Founders: Sam Means & Michael Rhee
Date of Founded 2022
The location of the headquarters: Chicago, IL; New York City, NY and Phoenix AZ
Bitcoins held by the Treasury N/A
The number of employees: 3
Website: https://wavlake.com/
Is it Public or Private? You can also contact us by email.
Sam Means has brought the DIY DIY spirit of punk-rock to Bitcoin.
Means co-founder Wavlake, an online music platform which uses both Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Lightning Network You can also find out more about the following: NostrSince early 2000, Means has made significant contributions to the music industry. Means learned a lot along the way, from promoting local concerts to managing his band while it toured around the globe to running an artist merchandise company.
Wavlake is a platform for music streaming that allows fans to bypass the middleman and stream their favorite songs directly. sats Directly to their favourite musicians. Wavlake offers an alternative to Spotify. Spotify has a reputation for not paying artists who are featured on their platform.
I spoke with Means about his career in music, Bitcoin, Wavlake’s creation, and how he manages to balance Wavlake along with his other ventures.
Below is a transcript of our discussion, which has been edited to make it more concise and clear.
Frank Corva Wavlake is the creator of Wavlake. Lightning StoreAnd I’ve just discovered that you own your own band merch business. Does this sound right?
Sam Means Yeah. My oldest business should be called my main business. Hello Merch. We do e-commerce, screen printing for tour fulfillment, direct-to-customer fulfillment. If you are a band, it’s sort of like having a single-stop shop to buy merch.
Corva: Let’s begin by asking you how you became involved in music.
Means: I have done a lot of things. [It started] With punk bands. Some of the bands I saw were in Mesa Arizona. But, I came from suburbia. My friends and I piled into a car to go to basement punk concerts for $5. It changed my entire life.
After working for a while at an entertainment venue, I formed a promotional company with two friends. I played in several bands during that time. I was in three bands with this dude — we just kept starting bands until one of them was successful. After being signed by a major record label and getting dropped, we decided to take everything on ourselves.
The label was distributed and the management firm we used is really great. The DIY techniques we had learned in school were put to good use. “punk school.” A really strong following was built. Touring was constant.
The whole time I was doing that, it really helped me to understand the business of music. In the band, I was the one who was responsible for merchandising and collecting money.
Short story: I worked in many different capacities and started my own merch business. Our friend was a screen printer. In 2005 we set up a very complicated e-commerce site. The Shopify platform didn’t even exist back then.
By 2014, a close friend told me that Bitcoin was gaining popularity. It’s not over yet. Mike Jarmuz is still around.
Corva: Mike Jarmuz Lightning Ventures?
Means: Yeah. It’s my friend from middle school. He was also a part of the story that I told. He founded the record label which released my first band’s debut album.
Also, he told me all about Bitcoin. He moved to New York. His bar was the first Bitcoin ATM in New York.
Shopify was my preferred platform for Hello Merch. I noticed that it accepted Bitcoin. Then I said, “Alright, well, I’m still kind of sketched out by this, but if some people want to give it to me in exchange for band merch, I guess that’s okay.”
Lightning Network was something I learned about in 2017. I set up a couple of nodes — didn’t know what to do with them — and just turned them on. It was like I said, “I’m helping” [laughter].
Paul calling me a couple of years after I first heard him. Sphinx Marty Bent podcast. It was the first time I heard of it. The first thing I thought was, “What’s stopping me from creating a Sphinx room and just calling it like the Lightning Music Room or something?”
This is what I did. When I added an RSS to the index of podcasts, it was as if, “Hey everybody, look, you can stream music over Lightning.”
Corva: Wow.
Means: After that, I created a store called Lightning Store. It was just a test. It was just an experiment. “I’m going to just put out a bunch of bootleg music shirts, like West coast punk mashups on T-shirts with subtle Bitcoin things and find all the super big music nerds in Bitcoin if there are any.”
“If they know who the Descendants and Black Flag are and they’re into Bitcoin, there might be a chance they could at least like — cause I’m not a technical person — walk me through what needs to technically happen in order to make this actually happen instead of just fumbling.”
Corva: It sounds like fun to fish for assistance.
Means: The whole thing was fishing. It was like people literally said, “What is this? What are these shirts? We can’t even buy them because you have no liquidity in your node.” Lightning Labs people were DMing and saying things like. “Hey, dude, like this stuff looks super cool, but no one can buy it because you don’t have any liquidity.” What I felt like “What’s that?” The whole thing was a blast. I did that in the very beginning of ‘21.
After that, I began attending more conferences to connect people to people who were working on similar projects to mine.
Michael Rhee of Chicago then created this Wavlake. The video wasn’t quite what I expected, but there was definitely something. It was, “Okay, this guy made a thing where you can connect it to your node and you can upload music and get paid without having to upload it through Anchor or something. It [wasn’t live] yet, though.
So, I helped him test it before he launched it. I was also helping with Lightning Ventures at that point. I got Michael on a call with [the team at Lightning Ventures] to see how we could help him.
It was just too technical, though. It was a cool idea, but it just wasn’t exactly catching on for a number of reasons. After that, I sort of lost touch a little bit.
Then, I bumped into him at a Bitcoin conference in 2022. He was like, “Hello, it looks like I will have to find a new job. There are only 27 participants. [Wavlake].”
I was like, “Keep going, you are on the right track. Someone needs to take this on.” Then, I had this idea. I called him and said, “You need to make a complete change. You could start again and create a new website. [new] product?
Corva: What was the date?
Means: October of ‘22. Reorganizing the business, we began again. In January of ‘23, we relaunched with a completely different product and brand.
In the summer of that year, we met. Ainsley Costello. She became Wavlake’s first superstar. Today, she’s released a brand new single called “People Pleaser,” Check it out!
Nostr appeared almost instantly after our launch. It was our long-term goal to turn this into a more social experience, but RSS isn’t very social. Nostr worked as a secondary distribution method for these files. Then we thought, “Hey! We can publish RSS, and then also publish to relays.”
Corva: Wavlake, is it a Nostr Client?
Means: The product we offer for artists includes Wavlake Studio. This is where you can upload your music. You can also subscribe to RSS when you upload music.
This is automatically added to the index of podcasts. Any client with a monetization feature can then pull this song from their library. The music is tagged.
The library will be accessed by anything pulling the music tag. Wavlake is a relay we created to push the library out.
Each song will be published on Nostr as an RSS note. This happens just on the website, and then gets sent to these channels. Just think of them like distribution channels.
As soon as we began to seriously consider Nostr we made the decision. “Well, there’s a couple of things here we can do. One, we can allow people to log in with Nostr on Wavlake. So, if you just want to be a listener and you don’t want to create an account, you can just log in with your Nostr account and interact.”
We started to think about it. “Okay, well, if we are going to utilize Nostr for a lot of social elements, most of those are going to happen in a mobile app. So, we [built] a thing called Wavman, which was our Nostr player proof of concept.
Our mobile app for iOS and Android is still in beta. That is an absolute Nostr client. When you sign up, you’re given a private key and a public key, or you can just log in and interact.
Corva: It sounds like it was a pretty organic process.
Means: Wavlake started as a conceptual thing to see if music could work on Lightning. I wanted to see it happen because the potential is so strong for this thing to completely change the infrastructure that we exist in today as musicians.
In my experience, you have to start somewhere. If you want to be in a band, you can’t just be like, “It’s fun — we played three shows and then broke up and then I got a job.” You have to just keep pushing through.
I thought it was a good idea. It just needed some work. We will just keep doing it until it works. Or at least until somebody else with a lot more money comes along and takes the idea and makes it work.
At the very least, we may just be like a spark for a bigger idea. Maybe TIDAL comes along and enables this.
My ultimate goal is just to see this change the music industry. I don’t care who does it. If we play a small part in that, that’s fantastic.
Corva: Let’s say you continue to iterate and Bitcoin becomes more normalized. How long would it take for Wavlake to replace something like Spotify?
Means: We have good Bitcoin service providers. We have wallets. We have all the fundamental stuff in place and working.
We have the money that’s so strong and being talked about in the mainstream media every single day. There’s a ticker for it on TV.
It’s time to bring in the mainstream. It’s time to bring in the normies. Let’s get them here. And we’re not going to do that with boring…
Corva: Lectures in Austrian economics?
Means: Yeah, and like, and like steak dinners and stuff. We’re going to bring them in with music and entertainment and social media.
Bitcoin is for everyone, and we need to build the stuff for everyone to use it. I think that we have a very good chance at helping a lot because right now we’re one of the main ways for music to waltz into both Bitcoin and Nostr.
Corva: Absolutely. But while you’re trying to do this, how do you balance your time between Wavlake, Lightning Store and Hello Merch?
Means: With Lightning Store, I have a fulfillment center, but I still pack all my own Lightning Store orders. I still like to put free stickers [in the shipments]. It’s just a thing I do for fun. Even when it gets kind of crazy, like when Jack wears the Satoshi shirt at the Super Bowl next to Beyoncé and Jay-Z and things get busy, it stresses me out, but I still will pack every single one of those orders.
With the merch stuff, I have a really good team in Arizona that helps keep that thing going. It doesn’t require a ton of day-to-day work.
And we’re still so small with Wavlake.
It’s tough to balance stuff, but I’ve always had a lot of things going on. I function better when I have more things happening. I’ll only work with things that I think can ultimately work together.
So, these are a lot of different things, but they’re all in the same world. It’s like, I make music, I sell merch. I sell merch for bitcoin. I’m a Bitcoin person. I have a music company that’s in Bitcoin and also has merch. All these things connect.
Corva: How much do some of the bigger artists on Wavlake make?
Means: The best metric here is that most artists who are active on Wavlake are averaging about 12 cents a zap.
It’s not about the total amount that they’ve made. Ainsley Costello has been on a lot of podcasts saying she made $1,500 in her first couple of months, and she had only made maybe $600 in her whole lifetime as a musician. She’s 19 or 20 now and has been doing this since she was a kid and has only seen $600 or $700.
It’s more about hope. People who really get it are getting it because a lot of these other things like these shitcoins and NFTs that are about making money really fast — everyone’s sick of that. Artists are looking for sustainability.
Just took Man Like Kweks. He’s been very vocal about how he’s like paying his utility bills with what he’s making on Wavlake.
We also just did an interview with this really great poet OKIN who’s in a group called…
Corva: Black Vulcanite?
Means: Yeah, Black Vulcanite. He made [the equivalent of] 500 Namibian dollars [from boosts and zaps on Wavlake] last month. That’s about $80 US dollars.
So, yeah, there’s hope. All of these things are out there that actually have a chance to help people in a sustainable way. It’s going to bring bands closer to their fans, which I know, based on my experience, is the most important thing.
Corva: You’ll be working with Bitcoin Magazine on a vinyl release. Can you tell me a little bit about this?
Means: Yeah, we did a really cool contest where existing Wavlake artists or new artists could just upload music to Wavlake and the 21 songs that earned the most sats would go to the next level. 11 artists out of those artists who made those 21 songs ended up on the record.
Man Like Kweks, Ainsley Costello and Joe Martin will be on there. It’s going to be available at the Bitcoin conference. Ainsley, Joe Martin, and JUSTLOUD will be performing there as well on the 25th of July, industry night. JUSTLOUD has been hurt by this industry, but is optimistic about what’s going on in this [Wavlake] world.
Corva: Awesome. This sounds fun.
Means: We’re grateful for the community’s support. Keep doing your thing.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
