 Wow, what's up, it's Brand Man. Shana, as many of y'all know, I run a music marketing agency. We tell artists break from ground zero, get record deals, platinum plaques, billboards, many of those things. And I only say that to say, I've seen many tools in the music space, companies that all say they help artists, but there's only a few that I really truly believe make an impact, right? So that's why I don't do a lot of music tool reviews on the platform. And when it comes to distribution, there's so many distributors out there today. And today I wanna talk about one distributor in particular that I was asked to talk about. And I turn a lot of these down, but this is one of the few distributors that I actually do think are doing something valuable. And they have a couple of features specifically that I think can change the game for you when it comes to marketing campaigns, because that's how we look at things first and foremost, because there's some things that they have that are helping us in the way we look at marketing campaigns or just making lives easier. So I'm gonna get straight to it. The name of this distributor is Symphonic. Now, even if you're a user of Symphonic or you heard of them already, I'm gonna show you how we in particular look at the platform and leverage it for success within our marketing agency and the client base and excited about a couple of features, especially this one right here, the TikTok Analytics. And I'll show you a little screenshot of one of our clients. We haven't seen anywhere yet where they have TikTok Analytics. You can see your video creations on the platform in this one space. You can also see the views that you're getting in this one space. Now, you can go look at the sound that you have on TikTok and see how many video creators are to it, right? But the views are a lot harder to figure out. We actually tried to build some tech at one point in time and it just wasn't worth it because we weren't gonna scale it, right? But we went through that process and we're doing it ourselves manually as an agency. This allows you to do it smoothly and something to keep in note, just like it says here. TikTok pays royalties based on the number of videos created using your music. The number of videos created using your music. Views of the video are not factor into royalty amounts. So you can get paid using the platform to be able to have your music tracked through TikTok. All that great stuff. Use Symphonic or whatever distributor to get your music on TikTok. But Symphonic allows you to see those video creations and why this is important, right? Watching trends, watching views is just a clean and clear space to stay on it. Cause I know some of y'all don't even like going on TikTok that often to be real, right? But beyond that, that's not even what we're most excited about. It's really cool to be able to see this and have this in the space. They have the engagement analytics, the stuff that you would of course expect to be on anything that's considering social behavior. We're talking about shares, likes, favorites and comments. But when we get down here, the territories is something that's really impactful for us as an agency helping clients build out their campaigns. Because on TikTok, there's not a clean and easy way to see where these videos are being created from your song. So sometimes you might see there's a lot of videos with Russian on your videos. So cool, these people must be in Russia or something, right? You can identify language, but to really get an understanding of the territories where these videos are popping up since everything on TikTok just can be coming from anywhere literally around the world without you knowing is great to have this because it starts to inform where we do the rest of our marketing activities, right? Now you say, oh man, it looks like a couple of influencers are popping up over here in this country or this city or area. Well, let us start trying to pay some other influencers on Instagram as well, or let us start targeting ads over in that area as well. That's a game changer as far as I'm concerned when it comes to any kind of social media campaign to know where the influencers who are posting are coming from, but especially TikTok, because it's been historically a little bit more difficult to actually know where people are seeing your content and then posting about your content on the platform. So that one, there is huge. Another thing that they now have, which is new, is YouTube UGC, which is user-generated content, right? We basically just talked about the TikTok user-generated content, those videos and the views and everything associated with it, but new, which I didn't even know, it just got launched basically as I got on earlier today. I think this is actually really cool because now you get that same type of data on YouTube. YouTube, you might not be as stressed in terms of figuring out where views are coming from because you get that data when you look at your stats, but even again, understanding the user-generated content where people are using your content, it can be really helpful, but this is what I break it down to when I'm looking at YouTube. You have even more impact and control that you can make than you can with those TikTok points of data that I just said and understanding that because on YouTube, you can do something like this. Check this out, right? One, I see some users using my content, I can pay this person to use my song again, right? Someone might've used my piece of content in their podcast. They might've played it as a song that they like or use it as a part of their intro, and now I can say, hey, well, let's strike a deal. Use my song in your intro again, right? Or play my song more times. Since you like it already, you're doing it without my knowledge, I'm completely fine with that. Let's figure out some kind of deal to strike and really make it a thing, right? Or you might see something because it also allows you to see not only the user-generated content views, you can see the watch time, you can also see the amount of new user-generated content views, which is important to know when a trend might be occurring. So something's happening right now. Oh snap, why are so many videos being created to my stuff on YouTube, which we had artists blow up about two months ago off of YouTube videos specifically, all right, but the interesting information I'm looking for, here we go. Top user-generated content videos by views. To see those top videos, that's gonna allow me to see something that could become a trend or could become meaningful and replicable for other people. That's another way to use that, right? If there's something that's occurring because you have to think about this. YouTube, right, we know now has shorts. So you might see something that could be a trend that I then take over to TikTok, a trend that I then take over to Reels because I understand that this thing is popping and it's taking off on YouTube. There's a good chance that people will take to that information on the other platforms. I just have to forcefully get it out there myself, right? So there is that, even if it's a long-form video, piece of content, it's worth still seeing if it's something that could be taken from that video that goes along with your song that you might wanna be able to get other people to do as well. On top of that, when you get to see the top user-generated content to your music, you also get a sense of demographic. Now that right there is powerful in and of itself because if I can see that this person that I didn't even know represented and loved my music in any kind of way, but now I understand that this demographic is likely to like my music, this type of person is posting to my content, I can now find more of those people, right? I didn't even know that insert type of person or type of creator using my music. Well, let me go find more creators like them and then I can create an omnipresence in that community that I wasn't even sure would rock on my music. That's a powerful thing to be able to do and it's hard to keep track of that if you don't have this data that's saying, hey, this is not only happening to your music but here are the top instances of this happening to your music. So why don't you surround these people, go to the YouTube channel, look at the similar, right? Feature channels or related channels, right? And then start to build out around them. Maybe you get some other creators to create to your content. That's what we've done with a song that did about four million streams in the last 90 days. This type of data is extremely useful. Now, this artist right here doesn't have a lot going on on YouTube, but I just want y'all to be able to see a little bit of what it looks like and the screenshots blurry, I know. With all that being said, Symphonic now has a starter program, which is crazy low. I'm talking about a 1999 annual fee, $20, folks, $20 a year. That's less than $2 a month. You can find that on the ground to pay for this. That's less than $2 a month. And I'm not about to go through all these comparisons to other distributors and things and their long list of things that they think are valuable to you. What I am gonna do is talk about the things that I find to be really valuable and why. So customer service response time, one day buy a human. You gotta put that these days, right? Actually talking to a human is nice. And 24 hours for paying $20 a year, that's, hey, that's not bad. I'm not gonna lie, I don't know how they do that, but they do have that available. And that's at the 1999 level. Now, the big thing personally for me here is the one to two day fee of delivery to DSPs. Now, why is that so important? Because as many of you guys know, we've blown up people on TikTok and that could happen so fast because we're blowing people up with content and then they'll be teasing the song and next thing you know, the song's taken off. We had a campaign last year that got over 200, not over 200,000, about 200,000 pre-saves on it because it went so ridiculous so fast and the song wasn't even finished yet, right? A moment like that, when you're able to hurry up, finish up the song, if it's not finished yet, hopefully it is finished and then make sure it gets out quickly. A one to two day wait time is ridiculously short when we're talking about the wait time that I've seen and have to deal with in multiple other distributors. That is a huge benefit to hedge for a moment where you might not be as prepared as you wanna be, especially at a 20 dollar level, because I could be honest, working with some of the other distributors, some of the artists and on our more boutique levels when it comes to distributors or major levels when it comes to labels and things like that, we can get music out pretty quickly if we really, really need to. But for a distributor that's accessible to independent artists and we're talking about $20 a year, that's for me unheard of, right? But also invaluable because more and more we've seen people turn on the artist when they really like a song. They really like the song but you're taking too long to put it out. So stop teasing the song, stop teasing 20, 30, 40 times and not actually dropping the track. Please just drop the track. Well, I got away from my distributor to put out or even if they're not tired of teasing because you haven't even done it that much, they just lose attention. I was hyped, I wanted the song to come out, I couldn't wait for the song to come out. Well, that moment of time is going in my life. You missed it. You don't wanna miss out on those moments. So between the speed of being able to get your music on to a DSP, which is invaluable to me, beautiful having one-on-one customer service but even cooler the strategic decisions that you can make from the YouTube and TikTok analytics on the platform, Symphonic is legit. It's one of the few distributors that I would do any video about. And if you don't have Symphonic already, it's definitely worth trying with one of your tracks, especially if you think it's gonna be more viral on a platform like TikTok. So you can use those analytics. And if you do have Symphonic, I hope you use it in the ways that I talked about when it comes to informing you for your marketing campaigns. That's it for this video, much success to you. Peace.