Ketan Rahangdale: Unity, Karma, and the Future of Fan Engagement on the ”Virtual Sessions” 3/28/23

Ketan Rahangdale: Unity, Karma, and the Future of Fan Engagement

In this forward-thinking Virtual Session, The DJ Sessions host Darran Bruce speaks with Miami-based entrepreneur Ketan Rahangdale, founder of Unity, a groundbreaking fan engagement platform redefining how artists connect with their audiences. Built on the pillars of “Create, Connect, and Collect,” Unity allows fans to earn rewards by engaging with their favorite artists’ music, creating short-form content called “vibes,” and joining exclusive crews tied to artists and festivals.

Ketan explains how Unity incentivizes superfans by rewarding them with Karma points, which can be redeemed for digital experiences, exclusive merch, meet-and-greets, and tickets. Each artist has their own Karma economy, creating unique value for fan interactions while giving artists transparent insight into who their most passionate supporters are. Unity has already partnered with artists and festivals across the spectrum, from Dirtybird, Claude VonStroke, and Walker & Royce to DJ Diesel (Shaquille O’Neal), Said the Sky, Dioro, and Breakaway Festival.

The discussion highlights Unity’s use of augmented reality features and its integration with RFID wristbands to merge offline and online experiences. Fans can collect Karma by participating in treasure hunts, digital drops, and immersive AR activations, all while deepening their bond with the artists they love.

Ketan also touches on Unity’s expansion beyond electronic music into jam bands, Latin, and K-pop, emphasizing the platform’s versatility for any genre. With over 2,200 digital rewards already delivered, Unity is quickly becoming the bridge between artist and fan, reshaping the music industry by turning engagement into lasting, rewarding relationships.

Show Notes – 

Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Ketan Rahangdale (Unity Founder & CEO)
Location: Virtual Studios, Seattle WA & Miami, FL

Overview:
Darran Bruce speaks with Ketan Rahangdale about Unity, its Karma-based rewards system, AR integrations, and how it’s revolutionizing fan engagement for artists and festivals worldwide.

Topics Covered:

• Founding Unity as a fan-first engagement platform 
• How Karma points fuel artist-specific reward economies 
• Creating vibes – fan-made short-form content paired with music 
• Crews as artist- and festival-specific community hubs 
• Early adoption and incubation with Dirtybird, Claude VonStroke, and Walker & Royce 
• Expanding collaborations with DJ Diesel, Said the Sky, Dioro, Prodigy, and more 
• Augmented reality activations, filters, and collectible objects 
• RFID wristband integration tested at Imagine Festival 
• Festival partnerships including Breakaway, Dirtybird Campout, Vibra Urbana, and Dancefestopia 
• Expanding genres: jam bands, Latin, K-pop, and indie artists 
• Artist dashboard for managing rewards, badges, and fan connections 
• How Karma transparency helps artists identify superfans 
• Unity’s philosophy: experiential ad units over traditional ads 
• Bridging the offline and online fan experience seamlessly 

Call to Action:
Download the Unity app at unitea.com and start collecting Karma with your favorite artists.
Discover more exclusive interviews and live sessions at thedjsessions.com

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the DJ Sessions Presents the Virtual Sessions. I’m your host, Darran. And right now I’m coming to you from the Virtual Studios in Seattle, Washington.

And coming in all the way from Miami, we have Ketan Rahangdale. I hope I got that right. Coming in from- Hey Darran, how you doing?

I’m doing great today. And you are a developer. You started a company here just recently.

Well, not recently, I think in the last few years called Unity. Tell our DJ Sessions viewers about Unity and what it’s all about.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Absolutely. First off, thanks so much for having me. You know, I’m just a fan that always wanted to be backstage and I think a few of us could relate, right?

So I said, hey, you know, why not start a social media platform where the more I engage with my favorite artists’ music, I have the opportunity to actually meet these artists by, you know, creating content, connecting with my friends and collecting these digital experiences with them. So it’s exactly what I did.

[Darran]
It’s so ironic. I mean, it’s so amazing that you came to that in 2019 because that’s, being in the electronic music industry for 30 years and being a video guy, I mean, I played around with a video camera when I was six years old, back in the eighties when my dad bought the first video camera. And I’d go to these nightclubs and we’d have these wonderful experiences, but then all we could do is the next week was talk about them.

And it always made me wonder why nobody was in the club with a video camera or recording these sets. But there was, at the time, the technology wasn’t there to share the sets. There was no sound, there was no YouTube, there was no video online.

I mean, I come from a public access broadcast television world. And if you were at that time to turn on the TV and see what we could produce and put on the air, you know, and how did you know what was going on? You had to be right there in the moment.

Now with technology, being able to be in our pocket. And one of the things you said is being a person who likes to be backstage, who likes to meet those artists, you created an app to make this happen. Create, connect and collect.

I mean, I think that is something that’s gonna, I think it’s gonna blow the minds of everyone. And you’ve been doing some really awesome collaborations with people, but from an artist perspective, why is it important that an artist would wanna get involved with Unity?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Well, at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to tell our story if we’re an artist, right? We wanna grow our audiences. We want our fans that we love to be able to unleash their passion.

And at the end of the day in doing so, grow engagement. So the way Unity works is I, as a fan, would download the app and immediately I see incentives that are rewards that the artists would post. These digital experiences could be anything from exclusive merchandise, song drops, meet and greets at festivals, tickets, anything, right?

And these are all things that fans want. And unlike traditional platforms, which exclusively focus on monetizing digital experiences, we’re saying, hey, if you’re an emerging act, you’ve got 20,000 fans, 200,000 fans, or even 2 million fans. If you can take your top 1% fans and turn them into a army to supercharge your streams, supercharge short form content creation, like TikToks, we call them vibes, right?

And share that out to the world. Well, heck, we all know if you can get 1,000 of your fans to pre-save your single on Spotify, that’s gonna boost the relevancy of the Spotify algorithm, right? If you can get 1,000 of your fans to create 1,000 TikToks, well, heck, that’s gonna grow your audience.

So at the end of the day, our goal is to really get your super fans to engage with you more and then reward them. And in the process of doing so, we actually value that engagement behavior with Karma. That’s our token and platform, which is mutually exclusive of each artist.

So I could have 500 Grizz Karma, 1,000 Claude Monstro Karma, and I could only use that Karma point token towards rewards in those artists’ Karma economies. So basically, the more Karma is being generated, the more the net value of that engagement, which we at some points can then even go leverage and take to brand sponsors to sponsor these rewards, which is in turn how artists get paid out. So, you know, not only is there a way to make money, but if you can say, hey, because I’m an artist, I found my top fans.

It’s Susie. She’s streamed my music 1,000 times in the last month, created three vibes, and here she is in Miami, and I’m playing my Miami date. We’re coming off Miami Music Week.

Let me drop her a word. Come get solicited and meet me, right? Not only is Susie happy, but at the same time, she was incentivized to basically supercharge your life, right?

So I would say those are the reasons that you should be on board as an artist.

[Darran]
You know, you just answered two of my next questions, and I always love when I guess on the show, and I know Jamie and the team wanted me to send you questions beforehand, but I don’t do that, because I like to have an impromptu interview. You just answered two of the questions I was gonna ask you was not only why it’s important for artists to sign up, but why is it important for fans to sign up, and then I was gonna ask you, tell us about Karma, and why Karma is so important to this whole thing. What are some of the artists that you’re currently working with right now?

I mean, you can name drop like a whole list, but you have some big names on board with this. This isn’t like a startup, and you’re looking for big names. The big names are being attracted to this platform.

Who are some of those names that you’re working with, and why is it so important that you’re working with those big names?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Yeah, so I’ll take those questions in reverse, right? I mean, we say big names, but for us, we’re for everybody. We’re for any artist that wants to galvanize passion of their top fans, and really, we like to say, get paid to get to know your best fans and reward them, so at the end of the day, some of the artists we’re working with, I mean, look, we have to give homage to Dirty Bird.

That’s where all of this started. We incubated the platform out of Dirty Bird, Claude Monstro, Walker Royce. These are our OGs, and a lot of respect to them for allowing us to battle test everything through them, so maybe some pain points in learning there as well, but we basically incubated out of the Dirty Bird nest, started working closely with Prodigy, Nightmare Slander, those guys, DJ Diesel, Shaquille O’Neal is one of the artists that we just included in our Augmented Reality Digital Experiences feature that we just launched, and we had Dioro, Said the Sky, top names like that, all the way down to the Ravenskoons of the world.

I mean, we all like to have a little base in our lives, right, Ravenskoon, and some really cool artists like Young Bae, Kendall. I mean, we love electronic music culture. That’s where we cut our teeth, so out of the 2,000-plus digital experiences we’ve done and over 40-plus at-scale festivals where we’re the official fan engagement partner, like Breakaway, Dirty Bird, Campout, we’ve done Vibra, BANA, Dancefest, Tobia, so I mean, just to name a few, we’re working from Chainsmokers all the way down to, I can’t say he’s small now, but back when we started Fred again, I mean, like, dude, we don’t care, right? We are fans first, and at the end of the day, our job is to make sure that there’s rewards for every fan, no matter whether you’re a bass head or you like drum and bass or you like techno, you like house, there’s something for everyone, right?

[Darran]
Do you see the platform extending into other genres of music or other avenues down the line, not just electronic music? Like, would you go into rock music? Would it go into classical music?

Would it go into any event, any artist that’s out there trying to even put out maybe even spoken word or opening that door? I commonly go back to the Boiler Room model of how Boiler Room was focusing on celebrity DJs and DJs in the nightclubs, and I saw that model being such an awesome model that could they expand that into bands? Could they expand it into other artists and start doing concerts and events on the line and even go into a pay-per-view model down the line?

That’s a whole nother conversation, but do you see it just being for electronic music artists or are you looking to maybe make this a platform for acoustic artists or no-name artists that’s just starting out and said, here, my fans, follow me on Unity?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Could be for any artists. I mean, even that new Augmented Reality digital experiences feature we launched, we had some squabby. We’ve been, we just came up Gem and Jam in February where we were working with the Motet, the Floozies.

I mean, we’ve really embraced jam because most of the artists that we’re working with are the ones that you’ll see at music festivals, right? But we’re open to every genre. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re rewarding fans for their passion and their loyalty, and you can be a fan or passionate about any music so we’re open to every genre.

I would say jam, EDM, the more indie artists is where we’ve been growing our community from. That’s not to say that we’re not looking at Latin music or K-pop or other genres that are seeing what we’re doing. They’re going, these artists are going, wait, I can get my top 1% of fans to pre-save my single 10,000 times so that they can get a signed t-shirt from me?

Heck yeah, I’m in. So we’re constantly looking at other genres, but that doesn’t mean we’re not true to where we cut our teeth initially.

[Darran]
And yeah, and one of the things I love about technology, and I am so excited to talk with you about this subject is that AR experience. I mean, that is the next, to me, that’s the next level. If it was websites in early 90s, mid 90s, then it went to social media in the mid 2000s, or the aughts, I guess that’s what it’s called.

And then now we’re on the TikToks and we’re on the generation, but we’re moving now into virtual reality or metaverse, but augmented reality experiences at events. How does the Unity augmented reality experience add to the platform, to add to the experience for the user?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
So it’s important we touch on vibes, right? I mean, basically, vibes are our short form user generated content feature. Think of a vibe like a TikTok.

It’s essentially a 10 second video clip that you pair a song to, okay? Now, in Unity’s vibes, we get our fans to create and edit original video content, soundtrack with audio from an extensive music catalog and topped off in certain moments with augmented reality filters that are artists branded or augmented reality objects that are artists branded for the ultimate customized vibe experience. So our goal at the end of the day is to say, okay, let’s pick any one of those artists.

Let’s take, okay, we’ll take Diesel and DJ Diesel Shack. If you’ve been to a Shack, DJ Diesel said, you’ll see he’s got this crazy gorilla that’s just going nuts, right? And he’s going ape shit for better terminology there.

So everybody knows he’s got the ape. He said, all right, why don’t you go ape shit on Unity? We’ve got a filter that turns your head into the gorilla, right?

And if you can create vibes with DJ Diesel’s music as your vibe and as the gorilla and share that to your friends, you’re able to get the digital experiences that in this case would be like tickets, meeting grades, et cetera, right? So at the end of the day, we want our artists to be able to incentivize their top fans to express their passion for their music creatively with something that is special, right? It’s special to Unity.

You can’t use that filter on Instagram. You can’t use that filter on Snap. And the reason for that is we want, from a data transparency standpoint, artists to be able to know who those fans are and actually reward them because that’s what Instagram and the others don’t let them do.

So if they can say, hey, here’s my fans that were going ape shit to my single and they shared and tagged this on Instagram and where else from Unity, those are the ones that I really wanna take care of and build a better relationship with.

[Darran]
And looking at those AR experiences, is Unity, are you looking at doing anything in the virtual world, in virtual reality to make a virtual experience for those that make it a custom avatar or a custom t-shirt or something they can wear to be in a virtual environment and maybe be at a virtual concert like, I am a super fan and because I’m a super fan, I got the super shirt. So when I’m running around that internal VR environment, the reason I bring this up is we just launched our virtual nightclub, our first virtual nightclub, well, second virtual nightclub. We were in all space, but now we’re moving everything over to VR check as all space went away, unfortunately, but we’re looking at launching multiple VR nightclubs and doing record release parties and doing meet and greets virtually with artists in those worlds, which I could see Unity being that, hey, come in and be with Diesel and sit in the DJ sessions, VIP lounge and Shaq’s right there in the VIP lounge, I’m hanging with Shaq right now because I was on Unity and I earned my points to be in this virtual nightclub.

I mean, that could be something really cool there. Have you looked at virtual reality or are you looking at the metaverse as the next frontier?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
I think absolutely. I mean, it’s definitely the next frontier. Might take some time for some of our older fans to get there, but I think that we’ve definitely been experimenting.

I mean, we did the first at scale Minecraft music festival with Above and Beyond at Junodeeb, and that was really fun. And what you just mentioned were some of the experiences we did. We had a custom Unity shirt that you could win in platform.

We had a virtual VR meet and greet where you can take your avatar backstage virtually, right? And meet Above and Beyond virtually in VR. And it’s just cool things like that, which obviously it might not be as fun as meeting them in person, but we’ve done that.

Where we’re going now is a lot of the objects that you can win that are augmented reality objects within the actual app, right? So let’s take Dirty Bird. For Cloudmonstroke, if you get on Unity and you earn your Cloudmonstroke karma and get the Dirty Bird egg, it’s a Dirty Bird egg that actually wobbles and then hatches and a bird comes out, right?

So that object can absolutely be used in the metaverse as well. So interoperability is huge, right? Whether you’re using that object in a platform like Minecraft or more so in these web three metaverses, Decentraland, Sandbox, OVR, Overland.

I mean, it’s all interoperable, right? So for us, we do see that as the next frontier. We also think that specifically in the electronic music, we’re embracing it way faster than, say, maybe String Cheese Incidents fans who might still be using Windows XP or something.

But I think that for the younger fans, yeah, absolutely, that’s where it’s going. It just might take time before it’s in the mainstream.

[Darran]
Now, would you see the augmented reality experience also being at a festival and you could do basically a treasure hunt or a contest or you go here and check in at this point and you tap this and get this and then it trickles in and you go 0.1, 0.2, 0.3. And then at the end of the day, you just earned a bunch of karma points for doing all these things. And at the end of the day, like check in with your karma points and boom, here’s my karma points. I’m backstage now with somebody or I’m here to complete this whole maze of events or whatever’s going on.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
I might need to bring you on the team, Darran. I think that you got it all going on up there, man. That’s what we just tested at Imagine Festival last year was our first integration with the RFID wristband provider where we were able to make it to where you just took your wristband and actually booped it onto a point of sale, touch point, which you had booped it like you were buying a beer, you booped it.

[Darran]
Who were you working with on that, by the way?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
We were working with Billfold on that and Eric Schneider over at Imagine. Okay. We actually did the Unity NFT Dome.

So we had Bloodlight Next, Live Wire, and a number of other brands participate in doing NFT drops where at the end of the day, you just booped and you booped your wristband and because your email’s registered to your wristband, you’re able to drop that into your Unity profile if your email was the same that you registered on Unity. So very, very cool tech where just basically that ability to use RFID to reward you to collect digital experiences while you’re onsite at an event where you don’t even necessarily have to take out your app because we all know when we’re at our favorite festivals, we might not always be on our phone, right? So making sure that the offline and the online are tied together for seamless experience where, hey, you booped your wristband, you claim that digital experience, you get your karma points when you log in next on Unity, we already know, right?

So it’s like really taking advantage of where we’re at with this new age in technology, you know?

[Darran]
One of the coolest things that I saw, I went to, in 2021, I went to the Brooklyn Mirage. And that was the first experience I ever had where they put an armband on, you go to the machine, put your credit card information on, you walk around the club and you tap your armband and pay for everything. I’m like, what could this really do?

If you were really walking around, my email address is attached to that armband and go boop, boop, boop. And I’m walking around and I know, I talk with the guy frequently, Harrison Bloor. He’s with We Get Sponsors out of the UK.

There’s a lot of big events overseas. He’s one of the companies that developed that checkout wristband technology. But what you’ve turned into, what you’re turning into is walk around and get that NFT kind of experience.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
I’ll tell you what it was. We did a golden ticket giveaway with Dilly Tonka and Bud Light Next, where if you were one of the first 500 people to find the golden ticket, you would get some VIP upgrades and free drinks sponsored by Bud Light Next, right? So, I mean, simple little things that just make your festival experience even more fun.

It’s like, wait, I can go find a golden ticket that’s augmented reality, where all I’ve got to do is bump my wristband and I got a virtual golden ticket. I mean, this is when I was growing up going to festivals, like, you know, a decade plus ago. I never would have imagined.

I was like, I mean, I remember going to festivals. I’m like, I better just tell my parents that I’m not gonna talk to them for three days because there’s no reception.

[Darran]
We didn’t have cell phones back then. We left, it was gone. You were gone and in the woods or in the forest.

It’s like, you show up to EDC, you show up to anything, you show up to Ultra.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
It’s like, everybody’s got 5G, Ultra. Man, we’re in a different world.

[Darran]
You know, it’s a different time and age for sure. Yeah, that is awesome. So tell me about crews and what crews are all about.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Absolutely, so for us, crews are where all the engagement’s really happening. That’s where the chatter is, right? So festivals and artists can have basically official crews.

So there’s an official DJ Diesel crew or Cloudmonstroke crew or Breakaway crew. And in the crew, it’s basically a group chat that’s tagged to that event or artist where it’s all about that event or artist. So you may be in some Facebook groups, like let’s bring up Rez because she’s got a lot of them, right?

But when you’re in those official artist groups, what are the rules? Don’t talk about anything that’s not about that artist or that festival, right? And in these crews, this is where artists actually have the ability to hop into the crew and directly start talking with their crewmates, airdrop special rewards to crew members.

And most importantly, I can give you a little bit of what’s under the hood. Let’s just say we’re coming out with some features which take the fan listening party to the next level when artists are coming out with new singles to where the crew is your specialized group chat with you and other fans to be directly in touch with your favorite artists and festivals. And so the more you engage in crews, the higher likelihood that you can earn karma with your favorite artists and festivals faster, right?

Because you’re already in a place where people care about stuff. And the way that karma works is it’s not just you earn karma for your engagement, but you earn karma for generating engagement. So that’s why when you get on Unity, you don’t just get karma when you create a vibe.

So say I use a CloudMob Strokes single and a vibe with the Dirty Bird egg, and I create the vibe and I share it. Well, not only will I get karma for creating the vibe, but every time someone likes it, every time someone comments on it, every time someone views it, I’m earning reciprocal karma. And that fan is also getting karma.

So karma is kind of what goes around, comes around, right? And so crews are the best place to wrap up karma. Basically, if you’ve created a vibe for CloudMob Stroke, the first thing you wanna do is share it in the Dirty Bird crew and share it in the CloudMob Stroke crew, because chances are you’re gonna get more likes and comments.

So that’s kind of a little cheat trick to karma hack. And we’ve actually had- They’ve been calling it Karma Farm. So we’ve gotten Reddit threads and Discord channels on the official artist Discords where the top fans are on there, and they’re like, let’s Karma Farm on Unity.

I’m like, oh, oh no, this is not good. But for the artists, think about it. We’re basically supercharging engagement around a really cool piece of content of somebody dancing to a song, right?

Or to something. So that’s exactly what an artist needs and wants. So that’s been really cool to see come to life.

[Darran]
Yeah, I could see Unity being, it is going to be the platform. I mean, I see this, the one-to-one artist engagement or fan engagement platform. Again, I’m not knocking Meta or Instagram or TikTok in any way, shape, or form.

They have their purpose, but you really are creating this touch, there’s a touching experience.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
I love that you’re doing this because I often joke that the Michelangelo painting where you have God’s hand, the creator touching the human, I’m like, hey, that’s the artist and that’s the fan, right? Yeah. We’re literally that touch point in between, but you hit the nail on the head.

I mean, we don’t view ourselves as competitive to TikTok or any of these guys. In fact, we actually incentivize our fans to share vibes onto TikTok and Instagram, right? At the end of the day, we view ourselves as exactly that.

We’re the place that you come to unleash your passion for being a fan of any artist and get rewarded for it through building a better one-to-one connection with that artist. So that is core to us. Our mantra is, hey man, it’s not about a million likes, it’s about a million karma, right?

The more you get people to connect around your content, that you’ve created, the more digital experiences you get to collect, right? So create, connect, collect is kind of our mantra.

[Darran]
And this is a free platform, correct? I mean, free for the end user to join. It’s not like a membership fee or a paid fee or anything.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
We do plug into Spotify or Apple. So the app works a little better if you’ve got a subscription to Apple or Spotify, but the platform itself, yes, it is free. And all the features you can use without having a subscription in case you’re a soundcloud guy.

[Darran]
Now, if I’m a business owner and I wanna reach out to your community, is there a way that as a business owner, is there paid ads? Is there any advertising within the app that I could say, hey, I’m the DJ Sessions and I wanna advertise to your fans and I wanna spend X amount of dollars per week and maybe there’s a click and a link that could take them to the DJ session. Is there advertising within the app or is it strictly ad free?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
So it depends how you define an app. So traditional video photo ads, no. We don’t have any of that really because we want our platform, at least right now to be all about the artists and the fans.

Now, if you are a business and you do want to have your product or service play a role in one of the digital experiences that an artist is putting into their karma economy for their fans to earn, then yes, we do allow you to do that. And what we do is basically say, hey, you know what? Tell us if you’re, I’ll make an example of, let’s go back to the Bud Light Next example.

Clearly they wanted to get some exposure and reach in front of the Imagine Music community, the Imagine Festival community. So we said, all right, let’s do this virtual experience drop where we’ll have the virtual golden ticket that fans can engage to earn. And that was directly tied to the fan’s experience at Imagine with those artists and being able to get a drink and get an experience up VIP upgrade there.

Those are the type of things we love to do because we’re basically enhancing that experience that the fan really wants, right? I might not really want to be a fan of Bud Light. I might be a huge fan of Grizz and Excision, would love to see them in VIP.

So you know what? That’s where we would take the brand on and say, look, we’ll make sure that you can get some placement for your logo and people can see that you’re a part of the experience versus trying to put a video ad or a photo ad in between the experience. That’s not our mantra.

Basically, if the artist doesn’t approve it, the festival doesn’t approve it, and it doesn’t enhance the experience that the fan already wanted, then it’s probably gonna be a no because for us, we think from a marketing innovation standpoint, it’s all going experiential and digital experiential anyways. That is the trend line. So I don’t know if my kids are ever gonna buy anything because they saw a photo ad or a video ad.

I don’t know. I mean, I barely buy anything. Now, unless it’s one of those impulse buys, you buy it and then you forget about it, but for the most part, I’m not loyal to a brand today because I saw a video ad, right?

I might be loyal because heck yeah, you know what? I’m a gal and I got my do-over with Urban Decay before I got to hang out with my artist, Malu Trevero, which we’ve done, right? So, you know, hey, I’ll always buy Urban because they got me to hang out with Malu and go to the Lasky Mandan Women’s Empowerment Festival at the Forum in LA, but I’m not buying Urban because I saw a video, right?

So that’s, we’re really pivoting away from your traditional media placement to more of this digital experience placement to what we call for brands, the world’s first experiential ad unit.

[Darran]
Yeah, one of the other companies that I run outside of this is iAlternative Media and basically, it’s basically a guerrilla marketing company. We do mobile billboard trucks, we do experiences that people are gonna remember, they’re gonna see. One of our things we do with the DJ sessions is we put DJs in the back of the truck, drive around with a concert grade sound system and people see it, they know it.

I mean, we’re known as the disco truck up here in Seattle and we got another disco truck down in AZ that we just launched as well with LED walls and all that fun stuff and we’re working, I’ll drop it right now, we’re working with Dr. Fresh on some stuff up here. It’s gonna, when he comes up to Seattle, do some stuff in the back of the truck, driving around, super excited for that. You mentioned Imagine Festival.

I will be, we will be at Imagine this year. We just got full media clearance with Relentless Beats and their whole crew and team. So we’re super excited to be out there, working with them.

I’m not sure if Relentless does Imagine, but the PR team out there loves us and so I’m super excited to be out there at Imagine. I wanna experience some of these Unity experiences that you have going on. I’d love to get an interview with you.

I’d love to do a segment with you when you’re out there. Is there anything else though that you wanna let our DJ sessions fans know about Unity or about what you got coming up? Anything you can release, any secret, secrets?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Yeah, so I’ll touch on what you just said with Fresh and Imagine. I mean, yes, absolutely. Would love to take you up on that and appreciate that.

It means a lot to us. And, you know, Dr. Fresh, we’ve done some stuff. Actually, we did a really cool Disneyland experience with Dr. Fresh kind of about a year ago. And that was crazy. You got to go to Disneyland with Dr. Fresh. So I mean, it’s just some examples of cool stuff we’ve done, right?

But yeah, definitely let’s link up at Imagine. And oh man, okay, so what’s coming? All right, I’ll give you guys a little teaser.

So right now, if you actually get on the platform, we’ve got some really cool, big, wild rewards that just went up. You may have heard of Hamdi. He’s doing his US tour.

So we’ve got some cool Hamdi rewards that are up right now. We’re also currently doing a lot of stuff on the augmented reality reward side with those artists I mentioned, some Squabby, Diesel, Claude Monstro, Dioro. And make sure you get those now because we may not have told you what the utilities are, but let’s just say that they’re pretty cool.

Some of the events that are coming up that we’re going to be doing rewards for include Breakaway, of course. So we’ve got the Breakaway series coming up. There’s six Breakaways this year.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re in Kansas City, San Fran, North Carolina, et cetera. I mean, Grand Rapids. I mean, we’ve got something for you coming from all the headliners on those.

That’s going to be really cool. We’ve got Dirty Bird coming up and we’ve got a few other festivals that I’ll keep under wraps from now, but you can expect every month or two that some of the biggest festivals will be doing. So that’s a little bit about what’s coming up.

And yeah, I think key takeaways are guys. I mean, at the end of the day, if you’re streaming music on Spotify or Apple, come get your karma points, right? It’s like your frequent flyer miles.

Like you got to get them. You want them, you want to spend them and you want to spend them with the artists you love. And so definitely get those.

And if you happen to be creating content, do it on Unity and share it off platform so you can continue to get more of those karma points and join some of those crews because you never know what you’re going to learn and oftentimes these festivals and artists are letting our crews know first what’s coming up in terms of their releases or early bird tickets links and other things. So definitely become a part of the Unity family. And Darran, I just want to thank you again so much.

This has been awesome and looking forward to hopefully seeing you at Imagine.

[Darran]
Absolutely, Ketan. And that website is right there below, unity.com. Grab that website, get that information, download that app, Google Play, Apple Store.

It’s out there ready to rock and roll. Wait, I forgot to ask you, is this, are you in version one of the app or is this, is there version two? Are there more features that are going to come out down the line that are not on the, they’re on the drawing board that haven’t been released yet?

And then can you let us know any of those upcoming features or that non-disclosure type stuff?

[Ketan Rahangdale]
So yeah, this is V1, right? So we literally actually just came out of beta and into V1 last month. So it’s really flowing.

And I would say that where we’re going with it is now that the features are out, it’s more about building more tools for artists to get to know their fans. So there may be some new features that are coming out within Cruise, like I was mentioning, that would allow artists to better engage their top fans. There’s also some really cool features coming out with our rewards marketplace and allowing for fans to actually not only use our karma tokens to get rewards, for some of those fans that don’t have much karma, we might be coming out with some features that could help you get them faster.

So- Boost the karma? I was going to ask you, is there a way to boost karma? Is there a way to- There may be, I’m not going to tell us just yet, but there may be some ways for you to get karma faster coming out.

And actually we just released privately our new badges feature, which is for every single artist, the more you stream music, the more content you create, the more you engage. And same for festivals, you’re going to be able to start earning badges. And these are really, really cool because at the end of the day, these serve as a way for identifying how big of a fan you are and what you’re a fan of.

And of course, you can probably imagine that those might be used to grant you access to other special experiences that could be coming up.

[Darran]
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I know we touched a little bit on this pre-show and we won’t go too deep into it, but could those badges be like NFTs that are specifically controlled and regulated so that nobody can duplicate or say, I got a badge, I got a fake badge, look at my face. And they would be like, nope, this one doesn’t work. You had to do this to earn this, to get this as an NFT.

And there’s only a certain limited quantity of those. I mean, that whole marketplace, that whole environment is a whole brand new world. And I see this kind of combining with what you’re doing into that NFT ticketing or a giveaway or a special, I got this and I own it and there’s value here.

And I earned that rather than just getting a special sticker or a download and like, you know.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
You hit the nail on the head. And yes, that’s where we’re going with it. And of course, when you go on chain, of course, artists have to have a way to manage those communities.

So we will be releasing very soon to the public, it’s in beta now, but to the public for artists, our artist dashboard, which allows you to self-serve, sign up on the platform and create your own rewards and manage these badges. And, you know, right now it’s been invite only for every artist and I said, we have had over 2,200 rewards we’ve ran. So you can imagine, you know, we’ve been very selective of making sure the artists we’re onboarding are the ones that are relevant for the fans that are going out to the events.

Very soon, you’ll be able to get on yourself through the artist dashboard. And that’s very exciting for us as we grow into other genres, like you’ve alluded to, Darran. So, you know, for the artists, you’ve got the dashboard coming from fans, you’ve got badges, you’ve got more crew utilities, you’ve got some new superpowers, I’d say, that are coming out around the music itself.

And we’re just gonna continue to layer on more digital experiences that make you happy.

[Darran]
Awesome, Katan, I mean, it’s been a pleasure talking with you, I’m so excited to see the Unity app brand grow, get out there. I think this is exactly what the community needs to create, connect and collect. Make sure that that happens and that these artists are really getting to touch their user base, their fan base.

I mean, that’s so exciting, you know, after, like I said, being at so many shows and being in this industry for so long, it’s nothing better than being able to say to an artist, you played a good set tonight, or thank you for touching me, thank you for, like, making me feel awesome. And then those artists that do the meet and greets or do those extra special things for their fans, it’s so important, it’s part of the process, you know, and then having this Unity app to make that happen and reward the fans for helping those artists also grow is just phenomenal. So again, thank you for being on the show.

We were definitely gonna follow up with you, bring you back on the show. I know we’re gonna touch base at Imagine in September. I actually just found out it’s camping, the hotels are too far away.

Like I was talking to the PR guys, like, no, you don’t wanna stay in hotels, you wanna camp when you go there. Four-day festival, we’ll be there on site doing interviews, we’ll talk to you then, but we’ll still stay in touch with you. Again, that website, one more time, Katan, it is unity.com, U-N-I-T-E-A.com, unity.com.

Download the app, get it today. Thank you so much for coming on the DJ sessions.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Thank you so much, Darran. Looking forward to touching base at Imagine, and this has just been a pleasure and an honor. So I appreciate you for everything you do for the community.

And like you said, we really do believe that, you know, in the olden days, you had bands like the Grateful Dead that, you know, they didn’t play, there was no social media, people would just show up and they didn’t kick at anyone, whatever. And the meet and greet experience was happening every single gig, right? But now with like all these, I think they’re, you know, platforms and ways that people, that’s channels people are engaging, it’s so hard.

So I think a little bit about what you do is common with what we do, which is we just want to share the love and it’s all about comments, what goes around comes around. So I really, really appreciate your vibe and yeah, keep creating, connecting and collecting.

[Darran]
Definitely will, definitely will. On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com. Find us on Facebook, Meta, Twitter, Twitch, whatever you want to call it.

Instagram, we’re out there. TikTok us, thedjsessions.com. You know, you can also get free prizes, enter in contests, do cool stuff and go over and get Unity’s app as well.

Make sure you can get those karma points and everything they got going on. Cause you know, I think the DJ Session and Unity kind of have a similar thing going on there. Now that I think about it as I do my outro, but we want to make sure that we are connecting fans.

That’s what you’re doing over there Katan and I’m loving what your team is doing. Thank you so much for being on the show today and we will be following up with you here soon. But remember, on the DJ Sessions, the music never stops.

[Ketan Rahangdale]
Thank you.

[Darran]
You’re welcome.