Welcome to Liner Notes, where we interview music-obsessed curators and artists. In each interview, we get their three independent artist picks and learn about how their relationship with music impacts their lives.

To kick off the series, we're interviewing the Harmonic team. First up is Dan Servantes, co-founder of Harmonic. Dan has been playing guitar for over 20 years, is a Berklee College of Music alum, and has spent his career working at the intersection of music and technology. Outside of Harmonic, he runs a consulting business with co-founder George Howard, works with the Erroll Garner estate on archival releases, and nerds out on guitar pedals.

Three Indie Recommendations

Andy Prasa - One of the most well-rounded musicians Dan has ever met. Equal parts soul, folk, and blues, Prasa's laid back tunes are Dan's go-to for finding his zen.

Spotlight Track: Some Kind of Blues

Billy Bauer Band - Dan's hometown heroes from Bethlehem, PA. Centered around the core duo of singer-songwriter Billy Bauer and virtuosic violinist Chris Lorenzetti, the Billy Bauer Band gave Dan his first opportunity to act as a session musician for their Maybe Tomorrow album.

Spotlight track: Rock Bottom

Nii - A new discovery for Dan, Nii is a British singer and guitarist. Dan was hooked after seeing a short clip of Nii's live performance of Penelope and fell down a rabbit hole digging up as much as he could of the young artist.

Spotlight track: Penelope

Full Interview

Let's start at the beginning. When did you know that you had a deeper relationship with music than maybe some of the people around you? Like you knew it was gonna be a big part of your life.

Probably in high school, once it became part of my identity — and other people's identities were tied to sports, or whatever else they were into. As a kid, I always knew I wanted to learn how to play guitar and I had this weird anxiety in my head that, knowing that I was going to learn how to play someday, I didn't want to be in college learning how to play. Eleven-year-old Dan thought that was really weird, for some reason — to be 22 years old and learning how to play guitar. Which is a totally acceptable thing, but my brother started playing in middle school, and I was like “I can't let him learn guitar before I do,” so I had to learn at the same time, and then that just blossomed into my identity in high school.

I love it. I also wonder if that was strategic on your parents' part, to get like a two-for-one special. When siblings are doing the same extracurricular, it's just a little bit easier.

He ended up becoming the bass player in my first middle school band. So it definitely worked out for me having a musical companion in the family, if only for a brief period.

And do you and your brother still play music together these days?

No, no, I think he stopped playing pretty quickly, because he found other interests that got him more excited. But I'm grateful that my younger brother learning how to play guitar before me spurred me to get on with it and pick it up as well.

And here you are still obsessed with music, at least as far as I can tell.

Yes. Maybe to a fault, as far as my bank account is concerned.

Well, you know, what is money for? Guitar pedals. Okay, so you had this familial relationship with music and guitar, and then you decided to pursue it to some degree and go to school. I'm just going to assume that guitar was your entryway into getting into Berklee. And once you got there, especially in that first year, what was your impression of what it meant to be a guitar player in the real world? And also your impression of what it meant to be a musician?

I actually think I lost track of what it meant to be a guitar player in the real world because I was at Berklee. It became about what does it mean to be a guitar player at Berklee, which is… as you know, every single person that is at Berklee was like “the music person” wherever they came from, right? And so it's a really weird situation for everyone's identity, collectively, to kind of be wiped, because you're no longer “the music person” at a music school. Now you have to figure out who are you in this group of 4,000 musicians, and I thought, “Okay, I'm not the best guitar player here. They’re skilled so far beyond what I want to do and where I want to go, but I love working with them.” And so I started doing music production and engineering, which was what I thought my passion would be.

But then I wrote a article for Berklee's Music Business Journal about copyright law. And then some site, I think it was Buzzfeed, read it and called me thinking I was some expert. I don't think they understood they were reading a student article, because HypeBot or someone shared it. And so it was pulled out of context. They were looking for someone to be a guest on some segment about copyright reversion, which was a big thing at the time. And I was like, “I'm 19 years old and I don't have any expertise in that.” I just wrote it, but I kind of realized there's this world of knowledge that’s not as commonplace as I thought it was, because it was so relatively easy for me to find the information from professors and text books and write about it. I thought everyone else must have this information as well, but it turns out particularly with music, sometimes the information is gatekept and sometimes there's just a lack of people who know where to look for it. There's this whole opportunity if you start to understand copyright law or music marketing or how record labels work, or whatever it is.

It's a small enough world that there will be value in you learning that. And at that point, knowing I wasn't going to be a session guitar player, that seemed like a path to work with artists and be part of… I wasn't even thinking about the music industry. I was just thinking of, “This is how I can provide value to all my music friends, without having to be the musician on the recording. I can provide value that way.”

Do you feel like your ability and desire to help musicians came from knowing personally what it feels like to be creating something and kind of in the dark about, you know, where you're supposed to take that?

Yeah, I think so. it's... I often wonder if it's more self-serving than I'm comfortable admitting. It's more fun to work on music and work with musicians than it is to, I don't know, work in an office. I think even in college, I thought that “failure” is working some boring office job that is not at all related to music. Like that was the worst case scenario. And so I'm sure my love of music and empathy for musicians comes from being a musician as well. I'm not trying to ignore that part, but I also think… what would I rather be doing than helping musicians and working on music? I don't want to make it seem like I'm overly charitable because I get so much out of it. I feel… I don't know, when I'm talking with my friends or attending my friends’ shows, I feel like I'm getting so much out of it that it doesn't feel like it's giving back or even based on empathy. It's based on the fact that this is just what really excites me and what I love to be around.

I think you're touching on something really important, which is that as an artist, I wouldn't want fans or evangelists or people on my team to be helping me because of charity. I mean, we don't need charity. We need people who have empathy, but who also see it as a win-win, right? What I'm hearing is you being critical of the fact that you get much out of it, but as an artist, I need you to get something out of it. Otherwise it's not sustainable, and it's not really the right type of relationship.

That's a great point. And that's nearly the myth of patronage. One of my early jobs was at a music crowdfunding company where someone that has lot of disposable income could spend lot of money on this artist's campaign by purchasing all kinds of crazy memorabilia or experiences. Like, you go to a baseball game with the artist. Because of Kickstarter and GoFundMe, spending a lot of money on an artist was initially framed as “I'm just a patron, I'm just giving money," but there's so much more — any music fan that has “music fan” as part of their identity gets so much out of going above and beyond with their favorite artists… it's not even bragging rights, because I don't hear anyone bragging about “I spoke with this artist” or “I bought all their records.”

It always comes from a space of “This is part of my identity, so I need to invest in it,” right? This is helping me find an idealized version of myself as a music nerd or a music fanatic or a musician, and that's why I put so much time and energy into and money into going to shows, buying music, buying music gear.  Maybe all of this is about self-realization. I also recognize I'm turning this into a bit of a therapy session, but it's healing, it's great.

My billables will come in the mail. I want to ask more questions about your life, but I think you said something great, which is that patronage isn't charity. It's when a fan or a patron or whatever you want to call yourself gives something. Often, that’s money or an opportunity to an artist; it's a value exchange. It's not a one-way street. And I think for some reason we've kind of forgotten that. That artists existing provides value. And a lot of it's intangible. So that's why we're kind of like, well, what am I getting? But when you actually think about the way music makes you feel, the value of it is unquantifiable.

Well, maybe part of that is the commodification of music too, right? Music, to many people, is just streams, and it's something that’s available without any incremental costs. You can lose sight of the intrinsic value of music and the people behind it, because it's no longer about “My identity is tied up in these five songs that make up my life right now.” It's just, “I listen to music when I'm in the car or at the gym.” It's been devalued in a way that feels wrong. And so when someone is really excited about music to the point that they want to spend money on it or they want to collect every vinyl record or every t-shirt or whatever, it’s weird that that’s kind of unique now when if you went back to the ‘90s, everyone had big music collections that represented their identity and everyone was a lot more tied to their favorite artists in ways that… it's maybe not uncommon now, but it's certainly not how it was 30-plus years ago.

Yes. Yes. I think we have to bring some of those very human behaviors back, but also acknowledge that it's 2025, and we sort of have to strike a balance.

I love knowing your story and I think it's really important for other artists who get to know you and discover who you are as a music curator and a supporter of artists. I think it's really important for them to know why you're in it, and that you really have their best interests at heart, because you do have an unusual amount of empathy for what it means to pursue this.

Thank you. I'll try to live up to that.

I love that you mentioned a little bit of your work history, because I would imagine that pursuing working in music, but not necessarily being a session player or a songwriter or a performer or all of these sort of front-facing responsibilities, I would imagine that it's still equally pretty entrepreneurial. And I'm so curious: Once you got out of school, you had this perspective, these realizations, you sort of found the beginnings of a path through writing that article, what the beginning of your career looked like and how you sort of pieced together working in music on your own terms.

Yeah, I don't know how entrepreneurial it was at the beginning. I did an internship for a company that I did really well at, and they offered me a job right out of college, which was a very unique and very fortunate position to be in. I worked with them for a year and a half.

And I knew I didn't want to stay at that company. It was a startup, and they were going through all kinds of startup issues; I didn't want to be at the bottom of the totem pole while they were going through those issues, because that's the riskiest place to be.

I saw two paths based on the people I was working with. Some friends were working in similar entry level roles, but at major record labels or major publishing companies or Live Nation and Ticketmaster. And it was very clear the path there was, you work your way up to the top, and you do the grunt work and eventually, you get noticed. Hopefully you network and make some friends higher up and you go up. And I just didn't feel like I had the patience for that — or I don't know, there's something unappealing that in retrospect I can identify, but I don't know how I knew it was unappealing at the time.

When I knew I wanted to leave that startup, I reached out to George Howard, who was a Berklee professor of both of ours, and I told him I didn't want to work at this company anymore, but I didn't want to go and like find a job at Sony. He had a consulting firm and he said “Come work with me and let's figure it out." And that was nine years ago, I think. We've been working together in various capacities ever since, but thanks to him, he kind of gave me the push to say “You can be entrepreneurial. You don't have to work at a huge company. you can build your expertise and find different ways to apply that without it being a straightforward job.”

I haven't had a proper job with salary and benefits and 401k ever since I quit that startup, and as a result, I've had to do a lot of things that were not in music. I've had to work in industries that I wasn't passionate about, but that's helped make me a little bit more well-rounded and give me a different perspective when I'm fortunate enough, like now, to come back to music and spend a much higher percentage of my time thinking about music and independent artists and the business of music generally.

I think that all of that only reinforces your ability to have empathy for working musicians, because the lack of salary, healthcare, 401k, and having to do random jobs is definitely very relatable and very real.

Yeah, my recommendation is to find a partner who has all of those, and has the patience to let you go off and do other things, but I'm sure there are other ways to do it. I think who your spouse is ends up having a huge impact on your ability to take risks and do things like that, whether that's just their faith in you to be like, “Yeah, they’ll be okay, they'll figure it out,” or the fact that they actually have dental insurance, which does come in handy in life.

So your advice to musicians and entrepreneurs is if you are going to be unstable, then marry stable, essentially. You're not the first person to share that. I think you're onto something. And you know what? I think we make their lives more exciting. I hope.

That's what I tell myself, but, you'd have to ask my wife if that's the case.

I think if you're going to be creating anything or sort of trying to build things to help other people, it’s just about building a life and relationships, whether that's friendship, romantic relationship, community, collaborative partners, where everyone is sort of regenerating each other. And that's what it's about. It's about having sustaining relationships that allow you to do what you want to do with your life. I think that's really important.

Yeah, I love that regenerating concept. That's a really great way to phrase it.

There's actually a book called The Regenerative Business, which I think is more about relationships than business, but it gave me lot of perspective on that. All right, so Dan's wife is basically his patron. No, just kidding.

So here you are today, having very much forged your own path and explored different nooks and crannies of the music industry, and being a musician, and being an entrepreneur. And now I'm so curious — what do you think Harmonic stands to offer people like you and people like me? Obviously, there's a lot of crossover with the way we've done things and see things. What do you think it stands to offer us, and how can we work together to make things more equitable for everybody?

The big existential issue is what we feel other platforms are not offering, and how we can fill that gap. That manifests itself in a bunch of different ways. When I was working with record labels putting out music, it must've been nearly daily that me and someone I was working with were like, “Man, wouldn't it be great if Spotify” — or insert company here — “did this or added this feature or just made it feel a little bit more fair?” And I knew everyone had problems with the status quo, but it wasn't until building Harmonic and starting to talk with everyone else about those problems that it really became clear that no one is happy with the status quo and where things are right now.

As soon as you ask someone “What would you change about how recorded music is consumed or the value of recorded music or how artists and fans can have relationships,” no one is like, “Yeah, it's good. This is awesome. We're living in the golden age.” Everyone feels like there's something missing, and people are able to articulate different aspects of it. And we've had to come together to figure out, what is the simplest product where we can address as many of these issues as possible, and start to build a foundation where, you know, once we get this core thing right, then we can bring in everyone's input and start saying, “You want this? Yeah, that makes sense. Let's build on top of it.” There can be a consensus around features that people feel are missing.

We can build something where it doesn't feel like you're just yelling at a wall — “Why won't Harmonic do this?” You'll actually get a response. Even before talking about any of the features of Harmonic, it's just a philosophy of how we want to run the company with artists at the table, constantly having these conversations with artists and curators about what they want.

It doesn't work if we just make up assumptions and build a product and say “Here it is.” I think that's how we've gotten into this mess, you know, as music fans and artists and consumers. We’re all the victims, I guess, but that's how these platforms have been built: Someone saying, “This is what people want, I'm gonna build it.” And then all of a sudden we're left with only those options.

The core of Harmonic is a music marketplace that is centered around recommendations and users building their own record store. A marketplace for people to purchase music, which is kind of crazy in 2025. And so what we hope is that we can build a place where people really tangibly feel that value in purchasing music. It feels like they're getting that value back. What that looks like initially is starting with just digital downloads, and hopefully very soon other digital products, because that's the easiest thing to build quickly and bring to market.

There are so many really important musical byproducts between when an artist initially conceives of a song and when they release the final studio version. That studio version is what ends up on streaming platforms, but as an artist, you can be so concerned about, “well, if I put the demo up or a live version up on streaming services, is it gonna downrank me somehow?” You’re playing the streaming game, and you want to give Spotify and Apple Music what they want so that they put your music in front of more people. As a result, artists become reluctant to put out the stuff that might have higher sentimental value for existing fans.

Streaming is for, call it top of funnel, reaching new people, it's the thing that people use when they're cooking or whatever, that's not going away, that's not going to change. And we don't feel like we've got the power to change that. What we can change is how people discover music actively rather than passively, and we can change how artists have a relationship with their most passionate fans that actually want to spend money.

And so when it comes to music that's in the form of the recordings that an artist would not put up on streaming services, whether live recordings, demos, alternate versions. I mean, for someone like you, Rae, you could sit at home for an hour, record an hour-long set just acoustically, and that's a live album that you could put up. How many people would need to spend ten dollars on that album for you to feel like “Yeah, there was a return on investment on it.”

My favorite recordings are ones that I from my friends who sent me demos, or from artists that I love where I found something online that they didn’t release officially, and now I love that I have that rare recording from them. The fact that something can be rare in the digital age is crazy, and I want to bring that back.

With recommendations on Harmonic, what we're trying to solve is the fact that music consumption happens in a very isolated manner right now, unless you're at a show. If you're listening to music on Spotify, you don't have a sense of who else is listening to it. Even if you're purchasing music from an artist's online store, it just feels like you're alone in the store by yourself purchasing something from them. You don't have a real sense of their presence there. You don't have a sense of the presence of the other fans.

And so the way we solve for that is creating recommendations. Once you purchase something from Harmonic, you can write a recommendation about it, and that gets surfaced to other people that are looking at that release; other people that are browsing the site. And so now everyone is here together. Everyone is talking about this release that you're considering. The artist is able to talk about the release in their own words. We want to bring as many voices to this music marketplace as possible, so it doesn't feel so isolating.

I almost feel like you're talking about capturing the after-show merch experience, especially at a smaller venue. I mean, for me, that's almost my favorite part of the show, when we just get to hang out at the merch booth. I don't even care if people buy stuff — I think it's an opportunity to talk about the music beyond what you get to do on stage, which is a singular thing.

I love it. I love that you and we are trying to take on so many serious problems in the music industry. And I'm really excited to see which solutions resonate with artists and which solutions resonate with fans and even people who try to make a living recommending music. Things have changed. But there are certainly a lot of things that we can do.

So I must ask, since you say you love music, can you put me onto three indie artists that you're really digging right now?

I'm so glad you asked. Yes. All right, first is a good friend of mine, Andy Prasa, who was at Berklee at the same time as us. I think of him as one of the most well-rounded musicians I've ever met. When I first met him, I just knew him as playing acoustic guitar and singing. I thought that was his shtick. And then I heard him play electric guitar, doing some session work, and he just shredded. And he's so soulful as well. Then he picked up the keys and started writing incredible music using like Rhodes sounds. He's also a music teacher, and an incredible vocalist. It’s just like, how do you have the capacity for all of this artistry in one body? His music is amazing.

It's so cliché to say, but your favorite music is the one that you put on and it's just like a warm hug or something. It's so comforting, and that's what his music is to me. It's very soulful. It's very — like, he loves D’Angelo, so it's got that kind of soulful background, but he's a killer guitar player. His one flaw is that he's horrible at marketing himself, which is why more people need to talk about him on his behalf, and I'm really excited to be able to do that. My favorite song by him “Sleepless Nights.” He pulled it off of streaming services, and I'm annoyed about that, but I'm very pleased to get that on Harmonic.

Next is the Billy Bauer Band. When I was a kid, first getting to go to shows, they were the hometown heroes. They were the ones that were going for it and putting out great music. He's very kind of Dave Matthews inspired, which was definitely the scene for someone who went to college in the early 2000s. Billy has this virtuosic violin player — Chris Lorenzetti — and the two of them are an amazing duo. Billy has a killer voice, writes beautiful music, and also has a background in history, and so some of his music talks about America in a way that isn’t political — which I think is really difficult, to write music about America and not be political — but just comes from this very interesting combination of the acoustic singer-songwriter sound, having this classical violinist as kind of the main melodic instrument in the mix, and then having this love of history that comes through in the music. He also worked for Martin Guitar, building guitars for a while. So he's just a fascinating person. I got to play guitar on one of his recordings when I was 18. At that time, I thought “I did it. I made it.” Even if it was only three power chords, it was like, that was it. I was on a recording.

Last one, brand new artist. I wish I knew for sure how to pronounce it. This artist's name is Nii. I'm pretty stoked about him. This was an Instagram Reels discovery, which I don't love to say, but I won't turn down discovering a cool artist just because I don't love algorithms. I came across a live video of him playing his song “Penelope,” and it's kind of a mk.gee sound. It was a live recording. He's a great guitar player.

I find confident guitar players that are also singer-songwriters, they don't just need chords as the supporting element. They're comfortable adding some melodic lines with flourish and kind of just moving past the four chords that make up the progression. And he does that in such a slick, really melodic, but not show-offy way. It feels really natural. And I think a lot of people latched onto his song “Penelope” because it has that Rockman sound that felt like it started popping up everywhere. But that's really just a small taste of what he does. He sounds like an accomplished songwriter already, but he doesn't have much of a back catalog as far as I can tell. Go look him up. Those are the discoveries that really get me excited, where I have no reason to come across this person's art, but when it hooks you that quickly, it’s so satisfying.