55. Dan Lilienthal & José Chayet - As [untitled] as it Comes

·Founder, Musician
Dan Lilienthal & José Chayet - As [untitled] as it Comes

Description

Dan Lilienthal (X, LinkedIn) and José Chayet (X, LinkedIn) are childhood friends and cofounders of [untitled] (X, Instagram), a platform for musicians that they describe as a sacred place for work-in-progress music. It is where a song lives between recording and streaming. [untitled] is closer to the Photos app than to a social network: a private place to store, listen to, and slowly share demos, with no feed.

Dan and José are not trained musicians, engineers, or designers, but they have built a product artists love by “method acting” their way into deep empathy. The platform has grown to 50K paying users and now allows artists to share unreleased music directly with fans. Lorde recently released XRAYS on [untitled]: 49 demos and works in progress from her album Virgin, creating a kind of museum behind the record.

We discuss music as a form of communication and a connection to the divine; why they have resisted adding a feed; product inspirations like the iPod and Snapchat; how empathy and QA underpin their product philosophy; designing for 16-year-olds and superstars; AI as an instrument; which parts of the creative process are worth sharing; what it means for software to be sacred; and building a company with your best friend.

I hope you’re inspired to consider what is sacred, share and live with the things you make, seek out music that inspires you, and stay untitled a little longer than is comfortable.

This episode on [untitled].

Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps

  • (0:00) Opening Highlights
  • (1:24) Intro to Dan & José & Thanks to Notion
  • (4:42) Start: Brackets, How Creativity Makes the World Bigger, and Music's Connection to the Divine
  • (20:40) Duchamp, Music as a Set of Choices, and The Museum Behind the Work
  • (27:52) [untitled]: A Medium for Music In-Progress
  • (45:03) From a Better Dropbox to a Creativity Company
  • (52:13) Empathy as a Product Philosophy and The Collaboration's Origins
  • (1:01:04) Scaling the Sacred Place and Product Intuition
  • (1:10:33) Lorde's XRAYS Drop and Designing for a Wide Range of Artists
  • (1:17:26) 10K Unheard Songs and Whether Process Should be Seen
  • (1:24:10) Brand, Trust, Alignment with Artists and the [studio]
  • (1:30:54) The Word "Sacred" and Resisting the Feed
  • (1:40:52) AI as an Instrument: Building Tools Artists Actually Want
  • (1:49:27) Building a Company with Your Best Friend
  • (1:56:31) Closing Questions: Dream Users, Rapid Fire Brackets, and Titles
  • (2:08:52) Thanks Again to Notion

Links & References

Transcript

(4:42) Start: Brackets, How Creativity Makes the World Bigger, and Music's Connection to the Divine

Jackson: (4:45) Gentlemen, Dancho and José, thank you for—well, first of all, thank you for letting me into this wonderland that we have here. The studio. Do we have a name for it yet?

Dan: (4:53) We're calling it [studio] (Studio in Brackets).

José: (4:55) Well, Studio.

Dan: (4:56) Yeah, it's called [studio], but spelled in brackets.

José: (4:58) It's stylized in brackets.

Dan: (5:00) And the website is studioinbrackets.com, spelled out. Sorry for the shameless plug.

José: (5:08) You can't type brackets into a URL.

Jackson: (5:11) The brackets. Is there a significance to the brackets besides the fact that the word [untitled] looks better inside of them?

José: (5:22) That's one aspect to it. The other one is essentially how we think about the best art and that relationship. One other way to describe it is the negotiation, the tightrope, the relationship between negation and common ground. So [untitled] is the negation and the brackets are the common ground. The marriage between contrarian takes, contrarian attitudes, and common ground is innovation. [untitled] inside of two brackets is that blend that leads to our favorite art, our favorite music, and our favorite technology. We're just fans of all that stuff. We get the same feeling when we hear new music that blows our minds as when we saw the first iPhone come out. That's what we're here for.

Jackson: (6:17) What is that feeling when something's new and fresh and interesting?

José: (6:21) It's like this obsession. It's like childlike curiosity. I got that feeling when I went to Copenhagen for the first time in 2006. Twenty years ago, design and architecture wasn't on Instagram, obviously. Copenhagen had the sickest architecture and design in the world. Even just the showers—the water coming from the ceiling instead of from a shower head. Something as cool as that just didn't exist anywhere else, and it felt like you were on another planet. It's this feeling that the universe is expanding. It's like, "Wow, I didn't know this was possible."

Jackson: (7:12) I didn't know this was possible.

José: (7:14) This was the world, and now the world just got a little bit bigger.

Jackson: (7:18) That's a beautiful way of putting it. Because there's also plenty of—I don't know, you could imagine an artist you love puts out an album or a song that is great, but also not that different. That isn't quite this feeling. Or the iPhone 17—it's great, but I remember when the Gizmodo leak for the iPhone 4 came out and it was the first one that was flat. That was cool. I want to start with another abstract question and then we'll go more specific, but I think this is you, José: music is a four-dimensional form of communication. What does that mean?

José: (7:56) Yeah, I think we haven't really said that as much recently.

Dan: (8:01) I think that was the Big Ass Kids interview.

José: (8:02) Yeah, but we've been talking about this a little bit more, and I think it's kind of interesting with podcasting. Audio is this thing that allows you to imagine what's going on visually in your head. If you're listening to a podcast or a song, you can be playing a film visually. That mystique—the fact that you get to place whatever image or idea in there yourself—it becomes maybe larger than what it really is.

Jackson: (8:50) It's participatory. Putting yourself into it.

José: (8:53) So I think kind of what we're saying there is like—we think that anyone's going to be able to make music one day. That's how we started untitled. Obviously, now it's very much happening with AI. So we thought like, okay, one day people are going to be sending each other songs the way that they send each other text messages, but it'll be a four-dimensional text message. I'll be able to explain to you everything that I feel about you or about a situation in a song that has maybe fewer words than a giant text, but you'll be able to kind of feel what I'm feeling in this high-fidelity format that didn't really exist before.

Jackson: (9:36) And by the way, I would say that people already do that with songs, for sure.

José: (9:38) No, for sure. The best songs are insane. You're like, "How did you write the perfect lyrics? How did you do it that way with the perfect melody?" It's insane.

Jackson: (9:51) What do you think?

Dan: (9:53) I mean, recently I've been—I think a lot of people feel this way, but specifically to me, it's been kind of a weird time in music where, on the one hand, there's a lot of music coming out obviously every day. There are what, 200,000 songs coming out every day? So there's a lot of music and we get to see music from all over the world and we get to have access to the tiniest of artists from the tiniest of countries. Yet at the same time, it's so hard to find things that are so fresh and give us that feeling that we were just talking about. Actually, one of our investors yesterday, Mo Koyfman, who I think you know—he was just talking to us yesterday about how music is, for the majority of humans, the way that they connect with the divine, which I thought was very—

José: (10:40) In this room, like we're all sitting here—

Dan: (10:41) Because the couch was rearranged.

Jackson: (10:43) Sorry, I blew up the room.

José: (10:45) He's critiquing us, giving us harsh feedback, being a great, caring yet strict parent, pushing us for the best. And he lands on that.

Dan: (11:03) He was preaching, and it was very true. And something you see across any religion is that music is a key part of that. At any temple, whether it's any religion, you'll see people singing. Singing is a big part of religion because, again, music is the way you connect with the divine. Anyways, as I was saying, one thing that is beautiful is that we get to see music from all over the world, but at the same time, it's hard to feel things that make you feel that divine. It's been hard to find that for me personally. And similar to what José is saying, honestly, the shit that makes me feel closest to the divine is the stuff that my friend is making. When José sends me music, when I listen to José's music, that's the stuff that makes me tap into the divine the most. Because not only do I get to visualize my friend feeling these emotions—someone that I'm already emotionally connected to—but also I get to visualize myself feeling that for him. It's like tapping into something deeper than yourself.

José: (12:03) When we started the company, we would say, "Holy shit, artists are really living in the future," because they get to do this with each other already. We're saying, "Oh, everyone's going to be able to feel this amazing way of connecting with each other, connecting with the divine," whatever. But you see some of these collectives, some of these scenes. Brockhampton was a big one—people playing music for each other. But even going back 50 or 60 years, all these artists being able to share music with each other and being able to connect. You talk to artists and they're so tuned in to the world and to the universe, to energies. They'll guess something about you. They'll guess your favorite movie. They'll be from a city that connects to your childhood or to something special to you. Artists are really special people. They really are just—

Dan: (13:01) They're living in the future, tapped into another frequency.

José: (13:03) Yeah.

Dan: (13:03) Something that Rick Rubin actually talks a lot about is the similarities between magic and music. Recently, José and I—

José: (13:11) Yeah.

Dan: (13:11) Yeah.

José: (13:11) Oh, my God.

Dan: (13:13) This was the first time that I think both of us finally understood—

José: (13:15) Understood what he—

Dan: (13:16) What Rick Rubin was talking about.

José: (13:19) I was always like, "What the—?"

Dan: (13:19) Yeah, what does this mean? I think magic had never been that for us. But we were at this dinner and there was this magician—actually, he went by a mentalist.

Jackson: (13:26) Okay.

José: (13:27) Insane. Have you ever heard of that term?

Jackson: (13:28) Yeah. There's this guy Oz, maybe.

Dan: (13:28) No, like this guy.

Jackson: (13:29) No, I've just heard that.

Dan: (13:29) Anyway, I had never heard the word mentalist until this.

José: (13:30) Insane.

Dan: (13:31) But this guy, for example—I'll give you one example of something that he did. Basically, he asked one of the guests at this dinner to take out their phone. Just look at the phone and think of their passcode. Not open the phone, nothing. Just think of the passcode. That's it. Put the phone away. Then he asked me to grab my phone, open the phone keypad, put it at eye length so that I can't see the actual keypad, and then just go like this four times without seeing it. Literally just, "Don't look and just do." I take my phone down. He's like, "All right, grab Matthew's phone." The guy's phone. "Now put those numbers that you just put into your phone into his phone." That was the code. The phone opened.

José: (14:18) And then even crazier, he basically had his girlfriend think of what she had for breakfast that morning.

Dan: (14:27) Yeah.

José: (14:28) And then he's like, "All right, someone go on my Instagram." Like, on the mentalist's Instagram. And then we go on his Instagram, and his Instagram bio says, "I had what she had for breakfast this morning."

Dan: (14:41) His bio. Insane. But how do you do that? You have to be tapped into something beyond us, like another frequency.

Jackson: (14:49) What do you think this is with artists or musicians? When you've gotten up close with this, what do you think that is? Part of what you were talking about earlier was around sharing music with each other in a way that's really personal. There's an interesting juxtaposition, which is, in some sense, music—especially today—can be global and universal. You have artists who literally have hundreds of millions of people who listen to them. And then there's a different element, which is more what you guys were speaking about, which is a deep level of intimacy: the act of sharing a song that maybe no one else has ever heard or will ever hear with one other person. Or even the connection between, "Hey, my friend shared this"—it's not just the same as hearing a song if the person who shared it with me has totally changed the context of the song. When you think about what artists are, why do you think they're getting close to this magic? Is it specific to music, or do you think it applies to all kinds of art? I know you guys also have art backgrounds.

Dan: (15:52) It's not specific to music at all. In any medium you'll find people tapped into that frequency. Being an artist doesn't just mean making music. You could make film, you could write books, you could do all that.

José: (16:06) But—

Dan: (16:10) I think musicians just—because sound can be so therapeutic to anyone. It feels like music is so democratized in the sense that anyone can enjoy it.

Jackson: (16:29) I would go beyond that and say that music can be a form of—it can be psychedelic. Putting on music and walking around changes the scene in the movie, in a way.

Dan: (16:44) Yeah, for sure. But also, for example, with reading, you have to have a certain level of literacy. You have to have a certain level of focus to be able to do it.

Jackson: (16:52) Totally.

Dan: (16:52) Same with movies and whatnot. Whereas music can be enjoyed by anyone, whether you're a five-year-old kid who doesn't know how to read yet or a 70-year-old lady who has dementia. Anyone can enjoy it. So it's just a different frequency.

José: (17:09) I think there are just special properties of music. And then the other thing is that abstract element. If you think about movies, there's going to be some storyline, there's going to be some plot. Some of our favorite music—I mean, we were all in Carnegie Hall. I told you, you shed a tear, basically. And if we were to say, "What's that whole album about?"

Jackson: (17:49) What's the point?

José: (17:49) What's the point? It would be an interesting conversation. I don't know if we would arrive anywhere specifically, but that's what makes the best artists. That whole thing.

Jackson: (18:01) And I would say that does apply to other mediums, but oftentimes the best films are challenging. But music especially so.

José: (18:09) Yes. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Movies can have that "What did I just watch?" element, but music has it to another level, I think.

Dan: (18:20) Also music, compared to a movie, is not as much escapism of your own life. Whereas watching a movie—even if it's the best movie ever where you left and you're like, "What just happened?"—you escaped your own reality in those two or three hours. Whereas with music, if you listen to an amazing song or an amazing album, you never escaped reality. You went within yourself and you probably imagined yourself with the lyrics of the song. You imagined your reality and how it related to the songs.

José: (18:49) It relates to what you said about it changing the filter of life. You've got AirPods in the grocery store and you're blasting it, but it's still life.

Dan: (19:02) But that's why—

José: (19:03) That's why it's psychedelic. It's not an escape. It's still life, but it's—

Jackson: (19:06) Yeah, it's an overlay.

José: (19:09) It's an overlay.

Dan: (19:09) It's like AR versus VR.

Jackson: (19:11) That's a great way of putting it. It's funny, this reminds me of a conversation I had with Henrik Karlsson, the writer. He was talking about how certain forms of media or certain forms of art sort of suck you in, but when you come out of them—like a TikTok—you didn't really learn anything about yourself. You didn't put any of yourself into it. He was talking about a painting. He's like, when you look at a painting for ten minutes, which is probably as long as you could realistically look at a painting, it almost spits you back out. You are almost prompted to have your own experience. It's not so much, "Come be engaged here." It's like, "This is a thing for you to go put yourself into and learn some things." I think that the best art, and certainly some of the most interesting mediums including music, is closer to that. You could even imagine two different types of film: an avant-garde, kind of strange film that would take three watches to really understand, versus a Marvel movie. The Marvel movie is really entertaining, but I've rarely ended a Marvel movie with thoughts about myself or my life.

Dan: (20:21) Yeah.

Jackson: (20:22) And so I think that music is beautiful in the way that it's almost always prompting something.

José: (20:29) Yeah.

Dan: (20:30) I've definitely never left a Marvel movie feeling like, "Oh my God, this is going to change something."

Jackson: (20:34) Which is okay.

José: (20:35) Besides the joy that—

Dan: (20:35) I can be entertained.

Jackson: (20:37) But you're more on a track.

(20:40) Duchamp, Music as a Set of Choices, and The Museum Behind the Work

Dan: (20:40) Yeah.

Jackson: (20:40) I think this is also you, José: "Art was democratized through conceptual art and photography. We believe the same will happen for music. It's going to be reduced to a series of choices."

Dan: (20:49) Yeah.

Jackson: (20:53) There are a million places that could go. Obviously, the AI piece is hanging over it, but I think it also is a nice setup for what [untitled] is and is doing. Maybe to start: how is music changing?

José: (21:05) If a Marvel movie was on one side of the spectrum, and then some really ridiculous black-and-white silent film that's in MoMA right now—that I will never understand—is on the other side, music and all the elements that we're building for is kind of somewhere in the magic middle, in our opinion. That being said, yeah, all mediums are very similar. They all have their own methods of creation, distribution, and consumption. In art history, we saw that as these painters and photographers were messing around—Marcel Duchamp primarily was just really curious and trying to poke holes and figure out what's next. And he's like, "Holy shit, it's just really my choices." That's all. If everything else is reduced down to zero from a cost standpoint or a labor standpoint or whatever, it really is just: what do I want? What do I see? What do I want to see? So for music, that's been happening slowly but surely. Because in art, you've got found objects—that's what Duchamp was—and then in music, sampling, hip hop, found sounds. It's the same thing: people curating.

Jackson: (22:16) Although, for what it's worth, a found sound... Part of the reason I asked this question is that you guys have built a company more or less fundamentally oriented around the idea of a work in progress. And implicit in a work in progress is process.

José: (22:31) Yes.

Jackson: (22:32) Notably a Ready Made—at least unlike a sample, which I—

José: (22:36) I almost pitched Dancho on Ready Made being the name of the company, really, by the way.

Jackson: (22:40) A Ready Made is almost without process, right? In this world—I want to talk about AI in more detail in the future—but in a world where you press a button once with Suno or whatever and you generate a song that feels energetically pretty far from an app and product that is almost entirely about artists and musicians being able to share the entirety of the process and all of those choices. So I guess I am asking both about where we've been and where we're going to go.

Dan: (22:59) I think one thing—and I guess it goes back to us being obsessed with new things—when we get obsessed with a new thing, we go very deep. We don't want to just listen to a great song and that's it. We want to go deep on the artists, find their interviews, scour the web, try to find everything about them, see if there's movies on them, see if there's TV shows. We get obsessed with that type of stuff. And one thing that José and I would talk a lot about as we were starting the company is how a lot of the greatest artists in the world were incredible draftsmen. Picasso would go through tens of versions, hundreds of versions, for any of his big paintings. Guernica had a bunch of versions to it. And one thing that exists in that medium, in the medium of painting, is the museum—being able to go through the versions, getting all the context on the story of that painting, and then you get to see the painting.

Jackson: (23:58) Yeah, right.

Dan: (24:00) In music, that didn't really exist. If you really wanted to get an understanding of the story of an album or the story of a song, you had to do a lot of research. You might have to go online and try and find things, and most likely you wouldn't find all the demos, you wouldn't find all the Voice Memos, you wouldn't find all the notes. Nowadays you have podcasts that try and do this retroactively, like Diary of a Song and Song Exploder, but that just didn't exist. So one of the things that, as music fans, really inspired us to want to build [untitled] is to be able to build that place that stored the entire story of your music and documented the whole process, so that as fans and as people who just love music, you get to have all that context in one place.

Jackson: (24:39) And the story, in some sense, is just a string of choices.

José: (24:43) Yes, that's the whole thing. So with Fountain, which kind of kicked off the Ready Made and things like that, you show up to a museum and you don't really know what's going on. You're not reading. You're like, "Okay, so the guy bought a toilet."

Jackson: (24:56) Like that.

José: (24:57) That's what happened. But then if you really are interested in the story and you realize that this guy was on the board of this exhibition and submitted it anonymously and then saw his peers disregard it—and then he made a fake newspaper saying that this is ridiculous. The newspaper was by him, him talking about this anonymous person that submitted it, and just all these things. You’re like, "Oh my God, this guy's pursuing something. This guy's kicking and screaming about something." And you read about it and you're like, "Whoa, that's cool." The physical piece is just the last piece of it. So if we want to talk about AI, it's like, we don't know. We're not 100% sure if that's what's going to happen. I don't think Dancho and I have fallen in love with a song yet where the last stroke of the story was a prompt and you hit a button and then you listen to it.

Jackson: (25:59) Right.

José: (25:59) I think we're certainly excited about that happening, and we will feel the same way that we felt when the iPhone came out or the first time that I connected with the Beatles' music. That's huge. It's highly unlikely that it's going to just happen in a vacuum. Thousands of years ago, all we cared about was telling stories, and we're just getting more sophisticated at doing that. There are all these different mediums of how to tell a story. We all choose our different tools: movies, podcasts, music, art, photography, company building, fashion. Ultimately, music will resonate if people can get behind the story, and the story is at the will of the storyteller. And again, a series of choices. It's just, what are you going to do?

Dan: (27:03) The best things usually are the most unexpected. We didn't see it coming. Like the best Kanye West album—when he made it, it was like, "Whoa, I didn't see this coming." And I think right now with AI specifically, when you make something with AI, it's kind of expected. You never hear something like, "Wow, that is so unique, that is so weird." Actually, something that we've heard a few times already from artists that we hang out with is they actually liked music AI more in the earlier days when...

Jackson: (27:35) I've heard this point made about GPT2 and poetry.

Dan: (27:38) Yeah, when it just spit out some random, weird shit, and you had no idea that was what was going to come out of it. Whereas now, it's like you said—it's too good. It's too good.

(27:52) [untitled]: A Medium for Music In-Progress

Jackson: (27:52) You mentioned mediums. I think this is from your Jobs page, and this is a way into actually talking about the product, now that we've circled in the clouds a little bit. "The deeper bet is that we're building a new medium, not just a better set of tools. Music in Progress is its own form of communication, and it has never had a place built for it." I think it would be helpful first, for those unfamiliar, to talk about what [untitled] is as it stands today. Then I suppose my follow-up question would be: where are you on that spectrum from set of tools to new medium, assuming that it is a work in progress?

José: (28:29) Basically, when we started the company, we thought about what happens with creation, distribution, and consumption. We think that when you blur the lines between creation and consumption, things change. You've got things like 20th-century Paris, where you're painting right across the street from where you're showing your artworks, and those two methods of production and consumption are getting nearer to each other. Distribution goes to zero with Instagram or with Snapchat. When you're taking the pictures on the same platform that you're distributing the pictures, distribution goes down to zero. When you democratize creation, anyone can do it, and you have this amazing flywheel of creation and consumption. I'm seeing you make something and I can make it too, so we're all inspiring each other to make things. [untitled], from the very beginning, was centered around building something for artists to make music, but it has to be just as good for listening as it is for creation. Listening is the thing that powers the whole flywheel. I listen to the demo, then I want to make the first version, then I want to make the second version, then I want to mix it, then I want to post it, then they listen to it, and then I want to make more. That whole mechanism maybe existed a little bit on SoundCloud and MySpace.

Jackson: (29:53) Closest comp in music.

José: (29:54) Yeah, I think MySpace, for some earlier generations, felt that way too. But Dan and I felt like we could actually bring design and principles to the product itself, such that it doesn't turn into a Frankenstein product. It shouldn't turn into something that the founders or the builders don't even know what it is, where they're just throwing paint at the wall. We felt like music deserved something that had craft, strategy, and principles, such that we could turn this thing into the operating system for musicians. The way that Notion exists for the workplace, or GitHub exists for engineering, or Figma exists for design, we were like, "Let's bring that level of focus and craft to a medium that we genuinely love."

Dan: (30:47) The big problem before we existed was that different companies were focused on a very specific use case. It was like, "Hey, we need to build a better tool for publishers to get songs heard by sync people." At the end of the day, people are using [untitled] for that now, but that's a very myopic use case. The thing that we brought to the table—and to the world—is that we were outsiders to everything. We were outsiders to making music. I was making a bunch of music on GarageBand and I was managing my older brother, but we were still outsiders. We'd never worked in it; we didn't have parents or friends that worked in it. We were outsiders and we had that perspective of technology. We're not engineers and we're also not technically designers when it comes to the pixels, so we weren't the ones who were going to be building it. What we had was basically an intuition around what type of product we wanted for ourselves.

Jackson: (31:58) Based on what? Based on using GarageBand?

José: (32:00) I think we were just such fans. GarageBand and music were inspiring our music intuition, but our product intuition was like Snapchat and Instagram, and obviously everything Apple. With Snapchat and Instagram, people were using Snapchat in such weird ways. They would do all the doodling and the drawing. Back in the day, it really felt like Evan Spiegel and whoever was around him were doing things in a very principled, intentional way. A product like the camera could be just as good for texting as it could be for broadcasting. People were thinking it was going to be the next television. It was all through a simple system that starts with the camera. A product shouldn't just be built for submitting songs to appear in movies, or for getting a management company to support an album, or getting a label to sign a project. There were all these products that existed for those individual things—like getting a producer to send a beat or a songwriter to help finish a song. Maybe in B2B SaaS you could create those individual wedges that turn into billion-dollar businesses. At least pre-AI, that was a whole thing.

Jackson: (33:56) Yep, a super simple problem.

José: (33:59) Music's not big enough for that.

Dan: (34:01) Simple and very intentional. For example, before we existed, a lot of artists and producers—some of the biggest names in music—to make their albums would use the Notes app. You would literally go on their phone and you would just see a literal notes doc, like on the Apple Notes app, with tens or hundreds of files.

Jackson: (34:20) And that's because there weren't enough people building dedicated music companies.

Dan: (34:23) There weren't simple tools built for that.

José: (34:27) The people that were building the dedicated music companies were basically building these niche bootstrapped apps that are like, "Hey, I'm a mixing engineer. This is my workflow. I'm going to automate it and then have other mixing engineers enjoy the fruits of my thing." But what about the stuff like the—

Jackson: (34:47) The bigger names that people know, like Ableton or whatever—they're just too much horsepower.

Dan: (34:51) Ableton is built for creation. Ableton is purely built for producing music, getting very in the weeds with sound, getting very in the weeds with, basically—I don't know if the camera's catching this—but these knobs right here.

José: (35:05) That's Ableton. Yeah, that's literally Ableton right here.

Dan: (35:08) Seriously, this is what Ableton is.

José: (35:10) And that's the thing. Dan and I come from that tree of simplicity. Obviously, Ableton would be Photoshop.

Jackson: (35:18) Yep.

José: (35:19) And then Instagram, Snapchat... got it. Or the camera app or the photos app on iPhone—that's sort of what we're aiming to be for audio.

Jackson: (35:28) To go back to your Snapchat analogy, Snap was built around this: What can you do with a camera that anyone has? Is there a metaphor for [untitled] initially?

José: (35:37) It's such a good question. No, it's not like you open up [untitled] and you have this blank canvas where you can start recording music. In fact, again, it's been six years and we haven't built a feed or any sort of social network on [untitled]. The way that people connect on [untitled] is implicitly using other platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp. There's no way to send someone something inside of [untitled]. You're relying on—

Jackson: (36:18) The internet's distribution, basically.

José: (36:19) Yeah. And the reasoning behind that is because music is still a very sensitive medium compared to photography, texting, and all these things. We felt like all the apps that had internal networks for music just got really cringe really quickly. Right. Because music is one of these things that, to be honest, I'll work on something for a really long time before I want someone else to listen to it. Dan is similar. Artists are similar. Even the most prolific ones where everything they make is amazing, they're still very shielded. So you have to start from a place of privacy.

Jackson: (37:03) A slower sharing. Kind of like, "I'm going to share it with one person and then two people and then five."

Dan: (37:09) I mean, oftentimes.

José: (37:09) And TikTok, when I saw TikTok drafts for the first time, I was like, "Oh, this is the first time that I've seen in pop consumer social media products actually have this private place for you to do stuff." Honestly, you've got to give them credit; they crushed it. But that kind of felt rare at the time of us exploring all this stuff.

Jackson: (37:36) You were going to say something.

Dan: (37:37) Yeah, I think in general, for people who take photos, you have the photos app. You have a great place where you can just go back and see all the photos that you're taking. If you want to edit one, you can go back and edit it a little bit. If you want to share it, you can obviously share it from there. In music, that just didn't exist. If you're someone who is making a lot of music for yourself, for your friends, for others, the closest thing before us was probably like a SoundCloud. Going back to unintentional tools, SoundCloud is a platform that throws a bunch of random music at you when you open it. You go on SoundCloud and you open it up to a feed. You see a bunch of random tracks by random people that are being recommended to you. If you want to get to your own music, it takes three to four steps just to get to your music. And when you're in the mindset of, "Hey, I want to go listen to my own song" or "I want to go listen to the song my friend sent," the last thing you want is to enter this place that is all noisy. Imagine if you opened your iPhone photos when you wanted to go see the photo of that restaurant you took, and the first thing you see is just a bunch of discovery—the Instagram algorithm in your face.

Jackson: (38:47) Yeah, it's a great point. Can we just quickly, for people who aren't familiar and haven't used the product, what is [untitled] today? Assuming it's somewhere on that spectrum of a set of tools to a medium. I also want to talk about where it's going and where it's been, but what is it as it stands today? Who's using it, and what can it do?

Dan: (39:07) The one sentence that we usually say with [untitled] is that we're the best place to store, listen, share, and organize your work-in-progress music. That's the one-liner.

Jackson: (39:17) So most users are musicians ranging from total amateur to professional. They have a couple of songs in there, or a hundred songs in there. And they're not making music in [untitled] for the most part, or are they?

José: (39:35) Making-making, you know.

Jackson: (39:36) Well, this goes back to our Ableton analogy. How much of music is the thing behind you versus "I have a guitar and a Voice Memo"?

Dan: (39:43) One thing I do want to say is that the magic about [untitled] and us building such a simple, flexible tool is that the platform is being used by people who literally know how to use this like the back of their hand—who could wire things, move things, know everything about sound—to literally a 16-year-old kid who just started making music on BandLab on their iPhone.

Jackson: (40:07) What else can you do with the product? Maybe the double click on that line around creation, consumption...

José: (40:16) Distribution.

Dan: (40:17) Well, there's creation, there's workflow, distribution, and consumption.

Jackson: (40:21) So what does that mean today?

José: (40:26) I would say just as a baseline for people that maybe don't make music—the super baseline here, and we would talk about this when we were fundraising back in the day, is an unbundling of a lot of things. Dropbox was being unbundled into different verticalized solutions. So you had Frame.io for video. We were unbundling Dropbox into this audio-centric cloud service. Instead of receiving a series of audio files that didn't have those special features for audio inside of the product, we built this purpose-built thing where you receive 10 audio files and you can actually play them through front to back. You can loop the audio file, you can do timestamped comments, you can do things that are specific to the medium. Audio is a first-class citizen.

Jackson: (41:21) And that was a really great "Dropbox for Songs" that was effectively the very first product.

Dan: (41:28) Yeah.

Dan: (41:29) One thing that José and I talk a lot about—and it's funny because we were very young when the iPod came out—but the last time that it was as easy to listen to your own work-in-progress music was with the iPod. The iPod obviously had the beautiful connection between iTunes and the iPod. It was easy to upload the files from your computer to iTunes and sync it to your phone. That was it, easy. And obviously the iPod was built purely for listening to music. Whereas for the last 25 years, during the iPod and after the iPod, people were using Dropbox and Google Drive and all these tools that were built for everything and for nothing at the same time. We decided to focus purely on music and what that medium needs.

Jackson: (42:43) To go backwards, you have a set of tools now. By the way, you have other things—now you can actually sell access to songs before they're released. These different types of things, presumably more creative tools are coming. Where are you on this vision of creating a new medium for work-in-progress stuff? Where are you in the amalgamation of tools to medium spectrum? What does that even mean?

José: (42:43) Yeah, our philosophy up until now—I think things are changing a little bit because we've reached this interesting point right now where we have over 50,000 paying customers and we're about to hit 5 million in annual recurring revenue. Dan and I are now thinking about how [untitled] goes from here, because we're not a tools company, we're a creativity company. We want to build the biggest creativity company possible. But up until now, it's been: build tools that are very useful in a very simple, principled way. If you just get out of the way and you don't do too much, the medium will start emerging. For example, if you don't really think too much about what a string of tracks is—don't call it an album. In the previous app, before we released it publicly, we used to call it a work-in-progress, a "whip." There was going to be a whole advertisement campaign of, "Yo, check out my whip," things like that. But we ended up calling it a project because it just felt like the most flexible, the most neutral, the most out of the way. And so now people share projects as their albums. People share projects as beat tapes, as beat packs, or as a string of demos that they actually want to go record. Some people actually record voice memos. This one artist was telling us that she recorded a one-hour morning routine inside of [untitled]. Every morning she wakes up and it basically tells her what to do: have coffee for five minutes, meditate for two minutes, make your bed, things like that. The more you get out of the way, the more you just put stakes in the ground wherever necessary, but outside of that, don't overdo it. The medium will start emerging without much force.

(45:03) From a Better Dropbox to a Creativity Company

Jackson: (45:03) Can you guys talk a little bit about... as far as I understand, six years into the company, the product initially launched in August 2023. What was that period from 2020 to 2023 like? Why did it take so long to launch something? How much did the idea evolve? What was that process?

Dan: (45:26) Well, I think the first thing to say is that the idea didn't really evolve. One thing that's extremely unique about us compared to other startups is that the idea from the very beginning was very clear and we knew what we wanted to build. Literally the first day we started the company officially, we wrote the product spec.

José: (45:47) It was the best day ever.

Dan: (45:50) It was the best day ever.

José: (45:52) That's what I was telling you about. Watching one of your earlier interviews really got me because Dan and I would wake up every morning. That morning we woke up at 5:00 AM and we went on a run.

Dan: (46:07) We were in San Diego, by the way, where we're both from, right?

José: (46:09) So you understand the analogies of the TBPN guys going to the gym and getting results. We literally went on a run on the beach—this was September 2020—talking about the product, talking about hiring, fundraising, and all the things that were in our heads. We would go shower, Dancho would pick me up, we went to the office, and we just started cranking all day. As Dancho said, we wrote the entire product spec in one day.

Dan: (46:40) The product spec—and I want to be clear—the product spec of what we launched with in 2023 was basically that product spec. Now, since then, it's been three years. We added a lot of those editing features, those creation features. That was always part of the vision. But the spec for V1 of [untitled] was what we wrote that day in 2020. What happened was that a lot of people iterate on the product or on the concept to get to product-market fit to get to the next day.

Jackson: (47:08) This was much more top-down. It was a vision.

Dan: (47:09) For us, it was like we had to iterate on how to build the thing. It was an execution story.

Jackson: (47:13) What did you write? This line you just gave me, which is like "creation for work-in-progress music"—what did you actually write?

José: (47:23) It was something along the lines of—

Jackson: (47:26) The best way to do the Dropbox?

José: (47:28) It was like: "The mission is to help artists nurture and maximize their creative process." What are we building? The best place to share, listen, and collaborate on work-in-progress music.

Jackson: (47:42) And you expected that your customers were going to be artists themselves.

José: (47:45) Yes, artists themselves.

Dan: (47:46) That was always from the very beginning. We talked a lot about how there are a lot of different companies and products building tools kind of like this, but focused on different people—focused on the industry person, the manager, or the A&R. Since the very beginning, we were always going to be focused on the artist.

José: (48:07) For selfish reasons and also for strategic reasons. Selfish reasons because we want to be building a product where the customer we're building for is someone that we're very inspired by. We were just dreaming of the day that our favorite artists were going to use the app. From a strategic reason, we kind of intuitively felt that. But as Dancho and I didn't know anything about the music industry, we didn't understand the leverage that existed. You should explain.

Dan: (48:36) Before I tell you this amazing anecdote that a producer told me recently, we basically said that we were really focused on the DIY artist. José and I were really obsessed when we started the company with this playlist on Spotify called Pollen. Back in the day, Pollen was a really special playlist because it was basically featuring DIY artists from all over the world. What we mean by DIY is an artist who's very much in control and has a say in the entire process of their music—from the songwriting to the beats, the creative direction, the rollout, and the tour. They have a say in everything, and they're pretty much in the driver's seat for the whole thing. Pollen featured artists in that world. We were getting to a place in that era with Pollen where DIY artists were getting very big. Tyler, the Creator—literally his name has "the Creator" in it.

Jackson: (49:27) He is almost like the artist-as-director example. Got it.

Dan: (49:31) Yeah. So anyways, we were really focused on these artists that are very genreless, very DIY, and highly collaborative. They're collaborating with people all the time. Going back to what José asked: one of the big strategic reasons that ended up working out with artists is because if music is a pyramid, artists are at the top of that pyramid. Everyone else serves whatever the artist wants—as fucked up or as sick as that is. It's the artist, then it's the producer a step below that, then it's the manager, then it's the A&R, and then it's probably publicity. Everyone just serves the artist. So if the artist loves your platform and they love your tool and they're putting all their music on there, everyone else will follow. That's exactly what happened.

Jackson: (50:18) Got it. Maybe not unlike some of these other metaphors you use around GitHub and Notion and Figma—you can get the person who's at the center.

José: (50:26) And it's crazy because now that we're a little more far along, sometimes we'll be having conversations and someone will be telling us why they use the product. One producer told me that this huge artist forces him to use the app, and he doesn't actually like using it. Nowadays, I don't really mind someone telling me they don't like the app because it's fine. But this huge artist is like, "Yo, if you're going to work on my album, you've got to use this app."

Dan: (51:01) You've got to upload it there.

Jackson: (51:01) Do you have a sense when somebody has that level of need for it, is it the easiest way for them to share? They like to listen to their own music there? Is there a most common reason that it's so sticky?

José: (51:15) The bread and butter of our product, the reason why people fall in love with it, is the listening experience. It's just so good. And listening is so critical to making great music.

Jackson: (51:30) Maybe in a non-intuitive way for a non-musician: listening to your own work.

José: (51:32) Listening to your own.

Dan: (51:33) We made your own music feel like your personal Spotify. I go on [untitled] and I make music—it's not amazing, but I love it because it's my own. I go on the project and it feels like I'm looking at a project on Spotify. I have control over it. I can change the cover art, I can rearrange the tracklist, I could change the title, and I could then share it with José if I wanted to. It's very empowering to be used to going on Spotify and listening to some of my favorite music from history and then going on [untitled] and looking at my own music and having it feel the same way.

(52:13) Empathy as a Product Philosophy and The Collaboration's Origins

Jackson: (52:13) That's cool. You mentioned, as I understand it, you guys are not engineers. You're not really musicians. You're not even maybe really designers.

José: (52:21) We're not.

Dan: (52:21) No, we're not. We're as untitled as it comes.

Jackson: (52:26) I was talking to our mutual friend and one of your investors, Ethan Daly, about you guys and what I should talk to you about. He observed that with all that context, you also didn't really have a technical "why now" for this business. So really all there is to—

Dan: (52:38) Yeah, I definitely had that romantic idea, but I think going back to your original question, there definitely is no technical "why now." But I do think there's a cultural "why now." Jose was alluding to this earlier. Basically, if you look at music, you have consumption, you have distribution, and you have creation. Then workflow is kind of wedged between creation and distribution, but you have those three. Consumption basically is what most of music tech innovation has been the last 25 years. We basically have spent the last 25 years trying to figure out how we consume music digitally in a way that the rights holders get compensated. Until that was figured out, it was very hard to think about everything else.

Jackson: (53:21) Well, and that was obviously the biggest market.

Dan: (53:23) Of course, that was obviously the market. That's where also most of the graveyard is. That's why a lot of VCs are scared of investing in music, because there were a lot of companies that died in that era. Obviously, Spotify figured it out, and obviously a bunch of companies followed after that to build streaming like Apple. But consumption had to get figured out before you could think about everything else. So when we started the company, and I spoke a lot about this, we were like, "Okay, consumption is 99% optimized. Spotify and streaming figured it out. So let's not do that." Distribution is kind of interesting. Music still has to go through a distributor to get onto streaming services. Most of the rest of media, distribution is over. To post this podcast online, you don't have to go through anyone, you just post it. Whereas in music, you have to go through a distributor. To play in that game and do anything new, you really have to be in that world. You have to have a lot of relationships. You have to be a music industry insider. As we alluded to, Jose and I were like, "Nope." We didn't do anything in music before this, so we didn't have any insider knowledge or relationships. We couldn't do anything there. Creation felt like the area that was the most fertile for innovation because for the last 25 years, no one was really thinking about it too much. Everyone was thinking about consumption or distribution. So I think there was a cultural "why now." When we started the company, Spotify was popping. Artists can now know that if their song was good and their music was good, they would make money. They wouldn't lose money as they did in the piracy era.

Jackson: (54:54) Where does this level of your product—I mean, I played around with it enough to have a sense for someone who's not a musician. And this is from everything down to pixels and the beautiful animations, but also it is clearly built with a deep level of empathy for your user. And yet you don't have any of the credentials. Credentials may be the wrong way. You could imagine a former musician being like, "I'm going to make the perfect app for me." That is usually how products like this emerge—I'm just going to build the thing I need. I don't want to discredit it—it sounds like you were making some music—but where do you think that level of intuition and empathy comes from, given that you're not inherently making something for yourself?

José: (55:58) Well, I think we—when we started the company, we were like, "We're going to be method actors." So we were building something for ourselves. Even if it's not great music, we were still like, "We are. We're going to..." But the one credential that's the most important for this product to work was product sense. Dan and I have just been students of products. We're fans of our favorite products, and we've studied them and we talk about them. That's what was missing in music—someone that came in with an opinion on product and had principles, a philosophy of how to do things, and can direct a team, an organization with that strategy and that vision in mind. Yes, you're 100% right. We were talking to a big musician the other day, and they were like, "It's as if you're in our brains and you know exactly what we want." To your point, why didn't a big musician successfully build a product like this? Because some have tried. The reason is because the product sense wasn't quite there. And then why didn't these amazing engineers or amazing product builders successfully build some of these products for musicians? Some have tried and it hasn't quite worked out how they wanted it to. Again, it's that empathy, that method acting, that research, that genuinely putting yourself in their shoes—that didn't quite go that far. Dan and I, as people who didn't go too deep in either side of it, we decided to go super, super deep in the...

Jackson: (57:50) The blend.

José: (57:51) The blend. The amalgamation of what these people need and how you're going to build it.

Dan: (58:01) I think part of the important context as to why José and I ended up doing things in music is that music is a key part of our DNA and our relationship. José and I—we're both the youngest of three siblings. We have two older brothers with significant age differences. Growing up, all of our older brothers were musicians, and some of them were actually in bands together. They were all into the same music. This was San Diego, early 2000s pop punk era. So when José and I would be going to school, we would go on the same bus. We grew up five minutes away from each other; I was five years old, he was seven years old. We would be talking about all the bands that our brothers were into. Music has always been one of the main things that we talk about. Funnily enough, during that era that we were on the bus together, José would always come to me like, "Yo, we need to start a band together. I'll write the songs, you play the instruments." Music is a big part of us. To be honest, maybe this is very selfish, but we really wanted to work with each other. We really wanted to build a company together. Because music was the thing that we were always talking about and was a big part of our DNA, it naturally felt like music was the right thing for us to spend our life working on together.

José: (59:20) We always wanted to work with each other. In college—and I graduated a couple years ahead, waiting for Dan to graduate—the obsession with music was... I think Ethan was 100% right in saying that. It's this level of empathy, an obsession with this category, that made this work out. That, combined with our deep level of excitement to work together, were the ignition for this company. Dan, at some point, came up to me and he's like, "Yo, I want to start a real estate company." This was before he was excited about starting a music company. He was getting very into music, but for one reason or another, real estate was a possibility. I was like, "Great, go do that. I can't go do that with you." I was literally banging my head on the wall thinking about music. I couldn't stop thinking about music all day long. I would annoy my roommate; I would annoy the people around me at Facebook. I would just be like, "I can't stop thinking about music. I need to work on music." It was like, "Okay, go on this random niche music team or whatever." But it was pre-Reels, and even now, music's not that important; it's not front and center at those types of companies. So I was just waiting for the moment, and then Dan calls me one day and he's like, "What if we start a music company together?" And I was like, "100%. Let's go."

(1:01:04) Scaling the Sacred Place and Product Intuition

Jackson: (1:01:04) Can you talk a little bit about—maybe this ties into some of what you were saying about Snapchat—this is a product that is quite complex and does a lot of different things, to the "suite of tools" point, that comes in a very simple package? It's delightful when pulled off well, but very hard to—

Dan: (1:01:26) —do—

Jackson: (1:01:28) —especially on mobile. Mobile compresses that; you just have less real estate. Can you talk about how you've navigated that, especially as the product has gained more and more surface area?

Dan: (1:01:38) To be honest, it's definitely something that we're starting to struggle with because we do have a lot of features. We have a lot of things that you can do on [untitled].

José: (1:01:47) Right.

Dan: (1:01:48) Everything from just storing your music and listening to it, to stem splitting and changing the EQ of the song, and a bunch of other things in between. We are getting to the point—and we've heard this multiple times from users and artists—where they're like, "Do you guys have some sort of FAQ video or something so that I know what I can do with this app?" Obviously, they love the app already, but they know there's something more they can do.

Jackson: (1:02:12) "I love it for this one thing."

Dan: (1:02:13) Yeah. "I know there's more things I can do with it, I just don't know what." So we've definitely, up until now, gotten to a place where we've been able to pull off having a very simple, intuitive tool that works for whatever you need it to, when you need it to, but doesn't get in the way if there are things that you don't want to do with it. But I think now, which is part of José and I thinking about this next chapter of the company, we're thinking about how we present all these magical tools that we've built in a way that's more intuitive.

Jackson: (1:02:41) Well, especially if they have very different contexts. For example, the place where I listen to my own music as an artist also being the place where I can sell or even share it—it's delicate, right?

José: (1:02:53) Very. 100%. I think we have an amazing team; that's number one. Dan and I, as part of that 2020 to 2023 odyssey that we went on, were figuring out how to deliver the package in the perfect way. But Dan and I, not being technical, not being in the pixels all day, we do something where we're talking to each other all day long and debating about literal buttons—where the button is placed on the screen, how the interaction comes up. Then we bring that level of debate to the rest of the team. We love when our designers bring 30 different versions of an experience and then we get to discuss aggressively together as a team. Iron sharpens iron. Then we finally find the truth—the thing that just feels right. Everything inside of the app—and this is one thing that worries us a lot—is that in the early days, when the app was just listening and sharing, there were so few features that you could debate something for a day and it would be worth it. If you've got more and more engineers working on more and more features, how do you actually scale that philosophy, that form of debate?

Jackson: (1:04:25) The filter, almost.

José: (1:04:28) Yeah. A lot of [untitled] went viral on Twitter when we launched originally with designers and artists. A lot of designers hit us up about, "How did you think of this?" We generally really love the way that we have come to make decisions about product, but we are realizing that it doesn't scale. We just created a Claude agent thing called Product Assistant that basically summarizes all the discussions in Slack and divides them into two categories: decisions that are left outstanding and decisions that were made. Every day at 5 p.m., we get this digest just to review what decisions everyone is collectively making, what's left outstanding, and what's yet to do. It's an exercise to see if this is a way for us to keep up with all the different things. But the main thing that Dan and I have to do is QA the product itself. I'm actually hearing from AI people that QA is becoming more important because a lot of PRs are getting through and people are spending more time QAing. I assume QA is now a more important function inside of tech companies. QA has always been the most important function Dan and I have ever done at this company.

Dan: (1:05:50) We literally say that is our job. Back in the day, we would say our literal job is just QA. But I think the thing that's really tough is kind of what José is saying—how do you scale intuition? At the end of the day, a lot of the decisions that we've made on the product and on basically everything that we do has been our intuition. We are obviously trying to build the biggest music company on the planet. To do that, you obviously need to grow the team a lot. You have to hire more people, hire more designers, and hire people beyond you that make decisions.

Jackson: (1:06:23) You're trying to build the biggest music company on the planet?

José: (1:06:25) Trying, yeah.

Jackson: (1:06:29) You have some competition?

Dan: (1:06:29) Yes, for sure. I mean, the best things in life are usually very hard.

Jackson: (1:06:35) Have you found—maybe to talk about scaling intuition—have you found you've been able to sort of download your intuition even to individual members on the team?

Dan: (1:06:47) For sure, 100%.

José: (1:06:51) There are people that are on our team...

Dan: (1:06:52) We've chosen people to be on our team where collaborating with them feels like ping-pong.

José: (1:07:00) It's magic.

Jackson: (1:07:01) It's honestly—there's moments, that's when they're coming in. Obviously it compounds over time, but there's something they have before they've even joined that has like...

José: (1:07:10) Yeah, and it's this perfect marriage. It makes me want—every time that there's this moment where we arrive at a solution. For example, recently, it was this... we just built commenting. Inside of the comment—I won't get into it—but basically we arrived at a solution around commenting to be able to listen to the music while also being able to navigate to the project. It was hard. It was a UX problem and we landed on a solution that was so great and exactly what we needed. It just kind of worked. I wanted to cry because I was just so happy. Those types of moments of collaboration are like... Dan and I, we've been telling each other recently that we love our team so much and it's so much fun being with them because you push each other and make each other better. We really believe in that band mentality of just being a core contributor to something bigger than you. We talk about how these non-technical people end up being the best recruiters because they literally can't do something by themselves. So they need other people, they become social, and you find...

Dan: (1:08:30) You find the best people because of that. You feel, out of necessity—for lack of a better word—just desperate.

José: (1:08:35) Chip on your shoulder.

Jackson: (1:08:36) It sounds like maybe that described you guys.

Dan: (1:08:37) That was literally those first three years of the company. When you asked us what happened from 2020 to 2023—we were very clear on what we wanted to build.

José: (1:08:48) We did some crazy things.

Dan: (1:08:49) We had no idea how to build it, and we didn't know who the right people were.

José: (1:08:54) We once hit up an engineer saying, "Hey, we're just in the city." We bought a flight—a four-hour flight or three-hour flight—just to have dinner with someone, but told them, "Hey, we're going to be here."

Jackson: (1:09:01) Nice.

José: (1:09:09) "Hey, we're just here."

Dan: (1:09:10) I would literally see someone on the subway with a Swift shirt and I would go up and talk to them. Or I'd go to WeWork and see people coding and just start trying to talk.

Jackson: (1:09:21) How do you test for this intuition, this ping-pong?

Dan: (1:09:23) We're still figuring it out. But our two founding engineers, for example—Ryan and Miles—both of them are really, really strong designers. Even though they're engineers, they're really, really strong designers on their own and have a really good eye for design, which is very important to José and I because that's one thing we really value in ourselves is just having a good eye for design. And then two, they are builders. Both of them had a lot of side projects on their own, outside of the work that they were doing. Miles, our founding iOS engineer, had his own music app called Andante. Ryan had his own agency called For Green Engineering. Both had built a lot of things, so they had a lot of agency over doing things. I think both of those things made them a perfect fit for us: strong design sense and builders at heart. Which balanced us, because we're not builders in that sense.

(1:10:33) Lorde's XRAYS Drop and Designing for a Wide Range of Artists

Jackson: (1:10:33) What about designing a product that, on one hand, is used by presumably tons of kids uploading their first song they've ever made, and a product where Lorde dropped... as far as I understand, you guys had very little notice. She organically dropped basically a follow-up to her album. Those are very, very different stratas of users.

José: (1:10:58) That made us cry, too. Because she dropped the museum exactly behind her album. Like what Dan was saying about how you walk into a museum and you get to see all the notes, all the drafts, all the context—she used our product in the way that we dreamed about using it.

Jackson: (1:11:16) This is sort of the evolution of media, right?

Dan: (1:11:17) Literally a dream come true.

José: (1:11:18) Yes, it was.

Dan: (1:11:18) And you don't understand how many times in the last six years we tried to force that. We tried to convince artists, "Hey, drop the demos. Hey, put liner notes." We tried to literally brainwash them to want to do it. And then we see Lorde, obviously one of the biggest artists in the world, do this out of her own volition.

Jackson: (1:11:38) Like, literally, how did it happen? What was your initial reaction when you—

Dan: (1:11:40) We just got a call from the man.

José: (1:11:41) We didn't even believe it.

Dan: (1:11:43) Yeah, we got a call from the man. Especially in music, the one thing you learn is that musicians are very flimsy. One day they say they're going to do something, and the next day they say they're going to do something else. So we never believe anything an artist says until we see it happen.

José: (1:12:02) Straight up, that's one of the most fucked up things about this. Dan and I would get so excited about certain things six years ago in music that were just very new to us. Nowadays, you don't understand how much stuff happens in this office on a daily basis. Amazing artists recording music, amazing artists getting interviewed, building product, events, performances—all sorts of things are happening all day long here and we're getting a little desensitized. With the Lorde thing, it was such a surreal moment when it happened.

Jackson: (1:12:48) What do you think she saw? Also, for context for the listeners, if you want to check it out, we can link to it. She dropped 49 demos from her album.

Dan: (1:12:53) 49 demos from her album—

Jackson: (1:12:57) —on Virgin for the anniversary.

José: (1:13:00) And it was about five demos per song. She had liner notes saying, "This is the beat. I texted when I heard this beat originally and told Jimmy, 'Do not send it to anyone. This one's mine.'"

Dan: (1:13:15) For context, Jimmy is Jim-E Stack, her producer who worked on the entire album with her. You would see notes between them about what the story of the song was.

José: (1:13:25) And you would play it through, and there would be these little differences.

Dan: (1:13:26) Yeah. And the one thing that's really cool is that the manager called us two days before it happened saying, "Hey, we want to do this. We just have these technical questions." We answered the questions, and then José and I kind of stopped talking about it because we are so desensitized to these things. We don't expect them to happen until they actually happen. Then it happened. I think what was such a cool experience was that getting all the context of an album or a project makes you want to go listen to that project more. It's reciprocal. For example, I know for José, this was a big thing with the Beatles. Watching the Get Back documentary was what led him to want to go actually listen to the Beatles' album, not the other way around.

José: (1:14:17) I wasn't a Beatles hater, but I was kind of like, "Why does everyone love the Beatles so much? It just feels kind of plain to me." I don't know why I thought that way. Then I saw the Get Back documentary and I was like, "Why does anybody else even make music? Why did anyone even try?" It was a complete 180.

Dan: (1:14:39) That's what happened with the Lorde thing for me personally. Now I actually listen to the album more, whereas before, to be frank, I didn't really listen to it. That's what's so beautiful about getting these experiences: you just develop a deeper relationship with the music. You get to understand it more. With Lorde, what's cool is that obviously she's one of the biggest artists in the world and she's doing this. But now we're seeing—I mean, the other day there was this kid in the studio named Zayok. He's 16 years old now, and he started making music with [untitled] at 13. This kid just got a record deal. He's actually growing a lot as an artist.

José: (1:15:17) He was in a bidding war.

Dan: (1:15:18) Yeah, a bidding war. It was one of those types of situations. Now, imagine a world where Zay is 28 or 29 and he's a massive artist. He's still using [untitled], and he gets to go back and see the shit that he was making when he was 13 in an easy way, the same way we do with the Photos app.

Jackson: (1:15:35) Right.

Dan: (1:15:35) Imagine if Tyler, the Creator had [untitled] when he was 15. But the problem is he didn't. So now it's like, "I want to go find the demos that I made when I was 15," and they're on some old MacBook. Who the fuck knows where those are?

José: (1:15:47) Going back to your question of why a 16-year-old is using the same product as a bigger artist like Lorde—how does that work? We generally think of it similar to why everyone uses iMessage or WhatsApp abroad.

Jackson: (1:16:07) I suppose my counterargument would be—and to be clear, my question is less about why this happens and more about how do you design for both?

José: (1:16:15) Oh, okay.

Jackson: (1:16:16) My counterargument would be that everyone uses iMessage because of network effects. Obviously, your product has some network effects, but for it to be a great tool for an artist, it's less about that and way more about whether it's ergonomic, useful, and intuitive. Maybe in Lorde's case, it was particularly about the distribution part of it. But designing a product for both those users is really, really difficult.

Dan: (1:16:38) It goes back to what José was saying around listening. We first wanted to build a tool that was so simple to listen to your own music or the music that your friend or collaborator is sharing with you. The reality is that whether you're a 14-year-old kid who's barely learning how to make beats in his bedroom or you're Lorde, you both want to listen to your music as easily as if it were Spotify. You both want that experience. I've never talked to Lorde directly, but if I had to guess, the reason why she did it was because listening to her demos on [untitled] is extremely easy and seamless. It's a much better experience than listening to them on Dropbox. Why would she share a Dropbox link?

José: (1:17:23) Yes.

(1:17:26) 10K Unheard Songs and Whether Process Should be Seen

Jackson: (1:17:26) There's a quote you guys have that I think ties into what we were talking about around the museum idea. You said, "If an artist is releasing 10 albums over the course of their career, which is maybe 100 to 200 songs, they definitely made over 10,000 songs." A lot of that music gets sent to just a few people, whether it's your mom or your significant other. I was thinking about this because of that moment in the Get Back documentary where Paul is strumming his way into "Get Back." It's one of the more miraculous scenes, seeing the song go from nothing into something.

Dan: (1:18:04) Yeah, it's one of the best songs.

José: (1:18:07) You hear it over and over.

Jackson: (1:18:10) It's miraculous.

José: (1:18:11) The repetition in that thing—"Don't Let Me Down" is maybe one of my favorite songs now because of that. You hear it so many freaking times. There was a moment where Paul actually tried to fuck up the song and add this call-and-response between him and John. John actually was down and they tried it out. You never actually get told in the documentary what happened to make it go back to the original vibe, but they still tried it. It's the story of the song.

Jackson: (1:18:48) I was thinking about this, and granted, I think it's important context that the documentary came out 50-plus years after the album was made. In many ways, this is kind of the thematic we talked about earlier. From a distribution or consumption standpoint, your product for artists sharing with the world is about work-in-progress. The museum. There's a line I come back to often from Jerry Seinfeld: "All art is disguising work." His point is that artists are a bit like the magician who hides something behind the curtain. The thing you see just looks easy and simple and elegant, but in fact, all this work is hidden behind it.

José: (1:19:32) Yes.

Jackson: (1:19:33) And so in some sense there's this tension. Especially today, maybe more than any other era, creatives are putting the process on display more than ever before. The tech analogy would be working with the garage door open. And yet there is something to like—I don't know.

José: (1:19:52) Building in public.

Dan: (1:19:53) Yeah, building in public. I knew that was coming.

Jackson: (1:19:55) Yet there is something to like, "I don't get any of the process and I just get delivered the magical finished thing."

Dan: (1:20:02) Yeah.

José: (1:20:05) I guess this—

Jackson: (1:20:05) It's a false dichotomy. These things aren't inherently at odds. But I am curious how you, especially going back to the medium stuff, how do you think about this? What are your expectations for how artists will play with this spectrum? Obviously, your product is in some sense kind of on one end of the spectrum.

Dan: (1:20:22) It's an amazing question because honestly, part of what we learned over the last six years when we were trying to brainwash artists to share the demos is that, one, many artists don't want you to see the demos. Right.

José: (1:20:38) That was a big issue the three years before launching.

Dan: (1:20:43) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:20:45) If you know how the trick is done—

Dan: (1:20:45) Many artists don't want you to. I mean, it's like Frank Ocean's whole thing where he had the hard drive that he would travel with, one for security, and two because he would say that if he died, he didn't want people to listen to the unfinished music. He wanted the tracks to go down with him if the plane fell down. So some artists don't want you to see that. And many fans at the same time don't give a fuck about the demos. You have to be a psycho obsessive.

Jackson: (1:21:14) Or maybe I care a year in or 50 years in.

Dan: (1:21:16) Yeah, it's niche. It's niche.

José: (1:21:17) Yes. And I think what I was saying about that producer: it's fine for someone to say, "I don't like your product these days," But back in the day, Dancho and I would personally onboard every single artist. And we'd be like, "You can share your demos. The museum. Publish with us." All these things, and they'd be like, "I don't care about any of that. Why would I want to share my demos with anyone?" And then we'd be like, "You don't understand." And it's true, it's not at scale. The Seinfeld quote is amazing: people barely have enough time to look at the main thing, the main thing that you work so hard on and that is perfectly polished. It's rare that we get a Get Back documentary. That's a rare thing.

Jackson: (1:22:02) And that's why you almost have to earn the right to give that.

José: (1:22:04) And that's why this version of [untitled], the one that launched, is not called a work-in-progress. The medium, or the project primitive, is not called the work-in-progress; it's called the Project. Because we decided, you know what, let's just—and that's kind of the getting-out-of-the-way thing—let's let people use it for however they want to use it. And we are so grateful that Lorde used it in that way. So grateful. And we hope that she got a lot out of it and her fans got a lot out of it. We certainly connected to her record more because of it, and we'd love to see some of our favorite artists do it more. But we're also very aware that the product needed to be directed and carved in a certain way that wasn't going to pigeonhole itself into that.

Jackson: (1:22:52) Yes. I would also observe that it's telling that your incentives from a business standpoint—the majority of your revenue is not artists selling unreleased songs to their fans. It is artists and creatives paying a subscription to you to use this tool.

José: (1:23:06) Yes.

Dan: (1:23:07) I mean, that's the magic of [untitled], right? Is that we're focused on the artist. And we want to build great tools for the artist, and the business model is incentivizing us to do that. It's cool. But I think it's kind of interesting—we don't need to dwell too much on this—but it is interesting how this museum analogy only matters if you're a goat. Like, no one wants to go to a museum of someone who isn't a goat.

Jackson: (1:23:34) Right.

José: (1:23:35) And that specifically happens in the art world. So there's so much friction. There's only so many museums. There's only so many exhibits.

Jackson: (1:23:43) Right. You have to be lindy for anyone to care about you being in a museum.

Dan: (1:23:47) The only people that are going to be able to get their fans to drop what they're doing and listen to their demos and listen to the work-in-progress are the artists who made such an amazing piece of art that people are obsessed with it and love it so much, in the same way that the Beatles did. And I guess Lorde now is doing that too, because her fans clearly wanted to listen to that stuff.

(1:24:10) Brand, Trust, Alignment with Artists and the [studio]

Jackson: (1:24:10) How do you maintain trust with artists?

Jackson: (1:24:16) Yeah. How—maybe this is duplicative, but yet, what is the philosophy around maintaining trust with a bunch of artists who love your product as you're trying—maybe a different way to frame the question would be: if this product is really beloved, that's relatively simple. And yet you also want to build the biggest music company in the world. It seems like making sure that artists still trust you on that way up—by the way, as you introduce AI features as an example or whatever it's going to be—maybe it's just intuition, but how do you think about that?

Dan: (1:24:49) Yeah. So, you know, part of us wanting to build the biggest music company in the world is because we want to build the best ecosystem for the artist. And to be able to build the best ecosystem, we think, because it hasn't existed yet, is that you have to build a vertically integrated music company—a company across creation to consumption. Obviously this is very ambitious and this is part of our 10, 20-year plan. But we genuinely believe that if we're able to do that all in one place, it's going to be a way better experience for the artist. If you're using one thing to do it all, then it's going to be a good experience.

Jackson: (1:25:26) But I would argue that makes trust even more important.

Dan: (1:25:28) Yes, for sure. And look, at the end of the day, we're figuring this out ourselves because it's part of the growing pains. But I think the main thing for us to be able to continue scaling and earning the trust of artists is that we just have to continue to build tools that are genuinely useful to them.

José: (1:25:48) I do think the incentive piece is important. Artists can just intuitively—so many people come into our studio or meet with us and they're like, "You're the only company that cares about artists." I see so many companies—Tidal, for example, or other people—doing so many campaigns and marketing, saying how much they care about artists or using tactics to prove to artists that they should be the brand that artists rep the most. And yet with us, I think it's part of the fact that they love the product, but it's also just that the business model is so clean and so aligned. We're not doing anything that's raising eyebrows, so from that perspective, they come in here and they just get it. They get that we care about them, and we're charging them.

Dan: (1:26:50) Yeah.

José: (1:26:51) But they feel good about that. A lot of people are saying that Apple might actually be the secret AI winner because of the level of care and trust that customers put into buying iPhones and things like that.

Dan: (1:26:57) Yeah. It is really quite beautiful to know that at the end of the day, the thing that keeps the lights on is making sure artists love what you're doing. It even goes down to something that is newer at [untitled] but has become a meaningful part of our day-to-day, which is our brand. We call our go-to-market team the brand team because, at the end of the day, we don't really feel like we're "going to market" when it comes to [untitled]. We feel like we're building a great tool and naturally artists are finding it, using it, and sharing it with others. We don't have to do much to go to them nowadays. In some ways they're coming to us because we have the studio.

José: (1:27:35) And our favorite products—the way that Dan and I fall in love with products is the storytelling and the brand. So for us, if that's how we engage with products, we want to crack that. We're still figuring this out—we have no idea how to do this—but we're temporarily calling the entire go-to-market team the brand team. Everything is brand and everything is a story. It's just how we get the thing that we're making here out to customers, and that all requires this very meticulous storytelling effort.

Dan: (1:28:12) And brand really is this universe that we're building. Part of our dream before actually starting [untitled] was getting a piece of land. Before we decided that we were going to build [untitled] and build the software company, we wanted to get a piece of land. We were going to call it Manzana, which is "apple" in Spanish, but it was...

José: (1:28:34) It was going to be stylized as two words, like Man Sana—healthy man.

Dan: (1:28:39) But we were going to get a piece of land, and this land was going to be the place where we did all of our experiments. It was going to be this ecosystem of all these cultural music experiments that we wanted to do, from a festival to a recording studio, to having a software play. We decided that was quite the endeavor to start with, so we wanted to first build software. Now that we're six years in, we've been fortunate enough to get this amazing building in Williamsburg where we're sitting now. We have a three-story building. We have the retail floor, the second floor, and the third floor where the studio is. Then we also have the rooftop where we do shows. Essentially, with this whole building, we've allowed ourselves to build an ecosystem of everything that an artist needs. We have the second floor, which is where we build the software and the tooling. We have the third floor, where we've built the studio. It took us a year to build it. And this isn't one of those hyper-simple studios. We have this super technical thing that José and I barely know how to use, but we know a lot of artists really appreciate.

Jackson: (1:29:41) What is that thing?

Dan: (1:29:44) It's the Patch Bay.

José: (1:29:45) It's a rack of preamps.

Dan: (1:29:47) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:29:47) Okay.

Dan: (1:29:48) Have you ever seen reverb plugins? Those are the physical versions of that. And then we have the rooftop where we do shows and artists can come perform.

Jackson: (1:29:58) Cool.

Dan: (1:29:59) Then the retail floor, which is still being built out, is a place where we're going to have more office space. Also, we're going to have a little area where artists can actually sell things. If you want to sell your merch, vinyl, or rare music, you could do that all here. This whole building is almost turning into the Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory of music, where you can do it all in here. We have our own universe.

José: (1:30:19) 8,000 square feet of indoor space, 5,000 square feet of outdoor space.

Jackson: (1:30:25) Crazy.

José: (1:30:26) Four different performance spaces and the engineering, design, and brand teams all intermixed, doing research with an artist to see what we want to build with them. They're performing, they're recording, and they're selling their stuff all in the same place.

Dan: (1:30:46) It's almost like the Get Back documentary, but with software too.

(1:30:54) The Word "Sacred" and Resisting the Feed

Jackson: (1:30:54) You call it on the website and many other places—you say [untitled] is a sacred place for your unreleased music. What does the word "sacred" mean to you guys?

José: (1:31:05) I think it's the feeling that you get where you're vulnerable or comfortable. Sometimes you might feel it when you're at home in your pajamas. I was actually thinking about it yesterday. Why do I feel so comfortable on my computer right now doing work? Would I feel the same way at the office? There's just a feeling of doing work at night, by your bed, getting ready to go to sleep. It's this feeling of vulnerability and rawness. That's what we want people to feel when they enter [untitled]—this feeling that it is really like their home for their unreleased music. A "sacred place" is the upleveling of that word. It's a little bit mystical—not just your home, but the sacred place.

Dan: (1:32:09) I think sacred is also something that you don't take for granted. It's very easy—for example, I think we were talking to an employee right before this. It was their one-on-one and accidentally we missed it because we were in another meeting. José said, "This is a sacred time for you. It's up to you if you want to do it or not. If we have something to discuss, we'll tell you. But regardless, it's a sacred time for you." That made me feel like it's a time you just don't take for granted. It's something that's special and very intentional. I think that's what I feel when I open untitled. It feels very intentional when I'm going on there because I open up untitled and, oftentimes, I'm going on there because I want to listen to something very specific.

Jackson: (1:33:01) Yeah.

Dan: (1:33:03) Now it's a bit different because I have so much shit in my untitled now that I do sometimes go in there and browse and look for things and not know what I'm going to listen to.

Jackson: (1:33:12) And it's more like browsing a library than an algorithm.

Dan: (1:33:13) Yeah, exactly. It's very intentional when you get in there. You have to choose specifically what you want or you have to go in to do something specific.

Jackson: (1:33:20) There's a quote from an interview—I think the Big Kids interview. They'd asked you about discovery or something, and you, José, say: "Curation is hard. I can barely get Dan to listen to the music I like. We build products for ourselves first. As people who love music, it's refreshing to have a platform where you have to actively seek things out in a world of passive listening. untitled is for active choices." And then you, Dan: "Nothing feels better than an artist sharing something unreleased with you. It feels amazing."

José: (1:33:49) There's a partial truth to that. We're also afraid to do discovery because we don't want to fuck it up. And that's part of this next year.

Jackson: (1:34:04) Scaling a sacred place is not easy.

José: (1:34:05) Yeah, that's part of this. The issue with Spotify—Dan and I have gone through the hero's journey of being obsessed with Spotify's discovery and curation and algorithmic playlists, then staying on there long enough to not like it. All of these different products are just staying. There are some algorithms right now that are super relevant, but not in music. In music, it's just hard. My brother Leon just started using Spotify for the first time in the last couple years. He's obsessed with it, but I wonder how he's going to feel in four or five years. He's discovering music from 10 years ago that we would all listen to.

Jackson: (1:34:56) Right?

José: (1:34:58) That's the fear: we've seen even the best of the best crush it and then no longer crush it in certain ways. That's the fear part of it that's not in that quote, but we're getting over it and we're just going to do it and see what happens. Big risk, big reward. But it is actually true. You send someone a song and it's like, "Did you listen to it?" and they're like, "Oh, sorry, not yet." If you're getting a recommendation from a friend and you're barely listening to that, how do you expect me to trust some tastemaker in Union Square telling me to listen to this up-and-coming musician?

Dan: (1:35:57) One thing, going back to building a platform that you don't take for granted and that you approach with a lot of intention, is that we've actually built certain mechanics that make it feel very special when you receive unreleased music. When José shares a project with me on untitled, we send a notification when someone listens to it. So if José sends something to me, he's basically waiting for my read receipt.

Jackson: (1:36:28) Right.

Dan: (1:36:29) He's waiting. And I know, because I obviously use untitled, that he'll see if I listen to it or not.

Jackson: (1:36:31) There's a norm established.

Dan: (1:36:33) Yeah. I want to make sure he knows that I received his music and I listened to it. Whereas with other platforms, like with Spotify, for me to know if he listened to something I sent him, I have to annoy him and be like, "Yo, did you listen? Did you listen?"

Jackson: (1:36:52) There's a template there for—

José: (1:36:53) There is a read receipt now on Spotify. Not about listening, but it is kind of cool. Every week we have this thing called Song of the Week. This guy Colin on our team, when he first joined, he's like, "Hey, is there a place where we can all share music with each other?" Then we decided to make a channel called Song of the Week on Fridays. And I noticed that if you put in a Spotify link into that Song of the Week channel—

Dan: (1:37:15) Oh, it saves it in the DMs.

José: (1:37:17) Whoever clicks on it—

Dan: (1:37:18) Yeah, I saw that too.

José: (1:37:19) —will appear in your DMs. The other day, someone sent me music from our company and I clicked on it and it took me to the DMs. Then the song that I'd sent for the Song of the Week appeared. I'm like, "You clicked on the link." He didn't tell me about it, but it's kind of cool.

Jackson: (1:37:36) There's a template here. We have so much abundance in digital space and very few sacred things. There's very little weight. There's very little substance. So I do wonder if there's a template here to explore making digital interactions more meaningful. Not all links are created equal. There is something about how a song shared with me on untitled can feel totally different and almost heavier or more substantial than a random other link. I think we'll probably see lots of exploration across digital mediums in that way as we just become so numb to everything.

José: (1:38:16) People are yearning for that. I'm seeing so many apps like these disposable camera apps—these limitations. Even things like Opal—turn off your phone. Let me try to...

Dan: (1:38:34) People are just craving offline, IRL-feeling experiences, even in the digital.

Jackson: (1:38:42) Friction creates meaning.

Dan: (1:38:44) Exactly. Even if we're artificially creating those constraints, people are craving that.

José: (1:38:50) Yeah. And I will be honest—I know that this is obviously super biased on our end. But if we're talking about that, what is a product out there that is super sacred-feeling, offline, IRL, physical—whatever adjective you want to give it—and works like that? It has utility. It's not just a gimmick where you do this once or twice. You actually use it on a weekly basis. I actually do think if the future is moving in that direction where people are searching for more—get rid of the noise, give me that human connection that we've all needed for thousands of years and is escaping us—I do think untitled is kind of like... yeah, I can't think of another product.

Dan: (1:39:50) That's one of the reasons. One of the things that we used to say when people would ask us why there isn't a feed is that we're a very intimate product. For you to have things on your untitled, you need to connect with people outside of untitled. I need to meet you and hang out with you and be your friend, most likely, for you to send me something on untitled. Even now, talking about curation—honestly, José and I talk a lot about this—the way I discover most music nowadays is literally via this building and the people that are coming in and out of this building. This building is my algorithm.

José: (1:40:30) In the spirit of building things for yourself, how do you build that into untitled? It's like, all right, I guess we've got to build for VR.

Dan: (1:40:39) Yeah.

José: (1:40:40) Because literally, I don't know how you would—I don't know how you...

Dan: (1:40:43) Yeah, I don't know how that scales. It's weird.

Jackson: (1:40:47) World building of some kind.

Dan: (1:40:48) Yeah.

(1:40:52) AI as an Instrument: Building Tools Artists Actually Want

Jackson: (1:40:52) We have to talk about it briefly. I think a lot of artists, and maybe even more than artists, a lot of fans of music are very stressed and upset or afraid about AI. As I understand it, the product today has stem splitting. That's probably it from an AI standpoint. I'm broadly curious how you guys are feeling. You made a comment earlier about how there's going to be a point where you listen to AI music that gives you that special feeling. I'm curious how you think artists are feeling. How do you think about how all this informs a product standpoint?

José: (1:41:28) Very quickly, we were in the presence of greatness a few months ago.

Dan: (1:41:35) I was thinking the same thing.

José: (1:41:36) Such a goat. They played an AI song and they were like, "Just listen to this. Best song ever made." It was all made with AI and we listened to it. Dan and I did not get that feeling that we were talking about, but just seeing someone...

Jackson: (1:41:54) But the artist was earnest about it.

Dan: (1:41:56) This person is in their 80s.

José: (1:42:00) They were very excited about that song, which means something obviously coming from a goat. So it's clearly happening, is all I want to say.

Dan: (1:42:10) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

José: (1:42:10) I don't want to lie and say that I've experienced that yet, but I'm so open-minded to it. And it is happening.

Jackson: (1:42:17) Whereas most people in the audience are not there.

Dan: (1:42:20) Yeah, please continue. I do want to say, I think there's one quote that we got from a goaded electronic artist in Stockholm—I'm not going to say specific names.

José: (1:42:32) Oh, that. Oh, my God.

Dan: (1:42:34) Their band name is synonymous with Sweden. Okay. We were in his presence, right? He's an amazing human being, really smart dude.

José: (1:42:37) Oh my God.

Dan: (1:42:38) And we asked him—

José: (1:42:46) This is a bar.

Dan: (1:42:47) We asked him what he thinks about AI and AI being trained on his music. And he said, "I trained on other people's music."

Jackson: (1:43:03) So do you think, when it comes to the intuition around this and your next AI feature, will it be driven by artists asking for it? Will it be driven by the AI stuff, the capability?

José: (1:43:17) We were literally sitting down the other day...

Dan: (1:43:18) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:43:19) By the way, I think it's worth noting that one of the earliest points we hit—and I think when I first met you guys a couple years ago, we talked about this—part of the implication with what's changing in music as a medium, it being reduced to just the choices, is that way more people are going to be able to create music as a result of this. In some sense, it's very in line with the thesis of the entire vision. And yet it's delicate, I guess, is my point.

José: (1:43:48) Yeah. Yes.

Jackson: (1:43:49) Maybe I can ask it in the simplest way possible: What will cause you to launch untitled's second AI feature?

Dan: (1:43:54) I think the thing, going back to incentives, right—we built a company and we built a business model that depends on us building amazing tools for artists and tools that they find extremely useful. The business doesn't work if we don't do that. And so when it comes to any tooling, whether it's AI or not AI, our biggest question whenever we introduce something is: Is this useful to an artist? With AI, José and I, as we were telling you, love music and we want to be making music a lot, but we're not musical. AI is the next thing to allow people like us to make music, and it's the next thing to allow the next billion people to make music. So we're very much open-minded about AI and we're excited about the future that it brings. Now, is AI in the place that it is now ready for untitled? Is it something that we think could be really useful to artists on untitled right now? We're still unsure. We're figuring it out. We know it's going to be at some point. We know at some point the artists right now who are feeling very negative about AI—which we understand because AI maybe trained on music that they didn't get the access to, and we totally understand where that sentiment comes from—but we know that at some point or another, AI will be in a place that most artists are going to want to use it because it's very useful to the workflow. It's in the same way that Auto-Tune is now unanimous in music. No one criticizes using Auto-Tune because everyone knows it's very useful. But in the early 2000s, when Auto-Tune was barely new, people were criticizing it a ton.

José: (1:45:35) By the way, that same person—amazing bar, by the way, and I think that really would help anyone. But in the grand scheme of things, the fact that we all train on other people's music to make our own music, that whole thing is awesome. That same person said, "Listen, I still haven't had a—" again, he said, "I'm super open-minded to AI being the thing that I use, but I still haven't been able to make something that I couldn't make otherwise with AI." The way that Auto-Tune literally actually allowed you to sing like 808s & Heartbreak... Kanye started singing. It wouldn't exist without it. He's like, "In fact, AI right now is regurgitating things that I could already do." So we're kind of figuring it out. Dan and I as non-musical people, it actually does for us. We are the target market. We're the ICP or whatever, because we love writing songs and we love being creative, but we aren't musical at all. So it is giving us musical superpowers. The issue with it is that untitled is this very intentional place where you work on something for hours and you put it there and it feels good. With AI, it really does take like 50 tries to get a good song. We're wrestling with the idea of whether we can create a dedicated place inside of untitled that can be this massive... take work in progress and take it to the nth degree. Because it's not even really progress; it's just choices. It's like the playground—800 directions and find the one that works. So it's like, can we actually redesign untitled in certain ways to let in all of that output and not distract from the really, really good stuff that you want to kind of sit there without distraction?

Dan: (1:47:43) I think it's funny because nowadays when you say "AI and music," the thing that people only think about is generative shit, right? People are like, "Oh, musicians hate AI," and the only thing they think of is Suno and generative models. But there's so much other types of AI that could be used to actually superpower the creative process that isn't generative. And that's something that we're thinking about right now. Right now, we've built this corpus of unreleased music. We've built the de facto storage tool for a lot of artists and producers. Now, how can we use AI to help them organize that scattered brain? How can we turn into the Google Photos of music where we help you organize, we help you be your assistant, your producer who's putting everything together in an easy-to-understand way?

José: (1:48:34) Even just being able to say, "Hey, what synthesizer did Stevie Wonder use?" so that you can go into your computer and pull up a similar sound. ChatGPT is helping a lot with that. Dan was saying the other day he loves doing research on artists using ChatGPT.

Dan: (1:48:50) Yeah, it's the best. When I first started doing it, I was like, "This is magical." Instead of me having to spend hours trying to piece together all the interviews and the videos, ChatGPT or Claude can literally just make a deck for me with the entire synopsis of the artist, which is awesome. But then on the other hand, I'm like, damn. Surfing the web is so fun. The literal word "surfing" is fun. Surfing the web—you're surfing. You're going through the whole process of finding things and putting them together. That stuff is fun. That's the exciting part.

(1:49:27) Building a Company with Your Best Friend

Jackson: (1:49:27) A few questions on you guys and your collaboration first. Are you guys artists?

Dan: (1:49:40) What is an artist? I don't know.

Jackson: (1:49:43) Do you feel like artists?

Dan: (1:49:51) I feel like a spiritual human being. That's it.

José: (1:49:56) I'll take it.

Jackson: (1:50:00) What is the best thing about working with a very close friend? And what is the worst thing?

José: (1:50:09) There's work and there's life. And when you do what Dan and I are doing, you get to pursue your life's work. The clock is never off, but you get to have fun with your best friend all the time. You can't escape work, you can't compartmentalize that much. The things in your life will always be there while you're at work. But you get to go to Stockholm and go on an amazing five-mile run with your best friend and hang out with one of the coolest artists in the world and enjoy life while also pursuing your curiosity.

Dan: (1:51:10) The other thing I've been reflecting on recently is that as you get older—once you become an adult and you get married and you have kids—spending meaningful time with close friends, people whose company you just enjoy where there's no agenda, becomes much more difficult. You have to schedule and find time, and you have to go out of your way to find time with these people. Maybe I only get one or two dinners a week with this person for two hours. It becomes much harder to schedule times with friends that you have no agenda with, that you just want to enjoy.

Jackson: (1:51:53) One or two dinners a week would be a lot.

Dan: (1:51:54) Yeah, that's a lot even. I'm not married nor have kids, so maybe it's a bit different, but it just becomes more difficult. When you work with your best friend, and work is the thing that most humans spend most of their time in, it's very magical to be able to have the opportunity to just go hang out with your friend and it's still work. You don't have to schedule anything. I don't have to schedule time to go get lunch with José or go get dinner with José. I just see him at the office every day. I think that's something really magical. Oftentimes like family businesses, you get to go see your family every day because you just have to work with them. I think that's one of the most magical things about working with someone.

Jackson: (1:52:40) Has there been any challenges or any things you guys have had to give up?

José: (1:52:44) You have enough time to get to the bottom of things, which is both beautiful once you get there, but it can be really hard as well. But to Dan's point, who do you really have in life that you can spend that much time with? How many unresolved issues are there between a bunch of people that are close—different levels of closeness—where if you had all the time in the world? Please, AI, let's build this. Give everyone all the time in the world with every single person that you love. It's really hard. Really, really hard. Especially your parents. Dan and I have the privilege of having all the time in the world with each other, and that's allowed us to get through so much. That's the only reason that this company has gotten to where it is today. It's a miracle that we're here as non-technical founders, non-musicians, who built this company. But our relationship and our ability to get through anything together is what gets it there. Dan and I did trade—this is our first business—we had a sacred bond. We were basically teasing each other, flirting with each other for 24 years, dreaming about starting a company. Then you start the company and you get the full reality of what it's like to do everything together. So we definitely entered a new universe together.

Jackson: (1:54:36) Yeah. No mistakes.

José: (1:54:38) And there's really no going back. The only way is through. Thankfully we have all the time in the world, but I think that's one of the elements that you get when you go so deep with someone. Especially when it's not like CTO and CEO, where you do this and I do that. Most co-founder relationships are more transactional. It's like, "I do this, you do that. I bring this function to the company and you bring that function." That's why we're here together at work.

Jackson: (1:55:14) Yeah.

Dan: (1:55:15) I also think the last thing I will say about this is that we're a hyper-creative company. We're a creativity company. The thing that we have going for us is our ideas and our intuition. In order to tap into that creativity in you, you oftentimes need to feel like a child—the childlike curiosity. And so if you're literally working with your childhood best friend, it's almost like a hack to tap into your childlike creativity.

Jackson: (1:55:45) And there are people—I think any of us can relate to this—where there's certain people that when you get to be with them, you get to almost go back.

Dan: (1:55:52) Yeah. You feel silly. You feel like you can make weird jokes.

José: (1:55:55) Dan and I constantly bait each other into these bits.

Dan: (1:56:00) We have some weird-ass inside jokes and weird things with each other.

José: (1:56:05) Yeah. And so we constantly bring each other back into, like, "Yo, this is fun."

Dan: (1:56:11) I really like that quote by Josh Kushner—I don't know if he said it, or if maybe his grandmother said it—which is that success in life is being excited to go to work and being excited to come back home from work.

(1:56:31) Closing Questions: Dream Users, Rapid Fire Brackets, and Titles

Jackson: (1:56:31) Indeed.

Dan: (1:56:29) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:56:31) A few final things. Do you have a dream untitled user that you're willing to say?

Dan: (1:56:39) Paul McCartney.

Jackson: (1:56:43) It's a good choice. I'm two for two on Paul McCartney. Last two podcasts Paul's been mentioned.

Dan: (1:56:49) He's just someone who's such a GOAT and has had such a profound impact on my life and on culture at large. He is obviously at an age where maybe you're less inclined to try out new technology or use a new device. So having someone like Paul—who obviously has made music at the highest levels and is at the tail end of his career and his life—use untitled and actually find value out of it would just be a really nice feeling.

José: (1:57:23) The dream artist—I mean, yeah, Dan's point about someone at the end of their life, there's definitely that. But for me, my favorite artist changes so often. Right now, speaking about the algorithm being this building for us, I never used to listen to this artist named Porches. His name's Aaron, and he did a show on our roof a week or two ago. It was amazing. My entire Apple Music right now is his entire discography because he's been making music for ten years. I don't even know if he uses the app.

Dan: (1:58:09) He does.

José: (1:58:10) Okay.

Dan: (1:58:10) I spoke to him about it.

José: (1:58:11) I was going to be like, "Maybe he's my dream."

Dan: (1:58:12) No, no. I was going to say he already uses it.

José: (1:58:15) But he is a savant. Like, he is truly, "Wow." I'm so excited about his music. We have some things coming up with him that we're ideating. It feels like we're connected in some way. I love his music. If he uses the app, I want him to keep using it. I'm very excited for some of the ideas that we're cooking up because it's really special.

Dan: (1:58:38) This is one of the coolest things about this life that we've designed for ourselves: we listen to music all the time. We can be listening to a new artist—for example, there's this new artist named Rian Brazil, who's a really sick, new, popping artist. He still doesn't have that many listeners, but is rising a lot. We could literally just DM them from the untitled Instagram and be like, "Yo, I love your music." And they answer us, "I love untitled. My entire life is on untitled. Let's do something."

José: (1:59:05) It's like, "I love you."

Dan: (1:59:06) Yeah, it's just cool. It's very nice.

Jackson: (1:59:12) I have some brackets for you guys. We can speed run.

José: (1:59:15) Oh, cool.

Jackson: (1:59:17) San Diego or Mexico City?

José: (1:59:19) San Diego.

Dan: (1:59:20) San Diego.

Jackson: (1:59:21) You're biased, but it's allowed. The Beatles or Frank Ocean?

Dan: (1:59:26) The Beatles.

José: (1:59:35) Frank Ocean.

Jackson: (1:59:36) Warhol or Duchamp?

José: (1:59:40) Duchamp.

Dan: (1:59:41) Warhol.

Jackson: (1:59:42) Drake or Kendrick?

José: (1:59:47) You're catching me at a specific time with that question.

Dan: (1:59:50) I was going to say Universal because they signed both of them, but in all seriousness, let me think about that.

José: (1:59:58) Right now, I'm going to go Drake. But I love both of them. I was Kendrick during the beef, so it's possible my Drake answer was not about the beef. It was about what music I am listening to right now.

Dan: (2:00:16) Yeah, I'm going to say Drake outside of the Universal comment.

Jackson: (2:00:20) Record store or art museum?

José: (2:00:23) Art museum. Record stores will usually be all love, but an art museum will be either obsession or like, "What the fuck is this? All this sucks."

Dan: (2:00:37) I don't have a record player at home. I very rarely listen to vinyl. We have a record player in the office, but still don't really use it much. My music consumption happens on Spotify or on YouTube. So a record store, while very cool, doesn't mean that much to me. That's a weird answer coming from someone who's obsessed with music. Whereas an art museum—I don't consume art on my phone, right? I'm not scrolling different webpages seeing new art and learning about it. So an art museum really is much more of a special experience.

Jackson: (2:01:08) Maybe on that note: studio or live show?

Dan: (2:01:14) What's happening in the studio? Are we playing music? Are we watching someone make music in the studio?

Jackson: (2:01:18) You're watching.

Dan: (2:01:19) Watching someone make music in the studio versus watching someone perform a live show? I'm going to say studio.

Jackson: (2:01:26) I guess that's on brand.

José: (2:01:28) We are going to do a festival one day that blurs the line between production and performance—like, are they making music or are they performing music? We'll get there, but in the spirit of that, I'm going to go with studio for now to lean into that.

Jackson: (2:01:44) All right. Blink-182 or Brockhampton?

José: (2:01:48) Blink-182.

Dan: (2:01:49) Blink-182.

Jackson: (2:01:50) Steve Jobs or Walt Disney?

Dan: (2:01:53) Steve Jobs.

Jackson: (2:01:56) CD, cassette, or vinyl?

José: (2:01:57) CD.

Dan: (2:01:59) CD.

Jackson: (2:01:59) You guys like CDs? CDs are not totally in vogue, but there's something about the CD.

Dan: (2:02:04) I mean, CDs for me personally were the first music that I owned. I had the huge binder where you would just go through the CDs, whereas vinyl—no. And cassettes neither.

Jackson: (2:02:19) If someday, hopefully in the far future—hopefully never—but if untitled ceases to be, what impact do you hope that you had on musicians and on music?

José: (2:02:35) That thought rarely enters both of our brains right now, but sometimes it does come up. You have racing thoughts, and sometimes you'll catch it for a second. I am so at peace, and I'm sure Dan is too, with what we've done. In fact, talking about the 13-year-old kid that's now 16 and made his music—the archives, the work, all of the music that people have made over the last few years—it's making its way into PR, management companies, and record labels. The stories behind how songs were made are all stemming from untitled. Similar to Get Back taking 50 years for those stories to come to fruition, I don't even know what stories are going to come out of it. Dan and I did not start untitled to create the most game-changing technological innovation of its time. We didn't start an AI company, an energy company, or the types of companies that right now people are talking about as multi-trillion dollar markets. We started it because we're obsessed with music and we're obsessed with each other, and we really wanted to make something that we were proud of. We've done that already, and now we want to take it to the next level. Now it's all just "what would you do if you weren't afraid?" vibes. In terms of that question, we are very at peace with whenever that thought, which rarely comes up, comes up. It's a very peaceful engagement with it.

Dan: (2:04:25) Yeah, I know for a fact there are many albums and songs that wouldn't have existed without untitled, for sure. I know this is a bold statement and I can't qualitatively say anything specific right now, but I just know because of the types of messages and the ways that people describe untitled. It's pretty bizarre to see the messages that we get from our users. It's almost as if we're an artist and we're getting messages from fans saying how their song changed their life. We get messages like that all the time. Now, honestly, we take it a bit for granted, but it is very powerful. It's clear that we built something that has helped people express themselves in ways that they couldn't before. But the other thing I would say, which is similar to what José is saying, is that something we both love in our favorite artists is that they constantly reinvented themselves. The best artists, from one album to the next, constantly reinvented themselves—Bob Dylan goes electric, that type of vibe. I think we're in that right now where we made a hit freshman album. We did it; we did something amazing. We did everything that we wanted to do when we were kids. And now it's time to make the sophomore album and make the next big one. There are many analogies you could say—it's time to burn the ships and build the next thing. I think some of our investors will be happy about the way we're thinking about the future, but we really are in that mindset. Shed the past, don't think about what we've done before, and let's just think ahead.

Jackson: (2:06:06) One final very cliché or silly question, but how do you know when something is ready for untitled?

Dan: (2:06:20) I don't think you do. I think it just...

José: (2:06:23) It's like you call time.

Dan: (2:06:25) Yeah.

José: (2:06:26) Like on your podcast right now. It's like constraints, literally.

Dan: (2:06:30) Yeah. I think that's one of the beauties of the past, when we actually had to print CDs and press vinyl, is that there was a forced constraint. Necessity is another way—we're going to spend millions of dollars printing this thing, we're going to spend millions of dollars distributing this thing, so this thing needs to be ready by this day.

Jackson: (2:06:50) Yes.

Dan: (2:06:51) And it all needs to be decided on. It's deadlines. Something we talk a lot about internally, how we set an engineering culture, is deadlines. Back in the day when everything was so physical, we created that constraint and that led to decisions having to be made.

José: (2:07:04) Yeah. Nowadays it's more difficult. Not to discount some people that have created these amazing concept albums where they imagined something and it was always the same thing from the beginning, but I think a lot of music and a lot of works are... you just use constraints to your advantage and get out of the way.

Dan: (2:07:26) Oftentimes, for many artists, the title of their song is the first thing that came up in their head when they were saving the session on Ableton, or even what the Voice Memos is called. In our case, we knew that was going to happen. We knew there were going to be many artists that didn't want to think about—

José: (2:07:44) Wait.

Dan: (2:07:44) Notion. Yeah, that's a great segue. So the name untitled, when it first came into fruition, was because when we first started the company, we set up a Notion to start organizing documents and whatnot—

Jackson: (2:08:02) —and make it a little real, almost.

Dan: (2:08:03) Yeah. Because we didn't have a name for the company yet, we just put "untitled HQ." That's it. And then as we were thinking about what the name for this company should be—I think José was saying "Ready-made," I think there was "Petition," "Whip"... There have been many times in the last six years, after the company was already originally founded, that we were debating the name again. But in that first week that we started the company, we kept going back to this Notion. We kept seeing the name untitled, and we were like, "Wait, that actually might be the perfect name." And the coolest part is that as the company has evolved, the more we've discovered why it's the perfect name. It's almost like God gave us the name.

Jackson: (2:08:40) Yep.

Dan: (2:08:41) And then he's like, "Yo, you need to go figure out why—"

Jackson: (2:08:44) —it's called Live Into Your Destiny.

José: (2:08:46) Yeah.

Jackson: (2:08:47) Gentlemen, thank you so much. This was wonderful.

José: (2:08:49) Thank you.

Dan: (2:08:50) This was awesome.

Jackson: (2:08:51) That's all I got.

Dan: (2:08:51) Thank you.

← Back to all episodes