The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Andrew Antar

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Do you want to disrupt an industry? To do that right, you might want to take an empathetic approach to your vision and your leadership.
The music industry has been one of those leading examples of disruptive technology, and we're going to dive into that today with our guest. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Mike Liwski. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:40)
Yes, thank you, Stephen, and definitely for our Bliss Business Podcast listeners. Let me tell you a little bit about Andrew Antar and really why he's the ideal guest for the topic today.
Andrew, for one, is a visionary entrepreneur, leader, thought leader and innovative disruptor focusing on transforming the music industry. He's also a Web3 founder, designer, developer, investor and crypto expert. And if that's not impressive enough for you, he's also classically trained as a violinist.
He's the founder and CEO of Tune.fm, which we'll talk a lot more about today. It's a groundbreaking decentralized music streaming platform and music NFT marketplace, where music artists get the full value of their creativity and fans like us have access to the introduction of hot and upcoming artists and rare or exclusive content from music artists, icons and legends. With a strong passion for music, technology and innovation, Andrew has been at the forefront of integrating cutting edge, blockchain technology in the music industry. He holds a degree from Brown University, where in fact he founded the first Accelerator and Incubator Fund as an inspiration really that continues to foster brilliant minds there today. He's also taught himself to code, build large enterprise applications for customers like Bank of America, Ernst & Young, Comcast, and where he was awarded even a blockchain patent. Andrew's on a mission to revolutionize the way music is discovered and played, and to transform how artists are compensated. By increasing music artist compensation through crypto and micro payments, by up to 100x compared to other music streaming platforms, he's democratizing the industry. Andrew's visionary approach and the immense potential of Toon.fm's model and vision have captured the attention of investors, and he's secured over $80 million in funding. The Bliss Business Podcast is featuring Andrew because he exemplifies empathy and leadership by empowering musicians to really receive the fair compensation of their work and creating a platform that prioritizes artists and band engagement. Embodying people-centric principles through innovative technology and equitable solutions. So Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:22)
Thanks, Mike.
Andrew, Mike mentioned a bit of, you know, your background. Can you share a little bit about kind of your journey? What inspired you to create Toon.fm? Was there an aha moment for you?

**Andrew Antar** (3:37)
Yeah, well, I've always been in music my whole life. Since I was four years old, I was a classly trained violinist.
I played in many orchestras. I won some competitions. I toured the world with orchestras. And then I got an electric violin and started jamming out, playing with bands, playing different genres, jazz, bluegrass, rock and roll, everything.
I joined some bands, recorded on some albums. And I started something called Musicians at Brown while I was there. And it was basically sort of a bulletin where anyone can sign up and just say, hey, I'm a musician. I'm down to jam, looking for a drummer, looking for a guitarist. They want to put a band together. And I kind of blew up overnight out of the 6,000 students, like 4,000 were on it within a few days. And it was pretty cool. And that was sort of the seed of the idea where I was like, hey, maybe there's something here. And that was back in the time when the Facebook movie had come out and social networks were growing. So sort of had the idea for creating a music social network.
And then fast forward a bit, I did a bunch of things in the software space.
I ran a software agency where we build a lot of enterprise applications like Xfinity Mobile for Comcast. I got really into crypto and blockchain. I actually started mining Bitcoin in my dorm room in 2010 And I ran a hedge fund for six years. I got really into trading and options and derivatives. And so I sort of put together all of these skills, I guess, in music, tech, finance and crypto to create TuneFM. And there was a sort of moment where I had a moment where I figured out what the right business model would be for music. And it seemed pretty obvious, at least what it occurred to me, that listeners should just directly pay the artist for the music that they're listening to.