bOydestiny on The Virtual Sessions presented by The DJ Sessions 7/2/25

In this insightful episode of The DJ Sessions: Virtual Sessions, host Darran Bruce interviews Mike Thornton, also known as Boy Destiny, a seasoned jazz and R&B musician with a deeply personal and inspiring story.

 

Originating from a difficult childhood in foster care in Hartford, Connecticut, Mike found solace and purpose in music from a young age. His early exposure to classical music, trumpet, and eventually organ led to a lifelong pursuit of music education and performance. As a teen, he joined the Stitton Teenage Jazz Band alongside future members of the iconic smooth jazz group Pieces of a Dream, later touring and recording with them throughout the 1990s.

 

The interview traces his musical journey, his academic pursuits culminating in a Ph.D., and his return to music under the moniker Boy Destiny—inspired by Harry Potter and Boy George. As a studio-based artist, Mike discusses his experience transitioning from touring musician to music video creator and independent producer.

 

He shares valuable insights on music promotion, including the cost and complexity of securing radio play, tracking through Songstats, playlist submission strategies, and the challenges of digital music marketing. He emphasizes authenticity, strategic investment, and patience, while recounting success stories like unexpected radio airplay in Monaco and Italy. Despite modest financial returns, his story is one of passion, perseverance, and innovation in a rapidly evolving music industry landscape.

 

Interview with boyDestiny (Mike Thornton) on The DJ Sessions – Virtual Sessions
Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Mike Thornton aka Boy Destiny
Runtime: Approx. 2 hours

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Early Life and Musical Beginnings

Mike Thornton, known professionally as Boy Destiny, was born in Hartford, Connecticut and spent his early years in the foster care system. Between ages 1 and 10, he was shuffled through multiple foster homes. His musical journey began at the age of five when he was introduced to string bass in a school music program. Although his access to instruments was inconsistent due to foster care relocations, a passion for music took root early.

At age 10, he was adopted by his father and relocated to Philadelphia. There, he picked up trumpet in elementary school and transitioned to organ and piano during middle school, eventually becoming a standout student under the guidance of Dr. Robert Walker. In high school, he joined the prestigious Stitton Teenage Jazz Band, where he played alongside members of the future smooth jazz group Pieces of a Dream.

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Career with Pieces of a Dream and Musical Achievements

Mike’s tenure with Pieces of a Dream (1988–2000) marked a defining chapter in his career. He toured extensively, sharing the stage with legends like Patti LaBelle and Bill Withers. He composed several tracks for their 1994 In Flight album while simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite the intense pressure of juggling science and music, Mike managed to balance academic life with performing until he left the group in 2000 to complete his doctoral thesis.

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Birth of the “Boy Destiny” Persona

The name Boy Destiny came from his fascination with Harry Potter, particularly the notion of a “manifest destiny” marked by the famous lightning bolt scar. He connected that theme to his own journey as a boy destined for a musical path. The name also pays homage to Boy George and the 1980s pop culture that influenced him.

His first song under the Boy Destiny moniker was a tribute to actress Emma Watson, titled Emma Watson (This is My Heart), which featured a self-produced music video. He explains the painstaking DIY efforts behind it—acting as producer, director, and editor—using rudimentary cameras and locations in Miami to bring the visual concept to life.

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Studio Work and Transition from Touring Artist

Unlike his past touring days, Boy Destiny is now a strictly studio-based artist, focusing on music production and video creation. He crafts elaborate music videos, often self-directed, and emphasizes storytelling and emotional themes. His work is influenced by artists like Stevie Wonder, Boy George, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Hot Chocolate.

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Academic Career and Dual Identity

In parallel to his musical endeavors, Mike is a professor who teaches genetics, cell physiology, and endocrinology. Despite a full-time academic career, music remains his passion, and he often works late nights in his home studio. He openly discusses the conflict between societal expectations (especially from his adoptive father) and his musical ambitions, describing the pressure to choose a “practical” career over artistic dreams.

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Radio Promotion and Distribution Challenges

Mike discusses at length the financial realities of independent music promotion. He reveals that he paid over $4,000 for radio promotion via companies like Radio Pluggers, resulting in airplay on over 70 stations—including unexpected success in Italy and Monaco. One of his tracks, Just One Touch, received heavy rotation in Monte Carlo, unbeknownst to him until he discovered the data via Songstats, a real-time music analytics platform. He contrasts this with Soundcharts, which he found lacking in radio coverage.

He discusses issues such as:

• FM vs. DAB (European digital radio)

• Performance rights via ASCAP

• The lack of transparency and feedback from many stations

• The role of AI bots and inflated streaming stats on Spotify

• The dangers of shady playlist services that could jeopardize an artist’s entire catalog

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Marketing and Playlist Strategy

Boy Destiny emphasizes the importance of real fan engagement and discourages artists from using questionable playlisting services. Instead, he recommends SubmitHub, which rigorously vets playlist curators and even includes podcasters and bloggers. He suggests building private playlists, involving friends and family, and tracking sources of streams to avoid bots that can trigger bans from platforms like Spotify or CD Baby.

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Future Releases and Final Thoughts

Mike reveals he’ll be releasing a new single titled I Need Your Lovin’ based on organic interest from listeners, highlighting the importance of paying attention to fan behavior and data. He stresses that passion should be the core motivator behind music creation, especially when profit is elusive. Despite acknowledging limited financial returns and potential tax implications (such as being labeled a “hobbyist” by the IRS), he remains driven by love for music.

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Key Takeaways for Artists

• Balance creativity with business savvy: Understand the mechanics of distribution, licensing, and data analytics.

• Invest wisely: Know that promotion (e.g., radio campaigns) costs money and may not yield immediate returns.

• Monitor real-time analytics: Use tools like Songstats for accurate, timely insights.

• Avoid shortcuts: Be wary of bots and illegitimate playlist services; quality engagement is better than inflated numbers.

• Love what you do: Do it for passion, not just for profit.

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Where to Find Boy Destiny

Official Website: boy-destiny.com

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Sessions presented by the DJ Sessions. I’m your host Darren and right now I’m sitting in the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington and coming in all the way from Florida, Tallahassee, Florida. We got Mike Thornton, AKA Boy Destiny with us today on the DJ Sessions Virtual Sessions.

Mike, how’s it going today?

[boy Destiny]
Great. Thank you for having me. It’s wonderful being here.

[Darran]
Thank you for coming in. Darren, I kind of first hear on the DJ Sessions doing back-to-back interviews and you got a little taste of the show and what we do, waiting there for the previous interview we were on. But thank you for joining us today.

Really appreciate you being here. You actually, you’re not like new to this music game. You’ve been doing stuff for a while.

I was going over your bio and you kind of got a good history by doing stuff. Do you want to tell us a little about how you got started in all this music business?

[boy Destiny]
Well, you know, as you look at this long life I’ve lived, it really started back in Hartford, Connecticut. I have a very interesting story. When I was growing up from ages one through 10, I was a foster child.

A lot of people don’t know that. Even some of my closest friends don’t know that. And as a foster child in Connecticut, it kind of moved you around like from this home to that home to the next home.

And when I got to about age five, after being moved to probably about three or four different foster homes at age five, I was taken to this one home. And when I started at age five to join the school system there in Hartford, Connecticut, I got introduced to music. They had a music program at that elementary school.

And even if you were a kindergartner or first grader, you could choose to get involved in music. And I did. They offered me an opportunity to play the string bass.

Now, if you’ve ever seen a five-year-old next to one of those tall string basses that they have for orchestras trying to learn how to play bass, it’s quite a scene. They had to get a little chair for me. I had to stand up there so I could reach the frets and try to play the bass.

And I did that for about two years through first grade. And then I got moved to another foster home, surprise. And the new school didn’t have any string basses to lend out.

So I had to kind of take a hiatus from music. But fortunately, by age 10, my father, Robert Thornton, who was living in Philadelphia, he adopted me and brought me down to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And by the time I started going to the school system there, by the time I got to about fifth grade, they had another opportunity for music.

And this time it was for trumpet. So my dad took me down to A Street Music in Philly, got me a trumpet. And I started playing trumpet with my friend Gary.

And I did that for about maybe two years or so. But I got tired of trumpet. I didn’t really like…

I wasn’t big on trumpet. But I did it. But I wasn’t in love with the instrument.

So finally, seventh and eighth grade, I found my love, piano. Piano. Actually, it was organ.

Dr. Robert Walker was teaching organ lessons in the C.W. Henry Auditorium. And I went in and I was listening and he was playing some Stevie Wonder, Isn’t She Lovely? And You Are the Sunshine of My Life.

And I was kind of in the hallway rocking my head. And I said, this is nice. I want to play that instrument.

Went in there, talked to Dr. Walker, and he started giving me organ lessons. By eighth grade, I was playing at the District Six Music Festival as one of the star pupils. So that kind of gravitated me.

It was like this rolling snowball that was saying, music, Michael, do music. This is where your destiny is. Your destiny.

As a boy, this is your destiny. So I started playing organ. And by the time I got to ninth grade, I became a part of the Stitton Teenage Jazz Band.

And in the Stitton Teenage Jazz Band, at that very time, a Young Pieces of a Dream smooth jazz group, a phenomenal group that is globally known. The key members of that group were in the Stitton Teenage Jazz Band with me, right next to me. So I was playing next to all of the members of Pieces of a Dream.

Come later, when I’m older in college, Pieces of a Dream members all know me from the Stitton Teenage Jazz Band. They say, look, we’re expanding. We need to add another keyboard player so we can have two or three keyboard players on stage covering all these orchestrations and these arrangements.

So that’s how I started getting into working with Pieces of a Dream and playing jazz and smooth jazz and touring with them. That was a wonderful experience that lasted from about 1988, 89, all the way up to the year 2000. Playing with them and touring with them and getting to share the stage with everybody else that was on stage with Pieces of a Dream, and in some cases, playing with those artists.

We used to play as the band. Even though Pieces of a Dream had its own name, we would be asked to play behind Bill Withers or we’d be asked to play behind Patti LaBelle as the band because the promoters could save money that way. They have Pieces of a Dream, who is an artist, they’re going to do the opening act, but then keep them on stage, we’ll save some money, we don’t have to pay another band to fly them into Cincinnati.

We’ll just keep Pieces of a Dream on stage playing behind Patti LaBelle. So that was really a great experience. But that’s how I really started getting into this music game, starting at a very young age with String Bass at five, and then kind of rolling with that over the years and making my way into the smooth jazz scene.

[Darran]
And in 2008, you know, the origins of the moniker Boy Destiny came out. You mentioned that in your notes. And I want to know more because I’m a huge fan of Harry Potter.

And how did, what did that, tell us all about that.

[boy Destiny]
Well, I made a little pun there about, you know, I’m being a boy at age five and having a destiny in music. But that really was not where that originated from. I am just a mad Harry Potter fan.

I just love the whole trio, Ron, Emma Watson, Hermione, of course, Harry Potter, Radcliffe, so all of that. And so one of the things I noted in that at that time when I was coming up with my moniker Boy Destiny is that if you look at that movie, starting from the before the Chambers of Secrets. It was it seemed to me that from the moment Voldemort struck Harry Potter’s head with that mark.

It was a manifest destiny. Because he had that mark, he had to manifest the destiny in which he would grow as a wizard and he would be able to use all that collection of magical powers to fight the most evil wizard of all times. And so it seemed to me that that was, you know, from the time he was an infant through his boyhood, that was his manifest destiny.

So that was a part of where I came up with that. And because I also say the connection is that because the first song I wrote, the very first song I ever wrote as Boy Destiny was a dedication song to Emma Watson, one of the starlets of the series. So that’s a Harry Potter connection.

And that connection about Harry with his scar and his destiny to become a great wizard that could defeat the evil wizard Voldemort. So that was I think those two were key things. The other thing about coming up with that name is, you know, I grew up in a different era than most artists today.

Growing up in the 60s when ABC was released on Motown Records, I was there. I held that record in my hand when Michael Jackson was singing ABC. I grew up through that era.

And as I went and experienced different music in the 70s, like Hot Chocolate, Your Love Has Got Me Screaming. Not a lot of people know that. What the hell I’m talking about?

Hot Chocolate and Brick and all these other great groups. Heat Wave from that era. I listened to music all the time.

I went to the record store every day. And one of the records I picked up as a child is Boy George. And I love that song.

Come a, come a, come a, come a, come a chameleon. Yeah, I’m trying to think of the name of that album.

[Darran]
That was a very unusual. I think, let me, Kim, give me a, keep going. I’m going to pull something up here, but keep going.

[boy Destiny]
It’s been so long. Nothing could be finer than something.

[Darran]
Oh, I can sing it if you want me to sing it. Color By Numbers was the name. That was the name of the album, was Color By Numbers.

Love will be easy if your colors were like my dreams. Red, gold, and green.

[boy Destiny]
Yeah, so I grew up on all that stuff. I listened to KC and the Sunshine Band. I listened to Boy George.

And when I thought of a name besides the Harry Potter connection, I said, yeah, if I named myself Boy Destiny, not only does it connect to Harry Potter, but there is a precedent, something from before of an artist that used a kind of boy combined with another name to create a moniker for themselves. Boy George did that, and he was very popular. So that is kind of how I ended up with Boy Destiny.

[Darran]
And part of this whole track of going through all this, actually ended up going to school and getting a degree, which led to a PhD. So tell us a little bit about that journey. I mean, do you find, obviously, as a musician, I would assume that you got the day job, then you got your passion, your music, you do.

And sometimes those can conflict. Sometimes it can come into play. I mean, I found out very quickly.

[boy Destiny]
Well, go ahead.

[Darran]
I found out very quickly when I went to school, I went for the sole purpose of learning how to run a company, run a corporation, and was fast-tracking my way to the Foster’s Business School at U-Dub through community college, and found out that you could be in the entertainment industry, you could be on the artist side, or you could be on the business side. I found that having the business side knowledge could also get me jobs. And being on the artist side, it’d be like, I’m a filmmaker, I’m a TV producer.

Great, how many more of those do we got to kick out of Canada and LA? But if I had a business degree in accounting and marketing and business management, I could go and get jobs working for companies like Apple and things like that and pay the bills to stay alive. But it’s hard.

People go to school, then you got to get the career, and then you got to make the time for both ends. Then you got all the other obligations in life. Do you want to have a partner or other hobbies or eat or sleep or take out the trash?

I was just talking with my friend today about, she posted me, I can read her text message. She’s like, how do people make all the time in the world to do all this stuff? I got to go to the chiropractor, bike shop, Ace Hardware, take the dog for a walk, go to the market.

And it’s like, I do to-do lists. If it wasn’t for my to-do list, I would be lost. So many things that I have going on.

You managed juggling a career in music and getting a PhD. What was that like? Was there, did you find it easy because you had musical, you had an entry to music at an early age, so it kind of progressed in life, or was there a conflict or anything like that that went on between those two?

[boy Destiny]
It was always a conflict because from five years old, I was introduced to music and fell in love with it. That was the problem. But also by age, let’s see, a fourth grade, whatever age that is, I started like raising my hand and answering all the questions in class, in Mr. K’s class. And everybody was like, man, he’s smart. And so people would praise me for my intelligence as well. When I finally got adopted in Philadelphia, I started getting straight A’s in sixth grade and fifth grade and everybody, my eighth grade science teacher said, after I did a presentation on Alzheimer’s, my eighth grade teacher said, Mike, you’re really good at the science stuff.

You should go to medical school. You should do this, you should do that. And then my dad heard that and said, yeah, that’s what you’re gonna do.

The dad that adopted me, Robert Thornton said, yeah, I adopted you. I came all the way to Connecticut to adopt you and you’re gonna become a doctor and become rich and take care of me when I’m old. That’s what dad said.

So I went to a school that you had to have high A’s to get into called Central High School for Boys. Graduated in the 240th class, got into college, got in the pre-medical program, ended up with a 3.7 GPA. And everybody’s like, keep going, keep going.

You’re gonna be a doctor. My dad’s like, keep going. We’re gonna get that Porsche soon.

Keep going. And I’m like, but I love music because the entire time I was in high school, I was in that stint in teenage jazz band with Pieces of a Dream. By the time I got to 12th grade, they were famous.

They had a song out called Mount Airy Groove that came out in 1981, 82. And then they followed it up a few years later when the Sixers won the championship with this song called 454, which was all over the radio waves. And they made it onto R&B charts as well as smooth jazz charts at the same time.

They were on both jazz and R&B charts. And these were like my best friends from my teenage years. And so once I got out of college in 89, I get this call from Pieces of a Dream that says, we know you love music.

And here’s the opportunity of a lifetime. We’re famous now. We’re famous Pieces of a Dream.

Will you join us and share in this fame? And how could I pass that up? My dad did not like that idea.

He was like, you were so close. You had gotten into medical school and you gave it up to go with this Pieces of a Dream? What’s wrong with you?

I said, dad, I love music. I love music. I might come back to the school later.

I might come back to schooling later. But right now, if you get a call, if you get a call from Patti LaBelle and she says, come on, you gotta do that. You might not get that call 10 years later.

That was a calling. And it’s something that I wanted to really do. And so I joined them in 88, 89.

And for 10 years, I stayed with them. But here’s the trick. 1993, in the midst of that, in the midst of touring with Pieces of a Dream, I told Pieces of a Dream, I’m gonna go to graduate school, but don’t worry about it.

I’ll still be able to play all the gigs. So 1993, I start my PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. By 94, 95, we had released an album.

Pieces of a Dream had released the in-flight album. I got to compose four songs on that album. And we got to start touring that album.

And I’m doing that on the weekends. I’m flying out to San Francisco, to Oakland, to play out there. And then by Sunday night, I’m on the plane back for my classes in cell biology on Monday.

So I’m doing both things. And I’m barely holding on because I’m trying to make all the gigs to fly to this city, fly to that city. But also my PhD advisor is, Mike, did you finish that Western blot for our data for the Journal of Cell Biology?

Yeah, Morty, it’s right here. Hold on, I’ll get it. So I’m trying to really burn both ends of the handle here, trying to do both things at the time.

But I managed to do it all the way up to about year 2000. And then I told Pieces of a Dream, I’m sorry, I’ve got to write my 400 page thesis, PhD thesis. So I’ll have to say goodbye.

And I did. 2000, I left the group, wrote my thesis that year. And 2001, I graduated and had my PhD.

Nice, congratulations on that.

[Darran]
You know, you mentioned just a few moments ago, you graduated college in 89. You look, I mean, most people don’t know how old I am. I’ll just drop it, I don’t care.

I’m 50 years old. But you, I almost say you look younger than I do. Maybe it’s just, I don’t know, you look good.

[boy Destiny]
Maybe it’s the camera. Yeah, I’m up there. I’m in the six club, the six O club.

So, and just trying to get in a little bit more music before it’s not possible anymore.

[Darran]
I hear you, you’re looking good. You’re looking good. So, you know, you’ve got that, now that you got the PhD though, and you’re still doing music, I’m assuming you’re doing music and stuff, or at least dabbling it.

Did you ever go back to the- Not touring, I never went back to touring.

[boy Destiny]
I became studio artist. In fact, Boy Destiny is entirely a studio artist. Gotcha, gotcha.

Boy Destiny has never performed publicly. I used to perform singing with other bands, but not as Boy Destiny. I make music videos.

So I will go out in the, I’ll go out in the real world to make music videos. I’ll go, I went to several sites. In the Emma Watson song, there’s a desert scene where he’s saying, telling to Emma Watson that he would die from thirst without her.

And I needed a desert scene. So I got in the car, went all the way up route 10, found this construction site that I had passed a few weeks back. And I said, that looks like a desert.

Put the camera up on the tripod, walked about a half a mile in to get to the desert dunes area. And I had zoomed the camera in so that when I had my Boy Destiny shirt on, it would look like I was in the desert saying I’m dying from thirst without you, Emma.

[Darran]
The thing we do for video production. I know how it goes.

[boy Destiny]
Yeah, artistry and creation in video and in music. I love that. I love video editing.

I love getting, going out and setting up the scenes and capturing the scenes and then compiling all the footage together into the final creative product. And this was at a time where, you know, all the video creators were just kind of coming into their being. YouTube hit 2006, and people were starting to make videos around that time.

And so I caught that wave. I used to watch YouTube in 2006. And I said, when I did the Emma Watson song, I said, oh, you know, I need to have a video to go with that song.

We can’t just release the song. We need a video to go with the song. And so I started putting all this stuff together.

That was a very interesting project. I was kind of the producer, director, editor, everything. And so I chose the location, Miami.

And I chose a park called Flamingo Park in Miami to film some of the scenes at the basketball court. We got stopped by the Miami police because we didn’t have filming license. You know, you just put the, throw this together.

I mean, we’re not paramount here. It’s like me with some cheap cameras before they were HD back then. And we’re in the park filming this scene.

We’re doing this choreography and here come the cops. They’re like, do you have a license to do that in Miami? Nope.

So we had to move to another location. We moved to a street corner and did some of the scenes there. And then I got, I went down to Lincoln Road in Miami and they have a Lincoln mall there.

And I found this studio. This is a weird story. I found this studio that would let us film on their rooftop.

Because I saw something on the internet and it was like, it was on this roof and you could see the beach and Miami beach and everything from the… So I found the building, talked to the people there and they let us film there on the roof. And it wasn’t easy because to get the best roof shot, there was a, the roof.

And then there was an elevated roof that you had to climb like these ropes and things to get on top of. And so I had three female dancers and three male dancers climbing up this rope to get on this roof. I’ve got the cameraman from FSU film school climbing up this rope to get the cameras up there and to film this so that we could have that whole Miami background in the shot.

So I had to be the location scout and then I had to get everybody up on the roof. In the meantime, to film the scene on the rooftop, I had to run back in the bath and wipe the sweat off my face, put my makeup back on, put my outfit on, climb the rope, get up there, try not to sweat to death before the cameraman caught the shot. So that whole experience of trying to be the director, the producer and the artist was fun.

[Darran]
It’s funny you bring up that old school, that 2006 year was very pivotal when YouTube, I mean, I remember 2005, I was in broadcast television, very heavy in broadcast television. Video on internet didn’t exist really before that. If it did, it was not worthy of airing, putting anything out.

There was no distribution for videos like that until YouTube came out. And I remember coming across the term predator, producer, director, editor. They called them predators.

And that was gonna be the new wave, the new kind of coin term for people that are producing to YouTube. And you didn’t need production houses, you didn’t need this, cameras were, you know, we had the GL1s, XL1s from Canon at that point that were broadcast quality. They weren’t HD, but you could shoot 16.9 with them. They weren’t four by threes. So you could at least get that 16 by nine feel, which was awesome. And you know- I started with Final Cut too.

I actually, when I worked for Apple, was a certified trainer for Apple that could train people how to train people on Final Cut Pro. So yeah, I had certs that would label me as like one of 300 people that were certified in the world for Final Cut Pro certification. I love the program, use it to this day.

Not very fond of some of the changes they did in the later versions, but hey, anyways, you know, software updates, you got to change it, make it look, feel for the modern age just because nobody uses film anymore. It’s all digital. So they kind of upgraded it for the digital world, which is awesome, but still use it to this day.

I’m an Apple guy, true and true. But yeah, you know, where was I going with that? Oh, I got stumped on my own show.

You know, just, but going back to those early days of online videos, you know, we looked past YouTube as a medium because a lot of what we saw on YouTube was what I would refer to as TikTok nowadays. And YouTube had a time constraint at that time. I think you could only publish like a 15 minute video unless you had a producer’s account and you had to submit your credentials and all that to then be approved by YouTube to go longer than 15 minutes.

And then they kind of opened up the floodgate for everyone. So we thought, oh, but we got really got into podcasting because later that year in 2005, the video iPod had come out and that was kind of a medium that we saw as we wanted to be up there. We wanted to be looking at like NBC and CBS and the networks or these shows you could subscribe to.

But they never made a monetization store for podcasts in iTunes, which is kind of a bummer so we could start selling our episodes because we were featured in the front page prominently as we debuted at number 50 when the iTunes store launched the podcast section, the whole revamp of iTunes and we debuted at number 50. And at one point we were doing 300,000 downloads a week. Now imagine if we would have been able to get 99 cents per episode or for doing something like that.

But I can understand from a licensing platform rights of iTunes taking the money for that, Apple taking the money for that. If you didn’t have your, it was a big ball, big ball of wax they didn’t want to get involved with because they knew the studios had the rights for everything. But independent production, I was frightened.

Anyways, that being said, we looked past YouTube and went to podcasting and the backbone of our support for our show is basically a podcast series. That’s all archived and up there and out there to all the different stations and everything. But yeah, it was interesting seeing the shift in my friend who I’d been in business with for years.

He goes, we used to film and be on public access. And if you weren’t on broadcast, getting the broadcast dollars was hard. But getting on public access, it still was hard because there’s only so many slots per day you can get a show into and you wanted to get a good slot.

You didn’t want to be at three in the morning. That’s all that was really left of a broadcast television. Everything was after one o’clock in the morning on the weekends because you had Saturday Night Live.

And if you had the local programming show, you couldn’t really get on until 1.30, 1.40, two o’clock in the morning on broadcast. But you were still on broadcast and you got a broadcast credit and you got Nielsen ratings. But his thing is now that everyone has one of these in their hand, everyone can do a show.

And now it’s the video to YouTube, video to TikTok, video to Instagram, video to Facebook, and all that is kind of replaced, mushing out how do you stand out from, how do you be different in that marketplace? Everyone now has a show and the ability to edit, post it in social media right from their phone. So it’s interesting the rise.

I think it was in a marketing class and my teacher in the marketing class said, this is 2017. He said, it’s more now. But there was a million videos posted to YouTube every minute around the world, a million videos.

And you’re gonna think something like, Facebook just launched a thing that said, hey, you have all these live videos on Facebook. They’re only gonna live here now for 30 days. We’re getting rid of this stuff that nobody sees, nobody cares, but it’s taking up gigabytes and gigabytes.

I mean, it’s probably for your own account gigabytes, but for them, it’s data beyond data.

[boy Destiny]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s got me, it’s got my legacy word. But I looked up this other week, how many people are on Spotify artists?

12 million and growing. Like, if I look at my popularity score, which is something like 8%, I’m in the bottom 90 of the 92%. I’m like, are they just gonna throw me away in 10 years because they’re gonna say like, we don’t have enough hard drive space for these people below 10%.

You know, let’s just get rid of it.

[Darran]
That’s the one thing that’s nice about, at least with audio files, you can really, you can control, you know what size you’re gonna get. If it’s saying it’s this, you’re gonna get this. If you’re meeting these standards.

With video, it can be a little different because I can encode a file for playback on a mobile device. I can encode it for a computer. I can encode it for an HDTV and you got three different file sizes there.

You know, depending on how you want your content to look. I know that 90% of the people are gonna consume our content through a mobile device. So I put it out there that’s gonna look good on a mobile device.

I could have people come in. I see these people spending all this money on the HD cameras and this, that, and the other. And for shows that you probably won’t sit there and go like this.

Music shows, you don’t sit there and just listen to the music video and you’re watching the music video. But once you watch the music video two, three, four times, I mean, I’ve listened to somebody like Kendrick Lamar. I’ve listened to his songs over and over again.

I’ve watched his videos. I’m like, that’s a dope video, dope video, dope video. But now if I’m listening to Kendrick Lamar and I put it on the video, I’m over here partying to the song.

I’m not sitting there. You know, you might watch the music video a few times but you’re listening to the music. So you spend all this money on production to viewers that aren’t even watching.

Now, of course, quality is king. You wanna make sure that you’re not low budget, low call. But I often have that talk with podcasters over the years and they say, I wanna start podcasting.

How much is it gonna cost me to get into this? I’m like, do you have a laptop? Yes, does it have a camera?

Great, yes, so you can get started. You have a phone? Yes, does it have a camera?

Yes, does it do video? Yes, does it connect in there? You can do a podcast.

You can start out with audio first and then put that up. You don’t have to go out and spend all this money and you look at the evolution of shows, even our own show and how it grows over time. And that just happens.

Technology gets cheaper, faster, better. We’ve seen this happen. We’re both in kind of the same genre, almost same age bracket, you know, all that fun stuff.

Where’s the weirdest moment you’ve ever heard one of your own songs play?

[boy Destiny]
Okay, well, oh man, let me think. Well, the first time I’ve heard stuff on the radio was in Italy, which is weird because I sent some stuff out through a radio promotion company. And what they basically do is they just mail it to 40,000 radio stations and all these other people.

And then, you know, then I listen intently on US radio, FM 99 and 108 or wherever. I’m hopeful, really hopeful that it will be played. And it doesn’t usually, for my stuff, I don’t usually see it in the USA that much.

Although I have some recent statistics from some weird US radio station. Okay, so there’s this one station in Wyoming that’s playing my song, Just One Touch from the Sheriff’s Office Radio Dispatch. I’m on Songstats and I’m looking at, they say you have 929 airplays and 72 stations.

I said, oh really? I didn’t even know that because sound charts, are you familiar with sound charts?

[Darran]
I understand the premise of them, yeah.

[boy Destiny]
I would get it, yeah. They are one of the major places you go. They charge you 129 a month, by the way.

I know that personally, that 129 a month. So they’re all the major artists on there. They’re all their stats, like every single follower, every single platform you can possibly think of.

What playlists are they on? What YouTube playlists are on? What Deezer playlists are they on?

What Instagram playlists are they on? What charts are they on? What radio airplay have they gotten?

And whenever I go there for Boy Destiny, me, I can’t see anything. I don’t see any airplay. I said, I can’t believe that.

I spent all this money to this radio promotions company. I should be on somebody’s radio station. So sound charts, they don’t follow every radio station.

A lot of people don’t know this. And same thing with the billboard charts. They don’t follow every radio station.

They have what they call the premium radio stations. And if you make it onto them, then you chart. And then they count, oh, you have these many airplays.

So for a while there, I thought I was on no radio station. So then I found Songstats, just quite accidentally. And I found I was on Songstats.

And then Songstats has more real time monitoring, like real time. I got on one radio station in Pescara, Italy two weeks ago. And at every moment I got on the radio station, the next day Songstats had it there.

You are on FM radio in Pescara, Italy. So they have much more access to the information. And so I knew I was getting on some radio stations, but it wasn’t until I got onto AntennaWeb, which is an Italian platform that I started to hear myself on radio.

So I started by saying that was the weirdest place, finding myself on Italian radio. And I’m from America, and I’m like, people are playing my song in Italy. I thought that was the weirdest place.

But then later I discovered that Sheriff’s Dispatch radio station in Wyoming. And I’m like, my music doesn’t fit with Wyoming at all. I just can’t.

When I picture Wyoming, you know, home home on the range where the bison and the buffalo and everything is playing. I just don’t hear Boy Destiny in that setting. So to find out that I was on this Sheriff’s Dispatch radio station, whatever that is, I don’t even know what that is, but that’s how it says.

It’s like the Gillette Sheriff’s Station something. You’re on radio there. And I’m like, okay, that’s weird.

So that’s probably the weirdest place. Another place, and I put this in my talking notes, and I don’t know if you’re referring to this. One of the weirdest places that I have found out I’m being played heavily, like heavy rotation, is in Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Wow. Last summer, through the month of July, August, and September, I was played like 700 times in that little… Monaco is really small.

It’s basically smaller than most cities. Yeah. And some DJ there got this radio plug promotion that says, here’s Boy Destiny, here’s his song.

And evidently, they fell in love with it because this wasn’t going on around the world, these heavy rotation plays. It was like a thing. And even to this day, like just yesterday, they played me twice.

They played me twice yesterday, and this is like a year later. So, you know, which doesn’t happen. And despite all of that, despite those hundreds of plays on what they called…

Are you familiar with DAB, Radio Station Versus FM? DAB is this European kind of thing, like satellite. Yeah, Sirius.

[Darran]
It sounds like Sirius, yeah.

[boy Destiny]
It’s like Sirius, except it’s European, and the European satellite shoots it down into everybody in Monaco’s radio. In Monaco, they get this satellite feed, and they’re being bombarded with Boy Destiny. I said, I wish I could afford to go to Monaco to hear this.

You know, that’s like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. You know, everything there, all the hotels are like, you know, 10 grand a night or something for a room. So I was like, I don’t know if I can even go to Monaco to hear myself on the radio.

But that is one of the strangest outcomes from my radio promotion of Boy Destiny’s music is that for whatever reason, Monte Carlo took a liking. The DJ there at that premium radio station is what it’s called in Monaco, took a liking to that song like crazy. And those were my highest performing places, Antenna Web, Italy, and then premium radio in Monte Carlo, Monaco.

[Darran]
So how do you get your songs into something like Dab over the pond? Is that submitted through something they pick it up?

[boy Destiny]
Back in the late 2000s, I talked to, you know, I was in Smooth Jazz for a long time. I wrote a lot of songs, a lot of Smooth Jazz songs. A lot of my Smooth Jazz songs are on the radio all over the place.

There’s one called Nikki Smiles played all the time. I still get ASCAP royalty checks all the time. And the president of one of the records companies that that Smooth Jazz Pieces of a Dream was on is called Heads Up Records.

And it was owned and run by President Dave Love. I know Dave very well from being in Pieces of a Dream. I called him up when I decided to put an R&B record as Boy Destiny.

And I said, Dave, you’re the president of a record company. How do I get this song, this Boy Destiny song on the radio? First thing he asked me is, what genre is it?

And I said, R&B hip hop. He said, oh, forget about that. Forget about that.

You got a hundred grand? I said, what do I need a hundred grand for? He says, you need an independent radio promoter.

The record companies take a hundred grand out of your recoupable budget, if you’re an artist, and they hire an independent radio promoter. No one knows what the independent radio promoter does to get the song on the radio. But suddenly, it’s on the radio.

And no one can get a song on major FM radio without the independent promoter. I just call it undercover, under the sheets, payola. I don’t know how everybody else looks at it.

But why does it, when I pay this guy a hundred grand, suddenly my stuff get on radio? And if I don’t pay him a hundred grand, it doesn’t get on the radio. So I was like, OK, well, that’s not good news.

Which is why I took a hiatus between the late 2000s and this new album I put out. Because I became very disappointed in the music industry. I was like, it doesn’t matter how good my R&B is or how bad it is.

I don’t have an extra hundred grand to radio promote this. And if I can’t get it on radio, other than grassroots, social media, build up a million followers, other than that, which as a professor, I don’t have time to do. I don’t think I can ever get on radio.

So what I learned from that experience, that 10-year break between my last album and this album, what I learned was you got to do it for the love of it. Because if you’re going for radio, it ain’t necessarily going to happen. But I did the album anyway.

I did the new album in 2024. And I said, well, I don’t care if I get on radio. I do.

But I told myself I didn’t. I’m just going to do this album. And I did.

I wrote the album. Because you have to go in, your mindset going into the writing album has to be for the love of making the album. That’s got to be the first thing.

Because if you go into it thinking, oh, why am I doing this? It’s never going to make radio. Then you’re already down.

That’s going to reflect negativity in your music creation. So you got to just say, forget about all of that. Just write what you love.

Put your heart into it. And then whatever happens, happens. If it doesn’t make it on radio, I guess it doesn’t make it on radio.

So that’s what I did. But I still did some research. So I went on the internet and said, how can independent artists get their music on radio if they can’t really hire an expensive independent promoter?

And I found out there’s a lot of other smaller companies, not the big independent promoters that are going to get it on Power 99 FM, but smaller radio promoters that can send it to small radio stations, small AM radio stations, small college stations, small FM stations. They charge you a little bit money, like about $4,000 for a six-week campaign. And they send it out the first two weeks.

And then two weeks later, they send it out to the same stations again, just in case they missed the email. And then two weeks later, for the six-week campaign total, they send it out a third time. Now, I did this back in 2024 with my single, Just One Touch.

And it got on Antenna Web Radio in Italy. And as far as I knew, it got on this radio in Spain called Ocio News. And I went to their website, and they have these little subdivisions where they do music.

And I said, OK, my music is on this kind of internet radio in Spain. It’s on this Antenna Web internet radio. But Antenna Web is pretty big, because they’re global.

Even though they’re based in Italy, they have little subdivisions. And so that was one way to get it onto internet radio. And a lot of times, that’s all you can hope for, is to get it on internet radio, not real stations.

It wasn’t until about seven months later that I hooked up with Soundstats, their website, and found out I was on other European stations that I didn’t know about. Because Antenna Web, when the radio promoter sent my music to Antenna Web, Antenna Web a week later wrote me back and said, we received your music that you want to get on our internet radio. And we’ll be happy to do that for you.

We need the following things. And only Ocio News and Antenna Web did that. So I thought, oh, that’s the only two radio stations I’m going to get on.

It wasn’t until I found out from Soundstats seven months later that I was on all these other radio stations. The radio stations that get your music don’t always email you back. They don’t always email you back and tell you, like, yeah, we’re premium radio in Monaco.

We love your song. We’re going to play it 700 times. They don’t always talk to you, the artists.

They just get it from the radio promoter. The DJ says, oh, I like this. And he starts playing it.

I don’t know crap. I don’t know anything about this going on. Otherwise, last summer and last July, I would have done, like, you know, a live performance in Monaco.

If I’m being played 700 times in Monaco, it makes sense as an artist that I should go there and do a show. My stuff is all over the radio waves, the digital, serious, XM kind of radio waves. Why wouldn’t I go there and do a show?

But I had no idea. They don’t communicate with the artists. This would have to be handled by some manager who found out about your statistics, found out, like, when it was happening in real time, that you were being played heavily in Monaco, came back to use the artist as your manager and said, hey, you’re being played heavily in Monaco.

I found this information for you. Now let’s pack the bags and head there to do a show. I had no idea.

It wasn’t until March of this year that I found out I was being played heavily in Monaco in August.

[Darran]
That’s great. Yeah, but that is one way to know where you want to go get booked, you know? I mean, I’m sure you would approach promoters or venues in that area and say, hey, I’m getting radio play.

You may have heard me, you know? Yeah, just one touch. The guy’s like, oh, yeah, I hear that five times a day.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome.

That’s a good resource to know. I never knew about that tracking software. I was actually looking it up online while you were talking about it, and that’s a really cool service.

Again, a lot of artists, I don’t think they know about that.

[boy Destiny]
And again, that’s a whole nother- I advise every artist to sign up for SongStats. It’s only $20 a month, and they have real time statistics. Two days ago, three days ago, I got on three playlists for my song, Love Is Forever.

A lot of people may not know how to do that. A lot of people may not know how- artists may not know how to playlist, because there’s an art to that. I got playlisted on three playlists.

When I went back to SongStats, they were right there immediately. When I go over to SoundCharts, sometimes it’s a week or two weeks later before they tell me I was on those playlists. And all that real time internet radio, SoundCharts doesn’t cover it at all.

You don’t even know. To this day, I can go to SoundCharts, and they don’t know. SoundCharts doesn’t know that I was played 700 times in Monaco.

They still don’t know. They have no clue. They don’t even monitor DAB radio.

It’s not called Sirius XM, which the charting system does follow Sirius. But these other types of Sirius-like programs in Europe, they don’t know about them. And they don’t follow them.

They don’t monitor them. They don’t throw them into your statistics. And it was wonderful.

When I found SongStats and found out I was on all these radio stations in the Netherlands, that I was being played in Haiti, that I was being played in Uganda, on the air, I wouldn’t have known. If I had followed SoundCharts, I would have never known that I was on the air at all. Because as an artist, you have certain goals.

You say, I’m going to write these songs. I’m going to get them on Distributed. I’m going to get them on Spotify.

I’m going to try to get them on Apple Music. I’m going to try to get them on Deezer. That’s part of my goals.

I’m going to try to get streams on those platforms, right? And one of the other goals, I’m sure every wish list for artists is, I’m going to try to get on some kind of radio. Even if it’s internet radio.

Even if it’s serious dab radio. I want to get on some kind of radio. And then to come to find out, I was on some actual FM stations and AM stations on real radio, over the air radio.

But SoundCharts, Billboard, they don’t follow those smaller stations.

[Darran]
Yeah, it’s definitely, again, going to the live streaming world and watching everyone jump online and start doing podcasting and live streaming in 2020. And even artists over the years, that’s not really in a, I mean, I guess there are probably tons of books, tons of resources out there. But when people don’t take the time to do the research about this backend stuff that’s in the music industry, and what they can or should be doing, and then realize there’s going to be a cost associated with that.

You know, this little, oh, it’s nickel and dime. You know, if you’re going to do this, look to spend 200 to 300 bucks a month.

[boy Destiny]
Everything costs money. What I’ve learned as an artist, I learned that. I didn’t know that back in the end of the 2000s when Emma Watson’s song came out.

If I knew about marketing, if I knew about Google Ads, if I had known about meta ads, if I had known about this or that, I could have made a big difference back then in terms of getting my marketing, getting myself out there. I had no idea. All I was thinking about was radio, and all I knew was that it cost $100,000, and I didn’t have $100,000.

So I pretty much, after Emma Watson’s song, just gave up. I said, oh, forget about it. I mean, I didn’t give up totally.

I went downstairs into my basement and wrote stuff, you know. I wrote music. I played stuff for myself.

But I wasn’t thinking about releasing a new album until last year. I finally got the motivation to do a new album. I can relate to that.

[Darran]
It was like our first television series we put out there. I had the money to put it on the air, but then they wanted to come back and go, oh, yeah, we’ll sell you a 20. It was $300 a week to put my show on broadcast television at 1.30 in the morning to the Fox affiliate here in Seattle. But they wanted to charge me $5,000, minimum $5,000 a week to run commercials for it, $20,000 a month for three months, $60,000. And if I was going to do this for a year, $250,000 in commercial ad spots just on broadcast television. Now, remember, this wasn’t like you didn’t have a way.

We could have advertised on Google or put ads and pay-per-clicks, but you weren’t watching video on a computer. You weren’t watching video on your pocket in 2021 or in 2001. So buying ads online was not really watch our show on late night TV.

We wanted to advertise on TV. We had billboards. You had bus bars.

You had the traditional form, even print media. Buying ads in the local newspapers was a thing. It was like, whoa.

I mean, we were shoestringing it, but we had a show on broadcast television and we were looking for sponsors, which eventually became nine separate shows approved on 13 stations on the West Coast. And that’s when the dollar started clicking in my head that I’m going out trying to raise $32 to $45 million a year to produce these nine separate shows, pay the crew, pay the staff, have the marketing budget. And people are like, are you insane?

You’re trying to raise $40 million? I’m like, that’s a shoestring budget for nine separate television shows airing in 13 different markets. Yeah, I mean, that’s nothing.

[boy Destiny]
That’s still peanuts. It’s nothing. And as an artist, your budget dictates how far you can go with it.

So if I had not spent, let’s look at it seriously. If I did not spend $4,000 last May, I would have been on zero radio stations. That’s the truth.

No one’s going to discover your song on Facebook and say, oh, I’m going to put you on my radio. Nobody’s going to just come across you on TikTok and say, let me put you on my television show. No one’s going to do that unless you’re very, no, no one’s going to do that, period.

Let me tell you what that four grand got me. I gave this company, I paid them in pounds, but it was four grand in English currency. Yes, currency.

I got sent to all these radio stations. When I went back to Songstance back in March and looked, I’d gotten on 72 radio stations. Nice.

Not only did I get, you know, without, if I hadn’t paid any of that money, that $4,000, I wouldn’t have gotten on any radio station. Okay. Yeah.

These are small internet stations. They’re dab stations, whatever. But I got on them.

I would have gotten on none had I not spent that money. I also found out like three weeks ago, one of my songs was more popular than I ever imagined it would be. I had this song on my old 2008 album called Girl Stop Playing, which I wrote with one of the members of Pieces of a Dream, but R&B.

Because James Lloyd, who’s one of the major people of Pieces of a Dream, the phenomenal child prodigy piano player, he likes to dabble in R&B. We wrote the song called Girl Stop Playing. It was put out on the 2008 album.

I go look through Songstance and find out that between 2019 and 2021 during the pandemic, that song was played 50 times on radio. Not only did I find out that it was played on radio again, it also ended up being played on Russian television. Nice.

It was played on 12 episodes of some Russian show. Someone found that old 2008 album, dug through it and said, oh, I like the song and put it on the show. When I go to ASCAP and I look, you know, ASCAP covers these television things.

I forget what they call them. But if you get on television, you get entered in some kind of thing. And then on ASCAP, they tell you if for TV you had this, your song was played on these TV shows.

ASCAP has nothing on it because ASCAP probably doesn’t monitor that little small city in Russia, that small television station.

[Darran]
It’s funny you bring up ASCAP. I’m going to chime in there really quick. I find that ASCAP, when they go out to do their music licensing for festivals, events, nightclubs and all that stuff, they only track.

I saw this years ago when I was looking at music licensing for my shows and all that fun stuff. They only track like the 300 largest events, biggest concerts, biggest series and all that, or the biggest promotion companies and all that. They don’t track each individual nightclub.

The Muzak that we used to call it, you know, put it in the dentist’s office and those type of things. Muzak, that will track how many plays you get, but that’s because they’re licensing the songs to play on their Muzak system. And they’ll say, this is how many times it played out, and this markets and territories and all that stuff.

That’s how I understand how Muzak works. You know, these nightclubs, they don’t have sensors and things listening to the music. They’ve actually, I think ASCAP proposed an idea years ago about putting a listening devices in anywhere that plays music that will listen like a Shazam.

Like Shazam! There was an article that was just recently done on a nightclub in this town that somehow ASCAP, they were doing cover songs. The bands were doing cover songs and they tried to make a, what’s it called?

Not a set. What’s it called when you make a scapegoat? Like, oh, this bar played two songs.

So everyone in the market, you know, they made this big story about it. So all the bars and everyone in the market, get your licensing from us. And they kind of walk around like this Gestapo police threat type thing.

You know, they don’t have enough people to police the environment, police what music’s being played. They usually go in and that’s the worst thing about, I don’t like about ASCAP is they go on as these kind of police enforcement. If you don’t do this, we’re going to fine you a bunch of money.

And then businesses are like, okay, but they are using their music to entertain their guests. They’re selling food and that music is part of the atmosphere. If not, get some cover, get some bands in there that are playing original music, you know, and don’t put a DJ in there.

You know, they’re talking about DJs, you know, now making DJ kits that actually are connected to the internet. And as those tracks are being played, it’s registering what tracks are being played. So the artists can get their royalty rights on the music.

And you know, the big thing in Twitch right now, you have live streamers that are streaming shows with music. And Twitch has done their due diligence saying, don’t use copywritten music in our stuff. But because of its ephemeral use, I hope I said that right.

Ephemeral use that people can stream because they’re not hitting that record button and then distributing it later on. So they don’t have to get the rights clearance for it because it’s only going to live once. That’s kind of how they’re doing it in live streaming.

But you know, people are still making money though, off their live streams. I had to go back and revamp our whole thing because of that. But yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting when it comes to licensing and payouts.

And a lot of people don’t understand that side of business so get involved with that.

[boy Destiny]
Can DJs sign up with sound exchange? It wouldn’t. Because yeah, you’re playing copywritten music, but you’re doing your own thing with it.

You’re doing mashups. You’re doing a lot of mashups and your mashups are different than so-and-so’s mashups or this DJ’s, DJ Bandcamp’s mashups. And yeah, you have a different mashup.

So how you mix stuff and how you mash it up is a performance. And it’s a unique performance that’s unique to you. I think DJs should get performance royalties.

[Darran]
Well, yeah, it’s very, very complicated. I would look at it… I learned this very quickly in 2000 when I became a broadcast professional.

But public access, they don’t look at crap. But when you go to broadcast television, you’ve got to have all your I’s dotted, your T’s crossed, all that fun stuff. Especially when it comes to music licensing and sync licensing and master use and all that fun stuff, which I’m sure you’re familiar with.

And people don’t understand, there’s still performance rights. As a DJ, you may not need the sync and master use to stream that live, but you’re still performing that out to an audience or attempting to have an audience. And you need performance rights for that.

And Twitch is not their responsibility to monitor that and do those performance rights. That’s up to you as the performer. So a lot of these people, and Twitch, if the labels wanted to make examples, they could start going after these people and do a huge performance legal battle and going, this happened with podcasting back in the day.

Some of the big name DJs were going after DJs that had successful podcasts and they were using their music in the podcast as like a radio show. They weren’t doing commentary. It wasn’t for educational purposes.

So they could fall under that radar in that spectrum. They were using it for a radio show and selling sponsorships. And they came and said, you can’t use that music.

Or I gave you the rights to use two minutes of my song, not three minutes of my song or five minutes of my song or my library in these podcasts. And the whole argument was, hey, I’m doing you a favor because I’m putting your song out to these millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people. But the thing is, you still didn’t give me anything back for that.

You know, that’s the whole point of having licensing and copyright to protect yourself. So, you know, like I said, I had to revamp our whole strategy and our licensing and figure all that out to make sure we’re doing it right. And there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t doing it right.

Unfortunately, you know, it sounds like you got a good head on your shoulders though. What has been basically the best business decision in favor of your artist career that you ever made though? So we’re trying to kind of talk about the back end of business and everything.

[boy Destiny]
Well, business-wise, okay. I mean, I wish I could say my business, you’re calling it that. I’m questionable sometimes about that name, business, because businesses should make some profits at some point.

When I fill out the Schedule C for the IRS every year and I show loss for all the thousands of dollars of studio equipment downstairs that I’m buying, and they’re telling me now, they said, if I lose and don’t make any profits this year, they’re gonna call me a hobby. They’re not gonna call me a business. They say, you never make money.

You’re always sending $4,000 for radio promotion. You’re paying these people to get submitted on playlists. You’re buying equipment.

You’re buying the new Nord electric piano. You’re spending all this cash on this software for the latest afternight music. And where’s your profit at?

You’re not a business. And so I think President Trump, when he was in office the first time, they changed the tax laws. And the new tax law says, if your business, your music business, shows three consecutive years of loss, which that’s coming up, that you will no longer be able to file Schedule C or any kind of business deductions whatsoever, we’re gonna call you a hobby.

You’re not a business anymore. That’s just, that sucks.

[Darran]
Because it doesn’t, it takes time for an artist to make it, and you have to invest. I think that’s really, that’s kind of stupid, in my opinion. But hey, I’m not gonna go into the commentary of the current administration or past administration in this conversation.

[boy Destiny]
Yeah, so if you ask my friends, the worst business decisions I have been making is just sinking in thousands of dollars trying to promote myself, trying to market myself, and getting nothing in return. This year, this year, 2025, I put out my new single. I’ve been spending cash like water on playlist submissions and all this other stuff, Google Ads, meta ads, every kind of thing that you can do.

Try to get some notice, because one of the hardest thing is people don’t know you as a new artist or even as an old artist from 2008 that’s now coming back and reemerging. It’s like starting all over. No one remembers you from 12, 15 years later, so you gotta start all over again, and it’s a lot of money, money, money, money, money, money going in.

And then I go look at my Spotify, and my latest single only has 3,000 streams, and I calculate that, okay, that’s 12 bucks. When I get paid from Spotify, that’s $12. To get that $12, I spent $400 at this playlist submission.

They submit your songs to curators of playlists who then listen to your song and say whether it says or whether or not it sucks, and then after that, some of them aren’t musicians, and then they’ll say stuff about your engineering where they don’t even know anything about engineering, because all they do is arrange the songs, a curator, a playlist. And then you send that to them, and you get on these playlists, and the big playlisters think they’re gods, because it’s like trying to get on FM Radio Power 99 getting on a powerful playlist that has 500,000 saves. So you pay all this money, you get on these smaller playlists.

Because you’re on the smaller playlist, you only accumulate 3,000 to 5,000 streams, and then you look at your income, and you’re just like, I got 20 bucks. So I don’t know if I found my best business decision. It seems like my business decisions seem like they have some value.

I think the best thing I did, but it’s not, I don’t know whether it’s a good business decision, it’s not coming back in money, when I go to look at my ASCAP radio airplay, it doesn’t include all of that, those 700 radio plays on premium DAB radio, it doesn’t show up on my ASCAP at all. You know, because it wasn’t on Power 99, it was on premium radio Monaco DAB. And so was the $4,000 I spent a good business investment?

It got me on a lot of internet radio stations, it got me on Monaco radio, it got me here, it got me there. But business is about the act of making money. Not just putting it out there and getting on the radio and getting nothing in return.

So I don’t know if I’ve really made a significant business decision that has really led to any kind of income. Now, fortunately, I’m a professor. I teach genetics every day.

I teach cell structure and function. I teach cell physiology. I teach endocrinology.

So fortunately, I have a support system. And that’s why I basically function as a recording artist. Because I’m in class every day teaching, you know, as a professor, I’m teaching.

So I, you know, got that money coming in. And that’s what keeps me going. If I was just living off like gigs, going out, grabbing my piano, grabbing my EV electro voice speakers from the 80s.

Those, remember those big EVs? And trying to play gigs at the local bars here in Tallahassee. I would be dead broke.

I would not have enough money to hire curators to playlist my song, to put money into radio. I would have, if I was just a musician, I would have no money to do all the kinds of expensive marketing that is really needed to push you out there.

[Darran]
Yeah, I hear you, I know. And that’s what people don’t understand that. And then when they see it, they go, I can do it.

I can do it without it. And like, it’s just the reality of the game. Well, you know, Mike, it’s been a pleasure talking with you here on the DJ sessions today.

Again, I learned something new. Thank you for sharing that information. Especially about the, you know, getting found out there, getting played out there.

I’m sure you use radio pluggers as the service you use to get out there. Is that what you’re using?

[boy Destiny]
Yeah, that’s for radio. And what that gets you for, you can do a 900 pound promotion that will get you out to the radio stations over a two week period. That’s the cheapest.

That’s what I did this year. And then last year I did the 4,000 pound one, which gives you six weeks of constantly bombarding the radio stations with your information. Now, it’s not that the big FM radio stations don’t get your stuff.

They get it. But, you know, they’re the big radio stations. They have so much submissions.

So most of them don’t accept solicitation. But if you’re a starting artist and you want to get on some kind of radio, it’s worth it. At least then when you go back and look at your sound stats the next year, you’ll find out, yeah, I got on radio.

You know, was it on the biggest FM stations in all these big cities? No, but at least you got on. So that’s one thing I would advise.

The other thing is I use something, I use a company called, can I solicit? Can I mention one of them? SubmitHub.com because they evaluate their playlist to be legit and not robot driven. And that’s very important because if you get on a playlist that’s robot driven, Spotify and your distributor will find out and then they’ll ban you and you’ll lose your Spotify account and you’ll be kicked out.

[Darran]
So you go to SubmitHub, I’m there right now.

[boy Destiny]
You submit a song. SubmitHub.com, yes. And they guarantee that they do this investigation of every playlist curator to make sure that their playlist is legit because a lot of companies, and I won’t name them because I don’t want to get into any, mentioning something negative about somebody because they come after you to sue you for misusing their name.

But there’s a lot of companies that sends your stuff to playlists, curators to listen, but they don’t evaluate their playlisters and a lot of them are robotic playlisters. When you get on them, you get all these streams, you go up to 200,000 streams and then that’s whatever that’s worth. Every 4,000 is worth $4.

So you do the math. So you get on there and then Spotify gets suspicious. Like last month you weren’t doing crap and now all of a sudden you got 400,000 streams and then you get in trouble.

And then DistroKid or CD Baby, the distributors say, what you doing? You’re doing something strange here. It’d be one thing if you’re like at a million followers on TikTok, million on Facebook and you’ve been marketing the hell on social media, but this is not what that is.

And they know that and they have access to your social media and they know that’s not what it is. So they’re like, where are you getting all these streams from? Plus they identify.

When I go to my Spotify artists, every day I check source of stream. I open up a song and say the source of these streams. What you want is the one, the column that says playlist private, private playlists of each individual.

Something like that. That means that they came, they saw, they liked your stuff, they put it on their private playlists. And I started out at 5% for this song that I recently, now I’m up to 28% of the song is listed on people’s private playlists.

That’s what you want. And then other playlists are the ones that SubmitHub got you on. And I’m about 41% for that.

But they got this other category called other. You don’t want that. If you submit to curators and their streams are coming from other, that’s robots, that’s bots.

That’s when they’re going to detect you. That’s when they’re going to kick you off. And if you worked hard at getting your Spotify stuff up there for years, you know, you’ve gotten all these accumulations of your archives of your songs.

You don’t want all that erased. That’s your legacy. It gets erased because they caught you doing something that they consider to be inappropriate.

What I like about SubmitHub is that I can get on playlists. I’m on three new playlists recently. I’m on Grandma’s Records, a retro, because a lot of my music has retro style.

I’m on Chilled R&B on this Chilled R&B playlist. And I’m on Vibes, some kind of Vibes. Cool Vibes.

Oh, no, I like this one. Popstar Vibes. So I don’t know the basis for that.

I guess they, you know, they look at their artists and they say they’re giving off a pop popstar kind of vibe. So I’m on those three playlists. They don’t have a lot of followers.

You know, you’re looking at 3,000 to 6,000 followers, but the streams are consistent. Like the Grandma’s Records, those playlisters, those people listening to Grandma’s Records are like in the hundreds every day. You know, and that’s what I found out.

I started my own playlist. You can do this. Artists can do this too.

Create your own playlist. Call all your relatives, which is what I did. I said, save it.

Save this playlist and play it. So you get 30 relatives. They save it.

They play it. That playlist with 30 followers, family followers, is outperforming all of these other playlists with 5,000 followers. Just because a playlist has 5,000 followers, doesn’t mean they’re on there listening to that playlist.

Over to the right side of Spotify, they can have 10 different playlists. Monday, they listen to Grandma’s playlist. On Tuesday, they’re listening to R&B playlist.

On Wednesday, they’re listening to hard rock. They don’t have to be on there every day. Yeah, exactly.

But what I found out about Grandma’s playlist is that every day, there’s about 100 people on there, and they’re all listening to my song, which is number six on the playlist. A lot of my other playlists, they have more people, but they’re never on there. They’re never on there playing that playlist.

So don’t be fooled by the numbers. Your own playlist can outperform some of the bigger playlists. Some of the big playlists of lots of people may underperform compared to other playlists.

But what you don’t want to do is get on playlists that are run through a robotic system, because that could ruin your entire Spotify account. So my advice would be, don’t do that. And some of these other people outside of SubmitHub, some of these other people that say the same thing, they’ll get you on playlists.

They may not be getting you on legit playlists, and you need to be really cautious about that.

[Darran]
There’s definitely the scammers out there. People can bump their numbers artificially. That’s a whole other conversation.

But Mike, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. I mean, again, lots of information that you’ve given to our DJ sessions fans, followers, viewers, producers, and the like. Where can people find out more information about you?

What you got going on?

[boy Destiny]
Well, I want to keep track of what’s happening with me. One place you can go is to boy-destiny.com, which is the official website for Boy Destiny.

[Darran]
Mike, definitely a pleasure interviewing you today. God, I got tongue-tied right there. I wake up at 6.30 every morning. You’re a doctor. You probably know about this. They’re getting up for class, getting up for work, doing all the stuff you do.

But yeah, it’s great having you on the show today. Again, lots of good information. I was interested.

I was, while you were talking about SubmitHub, I was looking it up online. I wish there was something like that for podcasters. There really isn’t.

And maybe there is. Maybe I just haven’t heard about it.

[boy Destiny]
Well, you know, I’ll give you something. SubmitHub has podcast curators. You know, that’s what I was looking up.

[Darran]
I was trying to see if there was something like that.

[boy Destiny]
I didn’t see that. My last submission, Love is Forever, I submitted it. And I got on two podcast shows.

That’s interesting. What they’re going to do, I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But basically, you have these podcasters.

They receive your song. And somewhere in their podcasting show, they play music.

[Darran]
OK, I see.

[boy Destiny]
And so if they accept your music, then they play it on their podcast.

[Darran]
But it is for music only, though. It’s not for interviews like what I do.

[boy Destiny]
I guess so. I’ve never got an approval where they ask me to do an interview for their podcast show. I’ve gotten approvals where they will play my music on their podcast show.

I’ve got approvals for people that write blogs. They accept bloggers. And the bloggers basically listen to your music.

They do a critique of your music. And I would advise this to artists out there. It’s a good win-win.

Because what I didn’t know is that they write this wonderful article. And at the bottom, they embed your song. And it links straight to Spotify.

I saw a rise in my Spotify numbers after I got on these two blog articles. Because the song was at the bottom. And it was linking to Spotify.

For that song. But I don’t know. I haven’t been in a situation where I submitted my song.

And they wanted to interview me and play my song on a podcast. But I assume that’s what it would be. Because you’re submitting music to the bloggers.

Music to the podcasters. And somewhere in there, there’s this integration of music. So for example, today, we were interviewing.

And at some point, you played the song. Because you got a submission from SubmitHub. And it got you interested in interviewing and playing the song.

When I did an iHeartRadio interview last year, a podcast. Somewhere during the podcast, they played the song. And then we continued the interview after.

So I think that’s what SubmitHub would do. I’ll look into that, though.

[Darran]
It’s a good resource for artists, DJs, and producers that I know to have. Both of those were definitely… I’ve never heard of either of those two.

I usually know a lot. I guess I’m not into music production and submission. But it’s always good to have in my repertoire.

Because I’m starting to possibly start a label of my own, eventually, with the DJ sessions. And knowing those two resources, somebody puts a track out. I can say, hey, we’re going to submit it here and here.

Put it out there and do that. So thank you for that. Again, a pleasure having you on the show.

Is there anything else you want to say before we let you get going?

[boy Destiny]
Well, I’ll be putting some new music out next month. So in August, I’m going to put out this song called I Need Your Lovin’. And that’s mostly because I’m looking at my stats.

Since the song came out, it’s getting a lot of non-solicited streams. And that’s another thing. If you’re an artist and you’re looking at your Spotify numbers, and you notice one song that…

Artists are terrible interpreters of their own good songs. Artists think, you know, they think this song is good. They put it out as a single.

But a lot of times, artists don’t know what’s the good song. Because they have this personal attachment to this one song that they wrote that they like. And they think, yeah, that should be the single because I like it.

I like it. What you want to do as an artist is look at the numbers. As you put your album out there and you have 12 songs there, look at what people are saying.

People will listen to your album. And they will say, oh, I like this. Even though that’s not the single you would have chosen.

So this one song, I Need Your Lovin’, is getting a lot of attention. And I haven’t marketed it. I haven’t submitted it for playlisting.

I haven’t done anything. I’ve just let people who I’ve made aware of the album listen to the album. And they’re telling me, hey, we like this.

We like this. If you get those types of clues when you’re looking at your Spotify statistics, pay attention to that. So I’m going to try to release that next month, playlist it, and see what happens.

[Darran]
Definitely. You’re right. We call that on our side is falling in love with your work.

You may think it’s the best song, the one you want to go with. But people don’t do focus groups and really blind test it. And say, what do you really think the top song should be here?

So anyways, going to wrap up the show here with you, though, Mike. Oh, go ahead. You were going to say something?

[boy Destiny]
Be careful about that. Because I did a focus group for my last album. And everybody was telling me this ballad called How Will I Know was the one.

It was the one. It was the one. But I sent it out to 158 playlisters.

And they all turned it down. So just be careful.

[Darran]
I hear you.

[boy Destiny]
It depends on you. Be careful who your focus group is.

[Darran]
That’s another thing is you’ve got to be careful. Because a lot of people want to use Fafar, or friends, family, and relatives. And it’s like, that’s not really your target audience, your target demo, or who you want.

Almost blind people who don’t know who you are in any way, shape, or form that might have some. They’re in the genre, at least. You wouldn’t send it to an R&B song.

And unless it had EDM elements in it, or something like that. So yeah, it makes some sense, though. But thanks again for coming on the show today.

I really appreciate you having me here. And look forward to hearing more stuff coming from your way. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me here. On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com. Find us on all the socials out there.

And check it out. And yeah, I got another show that I got thrown almost back to back with shows again. You know, I got him coming in right now and hitting me up while I’m doing it, finishing up the interview with you.

But go to our website, thedjsessions.com. Our stories there, our music stories there. 2,600 past episodes, over 600 stories, all there at thedjsessions.com.

That’s Mike, or a.k.a. Boy Destiny, coming in from Tallahassee, Florida. I’m your host, Darren, coming in from Seattle, Washington, for The DJ Sessions presents The Virtual Sessions. And remember, on The DJ Sessions, the music never stops.