. And then yeah. So we're excited to get more people in and, we'll be giving out invitations, to people who are members now to invite their friends and musician contacts to build that community gradually and and make sure it's a really high quality group of, of dedicated musicians who are on that platform really looking to to connect with others and and make a difference. Well, you talked about that community. And Rocky, I wanna give you the last word here before we wrap up. Know, I wanna ask. Right? Obviously, kind of focusing on that prosumer consumer musician level right now. But what are some of the communities that you could see in the future benefiting from this? Is houses of worship? Is it houses of worship? Is it video editors? What I mean, what are the what are the applications and what are the communities that can be impacted by this as you guys continue to So it's your everyday musicians who are busy, who have kids, who have families, who don't have the time, to really carve out three hours to go meet with their musician friends because they have so many responsibilities. But in addition, I would say, houses of worship. We had a lot of interest at Nam from different houses of worship who came by and said, you know, they're their members could really benefit from, a solution like this. We also, talk to people who were serving wounded veterans. And this would help bring music to to their lives. They they saw this platform as a link for music educators to connect one school to another school and be able to connect, musicians from different communities through, through that connection. So music educators who are very excited about that private music educators were really, really happy to have a solution like this because now they don't necessarily have to travel and go to meet their students in their homes or invite students to their homes. And if it's implement whether that they're dealing with, it's very easy to still continue to have a music lesson over the internet by technology like this. So there's a lot of different, I think applications, to to using a technology like this and I would say, you know, having a team of musicians behind, building the Lootfish, technology has been a big blessing for us. I think our our team members are able to step in their own shoes. So in addition to all the research that we've done, I would say having a team of musicians who can step in their own shoes and say, okay, this is what I would want in this platform as a musician from a networking perspective. This is what I would want to hear from a collaboration perspective. And this is right, and this is not right, and having that ear for for the right type of online collaboration, I think, has been amazing. And I would say we are really proud of our team our team has gone above and beyond to make this platform what it is today, and the vision for what it'll be in future. So of that answers the question? It it does, and it's exciting to hear because I know a lot of our listenership based and a lot of our community in the the AV world, has come from the world of musicianship or performance or mixing or or sound engineering so many different places. So I know that a lot of folks are gonna probably send in an email or text and say, hey, how can I figure this out? How can I get on? How can I I get signed up? So I'm gonna go ahead and ask you guys you know, Rocky, what's the best way for people that are interested to try and sign up and get some of this technology for the first time? So right now, as Patrick mentioned, it is a beta, flat form, and it's invitation only as we are continuing to refine all the features. So the best way to, is to go to lootfish dot com and sign up on our wait list. And in a few days, you will get an invitation along with a code, to to actually become a member and create your profile, and it's all free. You know, there is no charge to become a member of the musician networking community. So I would say go to lutefish dot com today. Just worth noting, if you are, on our on our sort of beta testing, crew helping us build it. Those are the people we're gonna offer the device to first with preferred pricing and early access as we do come to market. So If you have people that are interested in in the collaboration piece, by all means sign up and we'll make sure that, that you're the first to know when we do have, inventory available. Well, I could tell you what, even just by some of the posts that I've already put on LinkedIn whenever I guys where I met you guys for the first time, there was a lot of interest. So I could tell you, that you're that you're serving a need, you're filling a need, and I I encourage you guys to continue as you go forward. Look, I I anticipate myself being a user of this as well. So this isn't something where you know, this is arbitrary. This this for me is is real world and practical. So I always love the the opportunity to get to talk to folks like you who are really making a difference. Not only the the world of technology, but on an individual and personal level, especially in the world of creativity and musicians. So thank you guys both for coming on the show, on the show today, Rocky and Patrick. It was fantastic to have you both on. We hope to have you on again soon. Maybe even, with some cool success stories. Sounds great. Much appreciate it, and, we'll see you soon. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for tuning in as well. Be sure to like and subscribe and check us out again on Pro EV today.