Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Steve Stewart. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Steve, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

Timing is much more important than people think. Looking back on my experiences, I find that the successes usually occurred when all the elements came together at the right time. When I started managing the band that was to become Stone Temple Pilots, music was at a pivotal point. In Los Angeles, the music scene in the early 90s was shifting away from metal and slap-bass funk, into more guitar-oriented alternative rock. Jane’s Addiction was a seminal band in LA at that time, and lead singer, Perry Farrell, brought a more rock-driven sound in, that was a shift away from the funkier Fishbone and early Red Hot Chili Peppers. Mighty Joe Young (which was STP’s name before the first record came out on Atlantic) was much more funk-driven. Working with producer Brendan O’Brien brought the band into a more alternative rock sound that coincided with a shift in music consumers discovering bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Had Stone Temple Pilots come out 2 years earlier or 2 years later, they might not have had the level of success that they did.

With Vezt, we saw the opportunity to add a retail (consumer) element into what had been an exclusively B2B industry – music rights. There was no way for fans or consumers to participate in the music that they loved. We were about 8 years ahead of our time, because what was a crazy, no-one-will-ever-do-it idea in 2016, is now becoming much more accepted and mainstream in 2023. It’s still a nascent space, but with major institutional investors buying up billions of dollars in music rights recently, I believe the next few years will be the right time for the retail music rights market.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and it’s impossible to time things exactly right. But, what you can do is position yourself for the upcoming opportunity. You can do this if you’re early, but not if you’re late. Developing a new market is monumental – it involves multiple players, and it takes years of marketing and consumer awareness to realize. It’s hard to gauge where you are in the timeline, while you’re in the middle of it. Only when you step back and see others enter the space, can you better understand where things really are. Looking back, it might have been better to start a few years later – maybe 2020, but then we were in a pandemic – which presented a whole other set of circumstances. So, you just have to do the best with what you have at the time that you have it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My background is in music. I played in a band through high school and college, and after a short stint interning for The B-52’s, OMD’s and Echo & The Bunnymen’s managers, and working for a major TV producer, I started as an assistant to rapper (and now actor), Ice-T’s manager. I was able to build relationships with agents, attorneys and label execs, so at the point my friends in a band called Mighty Joe Young were looking for a record deal, I was able to shop their demo to more than 50 record labels. Every one of them said “no,” except Atlantic Records, and we signed a deal there in 1992.

We changed the band’s name to Stone Temple Pilots right before their first record came out in September of 1992, and saw immediate traction with rock fans. The record was Gold by Christmas, Platinum by February, and the band went on to sell more than 40 million units worldwide. I signed another 20 bands to major labels and publishers over the next 15 years, when 360 degree deals became very onerous for new artists.

Since then, I’ve co-founded tech platforms focused on getting artists the value they’re due from their creative efforts. Vezt is the first fractional song rights marketplace, and SongHub (www.SongHub.co) is an artist collaboration and song registration platform which uses blockchain technology, allowing for the tracking and monetization of music in the future.

I’ve always thought that music is the most undervalued entertainment product. You might spend $25 to see your favorite movie once or twice, you might pick up your favorite book for $30, and read it once. I listen to my favorite songs thousands of times – and they’re available for FREE. It’s time to correct this upside-down value proposition, and compensate artists properly, for providing the literal soundtrack to our lives.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There’s no doubt that any operating founder or CEO needs to develop a thick skin. There are ALWAYS issues with the initial operating model, development timelines, user concerns, etc. It’s not for the faint of heart. After you’ve experienced these occurrences for years on a daily basis, you get a certain look in your eye, and cadence to your speech. You can recognize it immediately in other founders and operators. They are more measured in their responses, more careful in their speech – there are so many pitfalls related to company forecasts and employee hiring and firing issues, for example. Stuff breaks every day, there’s no such thing as a perfect platform or piece of technology. Even Apple, the most successful tech company in the world, has software patches (“updates”) every few days.

We had an issue once, where an employee failed to properly manage a recurring ad budget on a major social media platform. We were scaling quickly, and running a number of ad campaigns simultaneously. The social media platform had a somewhat ambiguous ad spend management system, and we ended up spending 3 times our typical ad spend within a particular month. We discovered the error within a day, but it was a major incident for a nascent startup. It took about 3 weeks of back and forth with not only the social media platform, but with our bankers, to come to a resolution. The good news was that we saw a huge uptick in response from the out of the ordinary ad spend, even though we had to limit subsequent spend for a period of time to make up for it.

Being able to take a step back, assess the situation, set up damage control, and negotiate a resolution took some level of resilience, as a shock like that to a small company caused a major impact both internally and externally.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

With SongHub, my co-founder, Joe Berman, and I actually raised a small “angel” round from a couple of entertainment attorneys and an entrepreneur that found success with a transportation platform, who also has ties to the music business. It was enough to develop a roadmap, initial feature set, and put a basic product demo in place. As we developed the platform further, we realized that incorporating a blockchain component was necessary to our core customer targets for the future tracking and monetizing of song assets.

Even though blockchain suffered collateral damage from the global “crypto-winter,” we were able to secure a small grant from a blockchain protocol that saw early merit in our platform. After completing a number of milestones, we were able to complete a MVP with those funds that has enabled us to attract a number of interested customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stevestewart.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevestewart7/
• Other: www.SongHub.co