When we first launched SoundMojo 1.0, the idea was pretty simple: find great independent musicians and use our platform to help promote them.
We worked with some talented artists, but there was a problem: from one artist to the next, there wasn’t much of a throughline.
SoundMojo didn’t really have an identity of its own then.
SoundMojo 2.0 changed that.
Instead of simply discovering music, we started curating and reimagining it — taking music from different cultures, genres and eras and asking: What else could this become?
That led to projects including:
ARYA — Persian pop classics reimagined as English-language rock and hard rock songs. Inspiration and origins explained here.
BALANCE — classical compositions given original lyrics and themes, then transformed into hard rock and heavy metal songs.
CURRENT — EDM songs reimagined as instrumental guitar-rock tracks. Inspiration and origins explained here.
RETURN — sports-inspired music built around my efforts to help bring the Montreal Expos back, with the aptly titled It’s Inevitable as the first example.
HEAT — hip hop music (about something other than the usual themes in rap music these days) developed as a companion to Terms & Conditions, a WatchMojo Studios project I’m developing, including Judgment Day, a diss track channeling some of my frustrations surrounding my effort to bring back MLB and the Expos to Montreal.
Each one had a different legal challenge given AI, licensing laws etc., which given my experience building WatchMojo, I “figured out.” But ultimately, it was about the music.
Different inspirations, but finally a common philosophy:
Curate. Reimagine. Create something new.
Where AI fits — and where musicians come in. I have discussed how I view AI as a storyteller/entrepreneur here.
We’ve been transparent about using AI as part of the SoundMojo 2.0 development process (certainly could have been more). That said, while the original feedback was 90% positive, I certainly understood the pushback and criticism when SoundMojo became an easy target for both a) fair/unfair criticisms of WatchMojo, and b) the general distrust, dislike, disdain for generative AI (holy Hank Green!).
For me, its most useful role isn’t replacing musicians. It’s solving a problem I’ve encountered throughout my career: communicating what’s in my head to creative people. But as I run a media company with 100+ creatives on payroll, I need models and systems that go beyond creating a single song, even though I laboriously translated each and every line from ARYA, spent months studying classics from classical music, listened to dozens and dozens of demos per song, etc.
Think less “push a button, release a song” and more a modern demo machine.
If I’m hearing a certain guitar sound, vocal approach, arrangement, tempo or combination of genres, AI lets me demonstrate that vision quickly.
In that sense, I’m trying to channel the role historically played by producers such as Rick Rubin or Mutt Lange — not comparing myself to their talent or accomplishments! — where someone has a strong idea of what a record could sound like and helps artists get there.
The difference is that today I can create a surprisingly detailed demo before asking a musician to interpret it. The process becomes clearer, simpler, less painful.
And that’s where SoundMojo 3.0 begins.
The original plan
Our roadmap was essentially:
1. Create demos and establish the SoundMojo sound.
2. Launch an American Idol-style search for the Next Great Band (casting call here).
3. Fund musicians to professionally record and reinterpret the songs.
I still want to do all three.
But I’ve realized that’s an awful lot of foreplay before the action for musicians.
Why make artists wait for a show before we start putting money into their hands?
So we’re moving Step 3 forward.
Introducing the SoundMojo Label Fund
We’re initially committing $50,000 to independent musicians, singers, producers and bands (out of the $10 million WM Studios commitment) to take SoundMojo demos and turn them into real recordings.
We’re providing the demo.
It establishes the song, direction and quality we’re looking for.
We don’t want karaoke versions of our demos, per se, but the quality of the demos are good, if you objectively look at the feedback before the herd showed up. But, music is what it is because of the human emotions invested in each song.
Change the guitar solo.
Change the arrangement.
Sing it differently.
Make the drums yours.
Take something somewhere we didn’t expect.
Give it your style. Your musicianship. Your soul.
The demo communicates the destination. How you get there is where things become interesting.
How compensation works
For accepted projects, we’re considering two models:
$1,000 per completed recording under a fully paid arrangement in which SoundMojo owns the commissioned master;
OR
$500 + a 50% share of defined revenues generated by the recording.
Reality is in 2026, making money off music is nearly impossible, but I do think if executed right, there’s a model here, over time. This is clearly a passion project as music has always been my first love: it’s not a surprise that WatchMojo’s first top 10 lists were music, which I curated, helped research, write… and which went on to become incredibly well-received by viewers, music fans and critics alike.
In either case, the musicians involved will be credited for their work. But hey, if you really think these incredibly popular and beloved Persian songs now re-imagined as modern English rock songs or Sasha’s incredible Xpander reinvented as a guitar instrumental are “AI Slop” and just want the cash, you can submit and be paid anonymously).
Before our demos existed, we were offering paying more per song, because we were effectively giving someone a concept and asking them to create the musical interpretation themselves, from scratch (this created another risk: divergent visions, which made the project more frustrating than fulfilling).
That’s changed. Using startup jargon, you now have an MVP, or Minimum Viable Product to use. Accordingly, we’ve researched comparable independent production and session rates, and believe the compensation is competitive for the type of emerging and independent talent we’re targeting.
Today, we’re supplying a developed demo that already communicates much of the composition, arrangement and production vision. That dramatically reduces the development work and creative risk involved, so upon researching and seeking feedback from the artists who’d shown an interest in collaborating.
But ultimately the market will tell us. If the structure needs adjusting to attract the level of musicianship we’re looking for, we’ll learn and adapt (you’re also welcome to DM/email me and propose something different).
“But I think your AI demos are slop.”
It would be intellectually dishonest to ignore the pushback re AI (even though most of the criticism weren’t from our fans, nor did we publish these on WatchMojo, but instead the separate SoundMojo channel accounts). We discussed the feedbit on the Inside podcast.
Online, in particular, you have a vocal mass and then average people who just consume the content they enjoy and don’t make everything dogma.
But it would also be intellectually dishonest to ignore that the feedback was pretty clearly positive before the “hit jobs.” This is pretty much demonstrative of most songs: great feedback at first, then “AI Slop.”
I must say, as a social experiment, seeing the masses go from “great remix” to “this sucks” showed that AI isn’t really about taste, but human psychology.
But, that’s fine. For me, as a creator, entrepreneur, builder, there’s no sense in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I had musicians expressing interest in the project, and after taking some time to reflect on the (fair and unfair) feedback, I realize I just needed to re-sequence the steps involved in building SoundMojo. Be realistic, if Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons invented Def Jam today, AI would be part of the recipe.
You don’t have to love AI. You don’t even have to like the demo.
If you hear one and think:
“I could make this SO much better.”
Please do.
That’s partly the point.
If you’re primarily interested in the guaranteed fee, that’s fine.
If you’d rather take less upfront because you believe you can create something that generates meaningful revenue, take the revenue-share option.
And if neither model works for you, don’t apply.
Different musicians are at different stages of their careers and value their work differently.
What we’re ultimately trying to build?
I want to find the guitarist who interprets three SoundMojo songs brilliantly and eventually becomes part of a band.
The singer whose version makes us rethink what an entire project should sound like.
The producer who hears something in one of our demos that I never heard.
The musicians who start as independent collaborators and eventually become SoundMojo artists.
My ambition is to build SoundMojo into a label in the historical sense of the word: discovering talent, developing artists, financing recordings, building bands, marketing releases and helping musicians find audiences. Music videos, tours, etc.
This pair, Meaning to Say and Let It Be about pre-relationship excitement and post-relationship heartbreak were original concepts I had in mind for a decade, wrote the lyrics… and AI helped bring them to life… At a time when few are paying musicians let alone envisioning producing music videos, the idea would be to also cast actors and produce 1980s style music videos (and to be fair, established acts like Ice-T only see a future where music videos are AI-enabled, though that is NOT our plan).
AI helps us communicate and prototype the vision.
And if no one is interested to getting paid to create music, then I am more than content to have produced these five albums which was something I wanted to do all my life. Some people complain, others create!
But ultimately, human beings bring it to life.
And somewhere among the musicians who participate in this first $50,000 experiment, we may find the people who define what SoundMojo ultimately becomes.
Learn more / apply to the SoundMojo Label Fund (we will follow up with a list of songs I am prioritizing soon).
Learn more about our upcoming Next Great Band project.
Thank you.