How to Find the Right AI Buyers for Your Content

**Rob Kelly** (0:02)
I'm Rob Kelly, and this is Media and the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. Each week, I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I'm also building an AI content business myself and share lessons of what I learned along the way.
You know, life's funny. I began my career lucky enough to interview leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Then I went on to be a three-time founder and CEO, driving $100 million plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table interviewing this new world's current and future leaders.
This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside. Welcome to Media and the Machine.
My guest today is Dan Steiny, who advises content companies on AI deals. Dan has spent nearly 25 years in licensing, including leading content partnerships at SoundHound AI. Today, he helps content and data companies figure out which AI companies to approach, what kind of deals to pursue, and why chasing only OpenAI and Anthropic may be a mistake. Dan built Nexus, a database that tracks several hundred AI companies. For one book publisher, his process surfaced 49 potential partners, including Pearson, Chegg, Perplexity, Coursera, and several emerging content marketplaces. We also discuss why training an AI model can be like putting a banana into a smoothie, why rag deals may give publishers more control, and his belief that quote, people make content, content makes AI, and AI shapes people. Away from business, Dan's a songwriter, keyboard player, screenwriter, and member of the band Whisky House, and even plays a little Grateful Dead for us in the intro. This is Dan's first podcast appearance, which I always love. Special thanks to Denise Garcia for connecting me with Dan many years ago. Please enjoy my conversation with Dan Steiny.
Why do you care about content so much and AI content licensing in particular?

**Dan Steiny** (2:22)
Well, my entire life, even when I was a kid, I've loved content. I started out when I was really young writing songs and playing in bands, and I really care about music, and I'm also a screenwriter, and I really admire creative people and people that create content because I know how hard it is and how much it matters. And AI, I think, is a particularly interesting area because it's new and it's also very confusing.

**Rob Kelly** (2:49)
Are you in your music studio right now?

**Dan Steiny** (2:53)
I am, actually. This is where I work each day. So I sort of go from my music life to my business life and back and forth. So I'm standing here right next to my keyboard, actually.

**Rob Kelly** (3:03)
All right. I know we both love the Grateful Dead. You're in a band. I know you have played Dead Tunes. Can you give a couple notes of Ramblin Rose?
I watched you play that live.

**Dan Steiny** (3:16)
Oh, like right this moment? Yeah, I think my keyboard's on. Just prove to me you really got the chops.
I don't know if it'll show up on the mic, but we'll try.

**Rob Kelly** (3:25)
Yeah.

**Dan Steiny** (3:26)
Okay, I'm walking over.

**Rob Kelly** (3:28)
Okay. That's enough before we get sued by the Grateful Dead estate.

**Dan Steiny** (3:40)
That's the very beginning.

**Rob Kelly** (3:42)
I love it. Well, I think I have a guitar in my, usually in my background. I've been asked to strum a song before and I know it's high pressure.

**Dan Steiny** (3:53)
It's amazing how many people I talk to have an instrument sitting behind them. I love that.

**Rob Kelly** (3:58)
So on the business side, can you talk about what you've done and what's unique about what you do in the AI content licensing space?

**Dan Steiny** (4:07)
I've been doing licensing for almost 25 years, I think.
In my last full-time licensing job, I worked for a company called SoundHound AI, and I was head of content partnerships. I learned a tremendous amount about the specifics about licensing content and data into an AI company to train the models and other areas. It's a kind of new area and a complex area.

**Rob Kelly** (4:34)
SoundHound would be a buyer in that case of content. They needed content to improve their platform.

**Dan Steiny** (4:40)
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. And I was talking to the content companies and working with the content companies in that job. And when I was doing it, and that was around 2001, I started to realize this whole area of content and data and AI companies was going to get huge. That was sort of my intuition at the time. And then, of course, in 2022, Chat GBT came out and the whole thing took off. And immediately, we learned that the AI companies were getting a lot of the data and content through scraping it off the Internet.