 I think y'all should take advantage of this viral music strategy that costs zero dollars marketing cost and help Kato blow himself up. Check it out. You know, I post all my beats on TikTok, on Instagram, and I'm like, yo, who got bars for this? Who wants to sing on this? And based on like what pops there, I'll use that feedback and I'll reach out to the artist. They might have gotten a million views on a duet that they did over my beat. Boom. I just found a new artist to work with. We put out the song. It's already got a built-in audience because it already went viral on TikTok or whatever. And still to this day, like my biggest hits have been discovered that way and we spent zero dollars on marketing. Now, what do you think about this? Because there's some people with thoughts in the comments section. I want to know what you think about this first. I mean, I agree. I think that the open verse challenge is probably one of the more genius social media marketing ideas that come out. I do think it's starting to get a lot more overrated because so many artists have kind of taken to it and used it, but when that shit first hit the scene, I was like, oh, this is genius. You know what I'm saying? Because just like he said, you're able to build a little marketing funnel off of all these people who already like the song or want to be a part of it in one way or another. And just with the nature of TikTok, if one of those posts does well or goes crazy, then that benefits the whole shit. And I think, I don't know if he started it, I don't know if I want to get Kato that much credit, but I think he really might have been one of the first handful of people that really benefited from it. Oh, 100%. Like hit it hard. 100%. This dude is, I don't know, all his business are the technicalities, but he's pretty damn independent. Yeah. You know what I mean? He's used his platform to maximize and create a lot of opportunities, but Kato has a great strategy here, right? Number four on as in terms of most duet artists, but still people hating people are hating and I don't even, I don't even mean hating like, yo, Kato, you not that dude. You're not great. A lot of people think Kato is awesome. I don't really see no hate comments like that. What I'm seeing is more hating from a standpoint of not respecting the strategy. People hating on the strategy, not the artists. All right. So let me see. Derek Minor said that's the adult. Shout out to Derek Minor, a bread man network member. Let me see. Emilio Roja says, hoping for a virality is not a marketing strategy. You're my bro Kato, but this mentality is buns. The algos respond to engagement, not artistry, not creativity, not talent. That's why there is so much BS in the feed because people have, I know people love fuckery. If you're basing your art on what does well on the platform that is geared towards shareable content, then the art suffers in my opinion. I call lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Why do I say that, man? For one, let's start with the art comment. You know my perspective on this. The biggest thing is the algorithms don't care if it's good art or bad art. They care about engagement. So it's up to you to put good art out there, period. Now I assume you put a beat on the platform that had nothing to do with the algorithm yet because you created that. That was all your artistry. Artists got on it. They came from their point of artistry. Right? This thing is not viral yet. He's just saying I'm going to push the one that people responded to the most. So that actually isn't necessarily saying I'm only creating music derived from how the platforms are responding. Yes, I am using it as a part of my production. However, my beat had none of that in mind. The artist themselves who got on it, they didn't have any of that in mind. But then as they got on the platform, people really loved it. And then again, even if it was trash, cool, it's trash because it's trash. It's not viral because it's, no, it's trash because it's trash, but it's not trash because it's viral, right? Something can go good that's viral. Something can go bad and be viral, whatever, whatever. Because we also know bad songs don't go viral and bad songs that, I mean, good songs that don't go viral. That has nothing to do with the argument. But I think so many artists get caught up in, and Emilio, I don't know you, you know what I mean? But so many artists get caught up in the perspective of art having to be solely them, right? Even if we want or solely from their perspective, their own creative interests. But I also believe that there's different types of art that people don't, that people don't respect, right? That's the classic traditional purist, hey, I'm this artist in a room and I come up with these ideas. But then you have collaboration. So now it's not just from you, it's coming from other people. And then there's different levels of collaboration. I might be collaborating with the entire community, the platform, the world itself. I might be the producer, I'm not the one pushing the buttons, right? The other form of producer, right? I'm not pushing the buttons or playing any instruments. I might not even be songwriting, but I'm putting it all together. There's an art to producing or directing a movie, right? All of these things are forms of art. There's art in business and understanding how to navigate deals. All these things are art, right? So there's only one way that people tend to acknowledge art. But I think even that itself is founded on quicksand. Let me take a quick second to say if you're an artist trying to blow their music up or if you're a manager, a music professional in general, trying to help an artist blow their music up, I have something that's a game changer for you and it's completely free. As you may know, we've helped multiple artists go from zero to hundreds of thousands of streams. We've helped multiple artists go from hundreds of thousands to millions of streams, chart on Billboard, GoViral, all of that stuff. And we've now made the way we've branded multiple artists and helped them go viral completely free step by step in Brandman Network. All you have to do is check out brandmannetwork.com. You apply, it's completely free. But the thing is, we're not gonna let everybody in forever. So the faster you apply, the better your chance of getting accepted. Brandmannetwork.com, check it out, back to the video. It always feels more like the frustration is, speaking for these artists, I just feel like they haven't all found a way to communicate it yet. But I feel like the frustration is more so with not understanding how to communicate their art through the medium, more than the medium itself. Because that's personally why I hate that argument of like, oh, it's not art. Because like you said, it takes away from what? It takes away from how talented some artists really are in their medium. And so it makes me think, I have visual art homies. And it will be like my painter homie telling my homie that draws a pencil. He's not a real artist because he draws on notebook paper. Yes, why don't you understand? Nobody will make that argument. And the real argument is you've chosen your medium in the way that you want to express this thing. I've chosen my medium in the way I want to express this thing. It's no different in the social platforms, but a person that can make beautiful videos on YouTube but can't make a great TikTok isn't a shitty content credit. He or she has just found their medium. You understand? Like this is the medium that for whatever reason, they thrive and they figured out how to like express the artistic view a lot better over here. So when I see these arguments, I wish that the artist would say, hey, I haven't yet figured out how to be creative and artsy over there. Instead of saying like, hey, this is trash and that's not art. Because that's really what you're trying to say. Just because it's successful over there. Yeah, because you're really trying to tell like, hey, I don't know how to express my artistic vision over there, which arguably is more of a view issued in the platform or something like that. No, that's not arguable. That is what it is. All these things are tools. Yeah. Right. Paper is a tool at one point in time. Paper was TikTok. Yeah, that's that's that's a crazy thing. You just fucked me up. It's a new form of expression of self communication at scale. That's what happened. Right. Yeah. So yeah, people spend too much time judging art and always say, all right, once you get into the box, you're anti art anyway. Yeah. All right. Like art cannot be put in a box. It's always in motion. It's always, all right, finding new forms of expression itself. And once art begins to be defined in a specific way, then it becomes a science. All right. That's the problem I always had with the older rappers, right, wanting to hear a certain style and it's like, yes, this style was new, creative and abstract at one point in time, but then as the boxes became more and more defined and then there was a specific formula to follow those formulas made of the science. And I love science, but don't act like they're fucking up the art by doing something that's not that science. Yeah. You get what I'm saying? Everything becomes a science over time. That's why we follow those formulas. So it's a completely different thing, man. And I just hate when artists get affected by this in a way that limits themselves. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, oh, now I can't do that because I want to be seen as a real artist, right? Or I want to be respected. And that's not the way to go about it. Yeah, bruh, bruh. Artists don't even realize, man, bruh, every other artist holding you back, man. They be saying shit like that. Meanwhile, you got a beautiful vision for your TikToks and you stopping because somebody was like, nah, real artist ain't on that shit. It's like, man, I've seen some masterpieces on it. I know I've said that before, but I've seen some masterpieces on TikTok, bruh. Like some shit where I'm like, bruh, I don't know who you are, what you do, or how you got this skill set, but this shit needs to be somewhere else. You know what I'm saying? The fact that you chose TikTok and gave it to me for free. Thank you. You know what I'm saying? I appreciate that. And then there was another point here at EMA2 that I kind of wanted to touch on. Like, let me see, let me read it back for you. He said that algorithms respond to engagement, not artistry, not creativity, not talent. That's why there is so much BS in the fee because people love fuckery. If you're basing your art on what does well on the platform, that is geared towards shareable content than the art suffers. So what the algorithm responds to is whatever people find interesting. Right? Like the algorithm is a mirror of cultural, not cultural expectations, but like where a particular culture is that in terms of like what they find entertaining, what they don't find entertaining, what they know, don't know. People don't like to admit that. I don't think because then that means I think to them that would say that, hey, that means the people didn't choose my content or choose my messaging or choose my art, which is typically the case, right? It's much easier to blame it on an invisible entity. I guess these people are still invisible, but an invisible entity. Ooh, the big scary algorithm. Then they say like, hey, my art wasn't communicated properly through this platform, just people don't like it. Right? Yep. And so we, I think as marketers are able to see that because, you know, how many times have we seen like a trend die on TikTok because of how sick of, how sick of it the community got, right? Like we talked about dancers a couple of episodes ago. Dancers don't hit as much because the community as a whole pretty sick of dancing, you know what I'm saying? They want to see other shit. How many times have we seen trends be birthed out of small community jokes on TikTok, right? Like somebody, there was a trend a couple of weeks ago with like a filter came out and like you're like riding a boat, you know what I'm saying? Across the sea. And it's like text on screen. It's like me on my way to do something like that. I remember watching that trend bubble and it was like a very like joke within like a very small segment of TikTok and then like somebody made like a funny ass meme and it just like spread out, right? So it's like the algorithms on most platforms, I think to some degree, they start by trying to like influence like what we see. You know, most of the platforms are as a blank slate to the people come, data comes right. So they start trying to influence what we want to see. But after a while, the algorithm is typically a reflection of what people on the platform are looking up, looking for, especially with something like TikTok where everybody's for you pages like a thumb print, you know what I'm saying? Like no two people's for you pages are exactly the same. Yeah. Right. So I would just always look at that as a cop out is to say like, oh, the algorithms only push trash and garbage. Like, no, the algorithms push what people are showing today. Like, you know what I'm saying? Maybe you have your one or two posts here or there. You know what I'm saying? Like some sponsored posts, some big celebrity posts where like, yeah, a hundred percent sure they're doing that. But majority of the time the people are choosing it because they're saying, Hey, I like this thing. I find this thing entertaining. And like what I've seen at least in the last couple of years of TikTok is that almost any artistic vision can fit on that. Now, you know what I'm saying? Like Kato Kato came from a time where like TikTok have very few boxes that you could fit in. You either was the cover guy. You was the dancing guy girl, right? You was the thirst trap girl. You was the company skit guy. And like I said, he was one of the first people I saw do like the whole open verse thing. But look, Brett, that's what artists are supposed to do. Yeah, that's the crazy part about it. Like they're supposed to be artists. He's pioneering people, barrier breakers. And then we see a platform and say, that's how it is. Oh my gosh. I can't go over there versus saying I should go over there and do something different and make it work. Right. But we misjudge things not working and blaming on the platform base instead of looking at ourselves and say, Hey, maybe it's not just that interesting. It's just not that interesting. Well, I don't figure out how to be interesting there because you got to make people know it's not that interesting. That's just what it is. It's interesting over here. But the iteration here is not interesting in this context. And we know context matters. Just like these people might like my music and these people might hate it, right? You might have to tweak it to make those people hate it, change the BPMs or whatever. We, we say what they like more importantly is what they feel because we know people will share videos that they're angry about. All right. Do they like to be angry? I don't know, but we know our emotions drive us. You know, happy, sad, mad, whatever. So they're sharing and engaging with something that makes them feel, and I think that should speak to an artist more than anything, right? What you feel be interesting. I remember Trevor Noah, you know who that is. Come on, man. Hey, man. Hey, bro, people don't be knowing people. It's a lot of people in the world these days, right? And I was super early at Trevor Noah. I bet you didn't know Trevor Noah the first year I know who he was. I was on Trevor Noah early too, bro. I ain't trying to make this. You know, we ain't about to do that. Yeah, I'm saying, I'm just saying, I'm just saying. So I had to put them on so many people. I know some people don't know, but look, he said that I remember, he said that he was going on tour with Dave Chappelle, Dave Chappelle invited him on his tour or his shows or something. And Trevor Noah was surprised. And he was like, yo, man, Dave Chappelle, you're Dave Chappelle, you can have anybody. You know what I mean? Like almost kind of like doubting, like, am I funny enough or like, you think I'm funny enough? And Dave Chappelle's response was some sense of, ah, funny. Whatever. Like, that's normal. And that's kind of like par for the course. I want you at this level, funny, whatever. What I like about you is that you're interesting. It's a difference. So you'll see how it's all about. Yeah, exactly. How many people, comedy, whatever, right? Or singers, they could be talented. They could hit every single note, but that shit don't make you feel nothing, right? Or that song specifically just didn't do anything for you. Right? It's the full package is how things are put together. And it's an art form to understand the platform enough to be able to deliver it in that way. So, you know, I look, I know that there's always going to be this argument every single time a new platform pops up, but you can't define art. Stop trying to put it in the box. Everything's just another tool. Everything is another canvas. Allow people to use it. And there's going to be different types of artists at the very least. There's different type of artists. And you can just leave it at that. Yeah, right now, with that being said, flipping the script just a little bit, we got to get into.