My Journey to a Better Investment
What does the path to financial freedom really look like? For most, it isn’t a straight line.
In the debut episode of JG Sound of Money, host Josh Gilliland shares the unfiltered personal story behind his search for a better investment. This isn't a story about overnight success; it's a real-world journey through the retirement challenges facing Generation X, from the dot-com bust and failed startups to the expensive lessons that ultimately led to the world of music royalties. Before you can understand the "how" of investing, it's critical to understand the "why."
In this episode, you will learn:
Why the old rules of retirement no longer apply and the "generational necessity" for finding alternative income streams.
The hard-won lessons from a $25,000 loss in a cannabis startup and a $60,000 passion investment in a band derailed by the pandemic.
The critical distinction between investing in a high-stakes music business and a data-driven music asset.
How this winding path led to the discovery of music royalties as a truly passive, non-correlated solution.
Resources Mentioned:
Start your own journey with the right tools. Download the free Advanced Investment Calculator that Josh uses to analyze deals: https://www.jgsoundofmoney.com/calculator
Transcript:
Josh Gilliland: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Sound of Money, the podcast that demystifies music, royalty investing, and shows you how to build a durable, passive income stream from the music you love. I'm your host Josh Gilliland, over the coming weeks and months and years and decades. Who knows? We're gonna dive deep into the data.
Run that deep into the different platforms that exist, the strategies you need to know to confidently invest in this very unique asset class. But before we get into any of that, before we dig into any of those details, before we talk about copyrights and multiples and decay curves and how to read a royalty statement, I think it's important that you understand my why.
Who am I and why am I talking about this asset class? Why did I [00:01:00] write a book about investing in music royalties? Why do I have a blog about it? Why do I have this podcast? It's not a just a theory radical exercise for me. This is a culmination of a decades long journey to find a better, a more resilient way to achieve financial freedom in my own life.
That journey was filled with a lot of ups and downs, some hard and sometimes very expensive lessons along the way. And so this is my story, for as long as I can remember. My goal has been to retire early. I remember when I started my career at the phone company. Back in the late nineties, I was talking to some of the older guys there and I was telling them about how I had this goal to retire by the year 2020 when I was 45 years old.
And these guys [00:02:00] chuckled at me, laughed at like the naivete of youth in my thinking. But it was something that was important to me to really set that target. Now, spoiler alert, I did not retire in 2020. But setting that goal definitely helped me to, to learn these lessons, along my journey.
But that goal felt like, I wanna say a generational necessity for me as a member of Generation X I realized that, we were the test subjects for this new and uncertain retirement landscape. Our parents' generation were largely the last to really benefit from that old three-legged stool of retirement.
Where you have the company pension and then you have personal savings, and then you have social security. For us, for those, in my generation. That tool was already broken [00:03:00] by the time we got into the system. The pension was a relic of the past. It was replaced by the, the great 401k experiment.
Social security was always, diminishing hope on the horizon that seems to be diminishing quicker and quicker day by day. And it just became pretty clear to me that we. We had to handle our money on our own, right. We weren't going to just hand our money over to fund managers and hope the market went up forever.
I just was not gonna allow that to be our path forward. So it became clear to me that the old rules no longer applied, and I had to find a different way. And so my first lesson in the fragility of a traditional career came during the.com bubble. It was the year 2000, 2001. I was working in tech.
I felt invincible, right? I had in demand skills and sitting on stock options, and just felt like I was taking the [00:04:00] world by storm. The world was my oyster. But then, poof, the bubble burst. The company I was working for at the time called us all into this big conference room. And as we all sat around the table wondering what today's topic de jour was, they mentioned that they were shutting down the office, that we were all going to lose our jobs, and that our benefits were going to stop by the end of the next week.
And so at that point, my career, my belief in job security, all of it was in ruins. But that experience lit an absolute fire in me, but that journey has not been a straight line. By the time 2007 rolled around, I was married, we had two kids with, another child on the way, and our family's net worth was significantly negative.
We [00:05:00] were a burden with around $40,000 of credit card debt. We had two cars that were financed. We had a first and a second mortgage on our house. We were really living paycheck to paycheck, and I was earning good money, but we were still paycheck to paycheck And with the young, kids at home, it just, it was a very stressful situation to be in.
Gradually we clawed our way out of that. I really got serious about learning about investments. I discovered the fire movement, financial independence, retire early, and I became hyper-focused on investing. I went from trying to be, an expert stock picker, to mutual funds. And I finally landed on, low cost index funds with Vanguard.
It was, discipline. It was effective and it was boring and boring's fine, but I needed just something a bit [00:06:00] different. And so while all those were great core to my portfolio, I still had an itch for an alternative. Something that could provide the steady, predictable cash flow, that the stock market couldn't guarantee.
That itch led me to my next expensive lesson. So I had some contacts who were starting up a cannabis company. I was living in Washington at the time, and they were looking for investors. And so I invested $25,000 in this cannabis startup. Cannabis had just recently become legal for recreational use in the state of Washington.
So I thought it was a great investment opportunity. Wanted to give it a shot. Well, it didn't work out great. On paper it looked like a guaranteed win, but really everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The master grower for the [00:07:00] business, he couldn't keep a plan alive, which is really needed in that industry.
And then our head of sales was, he was one of those guys that did a lot of talking. But not a lot of walking. And so the business just never really materialized. And then the market was completely saturated because we were not alone with this great idea of getting into the cannabis industry. There were a lot of entrepreneurs had the exact same thought.
So it needs to say the business collapsed. And, I lost my entire investment. Well after that disaster, I knew my next venture had to be in the world I understood and loved, which was music. So through a personal connection that I had, I invested $60,000 to help a new band fund their debut album and tour.
This album, was launched in March of 2020. You may see where this is going to rave reviews. We had [00:08:00] a six week European tour booked that was selling very well, and I was excited, was like, we're doing this, like this thing is going to pop. And then as you guessed, COVID-19 had other plans and so.
COVID hit right after the album dropped. And within weeks, the entire tour, which was the vital engine for the investments return was canceled. The financial outlook was grim. But you know, in that failure, I learned another invaluable lesson. There's a world of difference between investing in a music business and investing in a passive music royalty.
Okay. The first, as I learned, was a high stakes venture, and the latter is really a data-driven financial asset, and that's what led me here. So in the aftermath of those ventures, I finally began to explore [00:09:00] true music royalty investing. Here was an asset class that was, it was understandable to me.
It was generally passive and completely uncorrelated to the chaos of the stock market. It was, I viewed it as the antidote to my previous failures, and so this podcast and the book that this podcast is based on is the culmination of that entire journey. It's the playbook that I wish I had when I started.
It's a guide to a smarter. A more diligent way to build passive income. So through this podcast, I'm going to be ripping the cover off of my investments, the lessons that I've learned Along the way, we're gonna be exploring the data and the platforms and the gory details of this investment class. Talking about the risk to these investments, et cetera, et cetera.
So [00:10:00] we're really going to go deep into music royalty investing. And I'm excited that you're here for this journey and I look forward to sharing that with you. So that's my story. Now I wanna help you write yours. So next week we'll start laying the foundation. We're gonna dive. Deep into the bedrock of this asset class, breaking down the two fundamental copyrights that make every song you hear a potential investment.
But before you go, I've created a powerful tool to help you analyze potential royalty deals. It's the same type of motto I use for my own investments. You can download it for free at jg sound of money.com/calculator. That's JG sound of money.com/calculator. Thank you for turning in to the Sound of [00:11:00] Money.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast and please leave a review if you've found this valuable. It helps others find the show and we'll see you next week.
