Epidemic Sound’s Vision: Where Music Meets Innovation

Justin Levinson (00:00.691)‍

Hey everybody, Justin Levinson here at the Agency Side Podcast. I'm here today with Oskar Hergloond, who is the co-founder and CEO of Epidemic Sound. I am super excited to learn about Oskar. Thanks so much for being here today, man.

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Oscar (00:16.108)‍

Hey Justin, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

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Justin Levinson (00:18.941)‍

Yeah, I've had a lovely intro conversation before we got started here. So I've learned a little bit about you. But I would be curious just for the listeners who have not, maybe not are familiar with Epidemic Sound. Maybe you could just give us a quick overview on what you guys are doing over there.

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Oscar (00:36.824)‍

course. So first off, my accent gives me away. So I'm a Swede. So let's get that out of the way. And for the last 16 years, I've been dedicating myself to one thing and one thing alone, which is trying to build a company that's attempting to soundtrack the internet. And that might sound deliciously vague, but in essence, what we're trying to contribute

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Justin Levinson (00:44.841)‍

you

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Oscar (01:05.806)‍

to is the following. We think that future generations at some point are going to look back at you and I, Justin and everyone listening and say, guys, your generation created the internet. Like that's crazy cool in our opinion. Didn't exist before you guys attempted and build that. And today, we use the internet for everything. It's how we shop. It's how we entertain ourselves. It's how we educate ourselves. It's where we do our banking and buy our medicine. And like, it's the patchwork of society. And how cool is it that you built that?

I look forward to have that discussion, but I know without a shadow of a doubt, like at some point, future generations are going to look at me and especially my future grandkids are going to look at me and they're going to say, granddad, if that was the case, like, how did you contribute to your generation's biggest collective achievement? What was your role? Please tell me that you threw your hat in the ring or do I have to be embarrassed for our family name? and this is where I come back to soundtrack and internet. I, I, I desperately want to think that that

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Justin Levinson (01:57.726)‍

Hahaha

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Oscar (02:04.354)‍

discussion is going to happen. And I'd love to be able to lean in and say, you know what, honey? A few of us up here in Sweden, we felt that we have this weird wonky language, but we're great engineers. know music like the palm of our hand. And the best way we could contribute to our generation's most prolific achievement would be if we are the company that soundtracks the internet. We like to democratize access to music, emotion. We want to try and help make sure that the internet is this

rich repository of the best of our species, the best of our storytelling, and ultimately democratize access to music. so Epidemic is that endeavor. It's the notion that 15, 16 years ago, we were fortunate enough to determine that everything online is moving towards video. Everything is going to need a soundtrack. Content without music is like food without taste. It's empty calories. It's bland. It's it's unremarkable.

But if you add umami and you add taste, it goes from being human fuel and dead calories to being memorable. And if you get it right, it becomes unforgettable. so epidemic is that pursuit. And so we built Epidemic Now where the world's largest soundtracking partner to all content creators across the planet. We built this incredible catalog of a quarter of a million pieces of IP of some of our generation's most prolific artists.

It sits on a software platform with tooling and AI and data and recommendations that allows you just to take your music, your idea, your stories, your brands, like the people you care about and tell them incredible stories. And the kicker is we've done it in a unique way such that all the IP, all the music is owned by us such that we can indemnify all of our customers everywhere across the world. And so yes, we use our music.

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Justin Levinson (03:54.429)‍

Wow.

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Oscar (03:56.0)‍

on any platform in any category across all commercial usages worldwide. And we have 16 years worth of track record and zero problems to prove it. That's what we do.

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Justin Levinson (04:08.112)‍

That's incredible. I imagine that's such a huge vision. Did you have that all in your mind when you founded the company or did it start out as more of smaller outfit? How did that happen?

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Oscar (04:21.518)‍

I mean, it definitely started smaller and more pragmatic. I like to joke and say that giving a long speech is easy. Giving a small speech is much more difficult. And so getting the elevator pitch down to less than three minutes took better part of a decade and a half. But if they were to like pull back time and take it from the beginning, I think it's fair to say that epidemic was forged in equal parts opportunity as well as frustration.

So for reference, my background is that I'm a recovering consultant. So at university, I was a numbers guy. Turns out that math and that kind of stuff ran deep in me. And so I went to the Stockholm school of economics. I moved to the U S I lived in Philadelphia for a while. I went to Wharton. did an MBA. And so I was a numbers guy and I found myself working for an American company called the Boston consulting group. Two years in, I realized that this is not my jam.

Like the people are ferocious learners, they're whip smart and we get stuff done, but my heart just wasn't in it. And so I left and I did a bit of soul searching and then eventually I, sent it around storytelling. I love the art of telling stories, whether it's with words or pictures. In my case, it turned out to be with video. So I started working for this TV production company who at the time was called Zodiac. They were based in Europe.

we eventually grew that to be the third largest production company in the world. Today it goes under the name of BaniJay. And so it was Fremantle, and the Mola Nas. but I joined many, many years ago. and initially I was the guy who made coffee and I would acquire companies. I did our IPO and I threw massive decadent office parties as well. And so I loved my job. my pay salary, my paycheck was cut in half.

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Justin Levinson (06:02.024)‍

Thank

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Oscar (06:14.31)‍

All my friends thought that I'd had a stroke because I left like a very lucrative business, but my heart and my family knew exactly I was doing the right thing because for the first time in a long time, I was incredibly happy. So I fell in love with storytelling and it started in television. Eventually I got promoted. So after a year and a half, I was asked to look into cats on skateboards. And more specifically, my boss was telling me that look, YouTube seems to be picking off. We think that this might be the future. Could you go and have a look and see how this works?

And so I did that and that's where the first component of like the smaller picture was, cause we were struck by frustration as we wanted to try and create content such that you and I are doing today, Justin, but we wanted to make shows online. It was impossible to find music, pay for it, clear it. There was a record label, a PRO, neighboring rights. It was very litigious. Everything was scary. People were reluctant to cooperate. And so like the frustration came to us where we said that, hang on, if you're a creator.

Adding music to your story, whether it's an advertisement, it's a brand campaign, if it's a trailer, if it's a TV show, if it's a feature film, if it's a TikTok, if it's a real, mean, regardless of what it is, adding music in a perfect world ought to be the pinnacle of the process. It ought to be a joy where you cross your T's, dot your I's, your content comes to life. You start to feel something, you connect with the audience. It was the exact opposite.

We were terrified about using music. have, licensed this. Do we have all platforms? What about the record label? What about the publisher? They have split management. There are fractional rights. need to report it. We can use it six months, but we can't use it seven months. was just fearful. Like we were afraid. And so the first thing we committed to like, let's build a world where that's not the case. Let's make it super easy for brands and content creators to use music. Let's bring back the joy. So that was the first component.

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Justin Levinson (08:01.703)‍

Yeah.

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Oscar (08:15.298)‍

And then the other component with five co-founders that Epidemic, two are music creators, two are content creators, and one is a serial entrepreneur. The other component was we looked to the artists, we looked to the supply side and we said that what do artists need? What are they looking for? How can we help them help creators? And we landed in two things. There were two things that are crucial if you are an artist. One is you want distribution. So the more people that hear your voice.

hear your song, hear your composition, the more content you are. Because ultimately you have a point of view you want to express and you want that to spread as much as possible. And the second thing is you want to be compensated. Like if I perform something that has value, aesthetic and commercial, please make sure I'm compensated. And on paper that was taken care of, like, cause the music industry has something called royalty, as many of the listeners know. And it's supposed to scale like

perfectly because if something grows, you're compensated. If it doesn't, you share the downside. But as we dug in, it turned out that that was a little bit of a so-called rig lottery because basically there was 1 % that were taking all of the value. The other 99 % didn't see their music distributed. It wasn't reported the right way. Music cue sheets weren't paid out the right way. All these different middlemen, the record labels, publishers, PRO, managers, neighbouring, right? They would always...

cut their pound of flesh and they had minimum guarantees. So at the end of the rainbow for the artists, there was this tiny, tiny, not even a pot of gold, not even like there was a dime at the end. And so we saw all these music, they were basically, they were being exploited because people were telling them, we're not going to pay you. You have to write on spec. If you get selected, you'll make money. so the people who didn't get selected or the ones that were selected, but didn't get that distribution.

They had to work at Walmart or a co-op or the post office or like a nursery somewhere. And so we said, okay, we take issue with that. You want to help recreate the music industry such that it benefits artists. build distribution, we pay them upfront. And we combine these two opportunities of helping artists and helping content creators. And thus Epidemic was forged. And so it's been 16 years in. Odds are a lot of you haven't heard of us because the first...

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Oscar (10:36.942)‍

10 years, we didn't give any interviews whatsoever. just very Scandi, very Swedish. Like let's under promise and over deliver. We don't give interviews. We build incredible music, rapport, catalog, brand, tooling. Today I can boast and say that our music gets heard every single day, 3 billion times. We soundtrack 70 % of our generation's most prolific storytellers. If they're YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagrams, also they're using us.

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Justin Levinson (10:45.075)‍

Mm.

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Oscar (11:06.446)‍

We power the multi-channel networks, many of the biggest broadcasters. We work with artists who are Grammy Award nominees. We work with iconic music creators such as Johnny Marr from the Smiths and Richie Horton, who more or less invented techno. And the list is very, very long. And we're now in a position where we realize that if there's one area where we haven't leaned in, it's agencies. It's people who work closely with brands because we think that

with this huge unlock this almost like a secret weapon in terms of helping them help their brands and clients tell super compelling stories across the world.

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Justin Levinson (11:46.045)‍

Yeah, well, you're in the right spot, Oscar, because this is the H2Cide podcast. yeah, hopefully some of the agencies that we work with can get hip to this and understand the value that you guys can really bring.

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Oscar (11:58.306)‍

I think so. mean, we're starting to see it. mean, we're working with the likes of Coca-Cola, Apple, the Sidemen. Only last year we signed Formula One, we signed Premier League, we signed the NBA, we signed Madison Square Garden. And so we're definitely starting to make inbounds. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a fool myself and try and do an American sports reference. And I don't know sports and I don't know American sports, but...

Like it's only the first innings, if that's an expression. I was in San Francisco the other week and I went to this state per stadium and I saw a baseball game, I thought was fascinating. Little did I know that baseball is all about food and drinking and having a good time. The sports is great, but the atmosphere was amazing. So we're starting to make inroads and like we're seeing a lot of success, but basically we want to be super clear that we're open for business and we're dying to get to know.

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Justin Levinson (12:27.527)‍

Yeah, that works. Good baseball reference. I like that.

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Oscar (12:54.163)‍

agencies much more.

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Justin Levinson (12:55.699)‍

Yeah, if there's agencies that are listening that are interested in seeing what you guys are capable of, what do you suggest? mean, obviously, you go to your website and kind of check things out. What sort of model? I know you guys have different tiers of subscription-based services and other things as well. What do you think typically works best for an agency?

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Oscar (13:17.71)‍

So it's a great question. You're absolutely right. Step one, I would say, is swing over to epidemicsound.com and have a look, have a listen. Our services are found on all platforms where content creators create content. So APIs, web, mobile, we do plug-in to all the big editing suites. And so we're basically in DaVinci, Final Cut, Resolve, Adobe, like anything and everywhere that you want to create content, you can find and use us. Second, never ever take

my word for it, as in the source. talk to people. We have like an ecstatic customer base that keeps on growing. So make sure that you get references. But then sort of, think that just see building on your question, the second half, where did you sort of end up just on the second half of your question?

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Justin Levinson (14:08.893)‍

Yeah, well just where can they, what's the best sort of subscription that they can get? What model is best?

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Oscar (14:13.87)‍

yeah, Right. And so if, if, if that's like the first point of calling, I think the second point is, our U S offices are in New York and LA. so once that's been established, the way we do business is also something which I think, puts us in the league of our own in that we have full autonomy in terms of how we create business setups for all of our customers.

So the vast majority of our customers historically, they've opted for a subscription. And the logic here is, if you pay a fixed fee monthly or yearly, or sometimes multi-yearly, they want to secure in a fixed cost such that it's predictable. they know typically, like almost all the customers we work with know that they have an underlying business that keeps on compounding as the economy grows. But more importantly, as online content grows, there's more video, there's more output. If you have a fixed fee.

And your output grows all the time. Like you just get better and better value for money. Like the more video you put out, the cheaper the cost is per video. So the vast majority of our customers tend to opt for a subscription. Now, where I want to be super clear is as it relates to agencies, it's not lost on us that agencies typically have more of a transactional model or you do one thing, maybe not sort of

full on subscription or there's no commit for a full year. And so we have rate cards, have bulk discounts, we have many different ways we can structure it. So it's basically up to getting to know either the agency or the brand or the in-house production unit, whatever suits them. We are at liberty to curate and create bespoke offerings. And again, I think that that's just, it turns out that's such a huge value component of our offering.

Because we don't have to incorporate other record labels, other PROs, neighboring rights, ASCAP, BMI, reporting, all of that. It's a one-stop shop. We're the only party in the transaction. So we can be incredibly flexible.

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Justin Levinson (16:22.825)‍

How customizable is like, you know, know AI is obviously taking a it's a big player in music these days. How customizable are tracks like if a client at an agency sees something that they really like, but maybe they want access to stems or different ways to manipulate that. How open are you guys to those things?

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Oscar (16:43.074)‍

Yeah. So again, a great question. The way I would characterize this is as a spectrum and where we have full maneuverability to both extremes. So on the one hand, we have artists and humans, and on the other hand, we have AI. Let's start with the AI component for argument's sake. We find ourselves in a position where because every single track in our vast catalog has been commissioned by us since day one and it's been paid for upfront, we can get into the re-immuneration model for artists if you like, Justin, but...

Basically we have all the IP in one place. And so we can indemnify and warrant to all of our customers that you can use our music any way you want. There will be no sort of AI knock on effects. There will be no litigation. There will be no nothing like we're unique in that way. And as such, we've been able to deploy a ton of AI driven value adding tools. I'll give you a few examples. You can search using AI. So you can drop any track, any link, a reference, semantic search.

You can drop pictures, but you can even drop raw footage. And when I say drop, you mean you throw it at Epidemic, any one of our interfaces. If you upload raw footage to us, we'll use AI. We'll look at that raw footage. We'll identify what it is. And then we can have a look at everything that we've ever soundtracked for the last decade and a half, which again, accumulates three billion pieces of signal every single day. That's the equivalent of 20 Super Bowls per day. And we can say that, huh,

This footage is similar to these 25,000 videos. In those videos, these tracks, these sound effects were used and they yielded this amount of attention, comments, likes, views, listens. And then we can play back in order of relevance. We can recommend that these are the tracks based on everything that we know about soundtracking from the past decade and a half, we think is most relevant for you, your brand, your target group, your platform, your demographic or whatever it is.

So AI has a huge role to play in recommendation. Then you go into adaptation. And so you find the track that you like. It's three minutes, 20 seconds. You love it. It's great, but there's just something about the voice or there's that saxophone that you really dislike or your video is 22 seconds long because it's a short, like it's something, it's a pre-roll. but the track is three minutes, 20 seconds. Historically, you've had to...

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Oscar (19:07.598)‍

So step into the shoes of a sound engineer and spend two, three hours trying to re edit, cut down the track, get out the parts you don't like, typically break the terms of use. Cause legally you're not allowed to manipulate a track the way you want to. We're the exact opposite. So we now built AI tools that you just drag and drop and identify. like the beginning. I like this. I don't like this. And then the flick of a switch, you can say, I want it to be 17 seconds or 17 minutes or 24 seconds.

And immediately we use AI to adapt it and mold it exactly the way you want it. Still a track made by humans, but you can get to use AI as you want to.

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Justin Levinson (19:39.945)‍

That's amazing.

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Justin Levinson (19:44.913)‍

It's sort of data driven. I can see how your experience as a numbers guy might still have paid off in your creative endeavors here because it seems like the two are pretty analogous.

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Oscar (19:57.154)‍

So, mean, you're absolutely right, but that's only if we stick on the left side of the spectrum. So that was the AI component. We can touch upon AI voice and we do generative things as well. But if you move to the other side of the spectrum, the human component, again, this is another thing that sets us apart. Since we are a bespoke company, which has stayed true to one thing and one thing only, all we do is soundtracking. All we do is audio. So over the years, we've accumulated a roster of artists from all around the world.

And they now tally in the tens of thousands. And so people reach out to us directly and say, look, I found this track. I really love it, but I'd love, I'd like something bespoke of this artist. I want something unique. And because we produce hundreds of tracks every single month, we too can be a bespoke place where you can order specific tracks and specific music as well, because we have that ongoing relationship. And so I bring it back to you have all the AI benefits, but it's human music. It's unique and it's bespoke.

and we really are this one stop shop.

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Justin Levinson (20:58.505)‍

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. How did you build that AI tool within your platform? I mean, I'm guessing like you've been doing this for 20 years, you've got music that's from a long time ago. Is it even adaptable to the new AI systems? How did you put that all together?

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Oscar (21:16.558)‍

So we started to build our catalog from scratch from day one. So when we launched 16 years in our catalog, we had exactly zero tracks. And we said that that's not problematic. On the contrary, this is actually a feature of ours because we want to build the best possible soundtrack in catalog such that it can help content creators bring their stories to life. So we've curated every single track. It covers 380 different genres. have everything from.

sound effects to walla to sound beds, to instrumental tracks, to vocal tracks, every single track that we've ever commissioned. We commissioned it into something we called split stems. So you have every instrument separated such that you can augment it, take it out, adapt it, depending on if you have a voiceover or if you want to make it unique. And so basically we've said that we want to have a setup where creators have full agency over the story, but then we do all the mundane stuff. do, we do the heavy lifting.

And such the creatives can be creatives. And that's how we started building it over the years. We eventually got to a point where our scale Justin really helps us because when you're as big as we are, we see all of our music as it's played on a global space stage. We can see what the world sounds like because we can track all of the music that we've put to the world because it's music. leaves a footprint and we're a software company.

So in real time, we can see what the world sounds like and what it feels like. Cause we can see how our music, our music gets tens of billions of streams on Spotify and other places, because it turns out the music is so good. People fall in love with it. So they consume it. Think about stranger things like Kate Bush running up that hill. When that's of when that track launched, the streams on Spotify exploded. Now we, Kate Bush obviously isn't with us, but that

The analogy is that we see that same kind of distribution, the affinity for the music happens like three billion times a day all across the globe. And when you aggregate that, we can see this is what the world sounds like. This is what they're feeling. This is what they're liking, what they're playing, what they're downloading, what they're listening to. All of that gives a signal such that we, when we commission tracks, we can base it on unique global demand. We know what all the storytellers out there are searching for, what they're looking for, what the comments are.

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Justin Levinson (23:18.557)‍

Yeah.

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Oscar (23:39.096)‍

how the ads are performing, where they're running, all of that tells us what kind of music we should be building. So we can be incredibly current on new trends or regional differences or gender specific similarities or dissimilarities across the world.

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Justin Levinson (23:56.045)‍

How much of your music do you put on to Spotify and the streamers to share there? How do you pick and choose what you want to share and what stays just confidential to your library?

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Oscar (24:07.566)‍

We put everything that we publish, not only onto our own platform, but also onto Spotify and all the other DSPs as well. So YouTube music, Apple music, like every single one on the planet. think there are 45 of scale. And the reason is very, very simple. We do that because it's in the best interest of our content creating customers and their artists. Because we've realized that when we do that,

We create a huge affinity, a huge fandom around our artists because the world's populations have find our music and they really appreciate it. And so if you're a viewer and you hear Katori Walker or you hear Sarah, the instrumentalist, or you hear any of our artists that are performing, or to mention just three different genres, like they have millions of listens per month across YouTube music, Spotify, Deezer and Apple and all of these platforms. And that's hugely important because then when brands start using them,

they get some artists which have like a very strong following in the younger demographics where all of our music can be find as well. And so it has to be our music. We're the only ones who we allow to issue a license. So you have to be a customer of ours to get to use it within your brand campaigns and your content, but you can find it everywhere because that just increases the value for the artists and for the content creators and the agencies and brands.

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Justin Levinson (25:29.083)‍

smart and obviously there's some probably back-end money coming through that you guys get from the streaming as well so I'm sure that it's part of something that helps. Have you found any of your artists that you've given them the platform and you've seen them like flourish that maybe working with you has sort of launched their career in a way?

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Oscar (25:35.662)‍

100%.

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Oscar (25:49.192)‍

I mean, that happens constantly. so it's something that we're seeing play out all the time. And there is, I mean, I could give you a couple of examples. I referenced Katori Walker previously. So he was soundtracking content from the NBA not so long ago, which just caused his following to completely explode.

Jan said is a British artist that we work with as well. She's seen similar success. We have a band called Loving Caliber, which has seen the same kind of success as well. Just the other day, the Outdoor Boys, which is this epic YouTube channel, which has been around for some time, decided to shut down shop. And the track that was used to soundtrack that final episode is a incredible artist called Michael Tell.

who's just exploded in the last 24 hours because of his storytelling resonated so much with the content creators and everyone watching that they immediately flocked to the streaming platforms. So we see constantly how we're able to launch artists careers and vice versa together with brands and with content creators.

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Justin Levinson (27:02.749)‍

Yeah, do you have any, I guess, what was some of the, do you have any early big placements that were really exciting? And how do you feel about, when you hear one of your artists' music that gets put into a Coca-Cola or something like that, how does that feel when you watch that? Does it kind of feel like, wow, I put, I was this connecting piece between this music and.

this brand and all these viewers, you still get that high when you see that kind of stuff out there?

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Oscar (27:36.31)‍

I a hundred percent still get that high. The way I think about it is less so about my contribution and our contribution, but it's more so that we love the idea of being a facilitator in this ecosystem of the creator economy. It's clear to us that storytellers, visual storytellers, they tend to have distribution, but they're looking for emotion. They're looking for feelings.

And artists, musicians are the inverse. They are emotion. They are raw feeling. Like if you ask me, music is the language of emotion. I tell my kids that I don't work with music. I work with emotion. Like we work with feelings. And when you can connect those two, like our job in that is basically minuscule. We have one job, like get out of the way, allow creative people to connect with other creative people.

And so when I see music resonating with a story that finds distribution, that brings back fans and they start to propel each other and the ecosystem starts to really be vibrant, that's been going on for the last five to 10 years. And so it fills me with pride or it gives me goosebumps. I don't take credit for it, but I just, I love the idea that we're able to facilitate all these incredibly talented storytellers to get to connect with each other. That makes me very, very excited still.

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Justin Levinson (28:49.074)‍

I'm

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Justin Levinson (28:58.696)‍

Yeah.

Yeah, I was curious because on a personal note, my line of business where I'm connecting people, we kind of do, we're in a similar space. connect sometimes on editors and copywriters and creative directors and producers to creative agencies and brands. And so when I'm on LinkedIn and I'll see the people that I've placed, they will share, oh, I did this TV spot or I did this work. Sometimes I do have a sense of pride to it where, yes, I know I'm not the creator.

But I'm like, yeah, well, you know, that trailer wouldn't have happened had I not taken that editor and put them in that shop and then it created that, then won that golden trailer award. You know, I don't, I'm not, I feel a little bit of, I don't feel like I did the work, but I feel like pride when I can tell my kids like, hey, that trailer, I kind of had something to do with it a little bit.

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Oscar (29:52.494)‍

I completely agree Justin. so I'll let you in on a little secret. Every single week I try and pride myself in doing great intros, at least one. Typically I'm old, right? So I love doing that either over email or over WhatsApp. And email lends itself to slightly better because I can be a bit more long-winded. And I love connecting people either because they ask for intros or sometimes because I just think that the world would be a better place if these two people knew each other.

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Justin Levinson (30:20.871)‍

Yeah.

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Oscar (30:21.038)‍

So I read up a little bit, something professional, something quirky, something professional, something quirky, and then I sort of mold them together. And I think it comes down to, this is me on a tangent and apologies in advance for being a bit pretentious here. But I think that as humans, like we have one role, and we're custodians of earth. It's like, leave the world slightly better than you found it. It's that simple. Like we're a small chain in the long chains of life.

And so we have one job, leave the world slightly better than you found it. So when I hit the beach with my three kids, they know that there's just one rule. You pick up three pieces of garbage before you leave. Not because you dropped them because you want to leave the beach slightly better than you found it. I think exactly the same way about bringing Epidemic to life. Because if we make intros, here's a great artist with a great brand or a great storyteller. We connect them to get out of the way. What they create between them is going to leave the world the more interesting.

like versatile, a more beautiful place. And so our day-to-day job is about sort of trying to facilitate that. So I feel pride. I also feel responsibility. Connect and then sort of get out of the way.

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Justin Levinson (31:24.723)‍

I love that aspect.

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Justin Levinson (31:33.543)‍

Yeah, super, super smart. We got a couple minutes here. I got just a few more rapid fire questions. Curious, any books that you really like? Any recommendations for the listeners that you appreciate?

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Oscar (31:41.442)‍

Please.

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Oscar (31:51.278)‍

I could go into a few Swedish books, but that's not going to be very helpful. I can share a few. I like many of the classics, but in general, I found the following in my consumption of books and films and movies, which is maybe a bit weird, but I'll leave that to others. In my line of work, I find that being moderate and tempered

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Justin Levinson (31:56.329)‍

It's okay.

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Oscar (32:20.238)‍

is a virtue. I trying to be a connector and being well balanced, I think is something that has served me incredibly well over like the 25 years of doing business. However, in my consumption of literature, film, culture and art, I'm extreme. As in I love when it's incredibly funny, incredibly raw, incredibly provocative, because I don't like to hold back.

So books, love crime noir, which are like the gorier, the better. love like the modern Sherlock Holmes, the old Sherlock Holmes series. think Game of Thrones because it's extra everything like siblings, just on the wrong side of history. There are dragons, fires. It's epic. Like everything that is over the top.

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Justin Levinson (33:02.472)‍

Yeah.

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Oscar (33:12.012)‍

I love the hangover because the humor is like, so dark. It's so, sort of in your face, but also the really deep, the dark, the seven, the movies, like some stuff that really gets, sort of gets me thinking and sort of leaves me like, wow, this is amazing. And so books is the same thing. There's this book called 1769, which is, from the 70 or the, think in English you call it the 18th century, which is about Sweden, which was gruesome and grueling. I absolutely love it.

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Justin Levinson (33:15.157)‍

Yeah.

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Oscar (33:41.976)‍

There's a series called Brun, The Bridge, which I think is being translated internationally. It's a Swedish, Danish piece of content, which is a great book and also has been televised. I was in TV production before and so I don't know if you read The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. So that's a great book. We did all the films. I can highly recommend that. That's also very dark and gruesome and Liespitz Lander is maybe one of the coolest characters you'll come across. So I'll stop there. Sorry. It's supposed to be...

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Justin Levinson (34:09.799)‍

Yeah, no, no, that's great. any music that you, any favorite music that you listen to?

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Oscar (34:16.27)‍

As you can imagine, I get that question a lot seeing as I work in music and I try and stay away from specific bands. I will say this. currently, deeply love listening to non English speaking music. And it's not because I don't love English speaking music. do, but I've listened to it so much. I really appreciate like Portuguese Fado like,

different kinds of funk, Brazilian music. I love listening to French rap, German hip hop, K-pop, J-pop. I just think that the melodies in other languages just really speaks to me.

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Justin Levinson (35:01.257)‍

Yeah, I love it. Well, Oscar, really appreciate your time here today and talking to us about Epimix Sound and giving us all this interesting value. And yeah, I'm excited to share this interview with my agency partners. And yeah, it would be wonderful to make some connections on that front. So appreciate you being here and talking to us today.

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Oscar (35:24.482)‍

Thank you so much for having me on Justin and yeah, for everyone listening, we're super excited to be around in the world in general in US in a big way. So please look us up. We'd love to get to know you.

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Justin Levinson (35:37.733)‍

Awesome, take care Oscar, appreciate it. Bye.

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Oscar (35:40.163)‍

Bye.