How To Build An Online Recording Studio That Employs 30+ Engineers - With Joe Wadsworth

Brian Hood (0:29)

We have a recording studio, Joe Wadsworth. How you doing, my friend?

Joe Wadsworth (0:33)

Hey, Brian, very well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, stuck in self-isolation at the moment, so trying to make the best of it. That's great.

Brian Hood (0:41)

You're one of those British people that sounds smart no matter what you say.

So you have that distinct advantage over me, someone born in Alabama with my thick Southern accent, so I can't sound smart. I have to do double the work to sound just as smart. So for those who don't know Joe, Joe is the owner of the Online Recording Studio, which is an online-based recording studio with something like 30 audio engineers working under him. Is something like that, Joe? Is that right?

Joe Wadsworth (1:04)

Yeah, if I'm being totally honest, I don't know the exact number of people that we have on our books at the moment. I probably should. But we have a team of producers and engineers and also session musicians. That's why it's slightly more difficult to keep track of because a lot of our producers have their session players as well, so it's difficult to kind of gauge. But yeah, I'd say at least 30 people on so far.

Brian Hood (1:23)

So this is a really intriguing business model to me for several reasons.

One of the reasons is this is essentially an agency model. So my old roommate, friend of mine, Brandon, has an agency called Media Whisper, and they handle all of the social media accounts for Live Nation. He has like 25 people working under him, and it's the exact same business model that you're doing except with an online recording studio. I've never seen essentially what is a recording studio agency. So that in and of itself is interesting to me. The second reason this business model is interesting to me is because of what's going on in the world right now with the coronavirus, and this is a business that seems to be relatively virus resistant.

And so last week on the podcast, we interviewed DK Waddell of LaunchPod Media, who has about 10 people working for him. They have 15 or so podcasts that they're producing right now in the business sector, and they're doing really well despite the coronavirus. And so I'm trying to do a series of interviews of coronavirus resistant business models, and Joe has one that I think is probably faring better than a lot of recording studios right now, especially if you're doing in-person recording. So I wanted to get Joe here on the podcast to pick his brain on how his business works, what we can take away from it as audio engineers, maybe if we're shifting our business from in-person to online, and what we can do as far as audio engineers that are just sitting in our basements right now tinkering with plugins and stuff, how we can think bigger and beyond just the one person home studio and perhaps end up scaling up their business to multiple engineers and multiple people involved. So Joe, can you give us a little overview of what exactly is the online recording studio? What do you offer? Just give us kind of the rundown of that so people have a good idea for the rest of this episode, what it is that you do.

Joe Wadsworth (3:02)

Absolutely. So essentially the online recording studio, as you say, it is a sort of agency model, and we provide services for singer-songwriters and producers as well who for one reason or another can't get into the studio or don't want to go into the studio.

Brian Hood (3:17)

Which is a lot of people right now.

Joe Wadsworth (3:19)

Absolutely. Well, initially, those reasons were a lack of experience, maybe a lack of budget, lack of confidence, or just not really knowing how to go about it. And so what started as just very simply doing music production for people over the internet grew into something where we realized that there were a lot of other services that we could offer in terms of promotion, branding. Some people just want mixing and mastering, which is something that did have a much bigger pre-existing demand for online, the mixing and mastering thing. But full production, there was a real lack of any kind of structured model that people were doing.

Now you've got things like Soundbetter, which is like an open marketplace, I suppose. But the thing with that is that, especially right now, now that we're all locked in at home, every single producer who sat in their bedroom is going on Soundbetter. And that thing is becoming incredibly saturated with brand new people on there. And those sorts of things are really difficult to do because either you have to do projects for a pittance, you know, for no money, just to like get your ranking up, or you have to spend loads of money on it, which a lot of people don't have. But in terms of what we do, it is a one-to-one, you work with a producer or you work with a designer, you work with a mixing and mastering engineer, and it's all done remotely. So you work on a video chat, you know, you send over a rough draft to one of our producers and we'll talk it through with you, develop those ideas, and then get it to a point where we've taken care of recording all the instrumentation in our studios in studio conditions with our session musicians, and then the artist just records their vocals at home, and they send us that audio, we mix it all together.