080 – Secrets to Learning – with Ian Temple of Soundfly

We all tend to consume a lot of information. But how much of that information sticks with you? Are you applying what you learn? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I talk to Ian Temple of Soundfly, who’s an expert on the topic of how people learn, and how we can learn more efficiently and retain more of the information we take in. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 00:14 – Introduction 00:28 – What is Soundfly, and how does it help musicians? 01:45 – What types of courses can you find on Soundfly? 03:50 – What are musicians missing about setting goals and achieving what they desire? 06:39 – Customized or personalized curriculums for music students 07:47 – Different styles of learning 10:27 – Self-directed learning 12:48 – Mentorship and accountability 15:35 – Why build a business serving artists? 18:29 – The opportunities music offers 20:43 – What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about leadership? 24:57 – With knowledge being as commoditized as it is, how do you build interest in your business? 28:26 – Learning through repetition 30:10 – How do you market your business, and what’s working for you right now? 34:13 – Content marketing 35:42 – What have you learned from your recording and performance career? 39:19 – What are some of the biggest struggles you’ve encountered as an entrepreneur? 40:30 – What are some of the biggest victories you’ve experienced as an entrepreneur? 43:14 – Are there any books that have helped you on your journey? 47:10 – Providing value for your customers 49:21 – What tools and apps are you using to run your business? 50:36 – Is there anything else I should have asked? Transcription: David Andrew Weibe: Today I am chatting with CEO and founder of Soundfly, Ian Temple. How are you today Ian? Ian Temple: Good. Thanks. How are you? David: I'm fantastic. Thank you for asking. Ian: Thank you for having me. David: Oh yeah. No, it's an honor. So, what is Soundfly and how does it help musicians? Ian: Yeah. Soundfly is basically a different kind of online music school. We exist to help musicians meet their goals. That can be many sorts of musical goals whether producing a professional sounding track from scratch or composing your first-string quartet or booking your next big tour. That's what drives us to do what we do. And the way we do that is we have free daily articles that are of interest to musicians. We have free mini courses that take you through a kind of single musical topic in a sitting. And then, we provide mentor services to musicians either paired with content or not in which we help musicians by pairing them with a personal trainer. Basically, someone who has knowledge and expertise in their field who works with them for a month or more to help them meet their goals. So, multiple levels of helping musicians achieve things and learn new things. David: It's fascinating and there's a couple things you touched on that I definitely want to dig deeper into. I think the first thing is what types of courses can musicians expect to find on your website? You just mentioned a few different subjects, but it sounds like you offer a lot and most topics are covered in a sense. Ian: Yes. It's funny because when we started out we started... I'm a pianist myself so we started just by kind of messing around with like some beginner piano content to try and learn about the market. One thing we discovered pretty quickly early on was number one, there was already a glut of bigger piano content out there. David: Of course. Ian: And number two, you know I like to say going from zero to one as a musician if you know nothing about music it's really hard because it's not that much fun to practice when you don't know anything. Right? And yet that's kind of the area that so many people are chasing. I mean there are some amazing resources out there like [Usician 00:02:53] or Playground Sessions that kind of try and provide that service. What we felt was missing was once people already know a little bit about music or already have some kind of knowledge and how did they learn all the things you need to know as a modern musician in today's music world to kind of succeed or to achieve their goals. And so, we focused a lot on courses on production, or composition, helping you with your song writing, or you know one of our most popular courses is orchestrating for strings, how to use a [da 00:03:30], how to make beats. And then some music business stuff - how to actually market yourself as a musician and stuff like that. So, yeah. It's been really interesting seeing that that was really where there was a hole in the market and that's really where we've tried to fill in and support musicians. David: What are musicians missing about setting goals and achieving the level of success they desire? Ian: That's a great question. I think there are couple big things that we think about here at Soundfly. The first one is that you'd be amazed by how many music students just come to us with a really big dream and no idea how to get there. Right? So, when we in take a new student to work with one of our mentors, the first thing we ask them is what do you want to learn? What's your big goal? So many of them are just like "oh write a hit track", or "be famous", "succeed with my music". It's really vague and hard to wrap your head around. Right? And that can be arresting for a musician. I mean having a goal that's that big and that vague, you don't really know how to start or how to achieve it. Something we really focus on a lot, one of our core kind of learning concepts is making sure that we're creating really highly deliberate learning plans for every student that takes their big goal and breaks it up into achievable small steps with kind of interim milestones that they can actually achieve. I guess a really good example for that would be -- we've had a number of students come to us who want to have their music in sync licensing live. Right? Have their music be on commercials and stuff. But they have no idea how to get there. That's just their goal but they don't know what they're doing. So, we work with them. We figure out where the music is now, and we say "Okay. We need to--. Truthfully, your composition needs a little bit of work, your production needs a little bit of work. And then we'll work with you once we've gotten through those things to figure out how to approach an actual library." And so, we go step by step through those different things. The first month might be creating a sound alike of another track that is already on TV or has already been licensed and we'll focus on the mixing, we'll focus on tweaking the sound design, and just make sure that she or he is really able to achieve that. And then the next one will be focusing in on some other aspect of that track and just taking those really small steps. I think that's kind of the biggest picture thing -- is getting really focused and deliberate in how you approach your big goals. David: I like that because I was a guitar teacher for over a decade. One of the things I tried to do away with was a standardized music curriculum. Instead, I tried to customize it for each student as challenging as that was because I must have had hundreds of students over the years. But I thought that was such a valuable thing to be able to do for people. And even though the enthusiasm level didn't necessarily change for some students, I think others found tremendous value in being able to learn things like Green Day or Blink182 as one of their favorite groups over trying to grow through this book that was like really painful, you know one string at a time. Ian: Totally. David: And reading notes and sight reading the whole works. Ian: Yeah, that's one of the interesting challenges is that so many--. I love learning and how people learn. That's kind of what we obsess about here at Soundfly. The interesting thing is that people learn in really different ways. To have that ability to personalize an approach for how this specific student depending on what their goals are, I think is really that valuable. I mean you see a lot of research actually supporting that now in the field as well. David: One thing I think about with different styles of learning is generally trying to provide three types of content and this is super challenging when you're both basically like a solopreneur with a couple of contractors working for you. It is creating video, audio, and text. Ian: Yeah. David: You can sort of repurpose it all, right. You can take your video. You can transcribe it. You can strip the audio, make it into a podcast or something like that. It's time consuming but I think it is one way of catering to different learning styles. What are your thoughts? Ian: Yeah, definitely. That's a great--. Yeah. Yeah. I agree 100% there. I'm trying to think. There was one model we looked at when we're starting Soundfly. It might have been of Rosetta Stone, that language learning software. They always provide for everything you're teaching. Like you speak it, you hear it, you read it, you see it. I mean it's really just those multiple elements. I think that's really great. I think the other thing that I would just add to that is that one of our big goals at Soundfly is that everyone should not just consume our content. That every piece of content we make should inspire action. Because really you can read and watch and listen to stuff all day and that's great and you will learn new perspectives and you'll hear a bunch of great stuff, but it really requires taking some action to make sure that learning sticks and last long term. It's the difference between what's called passive learning and just kind of sitting in a… Let's say the best example might be like sitting in a college lecture and active learning which is ac