CVA Podcast: Tatiana Moroz, Crypto Media Hub

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host tras ahmed ready to kick off another bite-sized episode of the crypto valley association podcast let's discover together the growing trends of this fast moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains we are joined by tatiana moroz the founder of tatiana coin the world's first ever artist cryptocurrency so let's dive straight into the hidden world of music tatiana great to have you here how are you good thank you so much for having me oh thank you for being here and uh well let's get straight into things why don't you tell us a little bit more

about how you first got involved within the blockchain space sure so i guess my interest in cryptocurrency is a little bit unusual because if you ask me 10 years ago what i thought about technology and finance i would have told you i hated them both i grew up in jersey and i went to college at berkeley college of music in boston and upon returning to new york i started managing a number of different recording studios as well as pursuing career as a singer-songwriter when i was growing up my mom used to play a lot of music from the 60s and the 70s and i was particularly inspired by kat stevens and a lot of the other artists with an anti-war message and i was always very interested in you know a dystopian future versus a utopian future i'd read a lot of those novels

and unfortunately my own generation didn't really seem to have its own cause so i was a little bit you know disappointed there was nothing to rally for but in 2011 i found out about the federal reserve and i became a lot more politically active i started supporting ron paul who's an american congressman who ran for president he was a big unifying factor in the united states you know there are people from the left and the people from the right and it was a really beautiful time to be a part of that i got to sing all around the country for thousands of people and it actually had a message so unfortunately ron paul did not win the election the elections appeared to be pretty corrupt in the united states at that point from my vantage point and at that time i was supported by

bitpay so tony gillippi and steven pair had sponsored one of my performances and then they came to new york to tell me all about bitcoin so about august 2012 i bought my first bitcoins at 11 even though i didn't really understand what they were talking about i was definitely intrigued and then it was kind of like i went down a whole other rabbit hole so in 2014 i was really looking well actually i should back up so in 2013 i decided that since bitcoin was so hard to understand i would write a jingle about it you know you want to sell something you write a jingle and that's something that i'm pretty good at so i thought actually maybe i could play it for you guys what do you think yes that would be awesome please awesome okay hira i'll give it a shot um

i didn't want to give any of my money to a nation based on war i wanted to be free nothing holding me back from where i want to go i thought about it i thought about it what was the choice that i made it was to take away the money don't give up your money use bitcoin whenever you pay use bitcoin whenever you pay use bitcoin whenever you pay so that's just a little small part of it people can go to my site at

tatianamarose.com and listen to the full thing but i know we have a limited time and i definitely want to talk with the audience so hopefully that wetted their whistle a little bit oh wonderful thank you so much for for that it's uh it was awesome wow blown away it's a fun way to get people into it and i was very warmly received by the cryptocurrency community i remember debuting that back in argentina when during the first run up and everybody was there and it was such an exciting time to be in this space in 2014 people started talking about bitcoin 2.0 and bitcoin 2.0 was ended up being blockchain right but i started talking with adam b levine from the original let's talk bitcoin podcast and we started to talk about what would it look like to bring the music industry

in with cryptocurrency and that was quite a learning experience um so i mean i guess i should probably tell you about it so basically we created tatiana coin because i saw two main problems in the music industry so you have fans and funding now a lot of people look at cryptocurrency as a way of helping to track copyright and that's an important component but a lot of artists aren't even going to get into the studio they can't afford to do that so they're not even going to register their works to be copywritten so i took the existing indiegogo type model and i improved upon it so traditionally if you donate 50 to a crowdfunding campaign you get a t-shirt and a cd and then that's pretty much the end of the

relationship but if you created a tatiana coin it would essentially allow you to have an eternal relationship as long as you're a coin holder with the artist that wasn't dependent on an outside platform or anything like that because of course crypto is peer-to-peer and it would also give them a little bit of a different benefit so if you had tatiana coin you would get a discount on future merchandise you could get access to different kinds of perks sort of like a patreon model and on the other side you know i had really taken advantage of social media platforms because i was like most artists a broke artist just trying to get some marketing done and you know those early platforms were really helpful but what i noticed when you went from platform to platform is

that of course you have to go from platform to platform obviously nobody's on myspace anymore but once you would build up an audience for that platform the platform would own it and as we see now there's even censorship going on so if i want to reach my fans even though they came and liked my page i have to pay facebook every single time i want to access them and of course if i have a controversial message or something like that then i can easily be censored and of course censorship is not the way to go so we created tatiana coin and we built it off of counterparty that was the best technology available at the time later on we learned that when your bitcoin fees go up it could be a little bit problematic for a token that's not worth the value of the fee

and it was generally a pretty hard thing to implement you know making the token is not that difficult but being able to figure out how to get people to understand how to use it that can be very challenging and then additionally it was like i had a car without any roads so what adam and i figured out after that whole process and you know i raised enough money i funded my album but we wanted to build the roads and so as a result adam created a company called tokenly and they were probably the first real token company that was out there i think and so he did a lot of different projects including you know spells of genesis and some gaming applications and a variety of other things but we also created a platform called token fm and that was our music platform so we had to go out and build it

ourselves over the years it's been kind of difficult because the market went down and in 2017 we had built a platform and we wanted to do it as a crowdfunding kind of you know just an ico right but as we all know that was a little bit legally sketchy and our lawyers told us that we weren't able to do it so now we're getting ready for the launch it's been a little bit a long time coming i guess but i think that you learn quite a bit during that journey especially that it takes developers a lot longer to do things than you would ever imagine which is i guess a common problem it was a really nice thing though because i decided to do some you know really relevant music to the crypto community i was a big supporter of

silk road and so i learned a lot about what happens in the drug war in the prison industrial complex in the united states and that was very educational for me and i think it's really important to be aware of not just you know stacking sats and lambos but there's a lot of i guess political implications of using cryptocurrency okay maybe it does more about this platform that you're trying to build so will that work a lot like indiegogo or will there be additional features is it based on blockchain technology as well or is that just the tatiana coin that will be within that can you explain to us a little bit about the ecosystem there that you're trying to create sure so luckily it's all built out but at this point we're just waiting for funding for marketing and for some final touches so that's a nice

feeling that at least it's completed but our approach with the product so tokenly is the main company but they have two products they've token markets which is an e-commerce solution and then the other side of it is tokenfm and our goal with it is to make a protocol agnostic platform that blends the best of decentralization and still has a centralized element i think it's a little bit premature to try and decentralize the whole music industry and just because of the infrastructure and also because of the ease of use not everybody's ready for crypto and i don't want to force them into it but essentially the platform allows an artist to create their own empire so it's a streaming platform where we pay 20 times what spotify pays you can sell your music you can set your pricing at any time so

currently if you try and put your music out through a content distributor you have to set your price and you can't make any changes and you're kind of locked into that system so here you can adjust your pricing whenever you want it automatically pays out anybody who worked on the record that's owed royalties or a cut of the proceeds in any way it also allows you to direct message with your fans and you can create any kind of token that you'd like so we had a bit of a challenge with tatiana coin because we were very careful not to make it seem like a security no one wants to go to jail but that does seem to be a model that artists really want and are seem to be embracing you know you can also do a number of other kinds of tokens so for example if

you wanted to do tickets to concert you can tokenize them you can have more of a patreon model that's kind of token controlled access and basically it allows you to not have to be dependent on another platform now of course we have our platform right so you could say well they're dependent on your platform but if you don't like what we're doing you can take your coin holders and go somewhere else and i think that that's really critical because at the end of the day you're the one that's building up the value and the current music industry is very beneficial to the overlords and not so beneficial to the artists so artists are always the ones that are last to get paid none of this would be possible without us so while you do need a certain you know supporting component from the music industry itself i think

that things are still a little bit backwards so that's what we're really hoping to change and also allow people to participate in the system not just using cryptocurrency but if they want to buy in with a credit card they're able to do that as well okay and a sense of combining the two and blockchain technology is a lot about this intermediation right being able to connect people one to another so do you see um your platform and blockchain technology being able to support the music industry by giving back more to the artist then instead of each person along the line being able to take a cut from the artist and then the artist as you you said before actually you're becoming harder for them to receive the benefits of their own work do you see that progressing forward with technology

absolutely if you look at for example i'm going to be putting out my fourth record that i'm also producing myself and well will hunsley's helping me but you know we're putting it out it's going to be a self-released album and i have a lot of reticence around that because even though i want to put it up by christmas this year there's a certain aspect of putting out music where it's like what's the point you know you spend 20 or 30 grand producing a high quality record and then facebook makes you pay more money and you make less than a penny for every time somebody plays it on spotify and it's a very cartel type business right so even though now i have more money than i did when i made my first or second or even my third album well not really but you know what

i mean like at least i'm not dirt poor or anything it still doesn't seem to have a proper roi and a ton of artists that i know just feel like well what's the point if 20 people are gonna play on youtube and if you're gonna make 300 off of ascap at the end of the year that doesn't really seem very worthwhile and it also just gives you a sense of not having any control over your career the music industry is one of those places where there's other places that you know if you're a really good doctor you can get ahead if you're a really good musician that doesn't really mean very much i mean you've seen some of the people on television that are aggrandized especially if you're an artist like me you know with an anti-war message and in the world of cardi b and rihanna

that's not exactly something that's welcome but i want to kind of create my own destiny and i think a lot of artists feel that way everybody wants to be famous sure okay and you know beyonce whatever but at the end of the day i think a majority of artists would be really happy being able to just make a living and not have to have a waitressing job and a day job and you know whatever uber driving and you know artists always have to do all this extra stuff and then at the end of the day the real work begins so when normal people go home at six o'clock they have dinner with their family they watch a little tv maybe they go for a walk get some exercise and an artist is just working 24 7. it would be nice to see us actually getting something for that

after putting in all of that time and effort real long work to be recognized and actually being able yeah and actually being able to do what you love right so maybe do you have message for some of these younger say musical entrepreneurs that want to get out there and do it since you've been through it already in today's day and age do you have a message for them of what they should be doing at the current point in time you know what i'm not sure what that message should be because i think it's a struggle for me it's a struggle for a lot of artists to figure out what the best solution is i mean honestly if i had any advice for an artist i would tell them to buy bitcoin because i think that the biggest problem for artists is that they don't have

money and you can't start you know being an artist is a business and you have to look at it that way so you know number one obviously you have to have a good work ethic i kind of think the whole idea that artists are lazy isn't very true in my experience most of the artists that i know are very very hard working but that hard work doesn't necessarily add up to cash and cash is king so if people were buying cryptocurrency and learning a little bit about that i think that they could potentially just make money when it bumps and then they would actually be able to support themselves i would welcome them to join our platform when it launches and to explore some of these unique offerings that are being done within the cryptocurrency community especially in the art community they're tokenizing a lot of things

but i wouldn't say that that's you know the answer yet because that space is is growing and it hasn't really hit the main market so there's definitely some advantage to being an early mover and i think that the community is really inspiring so from that perspective it gives your soul a lot of juice but i don't know if it's gonna give your pockets a lot of change so you know i mean i have a bitcoin logo on my guitar that's sometimes on there and i mean theoretically i've played a ton of different bitcoin gigs it's not like i have a lot of bitcoin stacked from all the donations i think the donation thing sort of fell by the wayside and also i think a lot of people were really wiped out when the markets went down i mean the 2017 run-up and then the subsequent fall was

a lot longer than i think a lot of us were expecting so i think the people got a little bit less generous around that time because you imagine yourself with tons and tons of money and then all of a sudden you're just looking at your accounts and you're like oh this isn't looking good but i definitely like the community i think that's actually been probably the most rewarding thing uh in cryptocurrency is you know in the united states we have a lot of political strife right now all around the world there's protests and a lot of problems but luckily when you're working in blockchain and in crypto you can actually take some comfort and solace from the fact that you're actually building something and that's a little bit played out right everybody in the crypto space is saying oh we're saving the world it's like all right you're not saving the

world just yet go to work but there is something about it where you a sense of fulfillment from participating in something bigger than yourself and the ideology that kind of binds us together you know this idea of freedom and access to technology in an equal way i mean there's so many wonderful things that give us power whereas you know i did a lot of protests and stuff i would stand in front of the you know white house and say end the fed and end the wars and no one cared but with bitcoin you don't have to ask for permission and with cryptocurrency i think that we can bring a lot more accountability to the world around us and that's something that's lacking right now okay i totally understand that that point of view and i'm glad that you survived the the crypto winter and i

think it was hard for many people and companies to get um through that maybe you mentioned the whole bitcoin side of things would you like to give our audience maybe your perspective on why bitcoin really matters and the values behind it sure i mean i think that one of the things that really fascinated me was just how much war was in the 20th century but there was a lot of war in the 20th century and the reason why that was possible is because of the federal reserve so the federal reserve was founded in 1913 and since then the value of the dollar has depleted by 98 if we don't control the money we cannot control the outcome of what's going to happen a country can essentially print money into oblivion and just keep funding their own programs and there's no way to fight back

so i think that the anti-war message and the concept of what creates value and what is sound money and where does money come from just that shift in that mindset is i think critical and i think that you know a lot of people also resonate with that okay right if we put it back to the to the music industry would you like to give our audience a view of where you believe the future of the music industry is headed with all the technological progress that we're seeing and maybe specifically as well within the blockchain space i don't know i i have no idea i mean it's not something that i spend too much time worrying about because i think of the music industry like the government or any other kind of really centralized kind of place right i don't have that

much influence on it i can only change it through what we built i do think that there's almost a day of reckoning coming because there are certain projects that are really investing into the creator community for example uh brave i really like the brave project i love the basic attention token i think that there's so many possibilities there and their whole focus is around content creators so that's where the value is coming from there are a lot of us right and it's an ever increasing amount of people but i would love to see a little bit more transparency in the industry and a little bit more decentralization you know a lot of the artists even if they're signed they're still doing a bulk of the work themselves and people used to dream of getting signed but if you get signed and your representative leaves the company then

you're in the trash and nobody cares about you and you can't even put out your music and i don't really think that a lot of people in the music industry are particularly thrilled to be participating in that but they're just kind of a part of the machine so i think we have to maybe break the machine a little bit and then we'll see you know the future is very bright and i think that there's a lot of other factors going on right now in the world that just make 2020 this very uncertain year and i've almost been leaning into a like a buddhist mentality where you just you can exist where you are and maybe it's a little bit uncomfortable but time keeps passing and we kind of just gotta roll with the punches at this point you see let's see well um i'm sure there's a

bright future ahead past this whole coronavirus pandemic and and we will see some of that transparency you're talking about and hopefully blockchain technology will help to enable that but uh well so thank you so much tatiana for those um valuable insights is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience well i have to show my stuff so one of the things that we didn't get to talk about was my company crypto media hub so we've been doing marketing and crypto for the marketing and pr for the crypto space since 2015 and that's been something that we've been revamping lately but also there's the tatiana show and proof of love so the tatiana show i founded in 2015 and it talks a lot about economics i have a lot of different

kinds of speakers of course we have a ton of different crypto projects and a lot of political speakers and things like that but after a while i got a little bit burnt out on cryptocurrency and i also felt that a lot of people in the community were very singularly minded your wife's not going to like you very much if all you do is talk about crypto right and i think that family is very important and love is very important and i had learned a little bit about myself through some self-reflection and realized that i had some walls up as an artist you know love is one of the most important things out there and i want to have a message beyond buy bitcoin right i evolved into a podcast called proof of love so it's proof of lovecast.com and we have sometimes different people from the crypto space sometimes it's

just silly girl talk but it's been a really nice journey and it also allows you to learn a little bit more personal side for different crypto people that you may admire so for example we had max kaiser and stacey herbert on and i talked to them a little bit about how they met and what it's like to work together i had giacomo zuko and mir and they talked a little bit about their marriage i had rob figlion and rosario papps from the horizon project so it's been a cool way to talk with people a little bit about the things that also matter and maybe are almost a little bit more important and then also like alcoholism and drug addiction issues i mean we have a lot of problems in this world and i didn't want to be so singularly

focused i think it's important to you know water the whole garden and not just one part of the lawn i think it's been very fulfilling so i'm hoping to have some maybe emmy come on to the show but i'm not sure she's going to go for that i see and maybe one last thing to add you are speaking about your platform when can our audience expect that to be live people can go and check it out right now at token.fm but i think that will probably if things go well which everything is so crazy right now i'd love to launch in january in a more formal fashion so people can kind of keep an eye out and i know that these things get a little bit delayed so don't hold me to it but it'd be great if we could launch by january awesome well i look forward to seeing

that and thank you so much for the conversation it was um truly inspiring thank you so much great well if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website cryptovalley.swiss where we host plenty of events educational content and even provide information on how you can join our growing community so thanks again tatiana for joining us and stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland bye-bye thank you