A singer with a vision for a new single is looking for a producer. She asks around, finds a guy who’s a friend of a friend, and sounds promising. They come to terms, she pays him--only to get ghosted. She’s got no track, and now she has to raise money from scratch, doubling the cost of the single. Stories like this happen regularly to artists, managers, and other music professionals. The issue of how payments in the music industry should be handled is a hot topic of discussion. Creators rightfully want to make sure their work is appropriately compensated in the complex webs of digital production, distribution, and marketing. BandPay is a fully customizable payment platform that is introducing a simple solution to the delays, errors, and losses that slow down many music professionals’ transactions and creative output. The platform streamlines two-party agreements by setting up deadline-based milestones in a given project and assigning payments to each milestone. This builds accountability and minimizes errors, especially with the feature that guarantees that funds are available to complete a transaction. It establishes trust by ensuring all parties, from musicians to producers to social media influencers, stick to their side of the agreement. Centralizing all payments in one platform is bound to revolutionize cost management and revenue maximization in the music business. DeCarlos Garrison is a music marketing expert, artist manager, and tech entrepreneur based in Orlando, Florida. He started his career as a college rep for Def Jam Records in 1995, later becoming manager of street team promotions. DeCarlos teamed up with developer Gleb Teper and spent several years designing and building products to eliminate key pain points in music creation, management, and accounting. Together they created Bandpay, an app that links payment to project milestones to decrease friction between creative collaborators. I invited them both onto the podcast to find out more about how they are reducing friction and increasing trust between people making music and undertaking other projects together.