You literally can't get your music onto Spotify without going through a distributor who by definition has to pay you their your master royalties. That's their two jobs. It's to distribute your recordings to streaming platforms and to pay you your master royalties. However, their job isn't to pay you your publishing royalties. And unlike on the master side, you don't get paid those publishing royalties by default. Like you can build a thriving streaming audience, think that you're doing everything right. I've got 100,000 monthly listeners. I've got a million monthly listeners. I'm crushing it and I'm getting a great Dro kid or two loss payment, you know, but not even know that you're not touching your publishing income. [Music] What's going on? Welcome to the new music business. I'm your host, Ariand, author of How to Make It in the New Music Business, the book, third edition. out now everywhere. All formats, audiobook, ebook, hardcover, however you like books, you can find the book. Today, my guest is Jacob Paul. He is the VP of platform growth and brand strategy at Cobalt and Cosign. Now, Cosign, you might not have heard of. This is a very new service that Cobalt has launched. It launched uh in February of this year of 2025 and it is an admin publishing service. We spend a lot of time today discussing what publishing is, how it works, how songwriters are paid, the difference between artists and songwriters, why it's helpful to have a publisher or an admin publisher and not just work with a pro or work with an MRO or something like that. I pressed them quite a bit on, well, can't we just sign up with this organ, this organ? What money am I leaving on the table or how do I get all my money? And so we we really break it down. Now, I have been impressed with Cobalt for years. I talk about it in the book. I appreciate that they're an independent organization. They're not tied to a major publisher. They're not tied to any of the majors out there. They're a completely independent publisher. And they've made they've become the fourth largest publishing company in the world behind Warner, Universal, and Sony because they have attracted such very high-profile talent like Max Martin or Phoebe Brides or Dr. Luke. and they've attracted this talent because they have really innovated and changed the completely changed and upended the model of publishing and we go into that he discusses the difference between co-pub deals and what are full publishing deals and what are admin deals and so anything you want to know about publishing for the most part a lot of it is going to get answered in this episode and so I I really appreciated hearing from Jacob and he was super helpful in breaking everything down full disclosure cosign is an official partner ner of Arie. But I do want to make clear that we scheduled this interview before we were partnered because this is a big hole in the industry and as longtime listeners and readers know of Arie, I only partner with organizations that I can stand behind and that I trust and appreciate. And so the reason that I decided to partner with Cosine is because I looked into them. We had a conversation in advance. I poked holes through. I saw what they were doing. I researched. I even applied. I made I went through the full application process. I'm like, "Okay, these guys are legit." And so, we are now official partners with them. So, you will hear some cosign ads throughout various podcast episodes. You will see some of their banners. You will maybe get some emails about cosign. I stand behind them honestly and I tell every company that I work with, I'm relying on the users, on my readers, on my listeners to give me feedback. So, if you've worked with Cosine or Cobalt and you have feedback, of course, please let me know. There are partners throughout the years that we've had for a decade and that we still partnered with. And then there's some partners that I had to drop because I heard from enough listeners, enough users, readers, that their service was not as strong as it once was or uh I heard some things that I didn't know just by looking into them. So, I scrutinize everyone, everyone in the industry, whether we're partner with them or not. Honestly, I scrutinize our partners sometimes even a bit more because I want to make sure that they get our stamp of approval and that I can fully stand behind them and because I know I act essentially as deacto customer support representative for every company that we we partner with or that I review. So, I encourage everyone to go check out Cosine. That's kosi gnusic.com and look into them. And if if you are in need of an admin publishing company and Jacob talks about kind of the threshold of songwriters that they accept, you can go check them out and look into them. You can find Cosign on the socials. You can find of course cosignmusic.com with a K. Find all of us that make the show happen on the socials. Find me rehurstand on Instagram. But if you wouldn't mind, just pause this episode right now. Give us a five star review on Spotify, Apple Podcast, thumbs up on YouTube. Hit the subscribe button, hit the follow button if you want us to keep populating your feed, and then also visit arake.com and get on the email list. That's the best way to stay in touch with us is getting on that email list. All right, let's kick into the show. Jacob Paul, welcome to the show. Ari, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. Um, so we're here to to discuss one of the uh most confounding, confusing aspects of the music industry. Something that is at the core of our industry and that that makes everything work and run uh but is understood by so very few. That is true unfortunately and uh but it is so important. Uh so that is of course publishing. Uh before we really get into cosign and cobalt and admin publishing and all of the stuff that we we will get into. Um please help everyone understand what is publishing, why should we care about it, uh where does it come from? Just just give us like a little brief publishing overview so we have a solid foundation to build off of for everyone listening right now. Okay, sounds good. We'll start really high level and then we can go peel the layers of the onion over time. At its most basic, I would say publishing is the business of ensuring that people who write songs get paid whenever their songs are played, right? Whether that is on Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube or a meta platform or Tik Tok or played on the radio or played in film and TV or if you buy vinyl and because you want to play the record or it's played in the bar, there are all of these venues that we listen to music in a way where some amount of money is being transacted. Someone's paying to listen to it in some way, shape, or form. And the issue is that we have lots of songwriters who might write on a single song. They might not be the artist. They might not be the label, but they still need to get paid for their contribution to the composition, the work, the song, right? And that's the business of publishing. And it gets into lots of complications. It has a really interesting history that we can get into, but at a high level, that's what publishing is. And that's why publishing is important. That's a great overview, high level. Uh, let me ask a few questions about it because that seemed pretty straightforward, but I uh before we move forward, you use the word artist and you also use the word songwriter, right? I think a lot of us interchange those two terms. Tell me why you mean different things when you say artist versus songwriter and what that means to you and how we should use those terms or how we should think about it at least for today's conversation. Right. So, the reason I I used it is because there are two copyrights to any track that you listen to, that you buy, that you stream. There are two copyrights that have two different revenue streams to them. And I think this is going to be familiar with a lot of people listening. There is the master recording, the sound recording. That's like the actual recording. And then there's the song, which is the music, the lyrics, the composition. If you're an artist, you're definitely attached to the recording in that you're generally the one who played on the recording or you're singing on the recording. You may or may not have also written the song. I think most artists today are songwriters. They write their own project. Some of them are 100% songwriters. They literally do everything themselves. But a lot of artists might work with a collaborator who is just a a writing partner who isn't the artist. They might not have any ownership over the sound recording copyright or the master copyright, but they're still contributing lyrical ideas, musical ideas, musical um uh actual pieces of music to the work that's being listened to. Right? So, uh when I say artist and songwriter, they can be used interchangeably, but they're not always used interchangeably. And and really what I mean is publishing is the business of giving credit and royalties to anyone who owns shares of a song. That could be a pure songwriter, that could be a producer who is helping actually create a beat or create, you know, sonic material, but there's compositional elements to that. Yeah. And or it could be the artist who is the person on the face of the album cover. Um, great. That's a really important and great distinction. Um, you know, it is something that I've gotten into. Um, yeah, it is the most I think this is the most misunderstood aspect of the entire industry is because so many artists are also songwriters and we're like, "Oh, I do everything. What's the difference between like I I distributed my my record, you know, through Drokid or, you know, Too Lost or Symphonic or whatever. Aren't they paying me all the money?" I I think what Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think what you're a huge part of why publishing is so misunderstood, which is that, and let's talk about it. Let's start from the artist perspective, right? Speaking to people who are independent artists and also write their songs, you get paid. We talked about how there's two types of royalties. Master royalties for your recording, publishing royalties for your song. Yep. If you want to collect everything, if you want to be making the most money you can off of your royalties, you need to be collecting both. But here's the issue is that you can you collect your master royalties by default. And what I mean by that is that you literally can't get your music onto Spotify without going through a distributor who by definition has to pay you their your master royalties. That's their two jobs. It's to distribute your recordings to streaming platforms and to pay you your master royalties. However, their job isn't to pay you your publishing royalties. And unlike on the master side, you don't get paid those publishing royalties by default. Like you can build a thriving streaming audience, think that you're doing everything right. I've got 100,000 monthly listeners. I've got a million monthly listeners. I'm crushing it. And I'm getting a great Dro kid or two loss payment, you know, but not even know that you're not touching your publishing income. So in that way it can be invisible to a lot of to a lot of artists and it's certainly invisible to a lot of songwriters who aren't artists who don't even really have control over the recording itself and they you know so you you really need to raise your hand and say I want to collect my publishing income and then when you make that decision the second problem is it's really complicated. It's a very fragmented landscape. We'll get into this. There's dozens if a hundred collection societies around the world. There are different types of publishing royalties. So, it's it's very daunting for people because they're not getting it by default. It feels sort of invisible. And when you start to peel back the onion a bit and say, "Okay, I want to collect my publishing income," you uncover a very very fragmented landscape for how to do it. Um, and you know, we'll we'll talk about, you know, what Cobalt does, what publishers do, what Cosine does. This is a new platform that we've launched at Cobalt. But at the end of the day, the job is to get money to people who own parts of songs and make their lives easier in collecting that money. Great. I love that. And that's a great segue because uh you broke it down and I love how you framed it. Uh you get your master royalties by default. Like you said, you can't put your your music on streaming services uh without that that that pathway. It's like you you send your music there and they're going to send some money back to that distributor who sent the music there but that's only for the master royalty. So for the publishing for those who wrote the songs like you said there's a whole web of ways that uh they need to get paid. So let's talk about that. So now we understand kind of who you know what publishing is for. It's not for the artist as we're going to use the term artist and differentiate that for songwriter. Publishing is not for artists. It's also not for uh people that did not help write the song. So, even to break that down more specifically, um, if a producer is hired to create a production with an artist and they did not help write the song and they're not cut into the publishing, they're saying, you know, you're we're hiring you to help us record this in your studio. We're going to pay you some money to do that. You might even make some master royalties on the back end. Uh, but they didn't help write the song. They don't get publishing. So, we're not even talking about the producers. If uh that was the agreement from the get-go, they're not a songwriter. They're not getting publishing. Some producers do, but some don't. Um so, and similarly, you know, like if uh if I were to record um a cover song, so a song that I didn't write, uh and I'm going to go put this out. So, a song, let's say Jacob, you wrote the song, right? Uh I'm going to record it and I'm going to release it. I'm not going to collect any publishing royalties on that on that song. song on that recording because I didn't write the song. Even though I might have made an incredible recording, I might have like recorded some like really dope guitars on it that have like all these cool new hooks and whatever, I'm not going to get any publishing royalties because I didn't write that song even though I'm the artist. Right. Right. And by the way, your cover recording of my song that I wrote might become a smash hit and it might eclipse my original rendition of that song. And that's a really powerful lesson about the power of publishing because when you make a song in the world, it's not fixed to a specific medium, right? It's attached to a specific recording to start, but other artists can go and take that song and cover it and they might bring it to an a sort of a level of success that you never could have dreamed of. And that's actually really common. And that's why publishing is so important because if I'm properly claiming on my song, my ownership of the song, and I'm getting paid on just not just my recording of it, but every other recording of it, that could become a evergreen source of income for me for the rest of my life. Like I'm just thinking of so many like like the torren by Natalie Imrugia. I hope I'm saying her name right, but like that she didn't write that song and she wasn't the original version of that song. It was a band called Edna Swap, right? Oh, I didn't know that. Damn. By the way, the Edna Swap rendition is awesome. It's like this grungy sort of just just guitar and vocal version. That's news to me. Um uh but but it sort of shows the power of of publishing. And in fact, the original writers of Torrren who were in the band Edna Swap, this is a total aside. We're now going off topic, which I'll try not to do, founded uh Pulse Music, Scott Culler, who understand the power of publishing and and their life story is is is an example of that, which is like you write a song, you put it out, you never know what's going to happen. Someone could take it and bring it to a new level and all of a sudden you've made a fortune on publishing. So that's why it's so important. Absolutely. And I I always think of the example of like uh Whitney Houston's song I Will Always Love You that was actually written by Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton. Even though Dolly is is an artist that we all know and love, she wrote I will always love you. Her version uh while great didn't reach the level of success or or just like kind of um that that Whitney Houston's version did, which was everywhere and was a smash hit. But Whitney Houston's not getting paid publishing for that recording. She's getting the master royalties or her label is and then Dolly is getting paid for the publishing on the Whitney Houston version of I will always love you because she wrote it. So yeah, beautiful. All right, let's jump in. So we now understand in publishing uh so talk to me about like uh you know I I've known about Cobalt for years. Uh and Cobalt is a is a standalone kind of independent publishing company uh representing songwriters, all that stuff. Um but but tell me about yeah maybe just like the history of Cobalt uh what Cobalt is and maybe what you know I think we understand publishing companies but yeah break down Cobalt and then how how it got to cosign really what we're here to talk about today. So yeah so Cobalt is the largest independent publishing company in the world. Uh which means that aside from the three major publishers which are very familiar names, Warner Chapel, Sony, Universal Music Publishing, these are companies that are almost like a hundred years old. Um Cobalt is the biggest publisher that's not those three and it's by far much much younger than those three. It has a very different story and trajectory um than those three companies. So Cobalt really, it's a 25-year-old company. It was born at the very beginning of the 2000s and it was really launched as a tech disruptor within publishing. And the reason why it was important at the time and still is frankly is that to actually collect publishing money from a very very complicated landscape where you have PRO in every country and you have sometimes different types of collection societies across performing royalties which is one type of publishing royalty versus mechanical royalties which is another and it creates a giant administrative and data problem. like not to get too technical and too boring, but the process of making sure you're registering songs everywhere around the world and doing so in an efficient way. And then equally as importantly, getting all of the data back from those sources of payment and making sure that it's in a structured platform and that if you're the songwriter, you can actually like see what's going on. Like, hey, where's my royalties coming in? Like where how are what's my registration picture looking like? It you know, at the beginning of the 21st century, like that was looking very rough. And to be fair, it was getting harder and harder because the number of transactions were exploding because of the internet, right? Because of the growth of download and streamings and now there more and more platforms coming online every day that use songs in a commercialized way. And it was just overwhelming the traditional legacy industry of collecting songwriting royalties. So there was a real need to say like let's digitize this like let's just build a single digital platform that's built specifically to handle the process of sending our registrations around the world entering into licenses with thousands of digital platforms and aggregating all of that into one place which is for a songwriter like here's your publishing income here's total transparency you can log onto a portal you can see it so again I'm just giving some kind of a little bit nerdy history but that is how cobalt came onto the scene And it went from a startup to being the fourth biggest music publisher in large part by solving that problem really effectively. And um you know fast forward to now we're a global music company, right? We're not just an administration company. We're not just a tech company. We have 10 offices around the world. We have like an ANR team and a sync team and all that good stuff. But I think that at our DNA, we're very interested in trying to um make the publishing landscape less fragmented and just sort of like deliver an easy and streamlined and efficient and transparent like way of just like getting songwriters paid, right? It's your money. If you're a songwriter, publishing is literally your money. You you want to get it. You want to understand where it's coming from. So that yeah, that's sort of a background of how we were able to build this kind of business from the from the start, right? And that's that's great and that's uh a great background. Um one of the reasons you became the fourth biggest uh publishing company in the world. I mean you attracted some of these superstar songwriters. Uh speak to that a little bit. So it you know Yes. So you know our most many of our honestly day one if not day one but our our oldest sort of uh you know relationships that we're most proud of is that we represent people like a Max Martin you know Dr. Luke, Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Charlie, who has more number one uh singles, hit songs than anyone else in the world. Uh I think he surpassed uh Lennon McCartney at some point, right? Yeah. Right. So um and you know, and and and it's a multigenerational roster. It's a really exciting roster. People like Phoebe Brides and Bonnie V um all the way to Carol G. You know, you know, we're a global company. Um, part of that is built off the strength of of of any publisher, which is having a great sync team, having a great ANR team who's who's making the most opportunities for our roster. Part of it is also coming from, I think, our philosophy around how publishing deals should work. So, I should say like traditionally, like for example, the major publishers, they built their business off of acquisition, acquiring copyrights, like the traditional publishing deal that you do, which is still a deal people do to this day. It's called either a full publishing deal or a co-publishing deal. And essentially what you're doing is you're selling half of your ownership of your song copyrights to your publisher in exchange for maybe an advance um and them collecting your publishing money. And when Cobalt came out the gate immediately it said, "Look, we're actually not going to try to compete with that and we're not going to even really do that. We're going to create a concept called the admin deal. uh or we're going to popularize this concept which is to say like us collecting your publishing money, us registering songs around the world. It's a service arrangement. You own your copyrights, you know, you should retain that ownership and what we'll do is we'll we'll make the process of collecting your money much easier and more transparent, but we're not going to take ownership of your copyrights. And I think that that was like in addition to the technological disruption of trying to build a really unified platform, I think there was sort of the commercial disruption of Cobalt, which was really popularizing the concept of admin and of publishing as just a service. I want to talk about that, but I I do want to go back for a second. You mentioned full publishing deal or co-publishing deal, and I think there's uh I I'd love to know what that means. like what is a traditional publishing deal like from the majors a Sony a Warner Universal uh you know what does full publishing deal mean? What does co-publishing deal mean? Right? So you know I think in a lot of ways a lot of the industry has caught up where it's not like you can only get an admin deal from Cobalt anymore but co traditional deals are still very um popular. What it means is this um traditionally when you have uh a copyright or you have your catalog it's split into two halves. one called the writer share, one called the publishers share. Um, for performance royalties for pros, that's really baked into how PRO even pay people. Like they pay people the writer share just directly, right? But in a in a in a traditional publishing deal, what you're saying is, hey publisher, you're going to hopefully you're going to pay me in advance. You're going to collect my royalties and the ownership of the publisher share that I own now as a songwriter. By default, I own everything. But now that I'm entering into a publishing deal with you, it's a full publishing deal. You are now going to own that forever. Um, and the reason I'm giving this to you is because you are paying me in advance. You're helping me out in my career. You're going to be really active creatively and, you know, trying to grow my profile, and I'm going to assign you ownership of this of this publisher share of the copyright. In a co-publishing deal, it's all of that, but instead of assigning the full publisher share to the publisher, you're assigning half of the publisher share to the publisher. So what that ends up being is 25% of the overall copyright that you own. Okay. So a full pub deal essentially, if I'm understanding this correctly, about 50% of the money uh is going to be kept by the publishing company and 50% of the money is going to be uh given to the songwriter. Is that right? And then on a deal. That's that's essentially right. Sometimes the actual rates of the royalties are different from the copyright ownership that you're assigning. Those two things don't necessarily need to always be the same. But the way I think about traditional deals is that is that you're assigning life of copyright is what it's called, which means forever uh or for as long as the copyright is is is is not in the public domain. you're assigning that ownership to the publisher, which means that, you know, at the end of your deal, sometimes in a co-publishing deal, it will actually come to an end and the writer will be able to sign part of their catalog elsewhere, but the the co-publisher will still own that half of the publisher share, that 25% of everything, and they'll like it's literally an asset that now they have. They can collect money on it, they can sell it to someone else. So, you're you're transferring ownership to to to another party in a traditional deal. Okay. So the the uh right so the um in these traditional publishing deals whether it's a full pub deal or a co-pub deal it historically is always dealt in ownership. So correct it's just that in a full pub deal they own the publishing and they own uh and they're going to keep 50% or so. Now can that percentage change? Uh can they say we're doing a publishing deal but we're only going to give you 25% or 40? Is that negotiable? Like a record deal is negotiable. I I think that you can make a a contract that says anything. I think that generally when you're when you're looking at transferring ownership and publishing deals, they they follow those frameworks. And and honestly, okay, from my from my vantage point, the most common one is the co-publishing deal, which is basically selling 25% of your catalog to your publisher up front. And and I do want to just clarify for people listening because th this this you mentioned uh publishers share and songwriters share which is a little uh confusing because uh in the indie self-published community uh what I've seen a lot and this it's just because people don't quite grasp this concept. Um, songwriters are trying to split that up with their coowwriters and be like, "Well, I'm the artist, so I'm going to keep the publisher share of your songwriting, and so you'll keep the you'll get the 50% of the songwriter share, and I'm going to get all the publishers share, and I'm going to be then also the 50% of the you don't actually break that up when you're when you don't have a publisher involved. It's not like like I I try to communicate to songwriters. If you write a song with someone else, it is uh and you're you're agreeing that it's going to be a 50-50 split. You each have your own publisher. You don't split up the publishing amongst other songwriters. It's I'm one writer. I have my own publishing. That doesn't I don't take your publishing. You don't take my publishing publishing. My it's attached to my songwriter. It it's like I I I cannot make this point hard enough and if people listening right now take away one thing, it's do not split up the publishing share of this song amongst your coowwriters cuz that's not how it works. And so I know you you mentioned that just based on working with a publisher and there's like the performance artist, but like got to be super clear about that because I I've seen this with a lot of the indie songwriters I work with and they show me their split sheets and they're like, "Oh yeah, we wrote this, but because I'm the artist and I'm handling more of this and I was going to register it like I'm going to just handle I'm going to keep the publishers share and they're going to keep the songwriting that and then like it gets so confusing and I'm like that's not how it works." No, don't do that. If you're if you're in the studio, if you're writing songs with your friends, your bandmates, just align on the splits of the song, right? That's the that's your job. The minute you start telling someone, I'm taking your publisher share, you've just become a publisher and you need to sign them. And if you don't if you haven't actually done that contract, you are just going down a road you don't want to go down. So, great, great, well put. Okay, so now let's talk admin deals and what that means. Uh, so Cobalt came on the scene and they're saying, "We're not doing the traditional deals where we're going to own your stuff. We're not doing cop. We're not doing full pub. not owning any of this. We're going to essentially uh help you collect the money owed to you as songwriters and we're going to call us we're Cobalt's a publisher so they represent songwriters and they're going to go get the money and then get them paid. Now what is that deal if it's not ownership? What how does that how does it work? How do you make money? The way the way it works is like a service arrangement and as the administrator like Cobalt in this case and we'll talk about cosign 2 which is sort of the the successor in some ways um to to to cobalt. It means that you are doing the work of publishing admin which is I'm sending your registration around the world. I'm making sure there's no platform you're not collecting money from. I'm making sure there's no collection society. There's no territory you're not collecting money from. I'm collecting that money. I'm paying you that money, but I'm taking an admin percentage off the top to to to pay myself in exchange for doing all of this work for you and making sure that your catalog is being taken care of and that you're getting your money uh quickly and your registrations quickly. So, that's that's the essence of how an admin deal works. And you you do it for a period of time. So, that could be three years, that could be 5 years, that could be whatever you want. But it what you're not doing crucially as an administrator, as a publishing administrator, is that you're not taking that underlying copyright ownership. So what it means is that once you're at the end of your admin deal, you can take your publishing catalog and you can sign to a different publisher or you can sell it or you can reup with your current publishing administrator, but you own those copyrights. And from a cobalt perspective, in a way, it puts us in the hot seat all the time. And that's kind of where we want to be. like all of our most successful client relationships, a Bonnie V, a Max Martin, Dr. Luke, like these are folks who we have to reprove ourselves like every 3 years, right? Cuz they could walk. Um, we didn't sign them up front to a long-term deal or to a deal where we are going to own a chunk of their copyrights. We said, "Look, we're going to perform a service for you and if we don't do a good job, uh, then you can leave, uh, and we will be, you know, out of a job." And you know the bet was if we do this really really really well people will understand the value of keeping their ownership and the value of being in this admin relationship and obviously we'll add in creative services as well for cobalts you know ANR and sync and we'll be able to build a business this way and that was the bet that we've made um and that's still what really fuels our business. Yeah. And and to clarify, every publishing company out there has an ad admin department or at least all the major ones out there do uh or they are handling admin in some way. So like Warner, Sony, Universal, like when even though they're doing ownership and and I think a lot of people think about like the creative services like you mentioned, they set people up on co-writes, they you know work sync licensing, try to get their songs on TV and whatnot. Um but everyone needs to handle admin. So they need to go register the songs, they need to collect the money. And it's interesting that you guys have kind of flipped that where it's like you call yourself an admin company, but you are also handling creative services in terms of uh I know Cobalt songwriters that you send out on co-writes. You put people in rooms to make songs. I think at this I think on for Cobalt we really call ourselves a global music publishing company that has its DNA in ownership for artists. So, you know, I wouldn't even necessarily say, "Oh, Cobalt is only an admin company." I don't think that's true. I think that we're a 21st century music company. And I think that success in in the in the era that we're in and the success in the future in many ways for artists and for I should say for songwriters, right? Some of whom might also be artists. But, you know, I I think that ownership in the long run is extremely important. Yes. For for most songwriters. Um, and and I think that what we're trying to do is not pigeon hole ourselves as just admin, but to create a service in the publishing space that honestly is like positioned to make creators be successful in this time, in this century and not like the previous century. Totally. Cool. So, let's talk about uh Cosine because, you know, for years Cobalt and I've been an admirer of Cobalt uh as like you know, an independent artist and someone who advocates for the indu indie music community. Uh and you know, I'm I'm always skeptical of anything the majors are doing. I have appreciated seeing what Cobalt has done and built over the last 25 years and has really uh you know positioned itself as a real advocacy company for the independent community and and you know has changed the model and has forced uh innovation and forced evolution in the industry and and really given a lot of the power and control back to the artists, back to the songwriters and forced the majors to come along because as these powerful players jump on over to Cobalt, like your Max Martin, like your doctor, the ones that are making a lot of the money. Uh, the majors realized, okay, [ __ ] uh, we can't keep taking advantage. We can't of of our songers, or at least we can't keep doing business the way we've always done it because they're all going to leave us for another company that gives them more control, more power, more all the ownership, and keeps having to prove themselves every year. Whereas, like, you know, historically, the majors were just like, well, we own you now, so good luck. and if you want to audit us, good luck, you know. So, I I've always appreciated that. But my one gripe about Cobalt uh is it was selective. It was exclusive that that most indie songwriters could not get access to Cobalt, could not get signed to Cobalt. It was like, you know, because it's a big player, it was like, all right, you're just for the superstars. You're just for the big songwriters out there. It's like, well, what are the indie songwriters supposed like what are the smaller indies that are not your Max Martins or Phoebe Brides supposed to do? We might, you know, not be making millions on our publishing a year, but maybe we're making thousands and I still love to find a way to get that money. And it has been this like case of just really uh like swimming through the weeds and trying to figure out I got to register with this company or this company and they only collect from the US and not international. So then I got to go register over here. And it's like I have made my life in business understanding this stuff and trying to help others educate themselves about it. But even for me it's like changes so frequently and there's so many organizations it's so confusing. So where do we go from here which brings us to cosign which I'm the problem is real because no creative person could do the comprehensive job of registering their songs everywhere around the world. you it would become your full-time job. You would spend thousands of dollars on account setup fees for reg for collection societies in in foreign countries, right? Like it it's it's not a realistic proposition. Um, I think you framed why we at Cobalt built cosign in a really in I think a really effective way, which is that Cobalt, we built our business off of building the best platform possible to unlock money from the the global publishing system and pay them to some of the top songwriters in the world. And you know what we realized over time is that there is a truly growing middle class of songwriters. And like today, like literally 2025, the ability as a songwriter, maybe you're also an artist, uh, but you know, as an artist or a songwriter, someone who writes their songs to really grow your audience and build it in an independent way is just greater than it's ever been before. And it's growing exponentially. And we can actually see this in data. Spotify puts out a great end ofear report called Loud and Clear. And what I looked at, you know, the 2024 loud and clear report and it showed people making $10,000 or more per year on Spotify has grown 200% since 2017. It's now almost 100,000 people. And that's just artists. That doesn't even count producers and songwriters. So, it's never been more accessible to build your audience. And I think the problem is that people are still locked out of the publishing system. You can get to the point where you might have 5, 10, 15, $50,000 a year in publishing income, but because it's such a complex landscape, it's so fragmented. It's so complicated. There aren't a lot of great options, people just like don't collect that money or they undercollect it. And that I think is the context for why we at Cobalt realized, okay, we built this incredible platform, but we're underutilizing it or we're not expanding it to a space where it really needs it. And that was the birth of of cosign. And I should I guess I guess I should say what cosign is. Um what cosign is is it's taking cobalt's publishing administrative platform and service and it's making it as streamlined and flexible as possible. uh so that emerging artists and producers and songwriters who have publishing rights can in a really simple way tap into global registrations, global collections, global transparency from Cobalt, powered by Cobalt, powered by literally Cobalt's admin team and Cobalt's tech, but in a format that is highly highly flexible. We can get into what that means, but essentially what it means is that you can tap in, you can get your money, and if you want to leave or you want to evolve your publishing setup, you can do that at any time. Um, and that for us was the missing link of the need in the industry to really open the doors a little bit more to to to Cobalt's technology, Cobalt's service to let people just collect their their publishing money. And how does it work specifically? like break it down like what uh what is like what is your I'm assuming the business model is you work on commission you're going to like similar to cobalt like you don't own obviously it's admin so is it a set commission rate for the songwriters there's signup fee there's like what you know what are the services that you provide give me give me those down so what it is is comprehensive global publishing admin across every every territory every type of publishing right type. So that's mechanicals and performance every platform. And it is you do sync. And so the way we're doing sync is it's a non-exclusive license because we want to be super flexible. Which means that if you're a songwriter on cosign and you want to do your own sync and you don't want to cut in the Cobalt Sync team, that's fine. If the Cobalt Sync team is able to secure something, then we'll take the 20%. And and when you talk about how does cosine make money, it's a flat 20% admin rate across every territory. It's not doubled for performance. Often in a traditional publishing deal, you'll double the performance rate for for reasons we can go down, but it's a it's a single flat worldwide fee with a rolling quarterly term. So you coign rolling quarterly term. Oh wow. Cuz previously you were talking about like 3 to 5 year terms and that's just on the cobalt side. But for cosign it's so after a quarter or whatever you if I get a pub deal I can be like thank you so much for your work. I I'm gonna go with this hands on publish. We built it that way by design because we know that a big part of the co-sign market are people who are growing their audience really quickly or know that they have something significant they want to collect on the publishing side, but they might be interested in a traditional deal down the road. And there are certain cases where that could work for someone. And what we're trying to do is not tie your hands behind your back and say you're locked into something, but basically say, look, you have money to collect. If you don't register those songs and collect that money, it doesn't stay in the system forever. We can talk about black the black box and what that is but we you know essentially if you don't claim your publishing royalties actively between 18 and 24 months it's different in different it's different in different uh collection societies but like at a certain point that money could be just paid out to the major rights holders and you're just going to lose your shot right so what what we want to do with cosign is say look this is an accessible format to send your songs to one company have them register them everywhere and just give you your money in the most transparent way possible without locking you down to be there long term. That's great. And I do want to talk about the blackbox because that is something uh all the time that you know I chat with songwriters about and they like they might have had a great sync you know on a TV show or a commercial something like that and they had forgotten to register it you know with anyone not a publisher not even their pro and it like aired and they're you know maybe got their upfront payment and then someone tells them like you know you should have gotten some backend royalties like what what are you talking about that was like 2 years ago right and then they like go to you BMI or ASCAP or whatever and they're like, "Oh, sorry. We don't have that anymore." Like, so talk to me about like how that works. Like when when you say like that money isn't theirs anymore or gets it gets distributed to the majors, like that doesn't like explain how that works. That doesn't make much sense, I don't think. when it's just like if there's money that was ear earned for your song, your copyright, and there's publishing money earned, shouldn't that get to you whether you register that day or month later or years later? So, the way it works is different based on what the collection society is or sometimes the streaming platform. So, it's a very very fragmented space. There's not one sizefits-all approach, but the basic idea of it is that these organizations, these collection societies, these streaming platforms don't want to be holding on to money forever, right? If no one ever claims it, they want to get rid of it because they have to pay it to some rights holder and they don't want to hold on to someone's money that wasn't claimed for like a hundred years, right? So as part of their agreements with the major rights holders, the major labels and publishers, they basically say after a certain amount of time, and what that amount of time is really varies based on where you are and what the source is, but at a certain amount of time, we are going to pay this to y'all and you guys have to figure out what to do with it cuz we don't want it to be our responsibility anymore. And that I think for most independent songwriters is really problematic because you know most of the the major companies what they don't do is spend a whole lot of time going down the food chain to figure out what little guy they should pay the blackbox to. Some of them just eat it themselves. Some of them pay it to their biggest clients. That all depends on the policy of of the major. Right. But yeah, that's why my message to to independent songwriters is this. The way to avoid your money getting trapped in the black box is to just register your songs and make sure that you're collecting them. Yeah. And then the follow-up to that is the best way to do that is to have a publishing administrator who is a single organization, a single person you can give your songs to to make sure that they're just registered everywhere, that you're not missing a territory, you're not missing a right type, you're not missing a certain streaming platform, you're just collecting everything as soon as you can. So I Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And and that was one of my biggest gripes with the MLC when they formed uh which is the mechanical rights organization in the US, the only one that collects mechanical royalties for US streams. Um when that was formed, it was baked into the law uh that they would hold have to hold on to the money for 3 years and if no one claimed the money that they're holding on to for three years, they would uh disperse it based on market share. and uh which of course the three major publishing companies have the biggest market share and so they're going to get all of that money that indie songwriters didn't know to claim and I I understand in some right they don't want to hold on for a hundred years but like I don't know maybe it could have been 10 or something like whatever I mean it's so true and look if you're an indie musician if you're an indie songwriter if it goes into the black box you are not going to get that money like because that's where you're competing with the majors the major rights holders and the biggest clients of those major rights holders. The way to avoid that from happening is by making sure that when your songs come out, you know what the splits are and you're sending them to a publishing administrator. That could be cosign. We think we're the best option in the space. It could be a different publishing administrator, but if you're not collecting that money immediately, don't don't don't have your backup plan B. I'll get it from the black box. Like, if you're if you're an indie, that's not going to happen. So, there are some super savvy songwriters out there uh who are like, "All right, cosign takes 20%." Why not just register with uh ASCAP? That's my performing rights organization. Why not just go to register at the MLC? Because any songwriter, any self-administered songwriter can do that uh can go register with the MLC. And they're like, "ASCAP has reciprocal agreements with every performing rights organization in the world for the most part. So ask if she have my performance uh royalties. MLC is collecting all my mechanicals in the states. Sure, they might not collect the international mechanicals, but like that maybe I look at my streams like that's so negligible. Uh you know, the amount that I that cosign is going to be keeping in 20%. I'm not going to make that back in terms of my international mechanicals. So aren't I collecting uh the vast majority of my publishing royalties if I just register with a pro if I'm in the states? like let's say it's ASCAP or BMI or whatever and the MLC like isn't that enough like why why not just do that why work with cosigner or another admin publisher sure I'll say two parts two two answers to that first is that increasingly consumption streaming is just more and more global for more and more artists so when you talk about your international mechanicals picture not collecting that could be foregoing like 30 or 40% of your money and it depends on what your streaming profile does, but that is significant and can't be swept under the rug. And like Ari, like if I show up to my job at Cobalt every day, like I wouldn't go to my boss and say like I just want to be paid 70% of my paycheck this week. It's like, you know, it's like I wouldn't do that. I want to be paid 100%. And um unless you are registering on the mechanical side in 100% of territories, you're not going to be paid 100%. So I would say number one is, you know, I'd question that assumption maybe that the person's making. Okay, let's put that aside. The second is why not just register at ASCAP and BMI and rely on the reciprocal arrangements, the reciprocal side deals they have with the other pros to collect the money, right? I'd say a couple things. One is that that I'm going to get a little nerdy, but I know you're, you know, your audience can take it. People want answers, right? Okay, you guys are smart. So, first off, the territorial coverage on those reciprocal arrangements might not be complete, right? uh which is to say that in some cases the PROS might not have a direct reciprocal arrangement with every society. They might have chains of arrangements where there is a daisy chain of societies that are that are pulling royalties from one to the other to the other and each of them are taking their cut. Right? So that that could amplify the number of third party middlemen that are all taking a cut and it could also slow down the time it takes to collect the money and it can also increase the likelihood that someone makes a mistake, right? Because the data is only as good as the society data and the data that they're sharing with each other and without pointing figures at any society and the societies are extremely important. like some societies don't have the greatest reputation for like the most sophisticated data and uh transparency, right? And what often that means is that you could look at a pro statement and see a line that says international and not get a whole lot of um granularity into where that's coming from, how many intermediary third parties were taking a cut along the way and and whether or not you are even covering the whole globe. So what I would say there is that it's imperfect because you might not be covering everything and there might be a lot of third parties taking a cut and they might be making mistakes. And let's contrast that now with an admin like cosign, right? How do we collect our money really from across the world? Well, we do a few things. We're registering directly with every society. We're not relying on the societies to pay each other and create daisy chains. We're just saying pay us directly, right? and we're cutting out that time and that administrative work. And we can control the data. We can control what we're sending them and what we're getting back. And that's why if you were to go to like the cosign client portal and you were going to go to my earnings, you can see line by line from every single society in the world like your debit card, like I'm a city bank, right? If I go to my checking account, I can see every single payment that hits my account. It's similar on the cosign portal app. You can just see payments as they come in directly from sources. So there are fewer middlemen. you're getting paid faster and you're just getting better data. The other thing that we do specifically which is unique to Cobalt is that Cobalt owns a pro called AMRA which is a digital only pro that actually is an international pro. So in the United States ASCAP and BMI have a monopoly that the government has given them to be performing rights organizations. That's not the case outside the United States, which means that AMRA is able to actually license directly on the digital side to Spotify, Apple Music, right, to all the all the streaming platforms around the world and just enter into licenses directly with them the same way that provos do. And for for cosign and cobalt, we actually just rely on Amra to collect streaming royalties outside the US, which means that we can actually just have an endto-end solution where we don't have to rely on a traditional legacy pro at all for streaming income. If it's outside the US, we can just do via AMRA, our own pro, our license directly with Spotify, collected directly from them, and have it all be in our ecosystem. So, wait a minute. So, so, uh, let me just pause there for a second just so I understand. So, um, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, songwriters are only allowed to be with one performing rights organization. Is that correct? Songwriters have a primary affiliation with one performing rights organization. So, I can't be with I can't be with ASCAP and BMI or I can't be with ASCAP and SOAN or I can't be with ASCAP or BMI and PRS or what, right? It's just you pick one. But when you when you sign with a a publisher or when you enter into a publishing admin arrangement, you are relying on that administrator to choose what is the network of collection societies. I'm going to register with around the world. Now in the US, I'm going to register with whatever your home whether that's ASCAP or BMI, I'm going to do that on your behalf. But outside the US, we get to choose what what path do we want to go through to pay you your your money. Right now, does that work with uh international songwriters, too? So, let's say you have a songwriter from the UK and they're registered with PRS. That's their performing arts organization. How does it work there? Is it you're using PRS locally and then you're still using AMRA internationally or then you're going to you're picking one of ASCAP or BMI in the states or how does that that's that's correct. So, if you if you're in the UK, you can still go through AMRA. There are some complications. There's something called beam territories which are some countries in central Europe that have slightly different rules. But what I would say at the risk of getting too too granular and in the weeds is if you're asking like why not just go MLC and ASCAP, it's that you can collect more directly and more quickly and more comprehensively by going through a publishing administrator. And by the way, I would say the proof is sort of in the pudding by looking at this. Let's take Max Martin for example, or let's not say specifically Max Martin, but let's say Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Phoebe Brides, Carol G, like our most some of our most sort of revered clients on the Cobalt side. Mhm. You know, not all of them are necessarily relying on an advance from Cobalt and many of them are primarily relying on Cobalt to in addition to servicing them on the sync side, like really make sure that they're collecting their money as well as possible. These songwriters aren't going it alone and just registering at ASCAP in the MLC, right? And they are they are represented by very sophisticated lawyers and business managers who want to maximize the value of those cataloges, right? And or you could say for just a a legacy catalog of maybe a band where the members have passed away, but they want to make sure they're collecting their royalties. Generally the way they do that is by entering into arrangements where they can register them directly with societies via a publishing administrator rather than hope that one society will just do the best job it can making reciprocal arrangements um without as much transparency. So So yeah, that makes sense because you know on one hand I initially was uh going to push back on like well we it's hard to compare an indie songwriter to a Max Martin or something like that. It's two completely different worlds, but at the same time, if the if Max Smart was going to be uh wanting to make more money because that percentage that Cobalt takes for admin services would actually be a lot more, he would make more money theoretically uh by doing the the registering himself. Uh but I I get your point as in like the daisy chain. And I like that idea of all these like various international rights organizations that are taking their commission cut based as they take it down the chain and you don't want to leave any money on the table. And I totally understand you're acting almost like as an agent where you're going out and hunting down all of these royalties wherever they may exist. I I think it's I think it's the speed of payment and it's also the transparency. Like if you care about transparent reporting, relying on the reciprocal arrangements is not going to deliver that to you. It just isn't right. Um, and I think you know what we've built at Cobalt, like the strength of our business in many ways comes from being able to build a platform that can collect more directly in more territories and then leverage the data that we're getting to give to songwriters. So that all makes sense. Um, and I'm curious though, uh, so is is cosign open to every songwriter, anyone who wants to sign up or how does that work? So cosign is selective. It's I think much more open than than Cobalt, but there's a reason why it's somewhat collective. So, I should say the process is actually simple. You go to cosign website, cosignmusic.com. You can look at videos. You can get lots of educational materials and you can engage with us and learn what we're about, but it's you then fill out an application that's that's that's pretty simple. It's like 3 4 minutes tops. The reason why we're selective is that comprehensive publishing admin is complicated and it really requires a lot of resources to do right and like what's an example of why that's the case well for example let's say there is a dispute in a territory where let's say Germany gamma and you put in a registration and gamma gets another competing registration that the splits add up differently and what they're going to do as you know is and this is any society what they would do is publishing is an honor system right when they're conflicting registrations. The society says, "Look, I'm actually not going to put my thumb on the scale here. I'm not going to take sides. You all have to fight this out and come to an agreement, and I'm actually just going to stop paying royalties on the song." Right? Okay. Let's say that happens. Well, that's GMA. That's not us, right? So, if we want to help resolve that dispute, we need a a global society relations team that has a really strong relationship with Gamma that can interact with them, that can get on the phone with them, that can say, "What's going on? What do you need? What documentation do you need? How can we get that to you so that we can resolve this dispute and get the money flowing again? And that's just one example of where publishing admin is different perhaps than distribution, right? Over time, distribution has gotten less comp complex as aggregation has sort of um increased around certain streaming platforms, but publishing has gotten more complex. And you know, you need someone who's not only entering into licenses, you know, we have a whole team at Cobalt who's round the clock 365 days a year re-upping our direct digital licenses with the most important platforms. That's not just Spotify and Apple Music, that could be Pelaton, right? That could be SMU. Like there's a whole landscape, right? So, we have to enter into, you know, we have to enter into great licenses. We have to resolve disputes. And it takes a lot of time and resources. What is the threshold for somebody? because it's it's obviously not at the level of what Cobalt is. Uh what are we talking if just like materially I can is someone listening can understand is like would I get accepted via the application? What are you looking for specifically from songwriters? I think for us you don't need to make $100,000 a year. I think I think for us it makes sense to engage when songwriters are, you know, getting to the point where they're making maybe three four $5,000 a year. At that point that can justify the amount of resource that we are are putting forward. And some people say like, well, you know, why not just charge us, you know, that's not our model. Like, our model isn't to charge people to get in the door. Our model is to apply a really, really high level of resource to make sure people are collecting their money as efficiently as possible. And, you know, there are open platforms out there, like I'm not going to name names, but there are open platforms out there for publishing admin. And I think making that really accessible is important. I think the problem is if you have a few hundred thousand songwriters on a platform um and maybe many of them aren't earning very much, it can just weaken the level of service on that platform. Um again, it's it's not in any way a judgment. What I would say is that this is where publishing is different and what we No, it is it is I I'll I'll pass judgment. I I won't let you I you don't need to do that. I I you know have experienced that firsthand and I interface with uh so many artists and songwriters and you're you're right about that where there are some uh admin publishers out there that were open to all and accepted all and I appreciated that from them because it gave a service to those songwriters. But I I do get that because if if they're only really making a few dollars a year, it doesn't make sense uh to engage this this company that has this full powerhouse infrastructure with all of that work that it would be to uh run admin publishing services because like you said to clear the issues and to register there or properly and so the support does uh lack because you know the people which I've seen and experienced is like those that might not be making that much money, uh, they take up a lot of the customer support requests. And I've heard that firsthand from some of these other admin publishing companies and it's like to their credit to these songwriters credit, it's like they want to make sure everything's buttoned up. Something didn't get didn't get registered properly. It is well within the right. They should make sure that it registered properly. They should get, you know, all that. But then it's a losing business model for the admin publishing companies that now they're spending all their time on these songwriters that aren't really making much money. And so that the commission that they're taking, it's not going to pay for those services. And I completely get that. I think what we're trying to do is also acknowledge that this middle class is growing. So it's not that cosign is locking the door at all. We're trying to open the door as wide as we can and we think it's going to be a bigger and bigger segment of people that we're servicing. And we just understand that there is a growing group of songwriters, some of whom are artists, some of whom are producers, some of them are pure songwriters, who want that highc caliber global admin. They want that highc caliber transparency where they can go into a portal and get incredibly granular amounts of detail and they want real admin service, but they also want flexibility. And I think that's the key with cosign is like when we crafted our publishing agreements, they're almost like TNC's on the platform. Like our literal goal was to make them as flexible as possible. Like if we can make them more flexible in a way that makes sense, we'll actually just do that, right? Because we want to just build a tool that's like here's I almost think of it as like cosign is like a really powerful car and the car is powered by cobalt. Like we built an incredible engine and incredible dashboard and can go really fast and really far. And what cosign is is basically just saying to the emerging independent community, here is the key to the car. You drive it as far as you want. You drive it as short as you want. When you're on cosign, like you can deliver us your whole catalog. You could also deliver us just your last EP. You're not gonna be in breach. Like it's it's taking a tool and putting it in the hands of songwriters. And you know, we want to make that balance between um not you know, making sure that we are ensuring the highest quality on the platform. And again, that's why there's an application process. But like here's the good news. We encourage people to hone their craft. We encourage people to grow their careers. like it it isn't an impossible bar to clear. And if you're really early on and you're making like, you know, uh $50 a year on your publishing, like you can grow that to the point where you will qualify for for cosign and then at that point it makes sense for to to to to really engage, right? And for Yeah. And for those that uh because there are so many artists out there that uh are also songwriters, but they didn't realize that there was a a difference between, you know, artist and they didn't they didn't realize that their distributor wasn't collecting all of their publishing money. they're uh that they might be making a good amount of money from the distributor and they're like, "Oh man, I don't know how much I'm making from publishing a year because I've never made money from publishing because I've never known to register with a publisher or a pro or maybe I they just registered with a pro or nothing else or something that's just like super common." Um it has been my uh calculation and correct me if you've seen different things uh but it it seems like from streaming at least about 80% of all the money that is earned from streaming goes to the distributor and those labels the artists and about 20% goes to publishing the songwriters. Is that about right? That's about right. It's something that Cobalt's trying to change and the publishing community in general is trying to change. A lot of that goes down to very old copyright law and the CRB. Um, you know, we feel copyright royalty board, you know, yeah, the copyright royalty board. Correct. You know, I'm proud to be part of Cobalt where we're lobbying for higher payments for songwriters, you know. Um, but that's true. But remember that 20% is still of a very very growing pie and more and more of that pie is going to this middle class. And I think that's the context for cosign, which is to say, look, there hasn't been a great option that's super flexible for people who value their independence. They value their control. They're maybe in a transitional moment in their career where they might in a year or two years time tap into a more traditional deal, they might decide to stay independent forever. And like if you're in that boat and you've got $5,000 a year or $10,000 a year in publishing income, that's really meaningful income. Like I think that sometimes we forget and we almost write off the idea of like, oh, artists are broke, songwriters are broke. To be an artist means you're going to be broke. And like that literally bothers me because like today that's becoming less and less true than ever. More people can can can grow their audiences today than ever before. More songwriters can achieve an amount of streaming that could actually sustain them than ever before. And I think the problem is that they're locked out of the system and they don't have education necessarily because it's so complicated. It's been set up for them to fail and there isn't a clear solution to just unlock that money really really quickly. And that for me is like the context of why I feel cosign isn't you know on one level it's an admin tool. It's a tool for people to get paid and get their money and that's all great but that's where it can impact culture because you know there are people on cosign who have you know pieces of really really big charting songs right or there are people on cosign who maybe don't even have a top charting song but they just are 100% songwriter themselves or an artist and they've built a following of 100,000 or 200,000 monthly listeners right that is the type of money if you're properly collecting and publishing that could be the difference between working five jobs and then trying to fit music in and quitting those jobs and actually doing music full-time, right? And that will change culture. Like if you can get, you know, I said that stat from Spotify that in 2017 I think there was like like 10,000 people making 10,000 a year or more and now there's 100,000 people. And if in 5 years time that's 300,000 people. Like if you can unlock those earnings for those 300,000 people and they're making music full-time, like that will change the culture. That will mean better music. That will mean more committed artists who are developing themselves more, who are taking more time to own their craft. So, it's sort of cheesy, but I think we take it really seriously because it's a problem that's not just about like, oh, how do I collect my royalties? It's about how do I sustain myself as a musician, right? Um, super important, Jacob. That was uh No, that I got off the soap box, but No, no, that was great. That was a great summation. It was a great way to to wrap it up. Um, yeah, fully aligned. So, uh, I I guess the the thing to do if if someone is interested in in cosign, they can go to the website cosign. What's the website again? Cosign. It's cosignmusic.com. Cosign, by the way, is spelled with a K like cobalt. So, it's kosi gn sort of sort of a little bit of a plan words. Um, but yeah, it's cosignmusic.com. And, you know, I think the highle picture here is that yeah, they can they can apply. um they can obviously stay in touch even if you don't get in the first time, keep growing our audience. You know, if you apply again, we love to see it. Um the goal is to is to demystify publishing to make it really really simple and really really direct for for artists and producers and songwriters so that they can really just get paid the money that that is owed to them without having to sacrifice like the quality of the system that's doing it. Because it really is like it's the same admin system that Max Martin relies on just made more democratized for people. Dope. Well, Jacob, this has been super informative. Uh I know that people are much smarter. Even though they were smart when they came in, they're even smarter now walking out and they have a much much stronger handle on publishing and uh how all of this works and and how to collect their money. I have one final question that I ask everyone who comes on the show and that is what does it mean to you to make it in the new music business? It's a great question. I would say there's two answers that are both the same thing, which is that you need to fully have ownership over yourself, right? I think on the business side that means like the way people financially really will make it in the new music business is by owning their rights. I I firmly believe that some people might make a decision otherwise, but I think in the long run, the way people really make money in music is by owning their rights. Um, and I think on the artist side, owning yourself means being authentically yourself and owning that authenticity and that relationship with your fans. Um, I think that the more you are, you know, it doesn't mean don't sign to a manager, don't sign to a label or don't sign to an agent, but at the end of the day, you need to be taking ownership over what you represent and and the work that you make. And I think the most successful artists and songwriters today all have that in common, which is that they have a high level of ownership over what they're putting out in the world and they're not relying on others to mediate that firm. Jacob Hall, that was great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Ari. Today's episode was edited by Ari Davids with music by Brassroots District and produced by all the great people at Ari's Take.