Setmixer is Recording Live Music and Bringing Back the Bootleg

This transcript has been AI generated. Please excuse any typos.

Imagine leaving a concert of your favorite indie band or singer with an actual studio quality recording of the live performance. Great for fans and for artists who now have a new revenue stream and a direct link to their fans. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Setmixer, the UK company that’s making that happen and coming to America.

Welcome back to The Angel Nest, where real angel investors and entrepreneurs partner to build great companies. I’m David Hemenway. I’m a five-time founder and an active angel investor, and my mission here is to tell the stories that are powering innovation.

Setmixer founder Pascal de Mul started out equipping venues in the UK with the Setmixer recorders, capturing every instrument and voice in its own track, just as a studio would. Then his platform distributes to fans almost instantly. He’s no stranger to the music space.

He served at a very young Spotify as their first hardware chief, and he spent time at French streaming service Deezer. He also headed TouchTunes and Play Network in Europe. We meet Pascal today and find out why seasoned investors are backing Setmixer.

One of those is Daryl Clarke, who has a history of starting and profitably selling businesses like Setmixer. He’s going to be chairman and leverage his business connections to introduce Setmixer to major music and entertainment companies, along with the management companies that represent the artists. Pascal and Daryl, welcome to The Angel Nest.

Thank you. Thanks, David. Thanks for having us.

Pascal, we’ve all been to great performances that we’d like to relive. What a fabulous idea to make this affordable and accessible. Thanks so much.

I feel exactly the same way. That’s why I set it up. So tell us how you came to invent this amazing program.

Well, I think as every good idea is, it’s kind of scratching my own back. I may look a bit younger, but I’m old enough to be growing up with cassettes and bootlegs. I remember that more than half of my cassettes were live recordings.

They were not always as legal as they should be, but they were fantastic. Especially the ones of the shows that I had been to, I just played them until you couldn’t play them anymore. Then in 2010, I found myself at a very young Spotify.

I saw firsthand how the music industry changed from physical distribution, so from cassettes and CDs, into the internet and streaming. During that time, record stores disappeared virtually
overnight because streaming just took over. Now they’re coming back a little bit because you can see that people really want to have a closer connection to music, which I think is another wave that we’re surfing on.

Primarily, I saw that if there’s no physical distribution, there’s also no distribution of bootlegs. The invention of Spotify, as part of the early team, we never intended to do this, but we basically killed the bootleg along with all the piracy that we killed. Therefore, there’s hardly any good live recordings out there anymore.

The only thing you can find now is handheld videos on YouTube and on the social media channels. Of course, if you’re standing in the audience, the audio is not going to be very good. Tell us how many venues you’re at and what adoption looks like.

We’ve got about 75 venues right now. In those venues, we have a permanent recorder installed that’s connected directly to the sound desk. We record all the incoming channels of the sound desk, basically how a studio does it. We also record all the audio sounds. You do hear that it’s live music. It’s got that full atmosphere of life, but it’s got incredible quality.

That’s great. Daryl Clarke, you’re coming in as a business person and an early investor. Tell us how you see SetMixer growing in the future.

I wasn’t fishing around for an investment opportunity. My investments in all the businesses that I’ve ended up coming in as have really been around the fact that they’re solving a need for me. I go to a lot of live music.

Pascal and I got chatting. Everybody you talk to about the SetMixer idea goes, it’s a brilliant idea, almost universally. I’ve never really seen that from a business.

You show some people an idea and they think, well, it could work, it couldn’t work. Everybody goes, it’s a brilliant idea. Why hasn’t somebody done it? I was super excited about, number one, it solves a problem for me.

I don’t have to watch these terrible recordings on my phone. That gives you no really fan experience back. Number two, it’s a really massive opportunity in terms of an opportunity for the bands.

It helps bands readdress the streaming demise of income that they’ve got. They’ve really been killed by streaming. Whilst it gives you a wider audience, no one’s getting rich off Spotify except that really tiny top percentage.

I like the democratization of income opportunity for the bands. It really excited me because bands work very hard and I think they get a raw deal now. This is a two-way win.

It solves my problem of wanting the fandom set. It solves the band problem of actually being able to earn some money out of the music industry. It’s a huge opportunity, really massive.

Of course, so much of media consumption these days, Pascal, is video. How are you going to deal with that? Do you have plans to bring video into SetMixer?

We have video on the roadmap. We haven’t done it yet for the simple reason that you can do audio without video, but you can’t do video without audio.

We get a lot of inbound traffic from people that are making live videos and they need a solution for their audio, which we can provide, but also for the fans. We already see today that clever artists that know that we are in one of our venues, they ask their friends to bring a phone and to make a video recording during their show. Then they manually sync our audio to that video.Instantly, they have a great live recording that they can put all over social media. We see that behavior already. We are going to put that into our product.

We’re looking at possibly Q2, possibly Q3, depending on how our finances work out. We’re going to put some development resources on allowing the fans to upload videos, and then we can sync our soundboard audio to it. Imagine you’re a fan, you’re just taking a video during a concert, you upload it to SetMixer, you get it back with perfect audio.

That’s the vision. We let the fans do it instead of having to bring cameras to the shows ourselves. The performers are really your clients.

It sounds like you’ve got a lot of ways to serve them. Talk about the SetMixer showcase, if you would.

The whole company has been set up really with the music industry in mind. I wanted to do something good for the artists. We have a couple of principles that are baked into our legal documentation that we have. They’re hard to change for SetMixer.

One of them is that the artist is in control. The other has to do with the fact that we’re paying the artists decently. We’re paying them 70%.

We’re really working on behalf of the artist. Now that we are in 75 venues in the UK, and there’s arguably about 300 venues that matter, maybe 250. We’re in a significant percentage of those.

Seeing that the artists are touring, we can see a lot of artists. We see a big percentage of the up-and-coming artists in the UK. We’ve decided to help the artists even more.

We have a newsletter called SetMixer showcase that I sent out to all my industry contacts with my background at Spotify. You can imagine that’s quite wide. A lot of people have signed up from big promoters, big labels, agents, lots of other people.

Every Tuesday, they now receive the five most listened to artists straight from the stage in our grassroots venues. For an artist, that means you just have to do a really great show. You need to get it out to your fans so that they listen.

The next week, you could be in the newsletter and picked up by one of the major labels. We make it that direct. I hope that there is going to be successes coming out of this.

Daryl Clarke, as the future chairman, I’m curious how big you think this business can get. Well, the opportunity is just colossal. I think it will quickly become a nice to have or a new idea to suddenly if a couple of decent sized bands get behind it, then it’s going to be that the expectation from the fan will be, why can’t I buy the live set? The pivot point, I think, is pretty quick on this.

We envisage a situation where you might be clicking on the ticketing platform and along with the insurance option, there’s an option just to purchase your set mix delivered to you 24 hours after the gig. From an opportunity point of view, I think it’s easily the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in. All of my other businesses, they’ve been pretty sizable, but from an opportunity point of view, you’ve had to work quite hard to grow them.

This is potentially global and massive very quickly. I hear you guys met on a random double date, right? Yes, quite bizarrely. My wife’s best friend was dating Pascal and we went on a random double date.

You do the boyfriend-husband shuffle introduction and Pascal’s like, I do this thing. I’m like, wow, that’s just brilliant. I came away from that dinner thinking it was the best thing I’d heard in ages.

I was excited from the get-go. Yeah, opportunities often present
themselves in strange ways, right?

They do. They certainly do. Pascal, talk about the archives. You’ve got some ideas about going into the archives and releasing, or maybe in some cases, re-releasing classic performances.

Yeah, absolutely.

When I started thinking about the idea, I used to be the managing director for Play Network, which does all the background music for Starbucks. In doing so, I was talking to, actually, a pizza chain here in London and they have some legendary jazz venues. I spoke to them about, well, if we do the background music, why can’t we play the music from your stages? That was a great idea, but they said, well, we know that the mixing engineer may have made some recordings, but we just can’t really get access to it.

That never lost my brain. I asked them, so who could be on those recordings? I mentioned a couple of jazz musicians that I actually don’t really know that well, but one name stood out and that was Amy Winehouse. They may be sitting on a recording of Amy Winehouse in front of 40 people.

Imagine that recording just not coming out. As a fan, that’s almost criminal, right? Those kind of performances are happening and you can’t relive them. That happened seven and a half million times in the world.

You can’t relive them. Those are things that are happening every day, but there’s also a whole history of recordings that may be around, may have been recorded somewhere and they’re just lying around, completely not accessible. One of the things that we want to do is allow people to start uploading these recordings.

We can mix and master them. We do that automatically for all the different shows that we are recording today. We can do that for the archive as well.

Then you could have it that major artists that have been recording for 10, 15 years, 20 years, I don’t know how long, they could upload their entire archive and we could turn that into mixed and mastered versions that the fans can have access to. That’s a wealth of live music that is just waiting to be uncovered. I just know that all those recordings are out there.

I’ve been approached by some major catalog owners about this. That’s something that’s also, we would love to start working on this and getting those recordings from the 70s, from the 80s, all those live shows, getting them published again, that would be a dream.

Are there copyright or performance rights issues with what you’re doing? No, it’s actually quite simple because every performance is a new recording, so there’s not any existing master that we need to pay for.

Daryl Clarke, what other opportunities are there for Setmixer? We’re very excited about the festival opportunity. We’ve had some initial meetings with some festival organizers and they’re thinking that you could, at the end of every day of a festival you’ve attended, download all the sets you visited because the users are tracked via the phone mask about which particular sets they do now. They do this in a small way in the UK with a couple of festivals where they’ll send you video clips of the sets that you attended, but if you could download thE entire day’s worth of attendance from a festival point of view, again, maximizing the fandom experience from the festival provider and again giving some additional revenue to those bands.

So we’re very excited about festivals as a market on its own. Pascal, I can sense that our investors are listening and wondering what the next 12 months look like and when you’re coming to the US. We’re preparing the US launch right now, so we’re having conversations with slightly bigger venue groups because we don’t want to start with just one or two venues, so we’re looking at venue groups and just launching with a whole venue group.

So those discussions are happening right now and depending on the speed of those discussions, we can launch as quickly as we want. We already support Northern Ireland, which is a different island to Britain, and we do that by Royal Mail, so we just send out the recorders there, the venues install some themselves, so we don’t even have to be there, so it’s very scalable. We can go to any market at the moment, so it’s just a question of discussions.

And separately, we are already going to the US, so we are already touring with some artists in the US, and we are going to expand that very rapidly. The US is probably going to happen this year, but I can’t tell you exactly the date when that’s going to happen.

Fascinating. Well, keep us posted. We’ll pass it on. Absolutely.

Pascal de Mul and Daryl Clarke from SetMixer, thanks for joining us this morning from London. Thank you, David. Great to meet you.

Thanks, David. Thanks for your time.

You can learn more and get contact information for our guests today at theangelnest.com, where you can also reach me if you know of an interesting company or an industry that we should profile.

A reminder that we don’t make or recommend investments at the Angel Nest, and this program is for informational purposes only. We produce the Angel Nest with help from Rob Higley and Charles DeMontebello. He’s at the controls of CDM Studios at the famous Art Deco Film Center building just west of Times Square in New York.

I’m David Hemenway. Thanks for listening. So long until next time.