YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Conte

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-01-11
most recent: 2021-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In the studio that Natalie and I had built on the property. And like I had to, I was not a carpenter. So I was like trying to learn how to frame a wall and like, you know, I was, I had to figure out how to cut wood at angles. I got a miter saw. Like I was just, I was flailing. I mean, this thing, like, you know, I was just trying to go and make it, but I was enjoying, like, it was really fun. It was just, you know, I was trying to do it little by little, you know?”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I go deep on the business side, I'm not going to do it. Because I'll be staring at numbers that don't make sense. And so I'm going to just leave all that behind. And I'm just going to do something crazy and creative. And so I decided not to budget, not to think about that and not to deal with any of the kind of constraints there. And so I ended up just spending like, you know, 100 bucks a day at Home Depot, you know, building the set and building rotating elevators.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It ended up costing 10 grand. I didn't know that when I went into it. If I had known that, I wouldn't have done it. But I didn't have a budget. I wasn't being strategic. At the time, I thought like,”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The make the models and the makes. So, like the first lyric is Hog, Pog, Vox, Wah, Octave Multiplexer, Big Memory Muff, Boss Chromatic Tuner. It was just like a list. I like that. Yeah. Just like a list of pedals. Yeah.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was kind of daft punky, technologic, you know, and I was listing out all of my guitar pedals. That was the lyric, the only lyric in the song was just a list of all the pedals that I used to process guitar sounds”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Pomluz had hundreds of thousands of subscribers and we were getting millions of views. And so how did you get your...”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, and she did that, and Got $13,000 and got a studio and got a mixing engineer and made a record. And what was so cool about it to me was it was her fans. Her fans stepped up and put. Wanted the record and paid her to make the record. And that just felt right and felt awesome.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point, no, revenue was not increasing. Revenue was decreasing at that point. So it was coming out of savings. But our roommate who was living at the house did this amazing thing, and she was going to make an album. And she went on to this new website called Kickstarter and did a 30-day thing. We had never heard of it. And I remember the night. That she turned her computer around at the dinner table and showed us, I think she had made twelve thousand dollars or thirteen thousand dollars?”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that, and I didn't, it bugged me that we had to do that because I felt like that's not what makes me special. I just wanted to be paid for, like, I loved iTunes because I could be paid for my music, which is what, and I was, yeah, that, so it was just one of those moments where we kind of realized that everything was changing and that, you know, three or four years from now would be completely different.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and like, and then we would, you know, play some shows. And I remember the whole time I was thinking, is my value to the world a hat with a logo on it? Like, that's not what I'm good at. That feels murder.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like we were growing. We were getting millions and millions of views and more views. And then, you know, Enter Spotify and suddenly we're like up a creek in terms of revenue. And what was amazing to me that I was watching this unfold over a period of a couple years, what blew my mind was like, wait a minute, I'm not doing anything differently as an artist. There is a system changing in front of me that I'm not in control of it's just these changing systems. And my artistry is yielding different results with regard to my income. And that was like very frustrating to watch. And I, look, I know businesses have to kind of like pivot and change and be innovative. And yet I found myself like having to do all this gymnastics, you know, to keep up with the revenue stream. So I was, you know, selling hats and t-shirts and we were selling dongles.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the transition to streaming was really hard on the band. Our streaming revenue was, you know, a tiny, tiny fraction of the iTunes revenue, where people were paying a buck for a song, you know, with a stream, you get fractions of a penny for one stream. And it just, it wasn't one for one because the user base wasn't there on Spotify yet. So we just, it wasn't, the volume wasn't making up for it. And so the income started to evaporate, which was very scary because now at this point we had a mortgage.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was, I think that that year in particular, I think, was 2010. Most of it was singles. A lot of it was licensing and brand deals. And we had a lawyer that we had brought on very early on who was helping us negotiate these deals and work with brands. And we're very music nerds and artists. But we absolutely were thinking about turning this into a sustainable thing. And so we ended up buying a house and we built a recording studio. We used the money to build a recording studio on the property. And then that became kind of like the home base for Pompe Louis for the next few years.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, when I grew up, I thought maybe one day I'll play for 100 people. You know, like that was, that would have been the coolest thing. And then here we are playing these clubs. We played Fillmore, you know, in San Francisco, which is 1,200 people. Magic. It was the best thing ever.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. Yeah, we didn't get hard offers from anybody, but we started to go down to LA and talk with them. And we basically decided not to do that. But we did talk with them and entertain it. We just didn't want to go that route. I mean, you know, at that point we're making a living, you know, when we started doing label conversations, we were making thousands and thousands of dollars per month. We were going on tour. you know, reaching millions of people.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just iTunes 22,000 bucks in one month. And like, that was when I was like, oh my, like, I thought we can do it. Like, this could be a thing.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. I mean, that was kind of the beginning of when Pompe News really started to take off. And, you know, we got calls from managers, we got calls from press. And, you know, when we came out with our second big one, that kind of really took off, which was telephoned by Lady Gaga, you know, we released a record. And, you know, at the end of the month, we logged into our bank account and like we had sold 30,000 songs. And because we hadn't signed with a label, we owned all our own masters and therefore we owned all the royalties. So we logged in our bank account at 22,000 bucks in it. Which, like, coming out of call, like after selling some iTunes.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's my childhood bedroom. Like, that's what it is. It's people in a room playing instruments synced up with the audio. And, like, it's funny because in 2020, that's really nothing special. But at the time, nobody was really doing that kind of thing. Like music videos looked like music videos. They looked like MTV. And to see humans in their bedroom playing instruments and having it actually sound good was, you know, was a little different.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and interrupted her, and it became this huge internet meme and just got tons of traffic and the video just exploded.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew that it was going to have a good shot at the VMAs because it was such a great video and a great song. And when she was up for best music video and so we covered the song and kind of just in time and put it out that night and then Kanye did that thing where he got up at the VMAs and Taylor.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, I think, the first cover was My Favorite Things. We ended up doing it in five four and did a cool arrangement of it. But that wasn't the one that hit. The one that hit was when we covered Beyonce's single ladies”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which anybody can do. Yeah. And that's kind of when I learned that YouTube is a search engine. And so people are searching for songs that they know. And if they then see a cool band who is singing that song, but maybe in a completely different way with a complete different sound and they've ripped out the harmony and put in their own harmony and ripped out the beat and put in their own beat and done it in three, four instead of four, four, or whatever it is, you can kind of get introduced to a new sound because you're coming from search traffic. And that single thing is how we ended up like growing the band so quickly.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, we produced a record for this singer-songwriter named Julia Noons. And I was super inspired by Julia because she just had this huge presence on YouTube. And I learned that it came from covers originally. And she would put out”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Original music. Yep. You know, we knew that that was kind of what we wanted to do. And so we just, and YouTube seemed like it was working. So we just started making more and more videos and putting those out.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what was funny was, you know, we kind of tempered each other, like we mitigated each other's extremes, so she calmed down my kind of. It was cool and different, and like it had some of my aggressive production, but then she has this very soft voice. And I think it was just kind of different sounding. And people seem to really like it. And so, you know, the idea was, let's see if we can make a living out of this. And right around that time, iTunes came out. And so we started putting our music on iTunes.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we got the band going. When we posted a YouTube video on my channel, at first we didn't call it a band, we just posted a video on my channel. We said, hey, this is me and Natalie collabing.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was making a couple hundred bucks a month and I was, I thought like, okay, this could turn into an income stream and I could do this full time. It was the first time in my life that I felt like that would be possible. I remember like going back to that moment in college, you know, when I made the decision to become a music major, it was actually like a very depressing moment for me. Like I was committing, in my mind, I was committing to a life of poverty. My uncle is a guitar player, a jazz guitar player, and he, you know, when I told him I was going to do this, he was like, Jack, the thing he said to me was like, don't do it. He was like, you can do anything else in your life. You're a smart guy. And you can do anything else. He said, don't do this. It's crowded at the bottom is what he said.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I graduated and started working on music, and it felt like it was working. I would sell a few hundred bucks of MP3s. I used a site called eJunkie. So I would put up my MP3s for sale on this platform.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like all direct sound, and yeah, that kind of thing. And I just really liked the idea of taking some of the mystery out of audio production because it really feels like magic when you listen to a record. You know, there's all these sounds, you have no idea how they're made. It just, you know, it feels like these people are geniuses just creating things. And at least for me, it felt like there was this gap between like where they are and where I am. And I just liked the kind of transparency of YouTube. I liked that it felt like behind the scenes and I liked the idea of kind of showing people like, hey, this is how sounds are made. And here's what it looks like. And it doesn't have to be super glamorous like you can be in your pajama pants on the floor of your bedroom playing a guitar through a shitty amp that you got on sale at Guitar Center.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, yeah, I would, I guess what the videos kind of became was the video version of a song. I called them video songs because there were sort of two rules. It was inspired by the sort of dogma filmmaking from the 70s and like the rules were if you hear the instrument in the mix, if there's an instrument in the mix, you're going to get to see it.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we started a band called Pomplus. And even before then, I had started using YouTube and uploading to YouTube. And it felt like something was working. So I'd put up a video and get a few thousand views. What”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think I was thinking about business at all. I was a part of the film society at school. And so I was also, there was a recording studio on campus. And so I was learning how to use a recording studio. And I was also, you know, because I was part of the film study, I was making movies. So I would make a few movies a year and I would do soundtracks for other people and for myself. So I was a music major. And then, you know, in the cracks, I was doing music and film and all that kind of stuff. I was not building businesses.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simmy, why are you ashamed of this? This was an awesome business, man. It was so cool. It was a big deal. Like, everybody knew about it. It was one of those things. You just marked it.”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think movies often show you one moment of realization in life is rarely like that. Life is usually like a slow burn. But this was really one moment of realization for me sitting in this physics class where I was like, this is not what I want to do. I was just thinking about songs. I was thinking about my music theory class. I was thinking about other things. And that's where my brain was going. And I didn't want to do physics. And I remember like sitting on a bench after that physics class for probably 45 minutes. I just sat there and just thought about what that meant for me because I was, it was kind of a one of those moments in college that feels pivotal, you know”
2021-01-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT