Guest: Dj SoundStorm - Road to 100K (Pt 1)

00:00:00Let's say hello and welcome to Spel Farsan med Vänner. Today we will have an international program because we have an international guest. So Peter, what are your thoughts on today's show? Horror, because as we did a little warm-up to the episode, you mentioned the fact that it's actually been five years since we had this particular guest on the show. And that made me... Question reality, life, and everything, as a certain author mentioned in one of his better-known books. Super thrilled, of course, to have this particular guest back with us. But, yeah, time is obviously, you know, life is happening out there, even if you don't want to go at the speed that we're going. Well, it's at least not 42 years.

00:00:57That's the most important. Very true, very true. We should also say that this is the second show after our summer break. And the first one we're doing in English for all of you out there that are rocking the international gaming contest. This one is the first one for you in a bit. So that's also very nice. So with that, I think maybe we've teased everyone. Just about enough. So do you want to... Yeah, of course. I will welcome the man, the myth, the legend, DJ Soundstorm to our show. How are we doing, guys? Very nice now. Very good. Wow. So first thing third, welcome back. I mean, five years. That is a thing. It does not feel like it was that long ago that I was walking through Stockholm, just bewildered with the different place that I was in for the first time.

00:01:52Getting to see the city. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago. It does not. I think actually the five years was the show, but I think, as you said, you were here on... And it's like three years still, right? Yeah, three years. So slightly not as bad when it comes to time passing by, but it's still been a while. And yeah, I'm not sure if our crowd actually knew that, but we had the... The great honor of having you perform at our big birthday bash three years ago when we had a dual celebration of the fact that we had crossed that 80 year together in life so far. So that was a very, very cool event for sure. And it was super nice that you managed to travel across the world to be a part of it.

00:02:49Yeah, it doesn't feel like it was three years ago, but I guess we'll just have to accept the reality. Have you had any thoughts on coming back to the Nordic countries? Very much, actually. I was just telling Oskar before we started the podcast as well that recently I actually invested in Tacoma clubs as well. So now I have more of a reason to visit Finland and thank those guys for my golf game, but then stop back over and visit Sweden again as well. It's awesome. You mean welcome whenever, obviously. So have you been, before we get into all the gaming content, which we have a lot to go through as well, have you been traveling at all since last? So about since the last time that I spoke with you guys off of stream, or when I was in Stockholm, the company that I worked with...

00:03:43the the things that i did in company for my day job took a turn for the needing a lot more of my time um i've been in a cost accountant role in our finance department since and i've been going back to school for my bachelor's in business management with some minors in accounting and and other stats and things for our data analyst roles that they have me working on so there has been that and then also balancing the personal fitness and really focusing on getting myself better on top of school work and then content creation. So in terms of traveling, not too much, maybe to a different plant within our network for the business, but in terms of leisure, there's been none of that. Right. So basically what we can sum it down to life happened and you got real busy with a lot of other things. So you haven't done nothing, but you haven't had time to do the Globetrotter experience.

00:04:41But it seems like you've had a lot of cool things happening to you. So it hasn't been an idle period from the very little that you mentioned just now. So that sounds very cool. So maybe seeing as it's the second time we have you as a guest on our podcast, and for everyone out there, we still have the vintage episode in the backlogs. If you want to have a walk down memory lane, feel free to do that. Actually, it would probably still be a pretty solid episode because we're talking about evergreen stuff. But would you like to do a little short introduction as to what you do and what takes up your gaming life these days for those who haven't had the pleasure of running into your content on YouTube or Twitch or any other platform out there? So since the last time we talked, I think the focus was on my classic RPG content.

00:05:38And also on Escape from Tarkov and First Person Shooters. That has evolved quite a lot into almost the exact same thing. But now we're getting back to streaming a little more often because we're finally being able to manage some of that into our schedule. But a lot of it is we've partnered a lot and spent a lot of time with YouTube as opposed to Twitch because the content creation has been more. time management helpful for me to sit down and get episodic structures for what we're trying to get accomplished in the games together and then have those as a release schedule, as opposed to sitting down and doing eight hour streams that take up that entire Saturday or that entire Sunday. So the delivery system by which we are diving into what it takes to get Kappa for a very casual player in Tarkov or what it takes to 100% complete a game like Final Fantasy Remake or Rebirth or any of the other titles that we play.

00:06:31It's been a lot less spending time live and having those conversations and a lot more taking our time to go through each of the steps and showing other viewers exactly what it takes to get there. That's very interesting because I think, as you mentioned when we talked to you last, the focus was mainly on the streaming presence that you had at the point. And also you talked a lot about what you wanted to do with music sessions and things like that. And I know that, I mean, music will probably, and I would assume still is a big part of your interest there. Just that you have shifted the weight of your content creation to YouTube instead, because as you said, it seems like time management wise, that makes a lot more sense and you can have much more structure and go for certain goals. Even though I would assume that you're still enjoying streaming because you also mentioned that you're trying to scale that up a bit again.

00:07:29I've also seen the notice that you have had some more streams in recent weeks than for some time before that. So what we learned, because again, five years ago, we had the understanding or the attitude that if we continued to pour our time and pour our person into the online persona on a constant where people could communicate with us, that that was the way. Because I've never been one of the streamers that has a... different persona when the cameras turn on. I'm the same person on and off the stream. And what we realized was we weren't utilizing our time and the funnels for content to get people to find our content as efficiently as we could. So as I've matured and as I've understood the systems, I know that if people are tuning into the streams and we have to stop at a certain point in our playthrough, their understanding now is that the next episode may be a video on YouTube.

00:08:21So they will go to YouTube to see the next part of that. Or if they aren't sure when that releases, if they're watching on TikTok or on Facebook Reels right now for Meta, they will see little clips of the next episode that's about to release to draw them into that YouTube video as well or into the next stream. So a lot of it was we thought we could just be the centralized piece, which takes. a lot more of our time and a lot more resources to keep doing on a constant for eight to 16 hours over a weekend but now we know that all of those funnels can be set up to find our music or find tick tock or find the youtube video and then we see the real the results of that when we get to the one stream a week if we can make sure that it happens that week

00:09:04Do you have a moment in time or an event that you can say that this was the breaking point here is where the aha moment or where you took off, so to speak, during this? Yeah, so probably about a year ago, I think it was in late fall. I noticed that the streaming numbers when we were on, it was the same group of people, but we were playing Escape from Tarkov, and it was almost like our RPG content guys were showing up in support, but it wasn't something that was necessarily, they didn't want to be there to see every shot on the snipers that were on woods, or they didn't want to see us hunting Tagilla or hunting Killa. they were waiting for us to talk about final fantasy or there was an update for something or right so we noticed that we were blending things together and maybe forcing people's we were really testing people's conviction in our content and that didn't feel great sure so what we realized was is if i was making five videos for tarkov for five streams to get something like peacekeeping mission done but i took the time to do three hour-long episodes of

00:10:08doing Final Fantasy, and those came out on different days, then those guys could have more of what they wanted, leave the comments, we would respond back, they'd find out what the next Final Fantasy stream was, and they would focus their attention around being there when that happened. So we felt like we were forcing a lot of our close friends and our longest-holding community members into situations that they were there because they wanted to support, but they weren't really enjoying themselves, and that didn't feel good for me or the team that was working on getting this stuff done. That is very interesting because I think you kind of mentioned the type of journey that a lot of content creators have been on for the last couple of years. Because I think back in the days when we didn't have as many tools to provide raw data, the feeling was that if you just apply yourself enough and through like online presence, be there for a lot of hours, talk to people, communicate, network.

00:11:05Eventually, everything will click together or not. But if it will, it will be great and you will have a great growth and build a long community and people stick around. I think what's happened, and this is going into sort of a hot topic, considering what people feel about AI, because for me, at least, it has a lot to do with these days that it's much, much easier to gather that data. and also to break down how the different platforms work and what the algorithms are actually using or what they're pushing to certain people and how they push it. So the thing that you mentioned that you felt like you were bringing in the, what should you say, the faithfuls, if you will, and they were there because they enjoy you as a content creator, but you were giving them content that they were not interested in on a day-to-day basis.

00:12:04if you take away like the human side, if you will. It makes a lot of sense because the AI will get as confused as a person, but they don't have the emotional attachment to you as a creator. So they will have four or five different topics to push to a crowd. And all of a sudden the algorithm will get confused because they don't really know what type of content you are creating, which means that they will have... four misfires for every one person that will fall in love with what you're creating and I think a lot of that we couldn't see a couple of years ago or at least we couldn't clearly see the effect of doing that so it's super interesting to see that you have sort of realized this as well because I myself started to look into like the raw data a couple of months ago and I came to the same conclusion like being the I don't know what you would the show for everyone is

00:12:59nice and it feels good to be friendly to everyone that stumbles upon your content. But it's also a bit of a danger in the content creating business because you diversify too much. So very interesting to see that you sort of came into the same realization. And that's kind of... So what we have been working on as a team, because there are guys that create Tarkov content with me, obviously I still do a lot of things on my own and make a lot of the decisions. I make all of the decisions for what happens with our resources. But what we noticed was our dog videos and our pet shorts, those were something that were bringing an entirely different crowd. Tarkov was bringing in an entirely different crowd. World of Warcraft, entirely different. And there were some similarities between the Warcraft and the RPG aspect of things, but there's a much different feeling in watching someone kill a mythic boss on pull 500 than there is watching them barely survive the last encounter with Cypher Sephiroth.

00:13:56Those are two different feelings that if you conflate too much of that, you're not as invested. So what we have figured out is that if AI is going to be making those decisions and if these algorithms are the driving point, not the humans, we're going to flood the grid. So I have shorts attacking each individual subject that we have. I have long form content for each of those things. We've just made it where the time management makes it where I can push those out to have all of those things. reaching out and intercepting. So we're finding for those specific people. And everything is pulling towards a unified strategy, I would assume as well. So it's not just you being everywhere, but you're actually everywhere consciously, if you want to put it like that. I think maybe at this point, we should mention that because we have the benefit of having this as a video call, so we can actually see the YouTube plaque on your desk right now. But we should mention that you have had tremendous success and growth in the last...

00:14:53few years and you have that, I think it, is it platinum colored or silver colored? It's always hard to see. This is the, this one is, I believe they call it the silver plaque for a hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah. I believe the platinum one, it goes platinum after that and then gold, which I think is the 500,000. Yeah. I think you, yeah. So we should have mentioned that the, that we're talking about something that has been really cool and somewhat fast. If you look at the span. Some people are on the platform for decades and they never break like 100 subs. So for you to break 100,000, which I actually checked on the stats before we had the show. So you are now in the 1% club when you have the total amount of channels on YouTube as a whole. And the most amazing part is that all of this without one single minute in a hot tube. Oh, no hot tub streams, yeah.

00:15:50So, I mean, the sketch the limit if you want to add in that hot tub content as well and spice things up. But yeah, it is very, very cool because a lot of people, myself included, often when you have suggestions or things like that pushed into your streams or channels of communication, it's usually for like huge channels where they have multiple millions or hundreds of thousands. And you might have, or... get the illusion that that's the majority of channels. But as I just mentioned, breaking 100,000 is about 1% of all channels. So it's a huge milestone. So it's really, really cool to see that you have gotten there. And I wouldn't even assume anything else than that it's a lot of hard work and a lot of strategizing behind it. So it's very cool to see work paying off as well.

00:16:46I had one question tied to that because seeing as you've gotten there, does it still feel as fun or has it become more of an intellectual challenge now? Like these things did that and I found that very cool and very stimulating. How can we tweak it even more? How can we make it grow even further? Has that become a part of the fun, so to speak, or is it still the fun of gaming content creation that drives the project? Right now, I think I'm literally doing a lot of what I'm doing out of general interest for... It's a general interest in the math because I've never run into an equation that I don't want to jump into and try to figure out and solve. So with my content, I'm still making... When I'm recording, I'm the same streamer that I have been for the last decade. I'm still talking about each thing. If I were to do a Dark Souls playthrough, I'd be that...

00:17:44dork that reads every item description so we can fully understand the area. That's the stuff that makes me enjoy gaming. And I feel like that heart and soul that FromSoft puts in their games is the same heart and soul that makes me want to spend time 100%ing all of my classic RPGs. So that part hasn't shifted, but I can say that looking at the aftermath and seeing that we've hit the spot now where... we had big bursts of people that were subscribed over a short period of time and now we're watching those subscriptions that haven't really tuned back in start to get trimmed off by youtube while our watch time starts to skyrocket so we're just paying attention to what those signals mean and trying to develop the best way moving forward for we're looking at things and entirely like like we're reading the matrix kind of is kind of how it feels now yeah i'll put stuff up

00:18:35We'll schedule things where they need to go. We'll pay attention to what hour afterwards is the most heavy time. Like where are the hotspots? If I put a Final Fantasy video release time here, can you guys in Sweden enjoy that during a lunch break or after dinner before you guys are going to bed to get to work the next day? And it's more, so it's more of a strategic thing, but I think that actually adds to the fun. Because I'm getting the content where it needs to go as opposed to blasting something off at 6 o'clock in the morning Central Standard Time for us. And then that landing in Bangladesh and no one watching that video because that's their activity time. So getting good has felt more fun. And the only thing it doesn't have is that personal touch that the streaming has. But based on my personal schedule.

00:19:25This is the best that I can do to make everything stay afloat right now. I think it's amazing that you keep things afloat with your schedule, that you can stream at all. It's kind of amazing. I'm guessing it helps to have a good structure, as you mentioned a couple of times. So a lot of that... So probably, and actually you guys probably remember this, but three years ago and then leading up to when I started really diving into this company, I made a personal decision that I was really unhappy with where I had gotten after my shoulder surgery and where I was physically. So focusing on making sure that I was in the gym five days a week, altering my diet and getting the, I think I've lost 56 pounds now since when you guys had seen me last. So getting that structure and feeling that win.

00:20:14was the motivation to get everything else in line because if if a worked b should also work because it's helping with c and it was just if i can stay focused i can spend time that night getting to the gym and working on school work the next night i'll do nikita just released another weekend event that i have to now go get shot in the face a thousand times for like the cleaning crew we're going to focus on that because it's new and make sure that that content is banked as well. It has just opened up a lot of the better body, better mind mentality. And it's kept that motivation moving because it's working. So those wins have helped with everything. But do you think when, because school will be temporary, I guess at some point you will be done with that. And then that time becomes free.

00:20:59uh thinking of life clip work life balance do you think that you will invest it in the growing the online content even more or do you think that it will go into family time or where do you so honestly we've already kind of calculated and mapped out what the plan would be after we don't have the school time there and i think the the the extra or the bolt-on for that because the content creation has become so standardized with when we get things out we we know that there's extra pockets of time are going to give me an opportunity to either a put that back into instead of a four hour or a six hour stream, do two hour streams in the evening, a couple of nights a week after we get off of work or to invest it in, in getting a group of people together like myself sooner when he's around and start doing what final fantasy union did and having conversations about final fantasy and conversations about how far we've fallen or we've improved and actually talking about those things to level. And then again,

00:21:55work a new funnel into the content. It's just always about adding another avenue for people to find the rest of the content at that point. Yeah. So I'm a little bit fascinated because you mentioned that you had a good look at how is my actual life working out and I need to get back into the gym, get myself into shape. I've talked to and also heard other, aside from that, talk about exactly those things that if you get life in a good balance or to a place where you're comfortable with it that creates a lot of new energy and With that energy you're better equipped to deal with all the other Tasks if you will or challenges So it's very interesting to see that for you. It seems to have been exactly that thing like if I can get everything working then this part of my life will also benefit from the

00:22:53the added energy that I have or that I feel better about myself or that I know I'm living life in a better way than I used to. So I think that along with structure, as uncomfortable as it sounds for a lot of people out there that hopefully still have a dream that you can just hit that on button, talk a little bit and get a million followers, it has become... A real work, if we want to call it that. An enjoyable one for sure. But I think the streaming and the content creation niche has matured quite a bit into it now being more of a science. A thing that you can do on a hobby level for sure, but if you actually want to go places, you have to sort of get into the data and have a vision and a goal. Would you agree?

00:23:49That's very much the case. I've grown to understand that it's not necessarily the type of content. It's how much where your heart and soul is going into what you're doing. That's where people feel that connection. The shorts that we make take the least amount of time because they're the ones of our dogs. Our dogs are nine now. They're not going to be around forever. We know that. But we're making those. When I first started posting those shorts on YouTube, I was making them so we had reminders and things. playlist we could go back and watch of when we had the dogs that was for us and when we decided to share that with the rest of the internet we slowly found out that most humans like dogs more than they like other humans so that was very easy for us to just share that that thing that we had for us with everybody else my appreciation for final fantasy and the fact that

00:24:39I have in very, very, very drunk situations done very complicated things in every mainline Final Fantasy game or played in hard modes or beat Nemesis. Those are because it's a passion of mine and always has been. And then Tarkov is the, you're never good at this game. So anytime you feel like you've won, you did, you actually earned that. So those things are all when you can utilize an actual passion that you have. And then I guess essentially like, take the college learning course of how the algorithm actually works and what needs to happen and pay attention to your times and look at those other facets, you can still do that for fun. And there's always a chance that somebody like the burnt peanut comes out and they are so hysterically over the top that that attitude draws everyone to them. But at the end of the day, the guys who have made it forever in.

00:25:33This as a business are the guys like Willers and Landmark and Pistilli and guys that have done this with that passion. But there's a team behind them that focuses the rest of that, too. It's not by if anybody's curious, it's by no sheer amount of luck that the burnt peanut ends up on stream with Tim the Tapman and with Nick Merckx. The business structure that moves behind all of these successful things is. the important part to the business. And I've seen a lot of changes specifically for Twitch that gears more towards giving the illusion that you have the opportunity to be a part of these different brands. And it's almost like a mirror to YouTube saying, well, if you're in the YouTube Partner Program, we'll give you the ability to put content out and make money off of Amazon.

00:26:20All of these things are mirroring each other because the business from the algorithm is what they're gunning for. So if you can match your enthusiasm and the things that you love with what they're looking for, that could line up in a very random way. But at the end of the day, it's just to remember these guys are trying to make money. Everyone is trying to make money out of that. So as long as you have that in the back of your head. On the topic of streaming platforms, have you ever considered a kick or is that just a big no-no for you? Here's the thing with kick. I have a very specific and distinct amount of advertising that I do not allow for my YouTube videos. So I'm not one of those guys that says, don't promote any of your Jameson whiskey or your Hendrix gin on my channel. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I were to say that. But there are certain contextual organizations that pay a lot of money that I do not want people to be exposed to while they're looking at that. I have that fear that.

00:27:19With kick specifically that because they have no algorithm in place and because they have a lot less restrictions there I just don't see the place where I would grow from that platform. That's the only reason why all of the other extras that are there like I still support Suna who's pretty much almost exclusively moved over the kick and I always will but kick is one of those locations without an algorithm and without the backing so the discoverability aspect of it is not enough for me to even click the restream button to start pushing content there as well because of the other stuff it's there so i worry that places with a lot less restrictions like that's one of the reasons why we haven't been getting drunk on stream anymore is because tick tock does not permit it youtube will demonetize and

00:28:07is screening for all of that while it happens so you can but they're like the second you start acting like an idiot or we can tell you're drunk we're turning your stuff off so i have no issues with kick and i'm going to support the people that are content creators that i know that are over there but i just don't think it's for my brand specifically so basically if you want to do one of drunken stream you have to just do it on kick and just ignore rest of the shell for that specific Twitch and kick are kind of like the wild West because there's so much more. And this is not to downplay any streamers that are doing what they're doing on, on Twitch, but YouTube's ecosystem is. to the 10th larger in every single way than what those guys are doing. There's so many more opportunities, especially with automatically having captions. International audiences are much easier to come by. There is just every opportunity there, and that's the one that I've been focusing on. But why do you stream on Twitch at all? Why not just stream on YouTube? Because I don't turn off the members of my community that were there when we were starting.

00:29:13There are just some people that are more comfortable with Twitch in general. That's where they go to watch their streamers. And even if I believe that YouTube is a better deal, like a YouTube membership as opposed to a Twitch subscription, there is no world where I would not turn on Twitch. So the guys that have been there since my first Final Fantasy VII stream, that's how they watch content. Wes Brehm up in Upper Michigan is a perfect example of why I will always turn on my Twitch. Guys that I've met with in the real world, had whiskey with, had good conversations, was told about his first kid being born. I turned it on for that guy because he doesn't want to go to YouTube. He has a thing against how they do business and he will always stay on Twitch. And it takes me no effort to push that to Twitch as well for content. So it's a loyalty thing for Twitch. A lot of platforms have that integration now that you can just dual stream to a lot of things at once.

00:30:10I would assume that if you didn't have a personal vendetta against a particular channel for any other reason, it's just, why not? You know, like, I might as well do this and reach as many people as possible. And I really respect the thing you said about the loyalty, because a lot of people, I don't think I've heard, maybe there are people out there that are as invested in YouTube streaming as they are in Twitch. But most people I've run across have one particular favorite. where they hang out, at least for the majority of their content-consuming time. So I would assume that a lot of the faithfuls that you had from Twitch would have been lost if you only stayed on YouTube. Because there's not a lot of crossover between those. A lot of people go to YouTube for the VODs experience more than the streaming experience. And I'm not sure if that's how it's going to be over time.

00:31:09streaming was that they lacked quite a few of the tools that Twitch had for the longest time but Twitch lacks a lot of the things that you would like to have when it concerns VODs and a lot of the tools that you would like to be able to create content with the videos that you had recorded and things like that so they have a good handshake from a creation or a creator point of view but for a viewer They don't really have to care about that. They only have to pick one place and hang out there. Well, and YouTube is now noticing, and we've noticed this as well in our analytics, that a lot of our long-form videos are being watched on television sets, on smart TVs, not on computers and not on phones. So a lot of the content that I personally do, where I sit down for an hour and a half and do part of a chapter outside of Gungaga and get lost in the jungle for an hour and a half, when I do that,

00:32:06People are going to sit down over dinner and watch that on their TV as opposed to the people in Twitch that I feel like they would still be there and be watching that. But it gives them the availability to put that on the smart TV and watch a very nice looking game with very good amount of content coming from me explaining what's going on. But it depends on your media. If you're one of those people that is watching YouTube and it just so happens that. the streamer that you follow on Twitch has a video that's out. You are more likely going to watch that on the smart TV. And that's the methodology that YouTube is going for. Twitch is always going to have that if you want to be involved. I, but I feel like YouTube's come a long way with that too, because their memberships, their memberships making it where are specifically other content creators can do anything that they want with this, but anybody that's a member on our channel.

00:32:57we have three and a half months of content for final fantasy and for Tarkov already backlogged and ready for release. So if people are interested in like, let's say for instance, your favorite TV show releases at Monday night at eight o'clock. If you're fine waiting, you can, but the fact that YouTube has made it where you can binge watch all that content and find out what happens with the memberships that in my opinion, because you can hit pause and come back to it is just more for people that are my age. Again, I need to take the dogs for a walk. Pause. I need to run and grab something from the store for dinner. Pause. I'll come back and catch this later. That's the medium that has become more acceptable. And that's what YouTube is driving on. And then the shorts and the rest of the reels from the meta side is to get people to those long form content. So Twitch for me is getting to be more personable, but YouTube is getting to give more.

00:33:50in my opinion yeah the larger group yeah that's how i feel also how i consume content nowadays that if i want to dive into something then it's 100 youtube that i watch or what i do and when i so that the streamers i follow that i go there for the conversation not particularly of course it could be an interesting game that they're playing but more for having But because then you have the community and then you have people in the chat and then you say hello to other people. So it's more of the social thing than that. Yeah. Mostly, at least. I think I think I just realized it's kind of recreating the Netflix experience in some way. And this is interesting because I just realized that maybe you could use. I mean, we're talking about because I think.

00:34:44I think Netflix, at least here in Sweden, were the first where we had the binge content. That became a thing like, yeah, so they released one entire season day one. So I just went home and binged for 10 hours. And it's kind of what you're describing here. Like you have a vast amount of content on your channel for the members. And you have these tendrils out on other platforms, basically giving them small trailers or like. what you can expect if you come and join the big community and binge. So you have kind of created the gaming Netflix experience in a way. And I'm talking about the vintage experience where you could actually go in and binge the good stuff without having to wait. I mean, they have ironically almost moved towards traditional TV when they're starting to give you like one episode a week instead of giving you everything at once.

00:35:38In some instance, you have actually sort of surpassed how the streaming of series and movies are sort of moving towards today. We know that that's the case, too, because YouTube's policy just came out after Ludwig and some of the other content creators went to Netflix with their shows. And YouTube warned them that their algorithm, where they are in that algorithm, would change on YouTube's side. So they are trying to steal the share of exactly what you're talking about. Makes sense. For those, I mean, the three of us here obviously know what YouTube membership is, but would you care to do like a brief description of what that actually is for people that don't really know that there is more to YouTube than just going to a channel and watching things? Yeah, so on Twitch, you have subscriptions where for the last, I swear to God, for the last two years, it's just been...

00:36:34every six months twitch does something to their subscriptions and everybody's mad about it for like four months and we hear about the whole time so youtube to counter that has let the the The content creators set memberships at different tiers on all of their channels so people can support them that way. And it is up to the creator if they add all of the emotes that they had from their other streaming platforms. It's on the creators to add the same badges for the amount of time that people have supported. But YouTube lets us set subscriber-only videos and subscriber-only content creation in terms of posts and polls and discussions. So what YouTube has done is... They've taken the subscription policy, made it a more personable membership and made it where for all the content that we do for a creator like myself that does things episodically, when someone has that membership at any level, they can then watch all of the content that is set for every phase of what we're doing for releases as opposed to waiting for the next episode to come out. So what they did was they.

00:37:35They essentially gave the binge watchers exactly what they wanted for content creators that are taking the time like we do. My last vacation was done so I could get two months of content recorded and get that on for our members. So it allows me to specifically utilize my time to feed that binge watching because I'm a terribly impatient person when it comes to things that I really enjoy watching. And that's something that I would appreciate if... For instance, with Tarkov, people waiting to see if I actually ended up getting Kappa. Those episodes have been stretched out forever because it took forever. But if they want to know the answer to that, they have the ability to be a member on YouTube and they can go right to the video to find out if we did or did not get that if they're paying attention to the release schedule. So what YouTube did was, in my opinion, they gave more perks and they fed more of that binge mentality for people that want to consume content as opposed to.

00:38:31i have now supported the streamer i have a badge and i have different emotes they took it a step further in my opinion and that's why i think that youtube's memberships program is just better in in almost every single way for that type of content creation what is the deal on youtube do you keep all the revenue or is it a split or how does it work with the membership there there is a split and i i i don't know the exact number but i know that it is very comparable to twitch's split yeah that's the same information I have. And I don't even think that's fluke. I think they are very well aware about where the competition is. Capitalism at work. Yeah, so that you don't just lose everything on your platform one day because one happened to be vastly better. But it is very interesting because that's kind of my experience with this as well, looking into it, that they have much more flexibility. And it's much more...

00:39:27up to the content creator what you want to do with the membership aside from like twitch only basically has the are you in or out i guess they have tiered sub levels but it's more about how much you want to give uh money-wise you don't get like actual perks in the same way correct um so it's very cool to see that you analytically just looked at what you could do and then realized yeah this fits my model much better And I can also get the crowd in that want to binge my stuff and give them perks by being a member. Because as you said, they can just get to that light at the end of the tunnel if they want to. Or they could just sit through the cool journey. But it's up to them. It's not like you have to sit here every Tuesday for a year and a half before you know the truth. Right. On the topic of content, I know that as we...

00:40:22that know you from before that you have a big heart and still has for the music genre overall but do you think that music in terms of games will make a return to the scene so when when beartooth did the song with tom morello for final fantasy for their last x-pack that they put out before this recent one i thought that we were heading in the direction that all of us remember very fondly of like having breaking benjamin on halo's soundtrack for the first time hearing that entry to come through. And then it doesn't stick the way that it needs to. Another band that has been very influential in terms of music, like Ice Nine Kills, Spencer and those guys did the track Play Dead for Dead by Daylight. So it's almost like music tries to poke its way back into gaming culture, and it just hasn't stuck like it used to. We don't have...

00:41:16We don't have Mr. T and Matt Heafy from Trivium saying what their character is in World of Warcraft for this next expansion. It's almost like those two don't play well together anymore for some reason. Yeah. Which is incredible to me because guys like Tristam and a few other artists that used to be on Monstercat, they still work for teams like Riot and other places to make the music. But I think I'm very excited for if we get back to... the rocket league boom where monster cat is every gamer's best friend because of the music yeah like that was such a fun time to be i didn't i didn't even play rocket league but i showed up for almost every stream for friends of mine that did because the music was so good we don't have that absolutely awesome yeah yeah very interesting because i i don't know why it sort of started it started working for sure and it did for any number of years but i'm not sure

00:42:10What happened to make it not work anymore, if that makes any sense? Because all of a sudden it just didn't. I feel like certain layers of copyright because of digital acts and because of things that happen in the courts, I feel like it puts up a lot of red tape. That's one of the reasons why Twitch tried to do their DJ stipend for guys that were doing it. But the problem is, again, for somebody who's a multi-platform content creator, if I start playing my own music, which I have a track that I sent Oscar that hasn't released yet that he can take a listen to for some of my new music. If I were to play that in the starting stream, a starting screen of my stream, I'm going to get a copyright violation for my own music. So if my choice.

00:42:53If my choice is to create content for music and keep it separate and then make sure that that's in the description, if they want to find my SoundCloud or if they want to go on Beatport and find some of my music, they have the opportunity. That is the most I'm willing to deal with as opposed to cease and desist letters or having to show my ID for the 70th time to a YouTube system to make sure that that is fine, that I'm playing my own created music on my content. Yeah. Not to sound like Deadmau5. Yeah, I mean, we had during COVID, we had the other big name in Linkin Park. He was doing live streams where he was creating music, his own music under his own brand. And he got copyright strikes from different companies on a weekly basis. It was like, no, you're using Linkin Park stuff. It's like, yes.

00:43:46I am them. I'm Mike Shinoda. I own this band. Yeah, Mike Shinoda, exactly. It was like, but that's me. And it's like, yeah, well, you know, you might be this man, but you're not legally this man when you're on this platform. You're just him, but not in that sense. So I can definitely get that headache. I mean, it must be like almost maddening to sit there like I am this person. All that music is me creating music. But because we have 10 different companies involved, I think he also mentioned that he was doing content creation along with fans. So they sent him inputs and texts and he made tracks with it. And then he tried to give them ownership of the tracks that he made. And it just became impossible because they were like, no, you can't give away anything that you create under the label of Mike Shinoda.

00:44:43And I think it was the same with Deadmau5. He also tried to do... Yeah, yeah. It became such a nightmare to just be nice with your fans, basically. Everyone wants to, depending on what side of the camp you're on, because Joel can never just not be the center of a controversy, ever, no matter what he does. But they want to use the, oh, well, he's just that way. But the reality is that for even smaller content creators, we don't have the money to go to court. If there happens to be a, that we just lose and then the cease and desist works and we move on. So it's a real, it would be wonderful if I could play my own music that funnels into a SoundCloud or into a Spotify playlist and that moves back and forth. But because of the amount of tape, you just end up, if you have a mix, you put a mix on MixCloud, you put a mix on SoundCloud, you do something live, but you don't do it on the platforms that have all of this red tape. It's just not, it's not conducive.

00:45:40And right now, everybody thinks that everything is AI, so they don't 100% buy in if they don't know the content creator. But that's the same reason why a lot of those guys aren't doing live streams anymore on Twitch showing their creation, because the second that happens, then we have more questions to answer. It's a terrible extra asset. I think also you mentioned one of the things that is, I mean, the big problem for... I would assume almost anyone who's content creator, even if you're like one of the huge ones, you're still not a billion dollar company. So if you get a notice from any one of those saying like, yeah, you have used our content, even if you know that we went to court and we all had limitless money to spend on this, I would win in the end because I have done nothing wrong.

00:46:30But getting there is impossible for 99.9% of people out there because they can't compete with these huge conglomerates that can just grind you down in court, basically. So even if you have everything done right, everything lines up, eventually you will win. It's not worth the risk. So why even get into all of that? So it's a bit... Sad that that's the reality we have faced now, but I would assume that until that gets resolved in some way, it's just not worth the hassle. I've always thought about, and I would love your perspective on it, if you could have like a streamer license or something like that. Everyone shipped into that boilerplate, like if you buy this license, you can use the content that we all had and part of...

00:47:24your revenue would then go in some split to the companies that hold the rights to the music. And your payoff would be that I know that if I have this license, then I could never get stuck in like red tape or legal controversies. Do you think something like that could eventually work? So as members of the YouTube Partner Program, they actually have licensing set up for all of the partners that there is a specific pool of music they can pull from that they won't get a copyright clap for. So that's there. But that does not help somebody like MPH or some of the other guys that are up and comers in music that aren't on that list. If you haven't been invited to the club, you don't get to party. So to get into that list means that you need to be a member of BMI. You need to be a member of Sony. And a lot of these guys, you don't just wake up one day and make a track and get a contract deal from Sony to do what you're doing. So it still is like until you're at a certain level, if you're an independent.

00:48:23artist, you're still on the office. And that, that argument and that conversation probably for another time, but our copyright laws are from the early eighties when people were still using stuff on RCA and everything was still like tape. And we're still abiding by the digital representation of all of those laws that Daft Punk got around for how long, but they got around it because there were Daft Punk. That's, that's why they got around. And they were working with Sony. When you have a team of 15 lawyers, you win those lawsuits. Sure. And as you mentioned, like a lot of these is archaic laws from before the digital age. So they're still catching up. But as they are catching up, the country creatures are still out there living today. And they are the ones getting caught in all these legal crossfires. So I just hope that at some point, hopefully during our active time with the platforms.

00:49:18things get sorted out so that it would be super easy to use music in content creation without having to double-triple-shake to make sure that you're not doing anything wrong or that you're gonna have to regret it along the way. Maybe it could be a way that you use Spotify as an umbrella for streaming, so basically you could tap into their library. and be licensed. Yeah, exactly. But you go on the Spotify flag or something like that. Yeah, but that was sort of what I was inkling towards. They would have to get their shit together as a group. How do we as a group get a little bit of that income so that we can all take a step away and let the content creators be content creators without ruining their everyday lives? Which again, if they were to do something like that, say for instance we woke up tomorrow and YouTube had signed a contract with Spotify.

00:50:13Then all of a sudden they're sitting in court because of monopoly laws, because of how that law works. And it just continues to snowball from there because that's just how things work in entertainment is there's always red tape. And unless you're lawyered up and you have the financial backing, you are not going to do things the exact way. You're going to do it based on how it's written up already. That's just how it works. It's a huge hassle. But I think we almost solved the big mystery of why music became such a hot topic. Unfortunately, because reality made it really complicated. And I think it was complicated always. But before people realized that Twitch and YouTube and other streaming platforms were a thing, where music was consumed by a large group of people, before that, information trickled their way up to like executive levels in these companies. They just didn't know about it. So they didn't care about it either. But then they realized it was like a billion dollar...

00:51:12industry. And all of a sudden, of course, they got very interested in how this was being run. So it matured. It is probably the harsh truth of it all, but that's where we are now. But yeah, I for one would like, I hope that we also get to see how they resolve this, but we're not there. just yet. So I do have an interesting question for you guys. And I know this is your podcast, but I have a question for both of you because I know you guys have played RPGs as much as I have. But I had an interesting concept brought up in a comment on YouTube on one of my Final Fantasy videos that stated that Monster Hunter Wilds has systematically and fundamentally changed how open world RPGs operate because of the market for games like Monster Hunter.

00:52:02Do you guys feel like that same formula they have is even creeping into the concepts behind how they put together Final Fantasy Rebirth and then seeing the clips and the gameplay from Final Fantasy Revelation and how they're putting the weapons out there in the wild? Are you seeing that correlation to yourselves when you compare the two? Well, that was, as they say, a very interesting question and one that we will get into in depth. But we will get into it in part two of our big interview with DJ Soundstorm. So for now we're actually going to be rude enough and leave you on a bit of a question cliffhanger. But we will be back with part two as the very next one on the schedule. So you'll only have to wait for about a week before we get stuck in again. And we will pick it up right where we left it off at this session. I truly hope...

00:53:00that you've had a good time with us, and we all hope to hear you back again with us in the next episode. But for now, we're done. Bye-bye.