Creative Cookbook

Nimrod Azoulai is Co-Founder and CEO of Mysphera, a music promotion business that connects new music to content creators. Mysphera's tailor-made solutions have helped thousands of artists reach new audiences and fans. In this episode, Nimrod talked about launching Mysphera, growing the company, and building an algorithm for connecting new music with playlisters, DJs, bloggers, and more. Nimrod also shares cutting edge techniques about how you can promote your music and build new audiences.  Find out more about Mysphera here.

Josh Simons is Co-Founder and CEO of Vampr, the No.1 network for musicians. In today's show, Josh talked us through Vampr's inception, growing to the first 1000 users, raising money, and what it took to hit the milestone of 1,000,000 musicians using their network. Josh is very generous with his time and information shared - if you're looking to start and grow a business, this episode is for you!   Find out more about Vampr here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Jesper Skibsby is an entrepreneur living in Copenhagen - he founded Word Airplay Radio Monitor in 2016, which now monitors 30,000 radio stations worldwide. Jesper talks in-depth about starting companies, the struggles involved, raising capital to grow, and the future of WARM. Don't miss this incredible show; you'll learn a ton!  Find out more about WARM here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Tasha Baxter is a singer-songwriter from South Africa whose voice is synonymous with Drum & Bass. Tasha's career is diverse; she has had an album produced by Noisia, worked with the likes of Feed Me, and sang for Camo & Krooked as part of Red Bull Symphonic, composed by Christian Kolonovits. This interview with Tasha is incredible - she goes into the depths of how her career began, the struggles involved and how she created her record label, Polyoto, off the back of the pandemic. Find out more about Tasha Baxter here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Scott Orr is a Canadian musician and owner of Other Songs, a label he created as a launchpad for his music. Scott also runs Other Record Labels, a YouTube channel and podcast series, where he teaches other aspiring businesses owners to start and improve record labels. This episode goes into depth about perseverance, marketing skills and how storytelling can help you build a better brand.  Here's a transcript teaser - "I think the blessing out of that is that you just keep your head down. You do what makes you passionate, and you focus on what excites you. If you try to create music for playlists. And I've done that. I've thought, oh, this song did well on a playlist. So I'll recreate, I'll do another one to try to get the same success. And that feels really gross on the inside. That's not something I would recommend, and I've tried it, and it doesn't work. You know, it's, it's silly. That's not how that song took off in the first place." Find out more about Other Record Labels here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Lewis Sinclair is the Founder and CEO of Cygnus Music, a leading electronic music distributor from the United Kingdom. Lewis talked in-depth about starting and growing Cygnus Music in 2009, running record labels, and pitching to Spotify to get in those needed playlists. If you're looking at starting a record label or music business, this episode is for you.  Here's a transcript teaser when Lewis arranged started setting up Cygnus: "We'll contact iTunes, and we'll say, "I'd like to set up an agreement with you. We're a distributor," and they'll say, "Great. Okay. How many record labels have you got?" I respond, "Well, just a one for myself," and they'll say, "all right, so you're not really a distributor. Come back when you've got some more labels." And so you'll go back with 10 labels, and they're like, "no, you, you need to have a hundred labels to get on board," - you go "Right. Okay." And then you build things up to a hundred labels. And then by that point, as the industry has grown, their criteria for what they will allow has grown, and they're like, "no, actually you need 500." Find out more about Cygnus Music here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Jay Cunningham launched his DJ career in 1995 and is now working as a Marketing Manager for Denon DJ. This episode talks about his awesome journey as a DJ, starting a 360 music promotion business, label ownership and flying to Boston to meet Denon DJ. Don't miss this incredible show.  Here's a transcript teaser: "And we ended up just chatting one day and, you know, we were talking, he mentioned this role, and I was like, "you know what? That's, that sounds interesting." So I went in and had a chat with him. And he was like, "This is great. Like when are you available to fly to Boston, to meet Jack who owns the company?"  Listen to Jay's mixes here. Find out more about Promoly here.

Chris Eddowes, better known as P0gman, has grown his social audience to over 200K fans and rakes in over 20K streams per month. In this episode, Chris talked about starting his career, seeking advice from SkisM and growing as an artist, running labels, and how you can do the same. Here's a transcript teaser: "One person who's always really good at giving feedback was SkisM at Never Say Die as he would always give very, very good feedback. It never felt like Tommy (SkisM) was telling you to change your song because he wanted it to sound a certain way. It always felt like it was actually just trying to help you out. You know, a few times over the years Tommy said, look, oh yeah, what about doing this?" Listen to P0gman here on Spotify. Find out more about Promoly here.

Nick Sadler is an established music industry entrepreneur with experience in both the record label and artist management worlds. His most recent success has been publishing his book, The Label Machine. In this book, he teaches readers how to be successful in the music industry as an independent label owner. He generously offered his advice for readers on how to succeed. Don't miss this episode. Here's a transcript teaser: "That was how we built a list to over a hundred thousand email addresses because every single release we did, we picked out what we thought would be the number one track. And we gave it away for free in return for an email leading up to the release of that track. And this is when you know, this is when all the music was hot AF. So, you know, and it was a growing scene. So, we just had thousands of people like lining up to give their email address and get the music and the odd thing as well, was that that the track that we gave away for free usually did the best, which you'd think doesn't make sense, because you could just Google that track name and at the very top, there'd a link to download for free yet, somehow it's still did really well." Nick's book 'The Label Machine' can be purchased here. Find out more about Promoly here.