EPISODE 228: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Richard James Burgess

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Richard James Burgess for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Richard and here’s what we discussed about-

1. Creating platforms to unite isolated music entrepreneurs and professionals.

2. Spreading best practices and insights via panels, roundtables, and conferences.

3. Encouraging cost-effective, community-driven marketing over big-budget campaigns.

4. Acknowledging AI’s creative potential despite controversy and uncertainty.

5. What independent artists and labels can learn from startup methodology.

6. Assessing the potential of NFTs and decentralized tech in artist monetization.

About our host:

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of Outgrow.co, a platform designed to help marketers create highly interactive web and social experiences to drive referral traffic and lead generation. With a background in venture capital, private equity, and startups focusing on financial services, transaction processing, and machine learning, He is passionate about leveraging technology to transform marketing strategies. He believes in shifting from traditional advertising to creating valuable tools and experiences for customers. 

About our guest:

Dr. Richard James Burgess is the President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), with a distinguished career in the music industry. A celebrated producer, author, and musician, he has worked with major labels and independent artists, producing gold and platinum albums.

Marketing Music: American Association of Independent Music’s CEO Richard Burgess on AI, NFTs, & Vinyl

The Intro!

Randy Rayess: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Randy Rayess, and I’m the co-founder at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to Richard James Burgess, who is the President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).

Richard James Burgess: Great to be here. Thank you.

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The Big Questions!

Randy Rayess: Welcome to Marketer of the Month. Today, we have a special guest from A2IM with us. He is here with us at South by Southwest. And Richard is the CEO of A2IM. So he’s gonna be giving us a little bit of an overview of what he does, and what A2IM does, and then we’re gonna dive into some questions. Welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard James Burgess: Thank you so much. It’s nice to see you. I appreciate it.

Randy Rayess:  So let’s start with, it would be great to just learn a little bit about A2IM. So what do you guys do, and then we can go from there.

Richard James Burgess:  Sure. Well, A2IM was formed 20 years ago, actually this year. And I’ve been associated with A2IM pretty much from the beginning. I was a member from 2005 when it was formed, and eventually I wound up on the board, and I wound up as chairman of the board. And then, when my predecessor left, they asked me if I wanted to, you know, take the job. There was a wide search, and at the end, they asked me if I wanted it, and I thought it was a pretty cool job. So I did, I took it. Previous to that, I was at the Smithsonian at the Smithsonian Poway recordings. And so I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve been here 10 years now, and last year in June our at our yearly conference, I announced that I was gonna resign as of the end of this year. So this is my 10th year, and I had just decided that 10 years was a good period to do this, and I have other things I wanna do, but it’s a great organization. I’ve been very happy here. And it achieves a lot, I think, and has achieved a lot over its 20-year history.

Randy Rayess: And would you be able to share kind of some things that details about what you guys do and what makes you guys unique or special?

Richard James Burgess: Sure. Well, you know, the organization’s full name is the American Association of Independent Music. And so it, itically represents independent record labels primarily. But we also have, you know, publishers as part of it. And then we have these associate members who are not voting members of the organization, but they’re the service industries that work with the independents. And what we do is we, you know, look out for the well-being of independent labels in every way, shape, or form. So, on one hand, you know, we say that we do advocacy, education, and connection. So it’s, you know, the being independent, isolating, because you’re very often, if you’re a very small label, it’s just you or a couple of employees, and you don’t have any contact with other people. You know, if you work for a major label, you’ve got contact with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people. That’s not true with the independence. So A2IM is a way ois f sort of connecting the dots between the independence and then also spreading knowledge. That’s the education part. And then if something’s going wrong in the sector in general, if we feel that things are moving against the best interest of the industry, we do advocacy. And that takes several forms. One is the most obvious form, which is that we have political advocacy in Washington, DC, with Congress and the regulatory agencies. But also, we sometimes represent Independence’s best interest in the states as well. And we work with all the other trade associations too, here we have common interests. And then we do advocacy, which is direct, you know, something’s going wrong with a relationship with you know, a distributor or some other kind of organization that’s an associate member of servicethe industry for the independent SIM. It’s very often have those conversations with them to see where the problems lie and what we can sort out. So it’s in the widest possible sense, just looking out for the best interest of the independent recording industry.

Randy Rayess: Interesting. And when you look at the independent recording industry, do you feel like their current approach to marketing and getting the word out, as you said, they’re much smaller organizations, they don’t have the networks when they approach marketing. How do you help them kind of think that through and improve in the way they market their independent labor?

Richard James Burgess: Well, we have an annual conference called Indy Week, and we have a lot of panels at that conference. And we also do round tables, we do keynote speeches, and then there’s just simply networking. So a lot of this information is sort of conveyed, you know, sort of peer to peer as it were. So, you know, we do several marketing panels every Indy week, and that helps disseminate information as to the sort of state of the art of of marketing in the independent sector, which is somewhat different than marketing in the major level sector, because most independent labels have less money than the major labels do. So they have to be more kind of gorilla, as it were. They have to be more kind of grassroots. But we have some independent labels that have extremely high revenues. And you know, and the endents also have broken some very big artists. I mean, I always point out that Adele and Taylor Swift were both independent until a couple of years ago when their contracts were up with the independent labels, and they wound up going to the majors. So it’s not that the independent can’t have big hits, they definitely can, but it is tthe independent very often indeed getsted in music that is a little more niche than the major labels do, because they have thcanhese niche artists and develop them in a way maybe that the major labels would not be interested in.

Randy Rayess:  I think that’s very interesting. And have you seen that with the growth of Instagram and TikTok for music discovery, a lot of people are now finding these artists that may not have been easy to find in the past. People are finding them, on they’re at least discovering a portion of their music. A portion of their songs is on these platforms. How has that kind of changed the ability for independent labels to get hits? And I’m guessing it’s probably improved their odds.

Richard James Burgess: I think the new tools are really interesting. I think, you know, TikTok, what I hear is that the biggest difficulty is having any control over it. It’s one thing, you know, if you get a viral hit and it causes a spike in your streams, then everybody’s grateful for that. But you know, if you’ve got a band that’s bringing out a record or an artist that’s bringing out a record, it’s very hard to engineer a TikTok hit these days. Maybe in the beginning it was a lot easier, but these days it seems that they kind of either happen or they don’t happen. And what is more useful for our labels if they have somewhat controllable marketing tools, know, you can never fully control marketing in the sense that you try things and sometimes they just don’t work. But with TikTok, there’s really to control it at all. You can, you can make all kinds of tiktoksTikToksan hire influencers to make them for you or whatever, but there’s no guarantee that they’re gonna go viral. You could just make it, and it would sort of disappear without a trace. So that’s a bit of a challenge with the current approach. But there are a lot of avenues for independents to promote their artists. I mean, touring being this classic one, and it’s still a valid path to success for a lot of independent artists.

Randy Rayess: Right, and have you seen AI play a role already in the way people market and the way people explore new ideas for music creation? And how do you see that playing out in terms of now this whole new technology that not only can help you think through ideas of where to tour and how to promote your, your brand, but also people are using it in the generation process of generation music or generating music, which is a whole thing in and of itself. How has that kind of impacted the industry?

Richard James Burgess: So I haven’t directly seen that, but I will say that I use AI a lot. I think it’s the most powerful tool, but I mean, I think it’s pretty obviously the most powerful tool that humanity’s ever invented. I hear all the doom and gloom and everything, but I’ve been involved in technologies, new technologies that impact the music industry since the seventies. And every time this new technology comes along, I remember when I made the first record by computer, everybody was up in arms, and this was gonna be the end of the music industry. And it hasn’t been the end of the music industry. Everybody makes records by computer now. Same thing. When I brought out electronic drums, it was gonna be the end of, you know, the world, and it wasn’t the end of the world. So I don’t think this is gonna be the end of the world either. And I think that it is a really useful tool. And I haven’t seen direct examples of how people are using it for marketing, but I can tell you that I use it for research a great deal. And I find it amazingly useful. And and I t in terms of the creation, a lot of people aren’t talking about the creation using AI because it’s kind of a controversial topic, but I’m certain that musicians will always use the latest technology. It’s been true since the time of Memorial. I mean, once upon a time, you know, there were no drums of skin stretched over hollow logs. And, you know, that started there. And then, you know, we’ve had all kinds of innovations since then, stringed instruments that didn’t exist at a certain point. And then we have the saxophone, the piano, synthesizer instruments, you know, so the musicians are creative people, and they’ll always use the latest technology, and I do not doubt that they’ll be using AI to assist them in creating new music. And I think even though it’s a controversial topic, I’m sure that in the end we’ll wind up with some great music that comes out of it.

Randy Rayess: That’s great. I think it’s kind of one of those things that we’ll see how it develops. I think it’s still so early in the game that you kind of don’t have all the information on how everything’s gonna play out. 

Richard James Burgess: I can say one thing about that. I mean, I recorded the first digital sample on Kate Bush’s album, Never Forever, with my colleague John Walters. Uwe was bowing the band landscape and, you know, I had the very first, or one of the first three, Fairlight, cmis that came out of Australia. And I can say that, as much as I was there at the beginning, I couldn’t know which way sampling was gonna go. I mean, that first sample was pretty primitive. You know, it was less than 30 seconds 30-second. It wasn’t a very wide frequency range. I think it was like a 4 or 5K frequency range. It was pretty limited. And, you know, it was hard to see how samples would wind up sort of, merging with hip hop and, you know, winding up, you know, where you have an eight bus sample of a track or something, it goes round and around. So I think it’s very difficult to say right now exactly where it’s gonna go, but I’m sure that AI will become a big part of our lives and creative life as well.

Randy Rayess: Agreed. That’s an interesting point. Yeah. When you look back, it’s like with the internet or with computing, you can’t, you only figure, oh, like 20 years later, you’re like, oh, that seems obvious, but 20 years ago it wasn’t obvious. It’s obvious today, because you see the success, and it makes sense. So I think that’s a great point. I know that you’ve done some really interesting projects at Smithsonian Folkways, and I was curious to hear more about that experience, what you found most rewarding what you found Interesting?

Richard James Burgess: Right. I mean, honestly, it was a great experience and you know, there were so werey great projects. I mean, honestly, everything I did there was really interesting. I went there because they had the Leadbelly collection. And the Leadbelly collection was something that influenced me as a kid. You know, actually, in England until I was nine. And I got interested in Leadbelly songs without knowing it through an artist called Lonnie Donegan when I was about 13. There was a, you know, the person in the record store where I lived in New Zealand said, You gotta listen to this record. And he handed me a lead belly record, and I put it on, well, they put it on, and I put the headphones on, as you did back in those days, in the store. I suddenly realized this was the original of all the stuff I had liked that Lonnie Donegan had done. It was like a midnight special and all those kinds of songs. And it changed my life because I realized that, as much as I liked Lonnie Donogan, the Lead Belly songs were sort of the authentic article, and it was incredibly exciting. So when the opportunity came up to go there, I jumped at it to work with that collection. And then subsequently, I wound up, you know, working on so many projects. But I wasn’t on the production side there. I was, you know, doing the business side, but I was still fortunate enough to be able to produce some things. I went to Venezuela and engineered some recordings there. And I produced or compiled the classic blues set, and then I produced jazz, the Smithsonian Anthology, and the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip Hop and Rap, which was a great experience. And you know, I was pleased to be able to add those titles to the collection because I think that it’s really important that the Smithsonian acknowledges music like jazz and hip hop. So, that was very satisfying.

Randy Rayess: That’s cool. It’s, you know, it’s nice to get like that broad experience and to, to a variety of different genres as well as being able to, to contribute. So I think that’s a, that’s a cool story. Do you feel, I guess in terms of the plate, a lot of people have been talking about, okay, how are NFTs and blockchain gonna impact independent artists? Some people say that NFTs and blockchain allow people to possibly, you know, buy micro payments for listening to a piece of art, for listening to a piece of music. It could be that they could sell their NFTs. For like you know, their super fans. Like, say, their top thousand fans get access to a certain NFT if they’ve attended a certain number of live concerts. And how do you, I mean, how do you kind of think through, okay, are NFTs and blockchain gonna impact these independent artists, and would it, how would they impact play? How would it impact them?

Richard James Burgess: So I think some technologies come along and, you know, they’re subject to, I think it’s called the Gartner Hype Curve, and where they’re over-prover-predicted short term and punder-predicted long term. And I think a classic example of that is VR and AR. Sure. So big VR AR fan, I think I have three sets of VR, AR headsets, and I enjoy VR, but it hasn’t broken out in a big way, partly because the technology is so clunky right now. You know, it’s big, it’s heavy., But it is an amazing experience. And, I do think that VR and AR will become a big part of our lives at some point in the future. I can’t guarantee that, but it’s such an amazing experience that I can’t imagine it won’t happen. But I think the same is true with NFTs and blockchain. You know, people have been talking about blockchain for a long time, and then some people say, well, it never really happened. And I go, well, it’s happening pretty well in the crypto world, Bitcoin was worth $108,000 the other day, right? It was only like 79,000 today, I think. But it’s working. And the thing about NFTs is, I think it was kind of discredited about two years ago because there was a lot of hype about it. And there were people kind of, you know, pirating people’s stuff and selling it as NFTs. But I think the concept of a token, which is effectively a crypto coin or something, is pretty interesting. I think, as you say, for ticketing, it’s a great way of, you know, sort of authenticating ownership of a ticket. But I think also that’s true for purchasing things, including recordings. So I don’t know exactly how it’s gonna manifest itself, but I think that the, you know, the sort of blockchain, crypto kind of technology that underpins NFTs or tokens is going to be useful in the future. And I think we just gotta figure out exactly what the application is these days. I hear people refer to it more as a token, ’cause it seems like NFTs get people’s backs up because of the sort of deceptions that happened two or three years ago. But the basic technology is solid. The other thing with blockchain, I think, that is important is the moving from proof of work to proof of stake, ’cause one of the big objections to blockchain is the amount of energy it consumes. And proof of stake doesn’t use anywhere near the same amount of energy. There are issues with proof of stake as well. But I think both technologies will eventually find their way into useful applications for recorded artists, recording artists and live artists, and the whole music industry. I think any kind of authentication is a good thing.

Randy Rayess: Fair enough, I think that’s interesting to see that the analogy you made with AR versus blockchains, where you have a technology that has a tremendous amount of power. The question is when will it, right? When will it find its time?

Richard James Burgess: Well, we saw it happen with Apple recently. They brought out those I forget what it’s called now, the Apple Vision Pro, it was amazing, truly amazing. But it was incredibly expensive and still pretty clunky. I mean, it was a little bit better. It wasn’t quite as heavy as my first my first headset that I had and don’t have wires, which was nice. But it’s still not there. I think when we get to a point where you can do VR or and or ar with sort of something that resembles normal glasses, normal spectacles, that would be amazing. Speculated that eventually it’ll get to a point where it’ll be in contact lenses, because I think it was 20 years ago we learned how to embed circuitry into contact lenses. So that’s a known technology, how soon would that find its way through into something like that? I don’t know. But we’re seeing the you know, massive miniaturization process that’s going on, you know, the doubling of power every 18 months kind of thing. And I think I fully expect that we’ll see, you know, VR AR integrated into our lives at some point, but also as NFTs, tokens, whatever. And blockchain, I think the smart contract thing has been talked about for a long time. It’s a great idea. The question is, implementing it, and, if you could write all the splits and all the payment systems into a smart contract and have everybody be automatically paid every time there was a transaction, that would be unbelievable. Upractically speaking. I think we’ve got a way to go on that.

Randy Rayess: That’s interesting. I think you’re right. When it kind of happens, and when people realize this is the exact solution. At what time does it look obvious?

Richard James Burgess: I mean, it’s like AI, you know, people have been talking about AI forever, and then suddenly it’s here. And you know, you also get this kind of phenomenon with human beings where, you know, we just accept things. It becomes the norm, like within about two hours, I mean, the fact that you can just ask AI to sort of, you know, give you a review of an 80-page document or something, and it does it in five seconds, it’s insane. It’s truly insane. It’s like it’s science fiction, and yet now I just take it for granted.

Randy Rayess: Right. It’s, it is amazing how quickly that not only how quickly it’s evolved and improved in the last, like, since the launch, I guess, November 22. Now you have this great growth, and it’s it is become kind of now people are expecting. People are now used to it. You know, so it’s, we are quick to adapt, I guess.

Richard James Burgess: Absolutely. I think it is an amazing thing, but it’s also important to look back and go, wow, I’ve come a long way.

Randy Rayess: Right. That’s true. And you know, you have so much experience in this field. What would you say are kind of your top lessons learned along the way? What kind of things have you learned today? You’re like, that was a big lesson, or that was a big moment where I kind of learned things. It can be multiple moments, but where you’re like, I learned something bad.

Richard James Burgess: I think the number one thing I’ve learned is never give up. And that anything worth doing is really difficult. I often say if it were easy, everybody would be doing it ’cause it’s too much fun. And I think more than anything, you know, I have a, I sort of lived my life out of sort of adages and sayings, but I always say, you know, you have to kiss a lot of frogs, you know, and the truth of matter is, is that, you know, it is very hard to do anything worthwhile the first time. You just gotta try and you gotta try again and you gotta try hard. When you think it’s just about impossible, you’re just about getting started is my, is my experience in everything I do. I started as a drummer, and I thought I was pretty good in the first week, but a few years later, I realized that was embarrassing. And you know, you just gotta keep at it. The other thing I would say is you have to learn to accept failure or rejection if you’re a musician. And I think the road to success is called failure. And you have to go down that road if you want. If you’re not prepared to go down that road, I don’t think you can be successful. 

Randy Rayess: Sure, that’s a good one. And applies beyond just the music industry, kind of appliesto  Everything in life.

Richard James Burgess: Yes. Everything in life. If something, you know, if it’s a big enough thing. I mean, but probably everything in life really, whether it’s dating or, you know, being a musician or being a good business person or whatever it is, being a technologist, I think you’ve just gotta go through a lot of iterations and you’ve gotta try things again and again and again and be prepared to fail. And I like the fail off and fail quickly. Yeah. Philosophy. I think that’s a good one. The quicker you get through the iterations that aren’t gonna work, the faster you can get to the iterations that will work.

Randy Rayess: Right. And the more you learn. Because you’re learning fast instead of learning slowly.

Richard James Burgess: Yes. Build, measure, learn, I think, is the saying. And I like that one too.

Randy Rayess: That’s a good one as well. One of the things talking about measurement that I think comes up a lot is how these independent labels think through advertising when, you know, you’re trying to measure the success of your ads versus organic growth. How do you kind of guide people through this kind of understanding of, okay, well you don’t wanna put a hundred percent of your money in your first campaign ad campaign, obviously you want to kind of balance some organic growth strategies with paid advertising. And given that the budgets are much smaller than, you know, the big labels, they can’t match the big labels when it comes to ad spend.

Richard James Burgess: So I think that’s sort of a secret source of being an independent, is that to do a lot with a little, and if you look at the, the marketing spends and the A and R spends of independent labels, they are just tiny fractions of what the major label ones have. But there’s a sort of truism on all this and that is that, you know, there’s, I think, it’s a British saying, which is you know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig, you know? We used to say that in producing records, you know you gotta start with a great song, and you gotta start with a great artist, and you gotta start with something that has appealed to people. And that’s hard to tell when you first start. I mean, there are a ton of ways you kind of make those judgments. You know, you try to sign artists that maybe they played a bunch of gigs and they, you know, they’ve got a rabid following. It might only be a couple hundred people, but you can, you know, you can see the model. It’s like an MVP. It’s like, okay, if a couple hundred people are consistently coming out to see them, you know, that’s like an MVP. And you know, I generally think human beings are fairly consistent, and you know, 200 people in say Baltimore is gonna translate to 200 people, le and, you know, many other mid-sized American cities. And so I think that it’s really important to ascertain whether you do have something that has appeal as early on as possible before you throw a lot of money at it. And I think that I’ve seen more money wasted because people are convinced that you can kind of market anything. And I’ve always followed the, to go back to my adages, the adage that the best marketing is a great product. Now that’s not enough. Making a great product is not enough. I mean, if you put it in a box and leave it in your basement, it’s not gonna do anything, you know, to take, that’s another thing I try to think of is what’s the extreme example of this? You know? So, you know, if you think, well, if I do nothing, so if I put it in a box, put it in my basement, that’s doing nothing. Well, nobody’s gonna buy it. So you’ve gotta get it out there and you’ve gotta, you know, put it in front of people. But at the same time, if you start putting it in front of people and you’re getting sort of rejection all the way, you kind of have to rethink it a little bit. And sometimes it is just perseverance. You gotta fail and you gotta fail often, and you gotta fail quickly. But at the same time, there comes a point where you have to say maybe the, maybe the product’s not quite right. And that’s where the build measure learn comes in. So I’m a big fan of the MVP concept of don’t build the thing out fully until you know that you’ve got something that people like.

Randy Rayess: Correct. I like the idea that you need a bad product with great marketing is gonna fail at the end of the day. Still a bad Product and then a great product with zero marketing,also it’s gonna fail too. You need some marketing, you need some awareness. Otherwise, as you said ,if it’s in a box in your basement, no one’s gonna find it.

Richard James Burgess: It’s like lighting a fire. You know, I was funny. I was just showing someone the other week about lighting fire. ’cause I, I grew up lighting fires and and you know, you start with like, well if you do it, you know, really primitively with a flint or rubbing sticks together, but even just with a match or with a lighter or something, you know, you’ve gotta have like, you gotta have the tinder, you know, the, the little tiny bits that catch fire immediately. Right. And then you’ve gotta have the medium-sized sticks that catch fire after that, and then eventually it’ll catch fire on, on the bigger sticks or the coals or whatever. And I think marketing’s exactly like that, but if you don’t get that tinder that in the beginning you’re never gonna get a fire going, you know, you can, you can hold a match to a large log all day long and you’re never gonna get a fire guy.

Randy Rayess: That’s an Interesting point.

Richard James Burgess: I think that’s how marketing works, too. You gotta see that spark in the beginning.

Randy Rayess: I like that. I like that idea of like the one extension of that is that you don’t have to focus on getting the biggest lognumbero. Going at the beginning. You wanna focus on the small one first, and then we will progress.

Richard James Burgess: In Fact, you won’t get there if you focus on the biggest lo, ’cause it just will not set. You need, you need a substantial amount of heat and a substantial amount of, you know, sort of things burning to get that big log right going. So I think a lot of people skip that phase. You know, a lot of artists skip that phase. They, they sort of think they’re gonna go straight to the stadium or something. You gotta start in small places.

Randy Rayess: You gotta crawl before you can walk, and you gotta walk before you can run. Yeah, exactly. This has been great, honestly. We’ve covered a lot of different topics. In closing, I always ask if you have any pieces of advice that you’d like to give, the audience or anything you’d like to close with.

Richard James Burgess: Do you think your audience is mainly artists or mainly labels?

Randy Rayess: The, well, the audience is quite a broad range. A lot of these, a lot of the audience is gonna be on the marketing side of things. How to market, yeah. How to market these products, music, or businesses. So it’s a lot of marketers. And so I think, but it can be, it can be general advice for marketers. There are a lot of entrepreneurs as well. Yeah. On the one independent creators.

Richard James Burgess: I think to understand your market. I mean, I’m a big fan, again, I go back to my adages, but you gotta fish where the fish are. You can fish all day. If there’s no fish there, you’re not gonna catch one. You know, so perhaps the first thing is to figure out where the fish are. And that can vary depending on, you know, if you’ve got an EDM artist, it’s gonna be different than a hip hop artist. If you’ve got a hip hop artist, it’s gonna be different than a, you know, sort of hyper pop artist or something. So, you know, figure out where your market is and then really orient your marketing towards that and your attention towards that. I think there’s a lot of wasted energy that happens because people are trying to you know, light the big log as it were. So that’s it. And then I think what I said before, which is, don’t give up. But at the same time, be prepared to iterate. I think iteration’s critically important. You know I’ve been, I still regard myself as creative, even though, you know, I’m sort of more in the business and advocacy side in this job. And you know, I don’t see much difference between what I did as a musician, what I did as an artist, what I did as a producer, and what I did as a manager. It’s all the same. It’s sort of, you know, you try something and you keep trying. You just keep iterating until you see that spark happen. And then just at that point, don’t give up. It usually starts to happen when you’re feeling completely exhausted, you just don’t feel like it’s gonna happen. Yeah. And that’s the point, not to give up.

Let’s Conclude!

Randy Rayess: Thanks, everyone, for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Richard James Burgess, who is the President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).

Richard James Burgess: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Randy Rayess: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.