Sustainability, Business, and Entrepreneurship

Join us for a weekly lecture series where we discuss topics in sustainability, business, and entrepreneurship from local leaders and Evergreen alumni.

This week Joe Bagale discusses how he was able to create an artist that never existed and build a sustainable career as an independent musician by creating royalty free music to be used by the billions of creators on social media platforms.

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About Joe Bagale

From the mind and ears of producer and multi-instrumentalist, Joe Bagale, comes a sound that is fresh but tangibly rooted in nostalgia. The name is Otis McDonald. The mission? Good Music.

In 2015, Bagale released 80 tracks for free, under the name Otis McDonald. Released as copyright free music, exclusively through the YouTube audio library, by 2016 these tracks had been downloaded over 3 million times, and appeared in over 3.5 million videos all around the world with an astonishing total of 7.6 billion views. In 2019, Bagale released a full length album, "People Music," in collaboration with his YouTube subscribers. He took over the lease for Studio D at the historic Hyde Street studios in San Francisco and in 2020 he launched a weekly live stream where he creates a brand new track on the spot and releases every week on all streaming platforms.

Whether it's performing, writing, producing, or coming up with new ways to engage with his fans, Otis McDonald plans on giving the world a dose of the past while always looking to the future.