Founders: Sam Means Michael Rhee
Date founded: 2022
The location of the headquarters: Chicago, IL; New York City, NY and Phoenix AZ
Bitcoins held by the Treasury N/A
No. of employees 3
Website: https://wavlake.com/
Is it Public or Private? Private Investigators
Sam Means has brought the DIY attitude of punk to Bitcoin.
Means is the co-founder and CEO of Wavlake. The platform offers music streaming using both Bitcoins Lightning Network The following are some examples of how to get started: NostrSince the early 2000s, has innovated in the music business. Promoting local shows, to managing his finances. own Means is a musician who has worked hard to build a successful artist merchandise business. work I learned many lessons on the road.
He’s now taken these lessons and combined it with his 10 years’ experience in the Bitcoin sector to create Wavlake. This music streaming platform cuts out the middle man, allowing users to stream directly from the artist. sats They can also send a message directly to the musicians they love. 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 and Wavlake. He also talked about how to balance his work between Wavlake as well as 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 StoreYou also just taught me something? own The company is a supplier of band merchandise. This is correct.
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 like having a single-stop-shop for all your merch.
Corva: How did you get 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 everything.
After working for a while at an entertainment venue, I formed a promotional company with two friends. The entire time, I played music. I was in three bands with this dude — we just kept starting bands until one of them was successful. Then we were dropped from a major-label and decided to go it alone.
The first day of our own We got distribution, worked with management and a cool label. The DIY techniques we learned during “punk school.” A really strong following was built. Touring was constant.
During that time, I was able to solidify my knowledge of the music industry. The band always looked to me as the guy who handled the merch, and got paid.
In short, I was a multi-faceted businessman who eventually founded a merchandise company. Our friend was a screen printer. It was difficult for us to set up our ecommerce store back in 2005. The Shopify platform didn’t even exist back then.
In 2014, I heard about Bitcoins from my friend. It’s not over yet. Mike Jarmuz deserves a shout out.
Corva: Mike Jarmuz is from Lightning Ventures?
Means: Yeah. My friend from middle-school was involved in the whole thing I’ve just described. He was the founder of the label who released my band’s very first album.
Also, he told me all about Bitcoin. He had moved to New York and opened a bar. It was also one of the very first bars in New York with a Bitcoin ATM.
Shopify is what I used for Hello Merch. And I found out that Shopify accepts 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 came to my attention 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’s voice rang out a few years later. Sphinx Marty Bent has a podcast. It was the first time I heard of it. It was like “What?” “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. The podcast index was a great idea. I put an RSS feed into it. “Hey everybody, look, you can stream music over Lightning.”
Corva: Wow.
Means: After that, I created a store called Lightning Store. This was an experiment. “I said,” “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: This sounds like an interesting way to ask for help.
Means: People were literally like, “It was all 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 DM-ing me 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?” I had a lot of fun. I did that in the very beginning of ‘21.
I then started attending conferences, and I connected people with those who were creating things that I wanted to happen.
Michael Rhee, a Chicagoan from Chicago, then built a thing called Wavlake. The video wasn’t quite what I expected, but there was definitely something. It was kind of like. “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. Do you think it would be better to start from scratch and create a new website? [new] product?
Corva: When did this happen?
Means: October of ‘22. The business was reorganized and we started from scratch. 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 was launched almost as soon as we were. The long-term plan was to make it a social platform in the future, but RSS doesn’t have many social layers. Nostr is a simple way of distributing these files. Then we thought, “Hey! We can publish RSS, and then also publish to relays.”
Corva: Wavlake is a Nostr customer?
Means: Our product for Artists is called 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. This song is marked as music.
We push the library to anything that pulls in the music tags. It is sent out via a Wavlake relay.
Every song is published in Nostr, but it’s not pushed through RSS. The song is published on a site and the channels are pushed. Think of these channels as distribution platforms.
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.”
When we began to think, “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 is happening now. [Wavlake] world.
Corva: Awesome. It sounds really fun.
Means: We’re grateful for the community’s support. Keep doing your thing.
“This article is not financial advice.”
“Always do your own research before making any type of investment.”
“ItsDailyCrypto is not responsible for any activities you perform outside ItsDailyCrypto.”
Source: bitcoinmagazine.com