Creating Global Ad Campaigns with Mike Young

Hey, it's David Ciccarelli, the CEO and founder of Voices. Well, today on the show we welcome Mike Young from Mike Young Studio. Mike and I are going to be talking about the creating global ad campaigns, managing complex projects and what to listen for during the audition process. Something and he and his team have lots of experience with. But first let me introduce Mike. Mike began his career in New Zealand across all formats of radio production and live broadcasting, then to Australia in radio station imaging and eventually to New York where he's lived for the past 15 years. Now for Mike, it was all about timing. Landing in New York in 2007, it was just as the streaming revolution was beginning. So Mike managed online streaming service for virtual mobile in the US and the luxury audiophile brand Macintosh Labs before gaining Spotify as a client for their launch, their US launch in 2011. Now Mike Young Studio is the audio production agency for Spotify's. Upsell audio ads globally in every language and in every accent, sometimes delivering over 2000 ads per campaign. That's incredible, Mike. That's something we'll definitely have to talk about. Welcome to the show. Wow, I sound impressive. That's your life flash before your eyes, as they say. Yeah, well, we're still back in time, but let's fast forward a bit to the advent of the streaming era. What was going on in advertising, media production and kind of those mid 2000s arriving in New York City, what was happening in kind of the scene at that point. I come from a radio production background and I was still just thinking about becoming a radio imagine producer producing station imagine and branding. And my dream was always to work at the 100 and take over from Dave Fox. He was like the legendary radio producer at V 100 and I met him actually, it was him that led me on the path to kind of where I've ended up now because he had heard about this thing starting up, this like, French company called Gum really ahead of their time who were launching in New York at the time. And he put me in touch with Romeo on the radio who is going to work there. And I got involved with those guys and through that it was a streaming platform. It was basically what I heart radio is now before I hadn't even thought of it, but it was too early. The technology as far as like streaming devices, it was really just a desktop kind of a thing and it failed. But there I met people who went on to work for Spotify, Hay and Kim, who was someone who was instrumental in getting me into Spotify. And like a bunch of people there who kind of came from traditional radio, came from Google and then dispersed. And then from there I went on to work with a small company that we had set up and we took on Virgin Mobile as a client. And there was a visionary marketing guy there called Ron Barris, who's now at Nike, but he had the idea of he could see where streaming was going, he could see all of that. And he was marketing for a mobile phone company. It was all just falling into place. And this is very early. And so that's how I kind of got into that team and learned a lot about how to build an app and build streaming within an app and how it sounds when it's run through there. And then from there. Hayeon, who I'd worked with at Goom, who was working with me on that project, was one of the very early hires at Spotify in the US. We're talking. And she introduced me then to the Swedish dudes. All these Swedish people coming over, and I'm like, okay, I'll talk with them. They're going to talk to you about what we're doing. And I remember the questions I was asking was like, but I don't get it. Is it like itunes? So how do I play music? Don't I buy? No, you don't buy or you don't download anything. Well, then how does it work? Almost like the licensing was their real big breakthrough, right? Like, rather than purchase, it was kind of available. The artist is still getting paid, but it's on a per stream basis as opposed to everyone else learning as they go. Like, you had real good mentors along the way, too. Was it being in the right place at the right time, as they say? And that was the draw to be in New York, being in New York, like I said earlier, my whole goal was just to work in radio in New York and had no idea that all of this stuff was coming. But as things develop, that's when you realize what it really means to be somewhere like this and to live and work and you're like rubbing shoulders and just socializing with people on that kind of level who are doing things that go on to become massive. That wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed in New Zealand. Yeah, well, same thing. I feel the same way starting Voices.com. And I originally grew up in Northern Ontario and eventually gravitated to our center of the world, which is near Toronto. So I hear you about kind of being close to where the heart of activity is, especially whether it's a creative endeavor, film or advertising, there's always a geographical hub. So maybe that's one kind of word to the wise of those listening that if you're looking to sell, it kind of break in or network and just being in the right presence of people who maybe can provide some mentorship or provide some guidance, even as an ad hoc basis, there is certainly value of being in those places together. So let's maybe kind of talk about how the recording and production kind of process has changed over the last decade. Maybe the obvious one is analog to digital. But beyond that, are there different kind of tools and techniques that you've seen have been almost like these step changes in terms of the production process.

Participant #1:
Yeah. Even you're talking about ten years. We were still using digital. It was protocols ten years ago. Yeah. For sure. So it's even 20 years ago. I think when I learned was real to reels and splicing tape and all that kind of thing. But in the last ten years, I don't really think it's changed. I don't think that the recording process has really changed. Okay. So now using newer versions of protocols or whatever where things maybe bounce faster or to different formats and you got more plugins that can kind of do things a bit better. But essentially you're still editing, which is the skill I learned on realtor, reals, you're still trying to make things sound natural and using your ears. I don't think recording has changed much. The production process even ten years ago was email scripts being sent back and forth and files being sent back and forth by email. So I feel like the last ten years may have just really as far as development and both recording and production processes haven't really changed. These cloud services now all of these things are good and great, but are they that big of a change? Industry change. And I think the next thing will be the biggest disruption will be AI voice. I don't know if people are aware that basically fake voices. Right. Computer generated voices, that will be the next biggest industry disruption. Yeah. So I think it'll be a great leading to that because I'm anticipating if you're to the extent you're able to talk about this, I'm curious what a campaign of 2000 audio ads looks like and then maybe that ties into why an AI voice might even be needed. Almost like what that use case is. If you can kind of maybe unpack these large campaigns, I'm sure they have 500 spots, 600 spots, and then a 2000 is it every language, every language, every geographical location. That's kind of how we I'm trying to how do you get to that scale? Yeah. Okay. So this is through Spotify as the size campaign? Yes. So when I started with them, I was just working on the US only and it was just about like we need to find the voice and sound of Spotify America. And at that time, no one knew what Spotify was. So it wasn't really any upsell ads or anything. It was just educational kind of stuff. Hey, did you know you can create a playlist if you push this and do that and you know, all the functions and so it's really just education promos. And then as they kind of people got used to all of that, you don't have to do that so much anymore. Then it just became about, hey, upgrade to premium and you'll get all these better features and you can do all the stuff that you want. And so we did that well. And then as Spotify were growing, then they were going into region. And every year that add on, you know, two or three more regions around the world. And for their team in Sweden, it was starting to become a bit out of hand. Like, we got to manage all of this and we got to deal with pain. Every agency and voice talent person, all of their fees for every little ad we do, all of that was just becoming a big mission. And they got to the point where, like, hey, can we do a couple more? Could you do Canada or could you do America? Hey, you're New Zealand, can you do New Zealand? Started adding on regions one. And I was like, okay. And then in languages that I don't even speak. And you realize that actually language is just all the same. You can hear even if you don't speak the language. I can still edit. Yeah, it's very musical, right? Yeah, it's musical. Exactly. So I can tell when things begin end inflections all of that kind of stuff. Although some languages some do use inflections differently. And it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then they were like, we just want you to handle everything now, and we want you to handle all of the payments. We don't have to deal with all of these billing and all that. We just want to have one. It's you, you do it all. So they keep you busy, it sounds like. Yeah. So they were pretty honest about can you handle that and need to get some help. So I did. And I Luckily found a great project manager. Emily is my project manager, and I couldn't do it without her. And so then that's when things also like, I would go out and cast and find local talent because we have to have local people in the places. I don't want a French speaking voice artist who lives in New York. I want you to live where you are. Yeah. It's got to be authentic voices. And then as things got bigger burger and then a service like Voices.com can really come in handy, and then I can rely on you guys to help project management as well. Well, there's so much to go in, so many different directions. It's just on this project management piece, are you using software or. I guess you're a partner in crime, if you will. Emily, is there like an Asana project management or is this a collection of spreadsheets? Or maybe you just don't care because you're kind of one step removed, but I would imagine you interact with it in some degree. I mean, just a lot of moving parts. People are curious in terms of what's the tech stack. Yeah. We use whoever the client is. We use what they use. Yes. And pretty much it's all just Google Sheets and Google documents, but they're big. A lot of pages and details in there, a lot of comments going on. And then for communication, it's slack generally for quick communication back and forth with people. But all of the project management stuff is done within Google Docs. Well, I think it goes to show you that you don't need to deploy Microsoft project or something. You need something fast and nimble that is accessible, almost like it is enterprise software. But it has this kind of consumer feel. But it's such an important point for future producers that are listening is adapt to what the client is using, make their life easier. Did you learn that one the hard way, or is that just kind of came naturally to you to yeah, I was whatever you're using. Yeah, I was hosting everything myself in the beginning. I'd make all the audio and then I'd upload, and then I'd sort of run out of space on whatever accounts I was using. Oh, can you quickly get rid of. No, we can't get rid of that. We need to keep all of that stuff for the next ten years or whatever. So then we realize, oh, I shouldn't be host. This is all your stuff. This is all your property. Everything we do is be yours. So now everything we do, whoever the client is, we ask you, can you set up where you want all of the deliveries to happen? And you guys set up all your worksheets and we all work within yours. So we actually have very little on our side. The only thing I host is when voice talent are sending me their raw voice files for me to work on. That's where I kind of the only things that I will have. That makes a lot of sense. You don't want to be doing searches on behalf of another client. Hey, Where's this file? It's theirs. They totally have access to it. And to be able to share it within their organization. I don't want to pay for all that extra bandwidth. No. And these are big files, too. That's something a lot of people don't appreciate when you're working with audio and video files. They're ten 2100 X. It's not a text file that you're dealing with. So certainly there's a cost consideration in there as well. You'd mentioned working with talent and the importance of working with local talent. There's probably a wide spectrum of either the professionalism, the quality of the talent, but then perhaps even the quality of their home studio set up. Let's say you find the right voice, but maybe their home studio setup isn't as soundproof as you'd like. You can hear the background noise. How do you go about overcoming the artistic hurdle and the technical hurdle to be working with the right localized talent? Yeah, I think there's two types of home set up. There's the amateur home set up and the professional home set up and then separate from that, you've got the professional recording studio. Yes. So I try to work with as little as possible these days. Why is that? Well, turnaround time. Okay. If I was a voice talent person, I'm getting paid the same fee whether I'm recording myself or whether I've got to go and book a recording studio to walk into. So when you book a recording studio with a big mixing desk and lots of buttons and a coffee machine and a receptionist who's going to do the bookings, you're paying for all of that stuff and you don't need to all you're sending me is a mono voice file. You're not doing any mixing at any music. It's just your voice, the most simple recording you could possibly make. So you don't need all of that. And also you're bogged down with professional Studios time, like booking schedule, you're at their mercy. Right. We booked out all this week. Can you come in next week? The home set up, they can turn stuff around and get it back to you within the hour because it's just them. So that's the main reason. But also I feel like people will give a better delivery when they're in their own almost their home environment. They're just so much more comfortable. Yes. So those are the two reasons. I feel like it's just pointless with people who got to deal with my agent and we got to book a studio like. No. Yes. I think it's really good for advice and encouragement for talent who think that they must be able to walk into a multi million dollar facility when, as you said, you're delivering one voice track. I mean, listen, you're not recording a twelve piece Orchestra and a whole rock band, and you don't need all of that where the sound is important. In fact, you're not looking for natural acoustics. Kind of quite the opposite. You're looking for a drive voice with no processing as clean as possible. And it sounds like so quality and the ability to turn things around quickly actually are paramount to the ambience. And even still walking into a facility like that, you're right. It can be very intimidating, in which case you don't get quite the comfort level, the ease, the read that maybe that you would get from that home. It's like kind of like your environment. You're going to feel best in your own environment. Yes, that's right. But within that, there's the person who has been told by friends and family, you should do movie promos or be on the radio. And they're like, you got deep voice. And like, well, maybe I'll give that a go. Yeah. And they go and buy themselves, like the cheapest USB mic from Target, and they just find some free software that's on their laptop. And if they get really serious, they'll whack up some egg cartons on the wall. And there's that or there's the professional home studio, which is someone who's probably going to be using not a cracked version of recording software and a decent mic, like annoying. I know you guys have done reviews on what are the best mics to use, right? For sure. Akg Sennheiser Neumann, you can get riding ones. I'm using the Shore here. And so someone who's invested in that, who has created a proper recording environment in a room in their home, like you said, made it dead. So there's no echoes, no reviews. I've got Echo in here. But you know what one of the best places to record is in a closet surrounded by fur coats, hopefully fur coats or inside a car. Sometimes I've had some people send me got their laptop and a mic. It kind of set up and like, wow, that's so dead. And I'm inside my car. It's all the installation, right, that's there to keep you warm. But it's actually kind of like ensuring that sound isn't slapping back. I'm actually surprised that I've heard of that as well, too, that a car is a good substitute for rather than being in a noisy house. But it's surprising, even though that there's all that kind of glass around, it still does have that kind of dead sound. So there's those two spectrums of talent of Homebase Studios. So even when you hear, hey, I've got a Homebase studio, it almost requires this next level. I'm sure you can spot it a mile away. Right away you're going to know quality of talent and what their setups. So that's where the auditions come in. That's where they're important. So when I'm listening through to auditions and remember, I could be receiving a lot of auditions when I'm using Voices.com. Thankfully, you guys filter out a lot, and I'm just getting a handful. First thing I'm listening for in the first 3 seconds, whether I'm just going to skip is the recording level. Is the recording quality at a professional level, if you can't, to record yourself. And some people think that they should deliberately send in low quality auditions or put tone through it or something because they're worried that you might use my audition in your campaign without paying me. Well, that will backfire, because if you can't prove to me that you can record yourself to the level that I need, I'm not going to ask you, I'm not going to go back to even if you sound like you're the right person, do you think you could onto the next one? Because there's always another person. Yeah. Well, there's this loudness concept. Some talent think that, as you say, I'm to going reduce it by six or nine decibels. You don't sound competitive to everybody else who is normalized. And whether you're a pro like Bike or another producer who's listening even for the first time, loudness is perceived as better quality. I don't know why that is, but people go, oh, you're loud, you're more present. You're kind of this larger than life sound. It's only because it's probably compressed and maybe normalized as well too. So I think that's really good. So advice to the talent out there that don't use quality as a way to watermark or degrade the sound. Right. You're really just disqualifying yourself from the program. There you are. Because the audition is not just for your performance. The audition is also can you deliver the quality of audio? You know, those are the two sides of two things I'm looking for. And then aside from that, the performance itself, I mean, you're probably hearing, hey, there's like six to ten great sounding, good quality. Maybe you've worked with them before you start to recognize some of the same names or it's somebody new. What are you listening for in the performance? I mean, this is copy. You're trying to bring it to life somehow. Is it just going to hit you in the heart, pulling the strings, or is there something else that you listen for? Usually nowadays it's a thing. And I know you guys have talked about it. It's that conversational. Natural sounding, so deep voice. I'm on to the next one. If anyone is talking like this, that's not natural. That's not conversation. And I'm listening for can I hear that you're just reading words on paper? Or does it sound like you really are trying to communicate with somebody or with me or with the listener, but in a totally relaxed way? So I don't want a car sales ad and it's really easy to spot. And also I don't want people to intro themselves, just get into it. If you are auditioning for this, you should have done a bit of research to find out what the brand is, what their style is, what they sort of like the vibe that they're going for. You should just be able to start the script from the beginning. Don't be like, Hi, my name is Mike and I'm reading for you today, and I'll be doing three versions. I'm onto the next. I'm not even going to like them. That comes from a construct of doing in person auditions. Right. When the name wasn't attached with the actor who was physically walking in the studio, that was sent there by their agent. Now online, what a lot of talent don't recognize is like your name is right beside the audition. You don't need to state your name again. And given that actually said, yeah, it's on the file, even if it's not your name. Sometimes you're just a number. Sometimes you're just like, because agencies have so many clients, they're not even putting. They're just putting your number. Our higher voice number 33413. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, right. That happens too. I don't really care what your neighbors. And usually when people start off and they do that and they say, I'm going to do three different takes and every take is exactly the same. Right. Setting yourself up, setting an expectation then not delivering on that expectation. Very interesting. Very interesting. No, I think this is so helpful because, listen, talent are auditioning ten times, 20 times a day. They're not getting the feedback. And one of the things that we hear from Talend is I wish somebody would give me feedback. Now listen, there's no expectation. There no one's going to go through reply to every single one of them. But I think today is a great venue to be able to you and many others are kind of speaking into the lives of talent, raise the game as well, too, and then ultimately get you and your clients better read. So I actually think this is super helpful. Any last things on auditions don't slate none of the preamble. There's a phrase in live performances for auditioning, which is, be good, be brief and be gone. And you're kind of in and out. Right? I think it's like if you're an actor and you're turning out for an audition for a film or something, there's a room outside with like 50 other actors. They've all got the same script, they're all going for the same role. And then there's like half a dozen dudes on the people on the other side of the wall. And they've been there all day long and they know the character, they know the film. So they know if you get it or you don't or if you're just going to walk in and if you're going to spend walk in and be like, Hi, my name is and look at everyone. Say hello to everybody on the line. They're like, we could have been halfway through it by now. Yeah. If you go like, well, I just need to get in. I'll just get into character and just give me a second. And they're just going to be like, are you going to be like that on set when we've got we're paying every second is money, and we're just trying to get the shot and move on to the next one. I want you to walk on set, boom, you're ready? And go, awesome. The audition process should be like that, too. When I receive a file, I just want it to be like, you know exactly what we want. And that's the birth. That's when it's like, yeah, I'll grab that person because I don't want to be good around, be good, be brief, be gone. I think that's a great advice, and thanks for the context there. Just switching briefly to the brands themselves. How are those brand campaigns changing, too? The idea of both simultaneously becoming more local as well as more global? I mean, brands are trying to spread their message more broadly, but realizing they need to do it in a localized fashion. How are you kind of seeing that play out? I've seen it a little bit. And going back to Spotify, I have done a few like that hyper local where it's about the accent of we've done some for Philadelphia and Chicago and somewhere else. It's got to be that local specific accent. And they'll use in Philly like I'm in New Zealandneyorker. I don't know if I'm saying John right. I know what it means. It means everything. They'll throw in local slang and sports teams, references, landmarks, whatever done a little bit of that. But I guess on a different side, the localization is also about devices you're using. So it's targeting the device that the user is listening on and which is not what you were talking about. But I do a lot more of that work than I do, kind of like just on campaigns based on a very small region. So it's like if you're on a mobile phone or a desktop, you might be served and they know what you're listening on. You might be served an ad where the call to action is click on the banner. But if you're at home on a connected device on your legs or whatever, and doing the housework, or if you're in a car driving, they also know when you're listening in that environment, you won't get served an ad that says click on the banner or whatever because you can't. Because you won't. Yeah. It's more like I always hear the phone number call to action when I'm driving and listening to Spotify. I mean, it's premium subscribers. I don't hear the ads at all. It's actually almost like Sirius XM or something else. I always hear these phone numbers in certain environments and then the click on the banner or something kind of more action oriented where you're in those other environments. That's fascinating. I think I heard one point. For every show on Netflix, there's something like 100 different formats. It was something insane of like Netflix is probably doing a similar type of thing for bandwidth, device geography, serving up a slightly different file format. And I think that's actually really interesting. That Spotify, both for probably the content itself, but also the Advertisement kind of recognizing like, hey, this application of Spotify is logged in from a car, so we know it's a car versus this one's connected to someone's Alexa. That's really how it's done. And that's how we get up to 2000 ads per campaign. That's because we're doing that many versions of one ad. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. And I know just kind of closing off and looking to the future you mentioned around the AI voice. How does that kind of factor into these multiple iterations of maybe one base ad? Is it different calls to action on the end, or is it just merely scaling up production? I think this is the most interesting. It's so interesting. When you start to really think about the applications of this, you will go crazy.

Participant #1:
I'm not using it yet, but I'm definitely looking at it and trying to sort of investigating. But imagine if you are any brand and you have your ultimate brand voice. What they can do, right, is like model an artificial voice on a real person's voice. You read, I don't know, 20 minutes worth of script, but it's very specific words that they choose you to say so that they can then manipulate that to kind of recreate any word. So you've got your that voice is the perfect brand voice for our brand. And now we want to use that. It wouldn't be great if we could use that voice everywhere. If you're like a Coca Cola or any global brands. Now you can create, you can type out a script. Now you've got that real person. You cannot tell that it's artificial like the real person. But now you can put the translated scripts in. And now that voice will read any language that you want, but it's the actual voice. You can imagine how brands will be like, yeah, now everywhere we're in, it all communicates the same vibe. And now think about those big kind of campaigns where and say there's a price point involved, 699. And then they come back a week later, they go, actually, we're changing the price on that campaign. It's now going to be 499 right now. We then have to go back and get all of the voice to, to rerecord that one line for that one little change or whatever. Imagine if then you'd be like, okay, I'm just going to go back into that script and change that price point and regenerate all those audio files and everything. Now within an hour, I've got it all back down and drop and just remix all of the voice of music. So those applications, which you can see just changing updates would be so much faster and so much less hassle. But also you can have one ultimate voice that is across everything. And then when you start thinking about it, and then I was like, wow, so then this could be applied to movies at the moment, dubbed versions of every movie goes out. Well, now you can actually have the actor's voice, the original actor in every single language down the road. I'm sure this is where you end up. Yeah. But of course, as voice talent, they'll be like, Whoa, wait a minute. Right? So you're going to come here, you're going to use an artificial voice to do all of this sort of stuff. Great for the person whose voice you're emulating because they're going to get rates and they're going to get a royalty. I'm very much in who if you're doing it down, if you're going down that track, the person's voice that you're modeling it off has to get royalties from their voice being used. They become the voice of the brand. But once that synthetic voice, that AI voice is created, the talent can continue to earn almost like a passive income stream. However, that's used maybe renew it annually. So the initial reaction that we hear is concern over compensation, over the long run, but I think that can be resolved through licensing. Just like you create an ad now and you're granting permission to use that license. But I actually believe as well that we are approaching, if not have reached that tipping point where the synthetic kind of computerized version of somebody is indistinguishable from their original recording. So interesting, we're starting to see talent actually take it upon themselves to say, you want to hire me to do it naturally, or do you want to hire my synthetic alternative, if you will? So they're using this to actually augment their own production because likewise, they don't want to be asked to kind of go back into the studio to edit one little thing. This kind of regenerates Tags as well, too. So there's definitely an opportunity there. And generally speaking, the shorter the content, the more suitable it would be for this. I didn't think about this book. Yeah, the audio book. I don't know. I feel like I might kind of clue in every now and then and be like, oh, I felt like it was missing a breath. There these inhuman type artifacts that sometimes show up. You're like, that didn't sound quite right, but when it's 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, yeah, it's almost so short where you wouldn't know and a lot of people don't know. So we're going to be thinking about doing some kind of blind listening tests and show people how they can kind of compare and contrast. But you're right. I think everyone acknowledges it's coming. It's probably more of a matter of when, if not, if you I think there's a race from the companies that are doing this development. There's a race between them to who's going to be the first to really nail it, but pricing has got to come into it as well. It's got to make sense cost wise and for the people who are paying for it to actually do it. But don't be afraid of it. Voice talent, you should see this as an opportunity. You should think, okay, I can either be afraid and think this is going to take, or I can be involved in jumping and learn about it, and I want to be one of the people that are taking part in it. Well, it sounds like that's what you're doing, as you said, used the word explore. So this is an exploratory phase. I think that's a discovery. Exploring first is a step in that direction without necessarily making any decisions or committing. I think that's likewise what we're doing here at Voices. Mike, we talked about what's next for the industry, anything you want to share about what's next for you in the studio or maybe some of the projects that you're working on that you wanted to speak to. I don't really have anything new kind of going on. Spotify continues to grow for me. I love working with them because the people there are so great and real everyone I've worked with. And the whole time I've been there, I've got to say, like, just real people, real down to Earth, funny personable. And there have been some agencies in the past that dealt with or whatever, and they're just so buttoned up and serious and business and it's kind of boring, especially in the creative industry. Right. You want it to feel like, hey, we're on the same wavelength here. Whatever it is that we're creating or project, we're contemplating. We're not working at a bank because we didn't want to work at banks. That's why we're doing this sort of stuff. Yeah. And I also do a music stream for Macintosh labs, which is a lot of fun to check that it's called Macintosh music labs are like super high end audio file audio components. You've got to be kind of really wealthy to afford one of the handful speakers. Beautiful. But I run a music stream for them, which is they're so open. They really let me pick and choose every song on there and I confer with them a little bit. Do you guys want to throw in anything here? Such an eclectic mix of music. But every song on there we make sure is great. It just runs like a radio stream. So you don't pick because you don't have control. You just push play and it's just playing like a stream of music. Yeah. So that is just a lot of fun from the music side of things. No, that sounds really cool. I'll have to check that one. Yeah. Macintosh music. It's a very basic little app. It's just like push play. And then that's why I think one of the reasons why Spotify itself was so successful Is that people don't want to always have to tee up the next track, like the playlist being right there just creates for an indefinite playlist, an indefinite listening experience. This has been such a delight to have you on the show today, and I think I learned a lot about formats as well, too, as well as the creative process. Helpful advice for producers evaluating talent as well as those talent who are auditioning for producers such as yourself. Mike, if people wanted to get in touch, Is there a way to maybe reach out to you through your website? What's the best way to connect? Mikeyoungstudio.com really simple. And my email is on there, [email protected]. Easy enough. Well, hopefully we don't get you inundated with that, but I know people appreciate seeing the projects that you do for Spotify come through Voices.com as well. Well, amazing. Thanks for joining me today, Mike. Until next time, I'm David Ciccarelli, the founder and CEO of Voices, and you've been listening to voice branding.