CTO interview: Olga Stern, helping musicians get their royalties
This time, I spoke with Olga Stern. An experienced backend developer, Olga independently developed a project that analyzed gender diversity in news reporting before she shifted to her current role as CTO at Tangy Market, a Swedish company helping musicians get the most out of their royalties. Olga shares how her company has and is working to fund itself, and she also gives advice to younger techies looking to grow their skills.
I’ve seen you’re part of a list of 50 inspiring Nordics. What is this list and what led to you being added to it?
This list is just a list of people who are doing cool stuff. It’s not specific to any career field. I’m super proud I was on the list, as the first person was Zara Larsson that year. She’s quite famous here.
When I got on the list, I had been working on a project called Genews — a system that analyses the news and how many men and women were mentioned in news articles. I was selling it as a service to different newspapers who subscribed to it. They had huge screens in the newsroom showing the statistics in real-time. One of the main companies in Sweden, called Expressen, was using it quite a lot, which led to an increase in the number of women they write about by 6%. There is a misconception that we need to change what the news is or make different news that is not newsworthy, but interestingly, what they did change was the expert they would interview, rather than the news itself.
The way journalists work, they have a list of people as experts on different topics, who they call when needed. Genews made them think about who was on that list and change it.
I ultimately stopped because I’m more of a team person, and I couldn’t figure out how to grow that to get more people on the project.
Can you tell me more about Tangy Market?
It’s a marketplace for royalties. Royalties are the income generated by copyright. If an artist makes money from a song, the song generates that money when it’s played on the radio, streamed, played in a commercial, etc. The people who created the music made an effort at one point in time, but sometimes don’t get paid until a long time after that point… sometimes up to 2 years later. And when the money comes, they only get a small portion over the life of the music. These people make art in order to have a stable financial situation.
What we do is estimate that piece of music’s potential value over time, and our Machine Learning model will calculate that this song will bring, for example, let’s say 10,000 euros over 10 years. If the writer agrees with that, we put the art on the marketplace and people can invest in that piece of music by buying one of the shares, which is directly transferred to the copyright holder. This way, the artist gets the money in advance and can invest that money in a specific producer for their next album, a piano, studio time, etc.
As the person who buys a share, how do I get my money back?
It depends if the song works better or worse than we predicted. We use lots of data to predict. In the latest season of Stranger Things, there is a Kate Bush song that was written in the 80s but is now in the top chart and making so much money because it is features in Stranger Things. It is a gamble of investing in something.
The money that is actually generated by royalties companies is transferred to us, and we transfer it to users that hold shares.
What are, in your view, the main challenges of a small company like the one you’ve created?
Not enough time because of the lack of resources. There’s just so many things you want to do, but you don’t have time. It can be overwhelming if you don’t plan well.
Do you bootstrap the company?
We made some smaller fundraising rounds to get money from angel investors. We are actually raising money right now.
Where are you operating?
The app is available to anybody who wants to download it. We haven’t done any focused marketing, and we don’t have specific music for other countries. We have some big international songs (the biggest one is a Christina Aguilera song from 2000 at the moment), but it’s mostly Swedish music right now.
Can you describe your technical choices?
We are using AWS. Everything is serverless, which is very nice. It gives us the option to turn them on or off depending on the traffic. Everything is event driven, which is very elegant. In the old way, if a user placed an order, an API would listen to it, the order would be matched, and the user would get a response.
For us, when an order is placed, it goes to a queue where workers are picking them one by one, and if user has a shaky connection, everything will still work. If our payment provider is down, we can still process the messages waiting.
Our backend is built with Lambda functions in Node.JS, and the app is React Native. I’ve been a C# developer from the beginning, but in Lambda available languages, Node seemed to be the easiest one to get started with while still being powerful. It’s also easy to find people who can use it and to hire them.
For React Native, we’re working with amazing developers in Ukraine.
Do you have any advice for younger techies?
If you want to be really good at things, get in places where you are surrounded by people smarter than you. It can be challenging because you have to say “I don’t know how to do this. How do I do that?” But being around people who know more than you do is an excellent way to learn.
If you want to connect with Olga, click here.
To learn more about Tangy Market, visit their website: tangymarket.com
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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