Ryno the Bearded - Celebrating 15 Years of Creative Commons Music Stream - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)

Tom Ray: Welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I am Tom, and this is a show where I talk to Creative Commons artists, other musicians, people who make music, people who make things for musicians, specifically open source things for musicians, all that kind of stuff. But I have a person today who is involved in music, also helping out musicians, and also involved in the CC music community. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do?

Ryno the Bearded: Hi, I’m Ryno, also known as Ryno the Bearded. I am a long term podcaster. I’ve been doing a, Creative Commons music podcast for 15 years now, which just seems ridiculous, but I never I was doing it really heavy. And then it just. My career took off and it just became this great hobby of mine where I get to celebrate open culture and Creative Commons music. And every Friday night I sit around and drink whiskey and play music and talk shit, and people come and hang out. But what’s really cool about that is because I’ve been very lucky in life. I’ve been put in a place that I also get to support musicians. So, like, the first time me and Tom have known each other for over a decade at this point.

Tom Ray: Yes.

Ryno the Bearded: And the first time I ever got to meet him was because I put on a show up and Milwaukee. I just like reached out to Cullah.

Tom Ray: The first time you got to meet me in public, we had known each other since then.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Just to clarify, That made it sound like we just met each other. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: First time in person. The first time we were in the same room after knowing each other for a decade. But yeah, and just from doing my show, I. I like supporting independent artists and independent music and sharing my podcast and stuff like that. And yeah, it’s kind of what I do. It’s. I like sharing open source music because I’ve learned and I’m gonna probably ramble here. It all started for me.

Tom Ray: Really?

Ryno the Bearded: Yes. Me, ramble.

Tom Ray: It’s kind of your thing. That’s what you always start your show off with.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. But, a long time ago when the RIAA started suing customers, I was like, no, I can’t deal with this. This is dumb. How is it okay to go out there and sue your customer? And I found Creative Commons licensing and kind of have built a lot of my life around it. And it’s been like this weird little podcast I do that hardly anybody tunes into has just become this great thing that has connected me with artists and musicians all around the world and allowed me to interact and travel and just have great music, great musical adventures and support music. Yeah.

Tom Ray: And the, well, first of all, okay, so I know these parts, but we gotta ask the things here just so people can learn more about you. Now first of all, where are you located?

Ryno the Bearded: I am based in the beautiful hub of Jackson, Mississippi. You are, the musical epicenter of the world.

Tom Ray: It’s not that bad though. I mean, you guys. Okay, you have record stores. I know. So I went there just recently to visit you and I was just wearing the other shirt that I bought from there yesterday and you took me around to some of the record stores. there. I didn’t. There weren’t any clubs or anything that I know of down there that I really was aware of. I know that you had mentioned something. One of the record stores does have live shows in shop. You showed me that. so, anyway, yes, Jackson, Mississippi. And now let’s get back to when you started the show. So now you said podcast and it is recorded, but you do do it live. It is, it is a live show. And it’s also, it’s one thing. I’ve been on your show, I’ve spoken with you, I know you, you’ve played us on the show, you’ve interviewed me on the show, you’ve had me play on your show. And truthfully, to this day I am still very confused by a lot of the aspects of your show that you mention. And I’m always asking you about them because you do a live show, but. But then you also have a separate after show stream, but you also have. You also do a video stream. But it’s. So explain the process of how your show goes. About. Tell me about running this show.

Ryno the Bearded: So, so I will say what happened. What. See what had happened. Mr. Ray was way back in the day, I was living in this tiny little town of Amory, Mississippi, which is just like 7,000 people. There’s like no one there. And I, I am kind of a round peg trying to fit in the square hole in Mississippi sometimes.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: And I wanted to talk to people and I found the Internet and I actually found podcasts and this whole thing with dropping music in. And I started doing a show through that, with the help of Adam.

Tom Ray: Curry, and wanted to get into that too. Yeah, yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: It started out on Friday nights. Well, it started out I was doing five, 37 days a week. I’d do an hour show every single day. Then it got to where I was just really doing one starting at six o’ clock on Friday nights, where it started out as this two and a half hour extravaganza. That’s where I’d sit there and go through it and record the first two and a half hours. I’d actually would have interviews, I’d have all kinds of new music, stuff like that. and then after it got off and I got done, it was like, oh, well, I’m sitting here in front of the computer, I’m drinking, I’m listening to music. Why sign off? So I would do what I called the afterparty, which kind of turned into this whole 247 stream. So like I have a stream that goes 24 7. I do like little shows along the way on the stream. The main one I do right now is Friday night at 6pm where I just do the top 10. And then I go into the afterparty and just like kind of screw around. And that’s where the chaos happens.

Tom Ray: Now let’s get it. Okay, you mentioned one of the things that I have a note that I wanted to bring it up, but that’s another thing I’ve always been confused by. So your stream is hosted by the no Agenda stream or by the server.

Ryno the Bearded: It’s run by the same thing. They used to host it and run all the backend. I’ve kind of split it apart from them a little bit. But Mark, if you need IT services, I have a great guy.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: and he actually has ran the no Agenda stream forever and he runs all my stuff. So it runs off their backbone, but there’s a little separation on it and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s basically mirrored exactly what they’re doing. It’s got the same setup as what they’re doing. And yeah, for years Adam actually used to provide the bandwidth and everything for the show.

Tom Ray: Now how, why do you know, how did you get connected with this? You’ve always alluded to Adam Curry, one of the very first MTV VJs, who then, is the. I still, I’m gonna, I’m gonna respectfully say, yes, the, the creator of podcasting. Although I still kind of feel like it was, it was a who beat, who did the punch sort of thing, history wise. But that’s just my opinion. But, how did you get hooked up with him?

Ryno the Bearded: So I’m gonna say the podfather is, I love that term used for.

Tom Ray: That’s okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. and what it comes down to is I got my first Windows, mobile phone, the old Tilt, a Microsoft Tilt phone. I don’t know if you know which one I’m Talking about fantastic. It was a smartphone. Okay. And on that phone, it had an app called Konoma. And of course, I had to pay, like, $20 for an app, which $20 for an app. Sounds ridiculous.

Tom Ray: That is very ridiculous.

Ryno the Bearded: But it suddenly had all these different podcasts I could sit there and find. That’s where I first, like, got into twit and stuff like that. and I came across no agenda, and I started listening to that. And that was Adam Curry’s second podcast. His first one was the Daily Source Code, and that one we can get into. That all really ties into the beginning of podcasting and everything, especially in terms of itunes. and the reason I say that ties into itunes is because when they first start using the RSS stuff, and Adam could tell the story better than I could, but he started messing around, and he starts like, oh, this is what we can do. We can deliver content like this. And basically, he started doing his Daily Source Code show and messing around with it. And unbeknownst to him, the people at itunes at Apple were seeing what he was doing and kind of configuring and making stuff work to go along in line with what he was doing. Yeah.

Tom Ray: and what I remember about it is they basically approached him and said, we want to build this into what you’re doing, into the iPhone. And he went, cool, and then sold them the rights and then realized, like, oh, crap, now I don’t own it anymore. Or not. Not even that I don’t own it. It’s just that, oh, now they regulate it. Now they decide what it does. And.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: And then that’s why he’s now working or has been working on the podcast 2.0 sort of thing.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. And he does a lot of interesting stuff on that and everything.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: but it was very interesting. Although I will say one of the most hilarious things. There’s actually a video of it on YouTube somewhere at, ah, Mac World. You know how Steve Jobs used to get up and always do the demos and how well rehearsed and how perfected he was in his demos. Yeah. He gets up there and he’s like, yeah, I want to show you itunes. And you had this other girl up there, and it’s like, oh, here, look, here’s Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. And it goes through his introduction. And then all of a sudden, Adam comes on and goes, you know, I almost didn’t get today’s show posted because my MacBook is acting like a motherfucker. And Steven, the other guy, was like, stop. Stop, stop.

Tom Ray: That’s funny.

Ryno the Bearded: But, no, through his show, no agenda that I kind of found, but.

Tom Ray: Him like, did, did you, like, did you say, can I host my stream on there? Can I do a stream on there?

Ryno the Bearded: It went through like 20 different steps. Okay. So the thing is, and I love the model that no gen has and is like really what I’ve based it on is there’s no advertising, there’s no subscriptions, there’s no that. If you like it, it’s a value for value. If I provide you value, you provide me value back to where if you like what I’m doing, go ahead and send me money. And they would have like this whole producer section because that’s when you send somebody money, you are a producer for their show, you are helping them make this happen. And basically you get little shout outs during the show. So if you send them money, they’d read your note and say, oh, such and such came in with $50 donation and they called somebody a douchebag, right? Yeah. And so it just went all through this. But through their model, they were very open to letting people participate and stuff like that. And they had their stream running and stuff like that. and through their stream somebody did that what they called the osdsc, the open source daily source code where you could suddenly drop tunes in it. And when Adam wasn’t live, it was just taking those tunes that got dropped into the Dropbox and actually playing them out. So like you had this curated stream of music by a bunch of different people who were just listening. Okay. And I dropped Terence and Phillips Banger, Uncle Fucker into it. And I’m sorry if I need this, let me know. and everybody blew their minds. And so suddenly I was known to be like one of the guys that regularly started dropping stuff in. And at the same time as doing that, I was actually had this great idea because it was right when YouTube was starting out, it was right when podcasting started out. And I’m like, it’s really difficult to get somebody to listen to a two and a half hour show. Like you’re not going to get somebody listen to it. But I was like, you know what I could do is I could take little clips out of the show, cut them down, this is interesting, let’s put it on YouTube and then people could share this little two minute clip instead of two and a half hour show.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Which kind of what’s happening with the shorts and stuff today? Right? I see a lot of your stuff to where you do the Big, long show, but you cut out the little bits. Oh, yeah. And share it.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: And I reached out and he’s like, oh, yeah, go and do it. He’s like, yeah, we’re licenses or Creative Commons license, so you’re good set to reuse it and stuff. And so I actually started a project where I started making videos for the no Agenda stream. Okay. And I did a lot of them. I. I will say that I had a moment where I broke myself and I overwhelmed myself, but that’s how I actually paid to go back to college. I ran a Kickstarter where I was making YouTube videos all the way back in, like, 2012. 20.

Tom Ray: I don’t know. I didn’t know that. Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah. And that kind of all just pivoted into me doing my show and having a daily show, then a weekly show, and. And then I was like, well, can I get my own stream? And they set up my own stream, and it just kind of grew from there.

Tom Ray: Now, you say that, but there is, So it’s a big step to go from that to, like, how are you setting up your stream? How are you running your stream? Like. Yep. You don’t just go. I just play music on my laptop. And it. It goes out into the world. It has to connect to it somehow. So what, like, what kind of software did you start out using and what are you using now?

Ryno the Bearded: So I started out, like I said, it was just a Dropbox where people are dropping it in.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: and then I ended up getting SAM broadcaster, which SAM Broadcaster is closed source. I, We. We’re both big fans of open source, but, yeah, it was what it was. It’s not an inexpensive piece of software, but it is what actual professional, real radio stations use.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: Like, not. Not just guys sitting in their office messing around. It’s actually, if you go to a radio station, they’ll actually have it running in there. But, yeah, I’ve been using that software for the entire time, and I absolutely love it. It’s been my best. My favorite software to create playlists and stuff, like, through.

Tom Ray: Yeah, you showed it to me when we met in Milwaukee and you were showing your library, which I’m going to get into that in a little bit, too. But you were just like, oh, and I do this, this and this. And you were showing me, and you showed me like, 20 things in, like, five seconds. And I’m like, okay, I’m not following what’s happening here, but I get the gist.

Ryno the Bearded: Well, and I will say I’ve migrated From my old PC to my new PC, which there’s a whole other story there that I’d like to go into. But when I migrated, I lost it. But I had the ability through the playlist I’ve built, I could sit there and put a week’s long worth of playlist together with maybe songs repeating three times tops. Three. And it’s just built out. I’m just like, click, click, click, boom. M. And

Tom Ray: So you’re still using the same software to this day is what you’re saying?

Ryno the Bearded: Yes, I am actually in the process of trying to migrate because, you know, the whole window. Yeah, well, Windows 10 went end of life.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: And I have this beautiful computer that is a great computer. The specs are still up to date. Like I can play high end video games on it, I can do everything on it. But because Windows 10 Microsoft suddenly decided, oh, we’re not going to support that anymore. I suddenly had this machine with an old OS on it. So I actually installed Ubuntu Studio, thanks to you.

Tom Ray: Oh, nice.

Ryno the Bearded: On it. And I’ve actually been trying to learn that, to start moving over to that because with everything we do regarding open culture, I kind of feel like I do need to move over to that because that is the natural end. And.

Tom Ray: Yeah, it makes sense because you are really, I would say a huge proponent for, music that is Creative Commons and freely available and reusable and stuff like that. Like you have probably one of the largest libraries of it that I know of. So moving on to that, are you going to be using, the one I heard of from, Dan, I forget his last name. did the Linux show in the uk.

Ryno the Bearded: Dan Ryan or.

Tom Ray: No, no, no, no, Dan, shoot. He did a music show podcast a long time ago that was based in England and he had a guy that he co hosted it with from Germany. Anyway, not important. it’s going to come to me the second this is over. Because he was like literally someone I listen to all the time and he ended the show. But he told me that he used one even to record the podcast that they did that was called BUTT which stands for broadcast using this tool. And I believe that is in Ubuntu Studio, but that’s what he used. And it’s a radio, it’s an actual like stream list microphone, turn on and off, connect the chat to it type of thing. So I was curious if you had tried that.

Ryno the Bearded: I’m wanting to, I’m trying, I’m wanting to Move over to that direction. And like I said, it’s, it’s one of those things. It’s so easy once you get stuck in a software and you’ve used software for so long.

Tom Ray: Yeah, for sure.

Ryno the Bearded: Like, I hate MacBooks. I hate Apple products.

Tom Ray: I don’t care for them either.

Ryno the Bearded: I’m like, where’s the right click button? Why do I not have the right click button?

Tom Ray: Yeah, it’s just working. Why not? m sorry.

Ryno the Bearded: Oh, it was hilarious.

Tom Ray: Let me put it this way. Mac is the company that made it go. And it’s only $2,000. Like, only $2,000 is not a phrase that, you know.

Ryno the Bearded: Like, I can see that on only 99 cents.

Tom Ray: Those are the only ones that they’ll go. This is only worth less than a dollar. But everything else, like, oh, look at this here, here’s some earbuds. And they’re only $200, you know, go, go to hell. And then everybody else started doing it anyway. Sorry, small rant. Go ahead.

Ryno the Bearded: I just want to agree on that rant. Like, I hate the obsolete, built in obsolescence of technology. Like, all of it’s just built to be thrown away. It drives me nuts. Like, you get this nice phone that you’re sitting there using, and it’s designed to be obsolete after three, four years. Right. And it’s not because the, it’s not because of the phone itself. It’s not because of the hardware, it’s not because of any of that. It’s just because the software manufacturer is like, we just don’t care to support that anymore. that’s that going into Windows 10.

Tom Ray: I mean, Windows XP was supported for like, I don’t know, 800 years. And then they, they replaced it with Windows 10 and then Windows 10. They’re like, It’s been about five minutes. Maybe we should stop supporting that one too, you know? Like, why all of a sudden? I mean, not that I don’t think that they shouldn’t keep their security up to date. Like, supporting Windows XP for the longest time was actually really horrible. But still, actually it was good for me because I was a really great, Internet Explorer 6, bug fixer. So that was like, literally what I got hired for, for a lot of stuff was fixing website bugs on Windows or on IE6. And now it’s just like, oh, no, you don’t have to. Anyway, sorry, I keep going off on rants. We got to stay off technology. go ahead.

Ryno the Bearded: Well, the technology is important to me. Yeah. But like, the whole reason I had to migrate off this machine is because the third party, the TPM chip or something like that.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: My computer didn’t support it, and because of that, there’s just no option for me to upgrade it to Windows 11. And it’s like, why should I throw that machine away? Yeah, exactly. Works. It’s still powerful, it’s still good. And that’s where I was like, all right, let’s try Ubuntu.

Tom Ray: You know what they should do? They should give people like they do with cars. You know, your car’s old enough, you can get, like, you know, collectors items on it and then still use it and then brag about having it and how you still get to use it. They should do that with the laptops and the operating systems and stuff. And you can have a big sticker on the back that goes, you know. Still using Windows 95? Yeah, it’ll be like a badge of honor.

Ryno the Bearded: I will tell you. I know you had Jon Worthy on the show one time, and I want to bring him up because he’s finally giving up his iPhone 6. Oh, yeah, yeah. He’s been using an iPhone 6 till, like, last week. And he finally upgraded from his iPhone 6.

Tom Ray: Like in the same boat. I think he just finally updated to whatever the next one was after six. Like, maybe not too long ago.

Ryno the Bearded: Like. Yeah. but the thing is, is there’s no reason to. The only reason he had to upgrade is because, well, one, you can’t fix it.

Tom Ray: Right.

Ryno the Bearded: Can’t replace the battery, and two, they just stop supporting for the software.

Tom Ray: Yeah. I mean, eventually they have to go. We can’t keep justifying hiring people to fix this thing that we don’t want to support anymore. We’ve moved on. now. Okay, so you’re moving over to Ubuntu Studio, and you were talking about switching your playlist thing, but now let’s get to your music library, because we recently I actually called on you for a promise I made to something I was going to do that I was like, wait, I don’t know how I’m going to do this. And then I went, I know who could help me do this. And I contacted you, and that was for the Ubuntu Summit, the online summit music stream that we just did recently. And so the reason I contacted you and this is how this is related is because I said or no, they asked me that because I was like, I’m going to find people to do live performances to stream after the summit that they’re doing online. And he Said, what if you had. Because he goes, I know you like Creative Commons music and you’re really part of that community. What if you played Creative Commons music all day long that we could have on in the background at the location we’re doing the summit and then do the thing afterwards? And me, of course, just going, yes, you know, like, of course I can. And then I thought of you and said, hey, I need your help. And you. Because, like you just said before, if you needed to, you could play songs for three days straight. That’s all Creative Commons without repeating one. And you did. You did it for two days. We only needed two days, but you did it. So tell me about your library. First of all, how, how long have you been, collecting Creative Commons music?

Ryno the Bearded: So, catalog and a spreadsheet. And I’m actually going to go back something, because it’s funny that I brought up my library to talk about my library, and I have my Ryno CC Music spreadsheet. And on the first page of that is 20 pound sounds.

Tom Ray: Oh, there you go.

Ryno the Bearded: The lead singer is Dan Lynch!

Tom Ray: Dan Lynch! That was who I was thinking of earlier when I was trying to think of the podcast. I knew his name was Dan, but I couldn’t remember the. The last name. There you go. That’s the guy who told me about the broadcast using this tool software.

Ryno the Bearded: The BUTT.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: So right now, in my library that I have actually gone through, cataloged, have a link for, in the Creative Commons license tag to it, I have 5,573 tracks.

Tom Ray: You sent me a link to that spreadsheet and it was nonsense to me because I was just originally going to go and pick some songs, and I’m like, I can’t look through all this. He knows it. And I’m like, why don’t you do it?

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. Oh, I’m super happy too, because I want to tell you, like, this is one of those moments where real people, you say, ubuntu Summit. They’re like, okay, yeah, whatever is that. I don’t care about that. I told the people I work with, I’m like, oh, no, I’m getting to participate in Ubuntu Summit. They’re like, holy shit, that’s cool as hell. It’s one of those things if you’re a software person and, you know, servers and stuff like that, it’s suddenly like, oh, that’s cool. That’s exciting.

Tom Ray: Yeah, because Linux is, mostly used for the stuff that you, the websites you visit. Like, it’s mostly hosted on Linux and stuff like that. Yeah, so it’s popular in that area.

Ryno the Bearded: Oh yeah. But, see what had happened Mr. Ray.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: is Progo, one of programmers that hung out in my IRC chat room which I need to fix the link to my RC chat and stuff like that. So if you like IRC chat. A lot of my stuff still resides in the IRC chat. He actually built us a vote bot way back in like 2015.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: And so as I was sitting there playing the tracks through and you were in the IRC chat and even still to today you can actually go in and vote on the tracks and that’s how I determine the top 10 list and stuff like that.

Tom Ray: Oh right, yeah. Okay. So now is the top 10.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah. So that way as I sit there and go through and get these, I can actually bring the links over and like, oh, okay, here’s what’s played. This is it. Let’s go create a spreadsheet that links here. Let me go and put all the details into it. And it allows me to automate a lot of the work I do and stuff. But basically every track that gets played fine size, our little vote bottom, says okay, this song was first played then this time. Here’s who’s voted for it, here’s how many times it’s been voted for. And I started doing that and I started putting together a top 100 show. I did the first one in 2015. So I will be doing my 10th top 100 show this year.

Tom Ray: Oh yeah. End of the year. Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. Ah, yeah. And so because I need to have that and I need to have links and I want to share it all back to the artists and stuff like that, I just have the link in there. So that way instead of having to create 100 links, I just create a spreadsheet number amount and it’s done.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Automation, is great, right?

Tom Ray: Oh, of course. Yeah. No, I love. It’s actually one of Automation is something I get so used to that when we switched our current site over to a static generated website. So I’m doing a Jekyll site. Like my site is. or the Lorenzo site is completely open source now. I forget with the CMS I was using, I was like, oh, I could schedule these posts and like do a bunch of them ahead of time and then I wouldn’t have to post for like a week or so. And now it’s like I gotta post it myself anyway. Sorry, you said automation and it made me think of something.

Ryno the Bearded: I’m struggling with. But no, it just makes it really easy. So every time I get new music, I just add kind of links to this giant spreadsheet and just keeps building.

Tom Ray: Now, finding the music, that is something that personally I think has become harder, more difficult over the years. How are you finding Creative Commons music these days? I mean, I know you can search for it on Bandcamp, but it’s such a crapshoot what’s going to pop up. Because it’s not. While it says you can filter for that, if somebody doesn’t tag it, that it’s not. It doesn’t really filter by the. Oh, and they selected this license on Bandcamp. It’s only really if they said that it’s Creative Commons, you know, so how are you finding it?

Ryno the Bearded: So at this moment, when I really want to go looking, I’ll go and search. And I have a Google search string that I use that actually will do the filtering on Bandcamp for you. But because I’ve gotten such a huge library in Bandcamp over the years, like, let’s see, we’re going to do the numbers. As of today, my collection in Bandcamp is 1,164 items.

Tom Ray: You’re saying if you’re looking at your membership, profile on Bandcamp.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Oh, wow. Damn.

Tom Ray: I don’t know why that’s surprising to me. I know that’s what you do. I mean, when I was at your house, you have an entire bookshelf dedicated to, even like the tchotchkes and baubles and things that you’ve, you know, that bands offer when you can, you know, download their stuff and you collect it, you have it all on display.

Ryno the Bearded: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Because support people, people. But because my library has gotten so big out there and I have a few people I follow. Like I just once a month, usually, on Bandcamp Friday. Because Bandcamp Friday is one of the best things ever. I will just go through and I’ll have 60, 70 emails from different bands, different people that have bought stuff. And I’ll just go through that list and I’ll find a bunch of new stuff there.

Tom Ray: And well, on top of it too, a lot of it also comes from. And we didn’t really get into this. You mentioned it briefly, your chat that you do with the live stream. I know from experience that it is a. I mean, a really dedicated group of people that you hang out with. Your show is really actually based around that you talk and you go through the chat and people discuss and they Even kind of drive what happens on the show to the point where you guys vote on what the title of the show should be when it’s over.

Tom Ray: But they also probably tell you about music or go follow this or like, I’ve found this as well. So tell me about the chat and the interaction.

Ryno the Bearded: Actually, the, the chat is actually my favorite part and I need to fix some stuff. Chat, I love you. I need to fix the link. My link, for some reason on my website that says join chat now isn’t working. And I don’t, I, I’m not, I’m. Oh, look, I don’t push buttons. I don’t push buttons.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: I can look at it and say, hey, you need to fix that. There’s something wrong with it. I’m on the GRC side of it, if you know what that means. No, government. Government, governance, risk and compliance.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: So I’m on over there with the people writing the policies and stuff like that. The people are like, hey, you need to make sure that computer logs off after 15 minutes. You’re welcome.

Ryno the Bearded: So that’s kind of stuff I do. I do that side, but I don’t press the buttons. So I need to fix my chat room. But yeah, we just sit there and hang out on Friday night and we’ll sit there and talk and carry on and just have fun. And it’s really actually what makes the show worthwhile for me to keep doing.

Tom Ray: it’s a fun part of it, doing your show. When I was down there and you and I would be chatting, and then all of a sudden things would just pop up to the point where, like, I believe at one time I was just sitting there reading what people were writing. I’m like, oh, yeah, wait, we’re supposed to be talking.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, well, and the thing is, is way back and like I said, my career’s taken off, so I don’t spend as much time on it as I used to. But like back in the old day, when I got on at 6pm I had people that were at midnight over in Europe that were tuned in, listening, and they were sitting there chatting. So I had this whole group of people I was talking to over in Europe. And then as the night went on, by the time it got midnight here, I had people out on the west coast of the US tuned in, listening, chatting. So there was always somebody there. There’s always some chat going. But, you know, it’s, it’s my chance to hang out with my friends. And people I like to talk to and share music with. And it really is that, it’s that moment to like share and be connected with people. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Now here’s something that just popped into my head and I mean, I know you’re probably too busy to do this now or, you know, just because you do have work that you do that occupies a lot of your time, like you were saying, but why have you never started a net label? Why have you never like, or even just a label in general with the music knowledge you have and the connections through the different creative cummins musicians that you know. Why have you never done a net label?

Ryno the Bearded: I don’t know. All right. I’ve never really actually thought about it. The one thing I’m working on and I, I still, I. I was not prepared and I did not. I should have gotten you a good show out and I’ve gotten better about that. I kind of peaks, and valleys. But I’m really starting to work on trying to do. Focus on local stuff. Yeah. And actually start like with the local shows, getting more artists come in and stuff like that. Like Conan Neutron and the Secret Friends just came down a couple weeks ago. and I didn’t know that.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. Oh, yeah. and so I’m, What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to focus on the local stuff and I’m actually trying to help promote shows that are local bands and prophesy to them about Creative Commons and be like, hey, this is what it’s about. This is what I do and try to convince some of them to release. And I’ve actually been in talks with some of them to actually come over and do old FMA style. Like, hey, you do a live set at the house, we record it and we release it in their Creative Commons. And that’s your first entry to it. Yeah. And so that’s where I’ve kind of been focusing. There is more promote trying to promote so that when I have bands come here and I get bands to come to Jackson, Mississippi, because who really wants to come to Jackson, Mississippi? but I’ve made it a place that a lot of bands actually want to come back here and stuff like that. I still think it’s hilarious with Jon. He comes here like twice a year now. Yeah.

Tom Ray: But he’s only like an hour away. I mean, and I only say that just because I drove all the way from Wisconsin down there and then my car broke down and I was in a shitty mood the whole time.

Ryno the Bearded: Well, he comes from Nashville. That’s a little over an hour. Yeah, four, five hours.

Tom Ray: But, I do that on a weekend that’s nothing. I mean, I love Jon, and he does great work when he’s down there, but he doesn’t have to take the travel that I. That the rest of the people do.

Ryno the Bearded: No, but I think it’s funny. Like, he’ll come here, then he’ll go to, like, South America, right?

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: It’s like, you come here to do my show, then you go somewhere real.

Tom Ray: Yeah, somewhere real.

Ryno the Bearded: But, the other thing I’ve started doing, like, in Guards to kind of like, not really a net label, but kind of is on that physical front and stuff like that is part of my local focus, is all the different artists I like. When I go out on band camp, if they offer records, I’ll, buy two of them and I’ll get one for me to keep, and I’ll take one to the record store. And I have actually gotten somewhere. I, have a little small section in the record store called Ryno’s Picks. And it’s just all the different music that I got that I’m like, I love this artist. I want to share them. I start dropping them in there.

Tom Ray: I forgot that that was, one of the. The trips we took around the town where you took us to the record stores because you were actually dropping off albums that you had bought. And we spoke to the owners and stuff like that.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: what was the name of that one? you know, on the topic here, I remember there was the End of the world or. No, the End of End of all music. And then there was the one that was also kind of like a comic book store.

Ryno the Bearded: Offbeat. Offbeat.

Tom Ray: That’s what it was. I was trying to remember the name of that one, and I couldn’t. Okay.

Tom Ray: All right, so now the.

Ryno the Bearded: I just want to say. See, I got that right there. That Pink Matters. Majin Buu.

Tom Ray: Actually from behind you, behind your trailer. Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: now with the. You were talking about the. Doing the local stuff. Now, you and I, like you said earlier, we finally got to meet in person because you set up a show in Milwaukee. You came here to Milwaukee, you set up a show, you were doing a few other that way too. or you were traveling around and going to places where bands you knew were and setting up shows.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Now, how were you setting those up? Because booking shows is a pain. So how were you setting, them up?

Ryno the Bearded: So I have not done as many of those, but, like, the last one I did that was out and about was in Charlotte, North Carolina. And, Walls, he’s actually on Blocsonic Artists on there. But I knew that he lived there in Charlotte. And I reached out and I was like, hey, man, I wanna. I’m coming out there on this time. I’m wanting to try to set up a show. I’m like, I got some money for you if you’ll do it. And he’s like, yeah. And he went and took care of the rest of it. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay. So he helped book that up too. Okay. So it was through the connections and then you were like, locally, here’s where I’m going. And then set it up. Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: See, now that’s the thing is you have. I, feel like I have the networking chops, but when I go to do that stuff, all of a sudden I don’t know anybody that. I’m like, oh, wait, maybe I don’t know somebody that can do that or set up shows out of town.

Ryno the Bearded: Although going back to Jon and shows out. We’re working on it. I have to get my passport renewed. But we are talking about trying to do international trip next year.

Tom Ray: Oh, really?

Ryno the Bearded: And we’ve talked to Josh from Louis Lingg and the bombs and they’re like, yes, we’ll get a show set up in Paris.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: And then, oh, I, Oh. Well, I can’t remember his name. Giant, tall guy, German. in Cologne, Germany. He’s like, yeah, and we can get a show set up in clone, Germany. Why am I forgetting his name? He’s probably gonna watch this and be like, how? How did he forget my name? Ah, but, we’re so like, if that all comes out, we’re going to have ones in Paris and Cologne, Germany next year.

Tom Ray: See, I tried to do something like that. That’s actually how I ended up with the Ubuntu Summit thing. Because I was I originally. Because I found they were doing it in London. And I was like, I know musicians in London. You know, people that I’ve met on Mastodon and had on the podcast. And I was like, what if I set up a show where it was like, nearby or like clubs, and we would promote it as open source Creative Commons music by where it was happening.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: And I was reaching out to the people I know from when we did the Ubuntu Summit in Prague. And they were like, oh, well, that’s not quite how we’re doing it this year. And I’m like, what are you talking about? I don’t care how you’re doing it, I just want to know around where it’s located so I could set up shows there. And then that’s when finally they, they were just hiding or they were. It was a big reveal that it was going to be online so he couldn’t tell me what was going on. And then that’s when I pivoted real fast and we, I was like, what if we just did this? And you know, the whole snaps as they’re firing. But anyway, what I was getting at is I was trying to set up shows there and then also I wanted to go to the the Linux Audio Conference. I think it is lac.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: And it was in, it was in France I want to say that’s what it was called. It’s some sort of, it’s a developer for like open source music on Linux and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. It’s really for programmers. But I was trying to do a talk there about how we collaborate using GitHub with Ardour and all that kind of stuff.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah.

Tom Ray: And I wanted to book a show there and I was totally talking to Louis Lingg about like trying to set that up, but then I ended up not going.

Ryno the Bearded: Anyway, I just want to say, and I don’t know if you remember this, but I want to say the, the Linux audio people are doing the Lord’s work because when we first talked a long, long time ago, okay, you asked is like, oh, why haven’t you tried Linux? And I said, well, I want my audio to work.

Tom Ray: Well back when we were talking. Yes, that was very true actually audio was one of the things that worked better than. My frustration was with video. Video is a horrible thing on there. Yeah, no, they got it all working out. But truthfully, once Ubuntu started doing stuff, and I know this can be an argument amongst the community, but they, they put a lot of the speed and the backing behind trying to get things to work properly. even though it’s one of those like dude came in with the money is, is how it really worked. But I mean he did, you know, and he did it. funny story now just because I mentioned it. So Mark Shuttleworth, the guy who runs the head, I don’t know his actual position but you know of Canonical, which does Ubuntu. When we were at the summit in Prague, I got on the elevator and he got in the elevator. It was one of those moments where it’s like, I don’t know what to say. This guy, you know, so he we were on the elevator alone. I knew it was him. He said something to me. Didn’t quite understand what he said. And I went, oh, oh, yeah, yeah. And then he just kind of looked at me like, that’s not an answer. And I’m like, I don’t know what you said. It was just one of those, like, I was thinking to myself like, holy shit, that’s Mark Shuttleworth. And then it was one of those. Wait, he just said something to me. So I nodded my head and was like, yeah. And then he’s like, okay.

Ryno the Bearded: I don’t know how to respond to that.

Tom Ray: He just looked at me like, why did you respond that way? He specifically might have said, what’s your name? And I went, oh, yeah, yeah. I don’t know.

Ryno the Bearded: Did you, did you actually get him to clarify what he said later? Or you just.

Tom Ray: No, not really. It was, it wasn’t that tall of a hotel. It was only like three stories. So the elevator went up and we just kind of stood there looking awkwardly. And I was like, my band’s playing, at the after party, so thanks for that I think is what I said. Kind of just like, oh, and by the way. And he was like, oh, great, glad to have you here. And then he walked away.

Ryno the Bearded: I don’t know. That’s funny. Well, I think you’ve also noticed and I, I, This is one of those things that’s weird. I’m a total infant revert, but I can fake it. Really great. Like, I, like if you met me, you would never know it. But like, one of my friends here, he’s like, you know, he’s like, you’re always booking your shows. And he’s like, you never come out for shows other than your own shows. And I’m like, you know, that’s fair. But honestly, I don’t even like coming out for my shows. I’m like, I’d rather be at the house, having it there, sitting in my chair, having my whiskey, having my food and stuff like that. And he’s like, no, I get that, I get that. Right? So, like I, can’t, I can’t deal with crowds that well, but I will start a conversation with anybody and just be like, hey, how you doing?

Tom Ray: Exactly. Yeah, no, it’s.

Ryno the Bearded: It.

Tom Ray: I, I wouldn’t even, I would say it’s a different word than introvert. But I get what you’re saying because I mean, I’ve known you so long that it’s just like, I mean, you And I. We just. I mean, seriously, anybody listening to this, it’s like, how many topics have we changed so far? and speaking of which. So let’s get back on task here. I want to ask one more thing before we get out of here today. Now, you were talking about doing the, top 100.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, for.

Tom Ray: For now. This is the end of the year thing. You’re doing the top 100. And why? Why? First of all, why am I not getting 10 million million emails saying, like, hey, view your top 100 wrapped list? Jesus, I’m m so sick of those damn things. Anyway, sorry, Rant. now what is your process? What are you going to do? How is this all going to come about? What are your plans for this top 100? How can we participate? Tell me about it.

Ryno the Bearded: So, ryno.cc R Y N O CC and you’ll see a listen live link which will get you to the stream. Then you might have to figure out how to get into the chat room. Because my chat room’s broken. Right.

Tom Ray: Yeah, you might want to fix that before this goes on, but okay, that’s up to you.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s irc.0 node.net and it’s double O, so. Oh. Oh, there’s some people that are nerds that heard that and like, oh, I know how to do that. Mm. It’s the normies that are just going, what’s going on? Why? But, yeah, but no, I just sit there. I’ll take my spreadsheets in my collection and I’ll just dump it into my spreadsheet, work some calculation magic and then some vlookups and then just 1, 2, 3, and just count it down.

Tom Ray: So you really just kind of do it on the fly, is what you’re saying?

Ryno the Bearded: Well, no, I prepare it in advance. Like, I get the spreadsheet, but, like, I’ll get the spreadsheet and I’ll have the. They’ll probably be like 1200 new tracks for this year. Actually, this year is probably shorter. There’s probably like four or five hundred new tracks that play dropped in this year. And I’ll just go through based on the vote total. and just pick. All right, here’s our number one. Here’s the number two. And just number them down through. Then flip the, invert the list and just start at the bottom and work my way up.

Tom Ray: Now, do you do this as a. Are you going to do this all in a row? How long is the hundred show?

Ryno the Bearded: I do it all in a row.

Tom Ray: I love the Response.

Ryno the Bearded: It is a kind of a long adventure. and I will say the first year I did it, like first couple of years I did, I would actually reach out to artists and be like, hey, you’re in at this point. Can you record something for me? And I’d get little bumpers done in it. But now I’m just like going through it. Right. That’s a lot of work. Seven to ten hours straight.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: I used to actually even time it out to where I hit number one at midnight.

Tom Ray: I vaguely remember you doing that. Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, but now I’m old and I’m just like, no, I’m just starting now. I can start now, I can finish now. It doesn’t have to match the time. We can pretend it’s New Year’s Eve as I hit number one. But yeah, then we just got to go from there.

Tom Ray: Okay. And, and just to let people know again, I mean, your stream is available all the time. You have past shows on the stream at your website, but the show itself is Friday nights at ah, what time?

Ryno the Bearded: 6:00Pm U.S. central.

Tom Ray: U.S. central. And me, I don’t know what it is and I’ve told you this so many times. I’m always like. Because I’m, I’m usually driving and I can actually turn it on, but every Friday I’ll get done driving and then I’ll be like, wait, it’s Friday? Oh, I missed this show. Like I missed your show so much. I still try to tune in while I’m out and out and about and I’ll catch it like maybe 50, 50% of the time, but I always forget. So do you have a calendar reminder or something like that or should I just set up my own?

Ryno the Bearded: I think you’re going to have to set up your own.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Ryno the Bearded: I didn’t know if you.

Tom Ray: That’s right. You, you’re still trying to figure out how to get the chat button to work.

Ryno the Bearded: Yes, it used to work. It used to get me right in there. and I will say one of the other things I find weird is I’ve kind of put myself in the obscurity because I, don’t like the social media stuff. I’m down to just using Mastodon. Yep.

Tom Ray: Yeah, you moved from, you did have the main Twitter presence for a really long time and that was where a lot of your audience did you find when you migrated over there. Was it much different? What are you, what are your thoughts on switching over to that? And you host it yourself. You have your Own server.

Ryno the Bearded: Yes. Yeah. Social Ryno, cc. the only two people. Well, there’s three people on there. There’s me, there’s my dog, Joe.

Tom Ray: Oh, right.

Ryno the Bearded: I didn’t have the dog when you were down here. The dogs knew you did.

Tom Ray: You did have the dog. It was down there.

Ryno the Bearded: Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: Because you showed me, you showed me his feed. That’s right. Because you were showing me pictures of it.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. At Joe. But I like it because I have the control over what’s there. Like I’m not being force fed by some algorithm to tell me what somebody else wants to. It’s more, I’m happier with the content I get from it. And I don’t feel like I’m just producing for somebody else. When I do stuff like when I put something out there, it’s, it’s for me, it’s because I wanted to put it out there. It’s not because I’m chasing some number or chasing some algorithm. It’s just like this is what I wanted to post because that was what made me happy for the day. Yeah.

Tom Ray: And so you, but you still find the engagement or even the interaction just as good as it was on Twitter?

Ryno the Bearded: Yes, And I actually find it’s less hostile.

Tom Ray: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, that was kind of a given, I suppose.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. Like it’s. And it’s also more my audience.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Ryno the Bearded: You know, it’s more, it’s more people like us. And you know what I mean when I say people like us?

Tom Ray: Like, you don’t have to explain, what Creative Commons is to them. You don’t have to explain what the value of open source and. Yeah. You know, and, and supporting musicians or whatever.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, well, and, and like you talking about the value, that’s the one thing I always try to like so hard to explain that culture is built upon culture. Nothing is made in a vacuum. But here we are trying to force these artificial constraints on culture and what you can do with culture. And I think that stagnates it and gives us this just media machine. Like I’ve realized. And it annoys the hell in me. Like the award ceremonies are just rich people patting themselves on the back. Like M. The Oscars is just a bunch of rich people patting themselves on the back for all this money. They said the Emmys. It’s like this club. It’s like, it’s this club that you’re trying to get into and once you’re in there, it’s this walled garden where I don’t want to be Part of the walled garden. I want to be something that like gets shared out and like people enjoy just because they want to.

Tom Ray: And I mean you have been making a show that’s based on what you want to listen to and finding other people that want to listen to it for many, many years.

Ryno the Bearded: So yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. It’s a fun hobby. I mean I will tell you that my goal and I’ve put the timeline on there and I talk about this timeline often. 55. So five years and three months. I want to try to be in a position that I can walk away from the corporate world and focus on doing the show again and like trying to build it to where I’m not doing it just to make money, that I’m doing it because I have a little money and then it can supplement and I can really focus on doing something I enjoy. Because when I was doing it first and I really had the time like it was nothing for me to do three, four nights a week of shows. Right. Like, like I used to always do the interviews, which I do two hour long interviews unformatted, which I always thought were fun. and the first unformatted was actually Kevin McLeod and it’s just two hours of rambling and it was like really great and fun to kind of talk to people like it. But now I have this computer job and I’m always on the computer that after I’ve spent 40 to 45 hours at work on the computer, it’s hard to be like, oh, let me go hop on the computer again.

Tom Ray: Exactly.

Ryno the Bearded: It’s like, oh, God, let me get away from this thing for five minutes.

Tom Ray: Well, and also I don’t want you to take this a certain way. But speaking of that, if thank you for joining me today. I was literally just going like I was going to wrap this up and then you said that. Now it’s like, well, now who’s gonna ask me? no, no, but of course it’s always great to see you. And also, let’s tell the people once again if they want to listen to your stream, check it out on Friday, Fridays or even just listen to it in the background during the week. Where can they go do that?

Ryno the Bearded: Yep. ryno.cc will get you to the website. R Y N O cc. I gotta say, I love it. Six characters.

Tom Ray: I mean, I know you got a really good short handle.

Ryno the Bearded: It’s. Yeah, I mean, and that’s where I’m building everything off of it. but if you want to go straight to the Stream Stream Ryno CC/OO and that’ll get you straight to the music. You don’t even have to look at all the other stuff. my podcast feeds are also messed up because ain’t nobody got time for that.

Tom Ray: Exactly.

Ryno the Bearded: I mean, it’s. Look, some of us mess, some of it’s hard to find. it’s funny, I actually call my main show is that show with the host is what I call my top 10. Because how does that work for SEO, right? Oh, yeah, I’m looking for that show with the host. I don’t know.

Tom Ray: Seems pretty solid to me.

Ryno the Bearded: I haven’t tried to Google it. I’m often Google it and see if I can actually find it and go into an incognito browser and see what I can find if I do it. but yeah, 6:00pm U.S. central. on YouTube, I do post some stuff there. Ryno the bearded on YouTube. Usually, when I have live shows in the house, I stream them on Twitch M, which I know you’re wrapping it up. Do you have preference? Twitch or YouTube?

Tom Ray: Oh, for those. It’s hard to say. It really is. It’s kind of 50/50. One is. YouTube is great for what it can do, but going live is different. Their focus is more on like the, I don’t know, the more tell if you, like, if you go to their live page with live streams that are on, take a look at it one time. You’ll see what I mean. It’s really just. It’s news coverage. It’s possibly somebody just playing old episodes of like, you know, the Real Housewives or something like that. It’s not really like, here’s people doing stuff live right now on Twitch. It is people doing stuff live right now. But the thing is, is on Twitch, everybody’s doing stuff live right now, so it’s hard to compete. Whereas, on YouTube, if you’re doing it live, it’s telling you, hey, this person’s live. You know, it’s just that it’s not.

Ryno the Bearded: What.

Tom Ray: It’s not easy to find. I don’t know. So it’s 50/50.

Tom Ray: I don’t have a preference. No. That’s a long way of saying no, I don’t have a preference. I do both.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah. so. But though that’s where to find me. And, you know, I love it. I love it.

Tom Ray: That was the, that was the response to. Oh, yeah, that’s right. I was saying this.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, well. And, the last thing I will hit is the one thing I always say. And this Is what I. I want people to understand and I preach every day is support people. People. Yes. And that is one of the things, and I think you’ve heard me say it. I m. Could give Taylor Swift $1,000 and she wouldn’t even notice. She farts more than that. I mean, it’s not. But like, people like you, like Jon like Conan Neutron, like Walls, all these artists, like Josh from Louis Lincoln Bombs, if you give them money like that, that’s a big deal. That’s like, hey, I get to keep living my dream a little bit longer. Hey, I know I’m going to be a little better on rent this month. I know all this thing to where to me, the whole basic of everything I do on this is. It’s about supporting independent artists and people like you, Tom, and like, the people that you have on this show all the time. Because I want to see independent people make it. It’s like, I always hate it when people say music today isn’t as good as music used to be.

Tom Ray: Oh, my God, tell me about it.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah. No, no. You just remember the best of what.

Tom Ray: Used to be, or you’re not looking for it. That’s the other thing, too.

Ryno the Bearded: Yeah, yeah. and it’s. And there’s just tons and tons of, great musicians out there putting out great stuff, and you’re just not hearing them because they’re drowned out by the noise. Nice.

Tom Ray: Now, see, that’s the way to end a show. Damn right there, Ryno It is always great to talk to you. You know I love talking to you.

Ryno the Bearded: Yes. We’re gonna have to talk again soon.