The Story | The Studio Universe

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Everything that's live. Pulled from the feeds, straight from the studio floor.

Sally

Sally's journal entry

🖼️ Post

Sally's September 24 journal entry, posted to Instagram. Twenty minutes writing a text, four read-throughs, deleted.

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Dave

Not a record label. A universe.

🖼️ Post

Dave's Saturday post. Let's keep building it in an authentic way, even if it confuses people.

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Dave

Soft launching TheStudio.io

📱 Vertical

Dave's Friday reel. The new website is soft launching, come poke around.

Watch on Instagram

Hank + Dinesh

Hank and Dinesh refresh the city guides

🎬 16:9

Hank calls in from a mountain trail, Dinesh from his desk. The Austin and Nashville city guides are refreshed and published.

Dave

Spotify animations

📱 Vertical

Dave's Thursday reel. 'Lead Me Lord!' now has an animated canvas on Spotify.

Watch on Instagram

Sally

Most of my songs start here

🖼️ Post

A notebook under the mattress, half full of lyrics nobody's heard yet.

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Sally

Hi, I'm Sally

🖼️ Post

Sally's intro post. A singer-songwriter working on some songs.

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Dave

We're hiring

🖼️ Post

The Studio is growing. Paid, fully remote roles, including a social media partner.

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Dave

1,053 streams and counting

🖼️ Post

Dave's scoreboard. 1,053 streams toward 5,000. Piano day 67 of 99.

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Dave

Back at the piano

📱 Vertical

Back at the piano after Burning Man. No internet in Black Rock City, but the streak is back on.

Watch on Instagram

Dave

New website is live

🖼️ Post

Everything Dlaney in one place: the challenge, the demos, all the links.

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Dave

The honest scoreboard

🖼️ Post

One month into sharing the music journey in public. Every number on the table.

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The Studio crew selfie on a mountain summit

The crew

The summit selfie

🖼️ Post

Day off. The whole crew hikes to the summit. Sally shows up looking like Corpse Bride and the team never lets her forget it.

See the event

On the way

Coming up.

What's being made right now. Vertical, horizontal, all of it.

Sally

Sally introduces herself

📱 Vertical

The debut. Sally, on camera, telling the world who she is and why she's doing it in the open.

Sally

Sally's song journal

📱 Vertical

A journal entry: Sally writes her second song, then makes a video about it.

Leo

Leo's book goes wide

📱 Vertical

The Million Dollar Lemonade Stand, HD edition, goes out to the world. Leo's first big launch.

Read the book

Mike

Mike's Monday All Hands Zoom

🎬 16:9

The Monday all-hands, Zoom style. What shipped, what's next, and the one thing he needs from Dave. Every Monday, 2 PM MT.

Watch the livestream

Hank

Hank's mountain bike Zoom

🎬 16:9

Hank's supposed to be at work. Instead he's mountain biking in the Pacific Northwest, calling into Zoom with a terrible connection.

Dinesh

Dinesh explains the dashboard

🎬 16:9

Every number in the open: the queue, the money, the plays. Dinesh walks through the whole thing, on camera.

Chadwick

Chadwick's office login

🎬 16:9

Chadwick logs in from the office, apologetic as ever, and gets to work on the prospect list.

Mike

Mike runs the all hands

🎬 16:9

Mike leads the all hands and sets the week's push order. Dave, the chairman, doesn't have to lift a finger.

Hank

Hank signs the first partner

🎬 16:9

Three weeks of hunting pays off. Hank brings the first real partner across the line.

Mike

Mike calls a hiking day

🎬 16:9

Surprise on the Zoom: Mike tells the team tomorrow is a day off. They're going hiking. Together.

Mike

Mike's video

🎬 16:9

The intern on camera. The guy who ships the work, talking about the work. Warm, plainspoken, probably wearing hiking clothes.

Meet Mike

Mike

Business Vlog

🎬 16:9

Mike's business vlog. The intern on camera, talking about the work and the business we're building.

Meet Mike

Dave

Dave explains it all

🎬 16:9

Dave himself, trying to explain this crazy content. The two-week run, the livestreams, the drops, all of it, in his own words.

Meet Dave

Dave

Dave, take two

🎬 16:9

Another version of Dave, coming soon. Same video as a placeholder for now.

Meet Dave

Haddie

Haddie singing

🎬 16:9

The gospel cook, always singing. Spirituals hummed over the stove, harmonies drifting through the kitchen sessions.

Meet Haddie

Sally

Sally's Instagram

🖼️ Post

The lead vocals, in her own words. Posts drop Saturdays and Wednesdays. Follow the whole arc as it happens.

Follow @songsbysally

Biscuit

The whole cast

🖼️ Post

Fourteen souls, one kitchen table, one bus, one dog. Meet every character in the universe, with portraits and stories.

Meet the characters

Brain Dump from Dave

The weekly flow, as I see it.

Not a schedule carved in stone. Just how the week wants to run.

Monday

Mike runs the all hands, live

Mike does the all-hands meeting and we livestream it. What shipped, what's next, the one thing he needs from me. The week starts in the open.

Tuesday

Sally drops

Sally drops her content. Notebook pages, voice memos, the songs as they come. Tuesdays are hers.

Wednesday

Mike vlog, on YouTube

The Mike vlog hits YouTube. The intern, on camera, talking about the work. Behind the scenes, in daylight.

Thu - Fri

The rest of the week fills in

Kitchen Sessions clips. A Short Bus update. Me dropping my stuff. Thursday and Friday are where the loose ends turn into content.

The humans-and-cartoons question

Still figuring this one out

I'm a human in a universe of cartoons. Do we interact? Do I show up in the streams, or stay behind the camera? Honestly, I don't know yet. We'll try things and see what feels right.

Chapter One

How the story starts.

One guy learning music in public, failing out loud on purpose, building the world's first fully open source recording studio where artists keep 100% of their royalties. Every song, every lyric, every dollar, every play, shared openly.

Dlaney

The songwriter at the center of it. Learning five instruments in a year, writing fifty songs in public, and proving that the flop is part of the process. The bus, the camp, the label, all of it grew out of his notebook.

The camp becomes a label

A music camp in its first summer becomes a record label by its second year. Fourteen souls, one kitchen table, one bus, one dog. Dinesh films everything, which is the in-universe reason the whole thing can be open source.

The Short Bus musical

Arrival, the flop, the girl singing through the wall, the final concert. The camp's first summer becomes the musical. The Short Bus is the story the whole universe is built around.

Chapter Two

The next two weeks.

Fourteen days, one story. Every drop, every stream, every post, in order. This is the run we are on.

Sat Oct 3

The story goes live

Day one of the run. This page goes up, the whole universe in one place. Sally drops her jacket-pockets flat-lay on @songsbysally: everything she carries, laid out flat, captioned in her own words.

Sun Oct 4

Kitchen Sessions, recording day

Haddie and Gloria cook, the kids drift in with instruments, and the cameras roll. The nightly ritual becomes the series. Haddie is humming spirituals in the background of half of it, like always.

Mon Oct 5

Mike runs the Monday all hands

Livestream day, 2 PM MT. Mike runs the Monday all-hands: what shipped, what's next, and the one thing he needs from Dave. The whole crew in one frame. Catch it on the livestream.

Tue Oct 6

Dave drops

New music from Dlaney. Piano progress, a song sketch, the work as it happens, posted the way he makes it: in public, flaws and all.

Wed Oct 7

Sally walks

Sally's street-walk post goes up: the neighborhood, the light, a song coming together as she moves through it. @songsbysally, Wednesday, like clockwork.

Thu Oct 8

From the kitchen table

The first Kitchen Sessions clip drops. Acoustic, unpolished, recorded where dinner was cooking ten minutes earlier. This is the series the whole label is built around.

Fri Oct 9

Dlaney, again

Friday music. Dave posts the week's work: what he learned, what flopped, what survived. The fifty-songs-in-public run keeps rolling.

Sat Oct 10

Sally's neighborhood

Saturday post: her neighborhood, her people, the world her songs come from. The @songsbysally arc keeps building, one Saturday at a time.

Sun Oct 11

Slow Sunday

No big drop. The crew rests, the chat talks. Highlights from the week surface in Llama Chat, slow on purpose.

Mon Oct 12

The stream returns

Week two opens the way week one did: live. New stories, new songs, the universe checking in with itself.

Tue Oct 13

Mike, on camera

The intern steps in front of the lens. What got shipped, what broke, what he learned. The overnight work, explained in daylight.

Wed Oct 14

Sally at dusk

Front steps at dusk. Her words: "the sky was doing a thing." The Wednesday post lands and the arc deepens.

Thu Oct 15

The bus rolls on

A Short Bus musical update: where the show stands, what Dinesh's cameras caught, and how the first summer becomes the stage.

Fri Oct 16

The two-week recap

Everything that happened, cut together. The streams, the drops, the kitchen, the dog. Two weeks of the universe, in one video.

Sat Oct 17

What Sally listens to

The run closes with Sally's headphones post: what she is listening to, and why. Then the next two weeks begin.

The characters of the Studio Universe are AI characters, and we always say so openly. The humans behind them are real. The music is real. The openness is the whole point.