Exclusive: Project Pat Partners With 2 Black Founders Who Are On A Quest To Amplify The Artists Behind The Viral Remixes You Hear On Social Media
A new platform has emerged to refine the relationship between artists and their fans.
Co-founders Darin Stewart (CEO) and Marleisse Stephens (CMO) are the visionaries of Happy Monday, a remix platform driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and their respective creative agencies. The goal is to keep the power in the hands of artists by enabling them to profit from their songs while also granting users the freedom to create various versions of the songs.
Happy Monday
The user interface, which resembles the nostalgia of an MP3 player, will present the option to choose from 10 different genres that can be mixed, resulting in a minimum of 100 song variations.
Genres include but are not limited to:
-
Hip-Hop
-
Reggaeton
-
Rock ‘n’ Roll
-
Lo-fi
-
Drill
“The whole idea is to curate your favorite sounds of each release, save them to your playlist, download them, etc., in an easy and simple way,” Stewart told AFROTECH in an exclusive interview. “In the future, the vision is to give more creator tools to essentially have more creative ability to do even more customizations.”
Origin Story
The genesis of Happy Monday derived from the experiences of both Stewart and Stephens in their respective roles in music and global marketing. The pair’s initial encounter occurred in 2018 while they were in Los Angeles, CA. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, they started delving into the industry’s disparities.
At the time, Stephens served as Netflix’s global creative marketing manager, original series, before pivoting to entrepreneurship full-time with the launch of her agency, Belmont Agency. Stewart was working on the artist management side and had launched a production company with rapper Juicy J simultaneously.
“Working with someone like Juicy J, who has a huge catalog and a ton of success for all those years, seeing that side of the business and also the challenges of monetization and different revenue streams for someone of that nature and other Grammy nominated producers, even some with hit records that you’d be surprised some of the producers haven’t even got paid to this day and these songs have been out for, two, three, five years now,” Stewart said.
He added, “As hard as it was for the Juicy Js of the world, it’s even a hundred times more difficult for 99% of the other producers. So, the ideation of this product for me dates all the way back to 2018 with a question of ‘It’s hard to get paid off of one record that goes out and get your money. So how can we monetize this other music?’ As a fan of Juicy J first, before a manager, I knew there were other versions on the hard drive that’ll never come — different melodies, different features, different loops.”