 A lot of artists think about how do I get more streams? How do I get more sales? I want people to buy my music direct to consumer, but they don't understand the middle part. How do I actually break myself as an artist so I matter beyond just the streams? Because that's what's gonna get people to support you in terms of the consumer and buying from you as your own entity, as your own brand. So how do you build your brand as an indie in 2024, 2025 and beyond? That's exactly what we're gonna do in this video, part one of Breaking an Indie Artist. I'm Brandon Shawn. And I'm Corey. And this is another episode of No Labels Necessary. All right, so the first thing that artists have to understand when it comes to breaking yourself as an artist is it's all about image, right? So most people have this issue. I have a song that started to go viral when you are blessed with the ability to have a song go viral or when you have a song that just starts to pick up streams, right? You pick up steam. People hear the song, they love the song. I have maybe 50,000 monthly listeners on Spotify but I have 1,000 followers on Instagram, right? 500 followers on TikTok. They don't know who I am yet, right? And getting people to buy from you, they need to know who you are. You can't just pop up day one. Even if I listen to four or five of your songs, right? And I actually really like your songs and you as an artist in that way. When you pop up and ask me to buy something, if I don't connect with you beyond just that music, I'm not gonna buy from you, right? I have to see you beyond that. I have to see you, period. Let's just put it that way. I can't just hear the music, right? Cause think about all the people that you actually hear their music. You listen to their music but you never see them on social media. And you're a regular consumer brand, not the artist. I'm trying to support an artist or I'm a deep music head. If you ask yourself, truthfully, the music that you hear and you actually like and you actually know the name of the artist, but you don't ever see the artist and don't connect with them beyond that, how many of those artists would you invest in if they just asked you to buy from them directly? Whatever that looked like, right? Merch, a show, their music, whatever that is, right? So because of that, you have to break your image, get people to see you, love you, whatever your niche is. And one of the primary ways to do that is PR. Social media PR. We're not talking about the old school, you gotta get an X magazine or you gotta get on the traditional outlets on the radio. Start small, start manageable and achievable, which is I need to pop up on whatever these Instagram pages that my audience follows, right? Whatever these TikTok pages or conversations or influencers that my audience follows. What does that look like? A little bit different for everybody, but first what we're gonna do is break down six different post styles that every indie artist should know and use. And then we're gonna get into some of the caption and headline breaking down to some of the science that we use on campaigns where we've blown up artists, broken artists, all that good stuff. So let's get to post style number one. Post style number one is straight up music driven, right? This is getting shared on another page and I'm gonna pull it up. All right, so this is, how you say her name? Jalen Josie? Yeah, Jalen Josie. Jalen Josie singing, right here. And if we go to every single slide here, she's singing, she's a singer, right? Now, how is this a music driven post? It doesn't have to be your song. It's just something that helps people understand very clearly that you're an artist and it's displaying your musical talent, right? Some level of post like that. But the mechanics of this particular music driven post style, Jacore, I'm gonna let you break it down. Yeah, so I mean, you pretty much touched on it, right? Like the goal of this post was to let people know, like, hey, she can sing, right? And so I do think that's the big point of the music style PR. You're trying to make sure that whatever conversations or decisions get made as a result of that post all have to do with your music and music ability. So like her, for example, she's singing, but it could have very well been her rapping or her playing the guitar or her playing different instruments. Something that, like you said, if I'm a regular person who's singing her for the first time, I immediately think music artists. And ideally, if it's good stuff, you immediately think, oh, and they're nice at whatever. The musical thing is that trying to get me to believe in. So she's a singer. So obviously the first thing she wants people to think is that, hey, she can sing, right? Which is, this post is, if you go through it, just different examples of her singing different songs. So she gets to show her range. She gets to show her taste and her influences, which is another way to connect with people. Or you're singing a Whitney Houston song. I know that Whitney Houston song. And it's a whole other thing for me to relate to you about. And I also think it allows her just to kind of like show personality a bit. Cause you're seeing like a lot of different sides. Some of them she's like dressed up, some she's under dressed. And so she didn't, all of it isn't even necessarily like this super like high quality, like high effort content. Because like you said, the emphasis is on the musicality. It's not on like, is this a good video or not? You know what I'm saying? And so I think personally, music style posts are probably the hardest of all of them to pull off because, why is that? Because it can't be swayed as much by narrative. You know what I'm saying? Like you can't, like let's just say, let's just say in an Austin universe, she couldn't sing as well. And she did this style of post. There was no headline she probably could put to dig her out there whole. So it's the, it's the style of posts where you have to have the talent period. Exactly. It's like you're going to lean on, this is the forefront, that shit gotta be good. And here's some, here's some alternatives, right? So yeah, can you sing in an acapella style? Yes or no? Maybe you can't. Okay, cool. And if you're a rapper, can you freestyle, all right, in general? No, you can't freestyle for real? All right, cool. Why don't you rap something that's rehearsed? Yep. You can do that these days, all right? And a singer, you can do something that's, you know, prerecorded. It doesn't have to necessarily be you singing acapella. It could be actual recorded version. And we can still work with that because the music posts then becomes your music video, right? A couple of your songs, whatever, right? It could be other versions of your music. They don't just have to be you singing live like talent show wise. Or rapping live like talent show wise. Once you have that, then it just becomes, all right, can I at least still be good in to some degree, period? Because if you can't now get behind, get in the booth and it sounds good when you sing, if you can't like rap your song and it still strike a chord instead of just freestyle and then I don't know what to tell you. But the beautiful thing about this is like at the end of the day, when you display yourself as an artist, you're getting people to pay attention to, one, your talent, if your talent is like singing, that's your voice. Or two, your songwriting, if you're like a rapper or if you're a singer songwriter. And that's another big thing. But again, the songwriter, those lyrics got a hit, right? But it's a huge, huge deal to get people to pay attention to your actual songwriting skill because now they're valuing you way deeper than just, oh, you have the talent to sing or you have the talent to like rap in a cool technical way or whatever. Yep, yeah, cause I was gonna say like, a rap example I saw of something like this recently, I saw this Big Sean post that was like highlighting a bunch of his freestyles. And so it was literally just like, Big Sean doesn't get enough credit as being a great freestyler. And it was just different segments of different freestyle series that he done over the years. So in that example, right? It's like, okay, the goal of this post is to remind people that Big Sean is a good rapper freestyler. So let's go pull the best moments of him rapping and freestyling no matter where they came from. So that's a good call. Like it doesn't have to always be like these raw posts. It's always gonna come down to like what you're trying to emphasize. You just gotta make sure the posts, all the posts in the posts are emphasizing whatever the musicality you want people to take away from that. Exactly. And the second one we'll go over is a narrative style post. So check this out. It's not a whole lot of depth and white borders. It'll be honest, never see cost shit. You just scared to get to life. So this is a clip of this artist Ray Khalil rapping on a show called Rhythm and Flow. The whole headline is Ray went from a contestant on rhythm and flow freestyling over Anderson Paxton's to being signed to his label, Ape Shit. All right, cool. So Anderson Paxton's new artist Ray Khalil drops her debut single. So they gave that headline, that narrative to start with. And now the next post is Bam Drop Music. And also she wrote Lockdown for Anderson Paxton. So she wrote another song. The next headline, this is all in a carousel. Her pin game is crazy. She also wrote Life is Good. So what's happening here, the narrative one is the thing that kicked it off. Cause you could almost say some of this stuff is just music driven. Cause it's saying, oh, she wrote this song. Oh, she wrote this song. That's the music driven aspect of it, but they didn't kick it off with music driven. They kicked it off with this story of, she went from A to B. Classic rags the riches. Classic rags the riches. We see that one over and over again. Now your story doesn't have to be an A to B rags the riches. It could be something is happening right now. Whatever that is. I'm trying to think of a narrative that isn't like that, right? Let's see. I have this one artist I'm consulting for that I'm trying to get to do a post similar to this. And so the idea I had for him, I was like, hey, the first slide should be something like you're bringing soul music back or you're representing whatever. There we go. Second slide, I was like, should be a fan comment saying something like, y'all are late. Dude is being here forever. And then the content under it would be like his first ever viral TikTok. And then the third slide would be something like, bro is always dropping the heat. And then it'd be one of his more popular singers. His fans already know. So yeah, it's something like that where it's like, like I said, the narrative doesn't, it doesn't have to be rags the riches. It doesn't have to be some of the more generic stuff. It's really up to you to just streamline the post in a way that it does tell a story. Kind of going back to the musicality, it's like, what is the point of the story you want to focus on? So her point of the story, her story was to tie her into Anderson Paak's story and to also paint that rags the riches story. Like those are the two big parts. Hey, she's Anderson Paak affiliated and she was just something on the TV show a couple of years ago and then look at her, right? That's the narrative. But like if you don't have that type of narrative, it's okay, right? Cause I know a lot of times artists don't have like these dramatic stories to tell all the time. You know, and even her, there's going to be a point in her career where like we already know that so she's not going to be able to use it as much anymore, right? As she gets bigger. But I think like that's the most important part is like, as long as you're streamlining it together in a way that is telling a story throughout the post, the story can damn near be about anything as long as the content correlates to it in a good way. And of course, you know, it doesn't need to be said, but it's good content. But yeah, I'll give it to you Sam. I want to drop a quick note for anybody who has a fan problem and not just any old fan problem, but the type of fan problem that we encountered after helping a lot of artists go viral, have a lot of success, get a lot of streams, but still not being able to know who exactly are my fans? How do I reach them? How do I actually leverage that to sell merch, go to a show? Because that's where Spotify leaves us without knowing who our real people are. Same for social media. If you've had this problem, I'll tell you how we've been solving it. And our agency for a while now, in the pro version is just now being released to be accessible to any artist or manager out there. I'm talking about Forever Fan. A lot of the campaigns and successes that y'all have heard us talk about on this channel have been powered by that software that's made finding and understanding your true fans simple so they support you with their pockets. Because we all need a little money in this music thing. And now they're making it available to our audience for only $1 at foreverfanmusic.com slash no labels, no labels with an S at the end. And you gotta put in the code, no labels, zero two. All right? Now look, the DSPs, the social media platforms, I think they've shown us how much they care about artists for a while now. So at this point, we can all play naive or actually do something about it. Bet on yourself at foreverfanmusic.com slash no labels. And again, put in the code, no labels, zero two to get initial access for only $1. Let's get back to this episode. The next one is the cultural moment style post. Okay. So this one's simple and straightforward. We're not gonna spend too much time in it. But one of the example posts is Tyler, the artist Tyler, she pulls up to Kaisenat stream. So the cultural moment is she was on a stream that was by somebody who is recognized in a specific culture that she's trying to tap into. Yep. Right? That's really the straightforward thing, right? Everybody has their own niche. You might think, well, I know Kaisenat's every are really big, I can't get on his stream. It's not really about that, right? It's what is a popular platform, a popular figure show, whatever makes sense in my niche, whatever my audience consumes, maybe there's a YouTube page and it's like an anime YouTube page and I got my music on the back of the anime page that puts together these compilations of Dragon Ball Z songs. I don't know. I mean clips or whatever, right? But getting yourself on this recognized platform, right, this platform that has a brand itself, right? Within your audience and then sharing that happening over and over again as much as possible. Yeah, right? Yeah, I agree. Cause I think, yeah, you're hitting it on the head, right? Cultural moments, I think sometimes can be unfairly tied back just to big platforms but it really could be in like a TV show moment, it could be a festival, it could be, I mean, you ran into somebody, like if Sean was out in the world doing Sean things and you ran into Issa Rae and she gave you some advice and for whatever reason you caught it on camera, hey, that needs to go out. Issa Rae is a cultural figure. Yeah. And she provided a cultural moment, right? If you become, you know, the great brand man Sean, you know what I'm saying? Five teams, that's gonna be a big cultural moment for people, you know what I'm saying? Like, yo, there was a point in time where Issa Rae gave Sean some advice and apparently it worked out, you know what I'm saying? So it's, it- Thank you, Issa. Exactly, thank you, Issa. So I do think cultural moment PR campaigns sometimes be harder because like, you're right. If it's not super obvious like it was with Kyle, I think sometimes people miss him because either they aren't as aware of how culturally impacted a certain moment or thing may have been or they may not, it could have been on accident. Like they accidentally stumbled into a cultural moment but they don't recognize like what's going on. But like, that is the one where like, I would say out of all of them or maybe other than this one we're about to get into, probably requires the most amount of just like social awareness, you know what I'm saying? Like you have to really know what's going on in the world and what people are caring about culturally to do a good cultural post. So like, to your point, people care about Casnet. So it's a good moment. And then she had just went on some other random streamer who let's just say streamer who's big in his own regard but doesn't have the same cultural weight. Unless she said or did something crazy that made the cultural moment, they probably wouldn't have seen it out because it wouldn't have any cultural ties. But it's like, okay, Casnet is cultural enough that it makes his work. Whether or not she says something that's culturally relevant, you know what I'm saying? But you get a situation where the two kind of happen, you get the perfect storm out of it. But that's, yeah, that's. And the next one is brand perception. All right, a brand perception style post. This one is Friday has activated, Friday is an artist by the way for y'all who don't know. Friday has activated the Haitians on TikTok with his Creole speaking performance of done for me. Now, why is this one important? What is the brand perception as being displayed? One, there's people who don't know that Friday is Haitian. Yep. All right, so he's making a connection with that community. So now you know this fact about him. And then two, he's showing support, right? Within this community. So anybody watching this, if I'm a non Haitian, I'm like, oh man, Haitians really rock with Friday, right? It's one thing to know that he is, but also to know that he's backed up by his community. Those are two separate things. And then me, maybe if I am a Haitian, maybe that might make me a little bit more receptive to him to see like some of my community not only is rocking with him, but he's actually associating and somehow like showing love somehow within our community, you know what I mean? Not just ignoring his heritage there. What's a completely different version of this? There's an artist, I referenced him a minute ago, probably like a month or two. It was a post on underground sounds where this artist got a post on the page and it was a carousel of women listening to his song. All right, one of those women being Ruby Rose. And the whole idea was this artist wanted to look cool to other artists in his category, particularly to show that woman rock with him and thereby getting support from the guys and his audience too. Like, yeah, ladies love me. It's one thing to be like, oh yeah, the dudes love me. Y'all love my music. That's one brand, but it's another brand to have like, oh, I get girls too, right? That's a different type of cool within a young man audience, right? He's a lot of his followers or teens. So you have all this support of women rocking with your music, right? In this carousel, your audience is now seeing that. And then in that particular audience, Ruby Rose is the woman, you know what I mean? Versus you could have had Zendaya. You could have had, I don't know, Lotto or Cardi B. Like they all have social clout, but within that particular audience, like Ruby Rose is like one of their main women that they focus on, love and talk about, right? So that's just being very aware. What does your audience care about? What brand do you wanna convey? I wanna convey to my audience that that woman rock with me. I'm a cool guy who gets girls and I wanna pay for a post of the girl that all these guys want, acknowledging me because that's gonna give me even bigger cool points. That's a cool point, I suppose. That's what it comes down to. And then that can look like, I wanna look like I have this support for America and I'm doing things associated with veterans and stuff like there's all these different types of posts, but that's what we call brand perception. Because in one post, you literally can get this one idea across and people run with it, period. It doesn't take much time where some of these other posts like or trying to make yourself go viral, right? Might require, I don't wanna say viral, trying to like make a song take off, right? That might take multiple posts, probably does take multiple posts and activity and then the streams go up over time. But no matter how viral this post of Friday talking about the Haitians, right? Goes, if I see the post, the work is done. It doesn't take me to hear it a bunch of times and see it a bunch of times. Like the fact is kind of like just there. Yes, because just to bring the point back around is because in this post once again, the music is a point in it, but it's the second point. The first point is, hey, I just wanna make sure you're aware of the Haitian heritage and that the Haitian community is rocking with him. So like, even if you had left this post, not caring about the song, but you knew that, the post would still be successful. You know what I'm saying? Yep. And that's what's great about these type of posts is that people, for lack of better terms, are sheep and I don't mean that in a bad way, but people like to see that other people are rocking with something. So the fact that in this Friday post, for example, that he's able to pull so many examples, even if like these five videos were the only five videos of Haitians fucking with him, let's just say this was it, right? It's enough because most people aren't gonna go beyond this post to really feel like, nobody's about to go ask the local Haitian friend, like, yo, do you fuck with Friday? They're probably not going that deep, right? So we're just taking the post as is at face value because there's enough proof in it to make me believe it. You know what I'm saying? Exactly. For what it is. And like that is what's really important for stuff like this. And what's really cool about posts like this is that sometimes they build up in a really organic way because you have tapped into a certain community and they are showing you love. And like all you have to do is just wait until you have enough good posts from that community fucking with you. And then you could easily execute something like this. Right? Cause let's say like it was skaters, right? And let's say it was a bunch of skaters came to this song. Like he could have very easily pulled like the six best skate clips to his song. And be like, yo, like, look at how skaters are fucking with my song, right? I was like, skaters are out here doing crazy ass tricks to my new single. And that would have had a similar impact but in a different space. What about the association posts? That's the next one. So have an example, just explain it. Cause it's pretty simple. Yeah, it's pretty simple. So association posts essentially are a way for you to include yourself in a conversation with other artists who are ideally in the same space as you and then also ideally bigger than you. Or the same size, if you're pretty, if you, if you're a mid-sized artist and up you want to go same and bigger. If you're a small artist, 100% should always just be big artists, right? So how can I give a verbal example? So let's say I'm on Hollywood Unlock cause that's what we looking at right now, right? And Hollywood Unlock makes a post and says like, hey, I don't know, spring time is coming up. People about to be back outside. These are the five, these are the five songs that make me want to go outside and just, you know, get wild, get dirty. And it's Cardi B, a Cardi B song, a sexy red song, a lotto song, and then Sean Nusenko, right? Now what I've effectively done is I've thrown you into the conversation of party songs for the summer or for this particular vibe or mood that's coming up. And I've also made it to where the fans of these artists are now aware of you and they're going to think about you in context to these other artists because the first time they were introduced to you was in comparison to these other artists or in the same conversation with them. So it's a really good way, one, just to kind of like bring in traffic around yourself because you can use the face and the name of these bigger artists or just get people to click on the post, right? Like you don't carry the burden of the performance for the post in the same way that you was if the post was only about you. It becomes like a collective theme. Downside to it, I guess is like, you are kind of like giving promo to the other artists but the pros vastly outweigh the cons of that. You know what I'm saying? I don't know, it just is what it is. Yeah, it is what it is, right? But that's how I look at associations. Like how do I get myself associated with a group of artists or a particular topic or subject? Kanye was a walking association post for years when he say stuff like, I'm Steve Jobs. I'm the Walt Disney of like always associating. People were not thinking about Kanye in that light before Kanye would make those statements. People will argue they still don't whatever, but you get my point, right? Before Kanye was known as being great at music and great as Kanye, right? But he was not being looked at as just an overall creator in the economy, et cetera. Until he started comparing himself to Tesla, Steve Jobs, insert the plethora of names that he would throw out there, right? Because he saw himself in that light and he wanted people to see himself in that light. And as much as some people might not feel like it worked for them, it definitely worked for the masses. Yeah, 100% because like you said, even if you had never thought of him in that way, now even being able to leave that post and I can turn you and Sean and go, so like, man, bruh, it's crazy. They comparing Kanye to Steve Jobs and you could be like, bruh, Kanye ain't nowhere near Steve Jobs. He ain't never did blah, blah, blah. Once again, post is a success because all we want you to do is think about them in the same conversation. And then when you think Elon, or not Elon Musk, you think Steve Jobs, now your brain might go to Kanye because you might be watching the Steve Jobs document like, man, I can't believe this nigga Kanye thought he was. You know what I'm saying? Either way, Kanye is now in your brain because of the way that they were kind of correlated together. And so I think like for research purposes, since we can't show it, we're gonna have to give some pages, some shout outs. I think two of the best accounts that do music association posts, there's one account called Savin' Kanye. They do a really good job in the R&B space. And then you mentioned one earlier, Underground Sound does a really good job in the rap space of doing it. But like, that's the best way to think about it is like, how do I insert myself into the conversation of other artists that are bigger than me? And most of the time is gonna be about either comparing yourself artistically to these other artists or comparing the vibe or messaging of your music or song to the vibe and messaging of other artists' songs. And the closer you can get them to kind of be in terms of like the same wavelength for that stuff, typically the better the association posts do, right? Cause like in that same example, I got this thread coming out about best twerk songs of the summer and I fucking round and throw a, I don't know, like a Justin Bieber song in there. Unless it's that type of song, it's not gonna hit the same, right? Cause it's gonna immediately break the association for the fan because when they consume the content, it doesn't feel like it all belongs in the same world. But if I'm, like I said now, we do a carousel post about, you know, best, I don't know, pop songs that make you wanna fall in love, Justin Bieber song might fit better in that conversation and it feels more organic because the person watching it can imagine a world where like all of these songs are getting played together at the same time. And I guess that's the best way to think about it is like, how you're building a world with these association posts, but you have to make sure that the world is at least believable. You know? For sure. And like I just wanna stand on the idea of the power of conversation, right? You touched on that a little bit, but I don't think people understand how powerful, even if something is untrue, just being in the same conversation is, no matter what the conclusion of the conversation is. Right? Like, we think of so many people within conversations through association, like you hear Michael Jackson and Prince, they're not really that close in terms of the types of music they make or the style or the listening session a lot of times. It's not that they don't have any overlap at all, but like they got pushed together, right? And they got compared more so because of the conversation, media-wise pushing them together, then really needing or deserving to be compared more than any other artist out there, right? And that's why you'll see like women artists complain when they get compared, because they know that can have a positive or a negative impact. It could be a hard thing to sustain. And you see it heavily in sports where you'll see Michael Jordan and LeBron James, right? Like how did they, and then or it was Kobe and Jordan or it was XYZ and Jordan. Jordan was a very strong person to associate people with. So now all I gotta do is compare and there'll be some people who don't stick and some people who do stick, but even when people are like, nah, Jordan's way better than this person, you are now elevating yourself to people by saying, well, this person, to be compared to number one, right? If we're considering a Jordan number one in just the anchor that people are being compared to, to be compared to number one, well, there's a whole field of people that you must be better than, right? So you at least gain that equity in comparison. That's a good point. I didn't think by the way, that's a great point actually. It's a powerful thing, man. Just being in the conversation, man, that's what association folks is doing. Yeah, cause that's the thing, man. I just had this conversation with the artists. Usually I get ready to clip as well cause I feel like I'm out of snap, you know what I'm saying? But I personally think that when it comes to social media seeding and the style of social media PR campaigns, the worst outcome of your post is for people to leave with no opinion, right? Yeah. If I see your post and I love the song or the narrative or I hate the song or the narrative, in my marketer brain, mission accomplished because we now at least made you a conversation. People can now debate about you. Sean can talk about how much he loves you. And in the same breath I can come behind and say talk about how much I hate you, right? The worst thing that you can make a person feel is indifferent. Yup. As always. That's the worst thing you do because indifference leads to nowhere, you know what I'm saying? People don't talk about things they're indifferent about. People don't talk about things they don't care about. And so like, I mean, you will realize, you know I don't think it's something we maybe said blatantly but a lot of these posts and these post styles have emotional undertones that are trying to force you to have a conversation about something or to at least acknowledge something. Yeah. Right? They're intentionally trying to elicit an emotion out of you good or bad because they know that emotion is gonna make you comment. It's gonna make you share. It's gonna make you watch the video a couple times. Let me watch this Friday post man. Is he really hating? Let me watch a couple of these videos and make sure these real, like these real legit Haitians, you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? It's making people engage with the posts in the way that they normally maybe wouldn't. And it's all those micro actions that lead to a viral post, right? And so sometimes when you see these posts and you're like, damn, how does this post get 100,000 views or 100,000 likes on? Do people really like the song or the video that much? Sometimes the answer is yes. And sometimes the answer is not necessarily but it created a conversation for people to have and people like having conversations. 100%. 100%, bro. And the last post style is lifestyle slash, I'll just say you said it or did it, right? This is like coverage of something that you accomplished or not even accomplished because that makes it feel like I achieved but you just said or did, right? Yeah, said or did, yep. So the lifestyle portion of it, on one side of the spectrum, you shouldn't do this as an indie artist because it only matters if people really care about your brand. If people gotta care about their life to care about their lifestyle. Right, right, like Drake could go to Target and they're like, oh my gosh, Drake was in Target and some people will click, cool. But the said or did, you can find pockets where even as a quote unquote nobody with not a bit of attention, you could have zero followers and post and find the right pocket and get a lot of attention, right? So here's an example. Jim Jones, Meek Mill, Rick Ross and other artists are urged by D1 to reconsider their lyrics that glorify destructiveness. We'll play a little bit of the clip just to add a little bit more context especially for people who haven't seen. Jim Jones, you could do better, brother. I love you too much. I love you too much to not be honest with you. Rick Ross, you could do better, brother. Meek Mill, you could do better, brother. I love you too much not to be honest with you. Are you the face of prison reform? Cause I have, are you the face of prison reform? Or are you sitting here on your new song with Ross talking about getting somebody murked and out at the red light? Which one is it, bro? So in this post, he's basically calling out his hypocrisy and just negative impact provided by these artists who are putting out lyrics to have negative impact. Period, right? So that's a message that strikes a chord with a lot of people. So you get that post, say rapper D1. I don't even know who D1 is. D1 can have zero followers, but I agree with what D1 is saying. Or maybe I disagree and I'm defending these names of Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Jim Jones, et cetera, but I instantly can get an image from it. People will see me and they say, oh, I'm the guy who was calling out Rick Ross and all these other people. And then two, people start to form an opinion around something that I'm saying or something that I did, right? Because there's an alternate. If I did something, you could have been just like, D1 could have been on a skateboard and did like this a really crazy trick or whatever that was just interesting or I don't know a magic trick. And then a rapper did some kind of crazy magic. That also could matter. Or when we did the chat focus headline, right? Like rapper stole $2 million worth of money to create like for his marketing promo. People care, right? About who that person is, regardless of knowing who that person is, right? So you can insert your way into these moments and it doesn't have to be controversial. That's why I said you could have did a skateboard trick. It could have just been a really good talent. Think about the random videos you've seen of someone, I don't know, just doing something interesting, right? And it was going viral, but it has to be something that you said or did that's interesting regardless of who did it. Right? And now, of course, you insert yourself and you happen to be the person who did it. Yeah, and I like this too, because I mean, this post is a good example of putting the audience in a position where they have to pick a side. And if you can force people to pick a side, you do effectively force them to engage in conversation about the thing, right? It goes back to the making sure people aren't any different. Now, what I also really like about this style of post is that if you do it well, it opens up a completely new content bucket for you, right? Because now, I mean, D1 has been making talking head videos for forever at this point, but let's just imagine he was completely new and this was a lot of people's first introduction to him. He has now effectively set himself up to continue just talking for content. And artists, I don't know if y'all realize this, but a lot of y'all don't talk. So sometimes that in itself is just interesting because it's like, no, fans like to hear what people on the inside are thinking. And even though there are a lot of people that do talk about the industry and their experiences within it, it's not a lot in grand context of how many people are in it, you know what I'm saying? So fans still do hang on to when they feel like, oh, somebody slipped outside the gate and telling us something or sharing the pen that the people inside don't want them to share, right? And so if D1 wanted to, he could stop making music content forever and only do talking head content and probably still be okay because he opened the door for himself with this. And so like I said, these style of posts are really interesting because if you can sell yourself to your audience and the existing audience as a person with opinions and ideas that are being shared, then whenever you're in a position where you need to create a moment and you don't want to do that through artistic content, you can just go talk. And in my opinion, that's one of the most powerful forms of social PR because it's not too many artists that can do that. No, that's a good point. That's a really good point. Oh, shoot, man. I say this. This is gonna be part one. Like I said, of how do you break an artist with the legitimate image? Because just getting streams, just getting views, that's not breaking your image as an artist where people know you and they rock with you specifically as you. The follow-up videos we're gonna get into how do you master captions, all right? How do you find the right pages, understand how to utilize those pages? But for now, we're gonna end it here. If y'all wanna hop into this conversation or get help before then, hop into our free community, knowlabelsnecessary.com and you can ask for help or thoughts on your captions, pages and get a lot of help around step-by-step courses of marketing strategies that we've implemented over and over again to create success. I'm Brad Van Shine. And I'm Colby. And this is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary Podcast. Peace.