So… Who Actually Gets Paid When You Hit Play? (with Spotify's Sam Duboff)

Hello and welcome back to the emergency room podcast. We are here in a slightly different set. We're actually here based in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. I'm here with Spotify. And today we have a very special guest to talk to us about all things artist compensation, artist marketing, and some of your brain questions around Spotify, artists, AI, everything. So yeah, super excited for today's episode and super excited to introduce to you our lovely guest, Sam Dubov. - Hi there. So happy to be here. - It's so good to have you. - We've been, I'm sure you've been having a packed time in South by Southwest. - It's been insane. - Yeah. - But I'm on day three. I've got my energy up for this. - Yeah. - You know, it's exhausting. - How long have you been in like the South by Southwest mode? - I got here like three nights ago. - Okay. - It's also amazing music last night. I saw a band called The Sofes, S-O-P-H-S. - What kind of music? - It was kind of like Indy Rock. And their first album came out like two days ago, they said. And they were performing nine times in three days. And the one I saw last night, late night, was their third show of the day. And they were incredible. So I wanted to give them a shout out because I can't even imagine. - Your first album coming in. - Nine shows in three days. And I thought it was so good. - They're going through like the K-Pop ritual of like debuting. - 'Cause that's crazy. - Yeah. - I've never heard of that. - That's why I got to bed late last night because I was at that show, which was great. But this is energizing and inspiring to me here. - I am so happy to have you here. Just to give a little background on yourself and your role at Spotify, could you tell the audience a little bit about what you do and would you just Spotify? - Of course. I've been at Spotify a little over seven years. I lead the marketing and policy teams for the music business. - Awesome. - So my team works on everything we offer to artists, songwriters, producers, labels, managers, tools that help them grow, helping them get the most out of Spotify, and then a lot of education. The music industry is famously complicated. - Yeah. - For sure. - So we produce a lot of resources that help artists and songwriters, especially understand how the music industry works, how to get more out of Spotify. - I love that. 'Cause I think there is just so much information and also misinformation around like the music industry, everything that goes into it. - Yeah. - So it's nice that there's actually people on the back end trying to combat some of that. (laughing) - Last week we released Loud and Clear, which is our annual royalty report. And people should go check it out if you Google Spotify, Loud and Clear. But yet to the point of getting to meet humans behind it, the report hopefully is great. We transparently publish exactly how much we're paying out, how many artists are making $1,000 a year, up to $10 million a year, every level between no other streaming service does anything like that but us. But the data is just data. It's what we really try to have face-to-face conversations as much as we can. 'Cause these are topics Spotify is happy to talk about. I think people think we don't wanna talk about artists pay and royalties and how it works. We really do. So conversations like this are part of our effort to just showcase the humans behind Spotify and get into the weeds and the details more about the streaming economy and how Spotify works. - For sure, 'cause I feel like there's always so much conversation around what artist compensation is looking like in the world of streaming. It's so different from how artists made money back before when you had radio play, you were selling CDs and banking on that. So it's just interesting and also really inspiring to see that you all are taking that front step. - Yeah, thanks. This is a special Loud and Clear year because it's Spotify's 20th birthday. We were founded 20 years ago. So we share all the year over year growth numbers like we always do. But we thought it was a good chance to take a step back and think about the music industry 20 years ago, 25 years ago, first today. Spotify was founded, probably, and missed the hardest time in the history of the music industry. Pyracy completely destroyed the industry. I think for younger listeners, you might have missed this era where there's like a three to four year period where the music industry was cratering. Everyone was illegally downloading music 'cause with the internet you wanted to be able to listen to any song you wanted to at any time. And Spotify was founded to inspire people to start paying for music again. Around nearly 70% of the money we make for music goes back to artists, songwriters, and the music industry. And so the mission of Spotify for 20 years has been, okay, when piracy is an option to people, how do we make something so good that you'd rather pay for it because you're getting that much value out of it? In 2014, about 10 years ago, we were paying a billion dollars a year. And when the payouts were that small, a billion sounds like a lot for all artists. That's not a ton. There's lots of really good questions about, could Spotify pay artists enough, like only a billion dollars a year to go around, isn't enough. And in the last decade, we've 10xed our payouts. So last year we paid out over 11 billion dollars to the industry. It's the most any companies paid out to the music industry in one year in history. Yeah. 50% of that went to Indies, Indiartist Labels. And our growth year of year was 10% when the rest of the industry is growing about 4%. And so at this year, especially, we tried to take that 20 year view of the industry of the past where superstars did really well. If you were from the US and Western Europe and you sang in English, yeah. Right? Because it was really hard to get noticed in the CD era to now this kind of thriving global network of artists where 85% of the artists who are making $100,000 or more a year on Spotify are from outside the US. Oh, that's insane. Songs in 16 different languages reached the global top 50 charts. This is a fundamentally different music industry than 10, 20 years ago where to make it, you kind of had to be from the US or Western Europe. Right. You had to sing in English. Maybe a few exceptions of people who overcame those obstacles. And now it's really just this kind of global vibrant artist ecosystem. No, for sure. I think we see that so often with the acts that are blowing up right now. You have artists from all over the world who just had that money. Do this performance all in Spanish. How amazing is that? Was phenomenal and unheard of. Gelsal first, Superbow performance done completely not in English. Yeah. Like music is just really evolving. Right. Instead of like we need to see what the DJ is going to play for you on your local radio stations, then if you hear bad bunnies amazing-- and we all do hear that because he is-- you can just open Spotify and go explore a whole new genre of music you never could before. For sure. And then yeah, you see that in culture with things like bad bunny in the halftime show. How cool is it? Amazing. It was amazing. There was a question for clarity sake. We met yesterday at a loud and clear pre-refig. And there was a little Q&A at the end there. And one question that was brought up that I feel like was really interesting. And that I love to hear a little bit more about was someone asked-- we talked about numbers around how much artist compensation with Spotify is for this past year. How does Spotify know what the numbers of payouts are in comparison to other streaming platforms when Spotify's the only people that are talking about it? Yeah. It's a good question because to us, one of our core principles is as much transparency about how realities work as possible. It's really, really hard to be in a creative field and make a career today in the age of the internet. For sure. I think they'll like table stakes. The minimum responsibility of a platform should be show creators what the revenue opportunity is on a platform. And for us for a number of years now, every year whether growth is better than expected, lower than expected, every March we publish, how much we paid out to artists in the industry, what the growth rate was, and exactly how many of our artists reached different levels of revenue. So it's 300,000 artists last year who made at least $1,000 a year, there was 80 who made at least $10 million a year. You go to our site, you can see every level in between. No weather streaming service even shares what their total payouts were. So if you're an artist and you're thinking about, OK, I'm going to try to make a career in this thing. Where am I going to release my music? What kind of money could I expect to make? You know on Spotify at least. All right, if I'm at this level, if I'm reaching these sorts of numbers, here's the amount of money I might get. No other service even shares how much money they pay out. And so you can sometimes look at third party industry reports. So there's an organization called the IFBI. There's one in the US called the RIAA, that people might know because they do certifications too. They'll take a bunch of industry data and publish industry level metrics. And so comparing the Spotify numbers, we release compared to what these trade bodies say. You can find out things like Spotify is about a third of all streaming revenue. Yeah. So when we're talking about an artist making 100,000 a year on Spotify, that might be 300,000 when you factor in all the other streaming services. Right. I like that from these industry studies. Yeah. But fundamentally, I think artists deserve to be able to compare the revenue opportunity on different services. Right. And so we're doing our part and hopefully over time, you'll see more folks jump into. We can hope so. I think it's so interesting because I think when it comes to artists, choosing what platform they'll put their music on. It's kind of similar to like when you're applying for a job position, you're looking at different companies. All right. What's compensation for the same role, you know? Yeah. So it's nice to have sort of like that glass doorification of music. Exactly. Right. Before you would pursue any career, you want to know what the revenue opportunity is. Exactly. And that's exactly how we're thinking about it. So in pop culture and in music, marketing is a huge conversation when it comes to things like a rollout for an album or a single or whatever project. And your opinion based on like what you've seen over the past year, a couple of years would have been some like standout marketing relapse that you've seen from some artists that have been really killing it this year. Yeah. Artist marketing is always fun. Yeah. I'll share my personal opinion. Not speaking on the half of Spotify with these opinions as a marketer myself. Yeah. There's one standout campaign that inspired me as a marketer last year. It'd be the rollout of Luxe by Rosalia. Yeah. And I think the way she positioned it really highlights a lot of the trends we've been talking about. First, the globalization of music. Right. Sure. She like sang in like 13 languages, I think. Inspirations from 10 different genres and music cultures. Yeah. Which is so cool to see. She's like singing opera. Yeah. Oh my god. Unbelievable. Insane. We actually had to rush to launch a new feature, lyric translations because we knew that's how good this album was. Our engineers rushed to launch a feature where you can see the translation of all the lyrics in your own language. That's what you can say. Yeah. And like shot to Rosalia for that. Yeah. That's an amazing feature. And that's part of the trend we're seeing across Spotify. Last year, songs in 16 different languages reached the Global Top 50. It's half that amount five years ago. So now because of streaming, people are discovering music and all different languages, which is so cool. Rosalia exemplifies that. The other trend, I think, that she really spotlighted is in this age of AI where there's what's real, what isn't real, there's just overabundance of video content and slop. People are craving authenticity and specificity. Yeah. So like before, if you were going to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, if you wanted to reach the commercial success of Rosalia, everyone would tell you, go really broad, go really general, do something that's really accessible to as many people as possible. Instead, she did something only she can do. And the whole positioning was about her years of training. Why she had the connection to all these different genres, a really intentional album with the exact right number of tracks where each track has a certain role. Not one of those 40 song albums. She's there on there. Yeah. Like in touch. Nowity and playing into the niche of it all. Right. And that's what breaks through now. And she was able to build her roll out with the story around her creative process. And we've been building a lot of features like song DNA. People might have heard about. We'll start to see where it brings that creative process to life on Spotify where you can click in and see who did you sample, what song is this, a cover of who was the guitarist, who was the mixing engineer, who was the producer, who was a songwriter. And Rosalia really like led the way with her human artistry. Yes. There. And then the third trend is definitely just the power of building a world around your music. You know, I thought her performance at the bread awards was like maybe the best performance I've ever seen at an award show. Yeah. And it was this culmination of months of the visuals that she built on Spotify and everywhere. Right. The album had such singular iconography. For sure. Yeah. She positioned it and kind of laid the breadcrumbs of the themes of the album across it. She did some like cool viral stunts, which is always fun. And then her music videos that are on Spotify now, amazing performance videos, this other extension to it. I'm sure her Torah is going to be insane. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so, you know, the whole way she packaged a position that album not only was it an album I love, but I think it really speaks to a lot of the core trends that we're seeing in music. For sure. And I think artists that are able to really build that world and bring the audience into that and like, Loki like sell the audience on that world. Because I feel like there's like a lot of audience buy-in that comes in for like introducing a new era or a new project. Yeah. Sort of like a reinvention of that artist. Yeah. And I know what you mean by the word sell. And that's like the right word in some ways. But I think it's like the authenticity where you aren't selling. You're just sharing your truth. I think fans today can tell if you're doing something to try to be commercial. Yeah. You know, a data point we see on Spotify. We have this metric called superlisters, which are people who listen to you as an artist actively more than 15 times every month. You're superlisters. It's 2% of your audience, but nearly 30% of your streams. That's wild. And that's for the average artist. For an artist like Rosalia, they may make even more. And so what you're seeing is to succeed in the Spotify era. You don't need to try to kind of water yourself down to be for everyone. You need to be yourself authentically communicate how this is music that only you could be releasing. And when you find those superlisters, that's going to power the financials of your career. They're going to be the ones doing the streams. They're going to ones buying your vinyl, buying your merch, going to see you on tour. That's what's going to sustain your career. And so there's no such thing as being niche anymore. You just have to find your core audience. And a lot of the new features we're trying to build. And every other service we're trying to build around that fandom, that artist fan connection. Yeah. That sounds so crazy when you first said it. And then I was like, wait a second. That kind of tracks because I'm an Ariana stand. I love Ariana Grande. The way that I listen to her entire discography weekly. Multiple times. I'm like, yeah, I'm probably running out the streams there. You are definitely in her superlister data. Point something percentile. That's right. Yeah. That's like what powers her music here. At the back that, and she can see and Spotify for artists is the product my team works on. That artists used to get all their data about what's happening on Spotify. They can see here's how my superlisters are growing or shrinking over time. Where do they live? That's where I tour. What songs are they liking most? And yeah, Ariana or her team probably are seeing your streams and your superlister activity coming every day. So you're saying that Ariana knows that I'm listening. How does Spotify approach Payakwiti for artists within without management and like representation? Is it different or is it about the same? Yeah. One of the great parts of streaming in Spotify has been leveling the playing field and making more opportunities for artists to pursue their career however they want. So you've got major labels, you've got indie labels, and then you've got what some people call DIY do it yourself. For artists who self-release their music through artists distributors. You may have heard of like Distrokit or CD Baby, Tunecore, United Masters, and so on. That last path, the DIY path, it's kind of brand new and streaming. Right before streaming, you just needed that upfront investment to be able to, it was really expensive to work in studios and produce music. You needed someone to like literally pay to produce the CDs and ship them to record stores. Promoting yourself was really hard. It was a process. Yeah. Right, you had to like get in front of people enough that they would go pay $20 for your CD. So you had to do a ton of upfront marketing to even make that sale. So DIY wasn't really a thing. Today on Spotify, $11 billion we pay out a year, over $11 billion. 50% of it goes to indie artists and labels. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. And when we think about that DIY segment, you know, we talk about Indies, that's DIY plus indie labels. But just that DIY segment, over a third of the artists making $10,000 or more a year, are DIY or they started their career as DIY. Wow. And that's a whole new opportunity within streaming where, you know, some artists stay DIY their whole career and are making, you know, seven-figure income DIY, which is keeping crazy to think about. A hundred percent of their royalties. For tons of artists of maximize the growth of their career, you start DIY. It's lowered all the barriers to entry. So you can get discovered, get those first superlisters, those fans. And then you can side-departner with a label at that point. And you have, you know, more data, more information, more fans to leverage as you're, you know, making that deal with your label who can do amazing things to help, you know, accelerate your growth and take your career to the next level. For sure. And so, yeah, Spotify, overindexes our payouts towards Indies because people discover so much new music on Spotify. Yeah. So even though we're about a third of streaming revenue in the industry, like, you know, on average, where, like, you know, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent and total payouts for the average indie artists in label, we're more than 50 percent of their streaming royalties. Wow. Okay. So, you know, our system, you know, on for the average, we're 33 percent, we have somewhere between 30 to 40 percent, but it's over 50 percent of what indie artists in labels make from their streaming revenue. And that's because Spotify inspires people to discover a lot more music than they otherwise would listen to. Yeah. And so you start to see more and more indie careers get powered by that sort of discovery. Gotcha. I think that there's like such an important, the DIY aspect of it all, I think is so important because we're seeing now, TikTokers, people that are really using like other social media platforms to platform themselves in the music industry and really seeing success in that without having like the traditional label or like indie support in that sense. Like one artist that I think of that is absolutely killing it and just recently hit a million. and monthly listeners is Trim. - Cool. - She has a bunch of amazing songs for the summer that have come out on track. - Oh, yeah. - And she's a vibe. - Maybe you're gonna be outside the summer and listen to Trim. - Yeah. - But yeah, she's blown up in the last year. I don't believe that she's wrapped it all and it's nice to know that she's getting comped the way that she deserves to be. - Yeah. - I mean, streaming, it's all about opportunity. - For sure. - And then it's still really, really hard to make it as an artist. - Yeah. - And so the data we're sharing is trying to say it's easy to be an artist today. It's really, really hard. But there's more opportunities than ever because yeah, when an artist like Trim is getting started, you might have had to perform locally, find a label who would take a chance on you, you kind of would take whatever deal you could get. 'Cause you needed that money to-- - Trying to pass up the studio. - Produce really a street. - Yeah, right, remember, yeah. That used to happen all the time. And then now you can produce music for Way Cheaper, which is really exciting. And then release it globally for-- - Whatever you want to be. - To pay a difference, there's no barit entry, so you can prove yourself, show the fan base that you're building, and then partner with a label when you're ready. And so, yeah, for artists like that, it's exciting because even though it's scary, you have to put yourself out there-- - Exactly. - Up front without that team around you. - Yeah. - The exciting part is when your music connects, you've got more opportunities and more options than ever. - And I think that community aspect and people really being able to rally behind an artist and building that community is so important. And it's kind of these between my next question that has to do with a lot of internet discourse that I've been seeing around AI artists that have been on Spotify. When we talk about things like artist compensation and things like that with these AI artists that are getting millions and millions of streams, what is compensation looking like for them? And is that like a conversation that y'all are having as Spotify? - Yeah, definitely. AI and the creative process and music is probably the biggest issue of the decade. So we spend a lot of time thinking about it. What I'd say first is you read a lot about these sort of like AI novelty acts in the press or on Reddit or on social media. Each one kind of represents a good kind of like Twitter or War case study of a certain type of AI use case. Whether it's like you know, an AI identity or the way the music's made or whatever it be. What we see in all the data is for a month listening picks up because everyone's talking about some AI artist, everyone's talking about it that everyone's talking about how high the monthly list account's getting because everyone's checking out 'cause they read about it. Then a month or two passes and all those metrics tank. They're always at a fraction of where they were at the peak, we're not seeing these novelty acts that are being built, sustained fan bases. And people kind of like move on to the next example and don't think back about what happened to that one. I heard about five months ago that everyone's talking about. So like when we look at all the data knowing on a technical level, figuring out who's using it AI and who's not is a really hard technical problem. No matter what third party tools we use to try to see if AI music doing well is it not. It's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of consumption on Spotify. It's like well under 1%, UMG a week or two ago, shared from their estimation, it's like under 0.5%, well under 0.5%. And so these sorts of acts aren't gaining much royalties, aren't getting much fandom, aren't getting much streams. And so our focus has been to get ahead of those issues and a lot of aggressive policies to make sure that you can't use AI to spam, impersonate, and deceive. If an artist wants to use AI in some way in their creative process and there's lots of great artists who've talked about the ways within their creative process, their creative vision, AI's one of many tools they're using. We don't want to police what creative tools people use. We're not gonna treat you differently if you use auto-tune, if you don't use auto-tune, or if you record a coup stick or if you use a synthesizer. Like, right, if you're doing it responsibly, if it's just part of your human creative process, that's okay, we want that sort of music to have an opportunity. But we don't want AI used for is to spam, industrial production, when there's no human influence. There isn't a human artist intentionally directing how it works. We're doing some aggressive efforts to make sure there's less and less and less spam and slop. AI generated it or otherwise in Spotify and recommendations. We removed over 75 million spammy tracks. Over the last year, right as some of these AI tools are blowing up, so a lot against spam, we're really focused on impersonation. We have strengthened our policies so people know you cannot do an unauthorized voice clone. No, that was too much. AI-fac. Yeah, that's not allowed on Spotify. Some artists, like Grimes or Imogen Heap, they've like, commercialized and trained an authorized voice, AI voice clone of themselves and they're in charge of how it's used and they are compensated when people stream it. Yeah. That's okay. Anything unauthorized, not allowed on Spotify. We take it down as soon as it's confirmed it's unauthorized. Gotcha. Deceptions, probably the hardest one though. And you'll see us work on that a lot this year, where if you're a listener, you want to understand who you're listening to. We have a lot of work to do in this space. So you're going to see us do lots of new features around artist identity. So you can trust who you're listening to. We want to make sure you understand the human artistry behind it. So a feature like Song DNA and about the song that we're working on highlights the human artistry. So you can work at any song, go into the Song DNA and see the human producers, composers, mixing engineers, session musicians who are behind it and fall in love with that creative process. You'll see us introduce AI credits and partnership with the industry where for people responsibly using AI, they can share that with listeners. So people can make conscious listening decisions. Exactly. And so I definitely think we have more work to do there. Because even now, when you look at a profile on Spotify, but also on like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and anywhere, it's really hard to figure out what's real right now. So you'll see us focus a lot on things that authenticate and trust and verify kind of what you're listening to. That's really good to hear and really affirming here, because that is something that I've been experiencing a little bit on Spotify. And I know that especially like my audience has been telling me about it. And it's just great to hear that from you. Because I have had-- I've listened to DJ. And I've been noticing sometimes I'll hear tracks. I'm like, oh, wow, this is kind of nice. Let me see this artist. And it's not a real artist. I'm like, oh. Yeah. Yeah. That's like an unsettling thing to happen. So-- And it's not just Spotify. It's like that for all apps. Like there are so many different creators that are posting on TikTok on YouTube that just aren't real. They're completely accurate. Yeah. And you have to go into the comments to see if they are not. Yeah. And there's no disclosure on that. So it's nice to hear that you're that shall we're working on that. Yeah, we're definitely working on it. You're going to experience that less and less and less. It is, unfortunately, really technically complicated. To be able to retroactively figure out what's AI and what isn't. We're working on lots of hopefully effective methods and ways to at least verify what's real and what you can trust, even if we're not always going to know exactly how AI was used when people are trying to be deceptive. Yeah. But we've been working on aggressively. I hear about this issue a lot all the time too. And people are going to see less and less and less of those sorts of profiles, that sort of music, popping up in an experience like DJ. Yeah. Because yeah, that's not what anyone wants in their streaming experience where you fall in love with the song. We want you to open up Spotify. You love a song? We want you to open up. And now you're going to see the music video and the performance video and you're going to dive into the song DNA and you're going to buy their merch and you're going to see where they're touring. That's the Spotify we're building. Yeah. Where it's about fandom towards human artists. Exactly. We don't want you to open Spotify. And you're like, who's this artist? And it's your confused about who it is, or you don't know if it's real or not. Yeah. You don't know if you can go see them live or not. That's not what we want. And we're going to do a lot more to make sure that's the experience that people have. Because I feel like you mentioned it before, but almost that consent piece to knowing who you're supporting. Yeah. And I feel like there's always going to be people that maybe you want to opt for more of the AI music. But having the option to choose that as opposed to just having that thrust upon you all over the internet is a good next step, I think. Yeah. It's like, first, definitely. Right? It's different if someone wants to explore the type of music and they're following an artist and that's like cool, but that should be up to you. I think that's true for not just the issue of AI, but also algorithms in general. That's really exciting. And I'm just excited for the future of music, the future of Spotify, and seeing how things progress. I'm moving forward into 2027 now. That's crazy. Crazy. [LAUGHTER] I did want to wrap on a little game or a little rapid fire section. OK. If y'all have been following the podcast for a while, then we're familiar with our prior conversation with Lisa Richie. We did this emergency ink block test, but I decided we're going to do some a little different. We're going to switch it up. I'm going to say a series of statements, and you just tell me whether you believe them to be true or false. OK, true or false? Great. First one. OK. True or false? Spotify is the only music streaming platform to be transparent with artist payment. That's true, unfortunately. That's sad. I wish others would step up. Clock it. True or false? Spotify pays its artists fairly. True, I hope. We always want to do better. Yes, it's hard to do one words. Hopefully true. True or false. Marketing is everywhere. True. True or false. And artists roll out is more important than the actual music. False. Interesting. You can do a good roll out, but you're not going to get streams after week one if the music isn't good. It's a waste. Yeah. But the opposite, if you don't do a great roll out, but the music's amazing. It often breaks through. So, you know, in the best world you have both. It goes a good roll out helps, but you can't fake it. You can do the best roll out. And if people don't like the music, fans get to decide. That's real. Who do you think did good for both outside of Rosalía? Oh man. I love Audrey Hobart. Who's the clown who's one of my favorite albums. Another example of like being exactly who you are and finding a huge fan base as a result. And she just like nailed it from like the breakout to sue me through to the album. The videos, the performances, everything was so intentional. Yeah. And the music was amazing. I find her iconic just because I feel like she would normally not be someone that will pop up my radar. But speaking to the roll out, I saw her all over my TikTok free page. And I was like, what is this? She's kind of came out by love her. Right. And got me sucked into the world. Yeah. That's what she did. True or false. Spotify is 20 years old this year. True. And true or false, you yourself have been a pay advocate for 20 years. A pay advocate. Yeah. You know, I'd say, I'm true at least for my working career. Okay. I don't know if I can say I've been a pay advocate prior to that. But you know, at least the decade plus I've been working. Absolutely true. It's funny you say that because I know this to be true about you. And I don't know if you remember this being true about you. You know, we love doing a little deep dive on the emergency room podcast. But just to like jog a little bit of memory. 20 years ago today. Not today. But 20 years ago. You used to be a writer. I did used to write. And I don't know if you're familiar, but you wrote in the Yolk news. Options to pay by ID may increase reporting on the ID payment for, I guess, your school lunches? Oh my God. So you truly have been in this field. You know what? But I could pay. I'm shook. I know the only way you're about to say that was 20 years ago. Yeah. Oh my God. Do you remember writing that? Not specifically. I was a, yeah. I was a reporter in college. And I guess I have been a pay advocate for 20 years. That makes me feel good. You know, two decades of advocating for people getting paid for what they deserve. You're also making me feel old. College was 20 years ago. I love it. Well, thanks for taking that up. Of course. We love to ring back the pass and see how it connects because honestly, it's kind of funny, but like, it is a through line. Yeah, that's actually incredible. Yeah. Wow. All right. I'm inspired by that fact. Well, thank you so, so much for taking the time to be on the podcast and to talk through any and everything. Really appreciated your transparency and the conversation about paid transparency. Is there anything else you want to leave off on or say to the audience before we up off? Oh God. No, thanks so much for having me. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, if you follow Spotify for artists on Instagram or TikTok or wherever your platform of choices, that's always where we're sharing stats and resources like this. So give us a follow. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. We are going to get back to all of these soft by Southwest activities. Make sure to follow along on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify for more information on that. All the updates and be sure to tune in next week for next week's episode. Let me know all of your thoughts. What do you think? Who do you want to see us talk to next and what about next down in the comments below and be sure to rate and follow? Yes. That's what you do on podcasts. Make sure to rate and follow to keep this podcast going. But thank you all so much for watching. Thank you so much for being here and we'll see you next week.