 Here's what we're gonna start with. One of the ones I put on the list was fake awards. So particularly, I find a very funny thing that there's a couple people on TikTok now that have fake gold records in their background for every shot and it's really funny because it's always been easy to fake a gold record to somebody who doesn't know what they are looking at. But I guess I have to actually go get mine to prove this and major flex, give me a second. You see, basically you can buy a pretend gold record for anyone, right? Like they're kind of a novelty gift, right? And the other piece is that if you don't know what you're looking at or if it's an indie label, sometimes people do buy gold records or just because whatever. We were talking about doing it for an indie label I work with because they had sold 10,000 units and that was something we wanted to celebrate. And there's, when you start to like dig into all the award type things, there's a lot of weird variations but Jesse has a real one, Jesse show us this. Okay, so this RIA whole gram thing, that's what makes a gold record real. And it's so funny because this, like I look at like the one person I'm particularly talking about on TikTok has more followers than Matt and I combined and they always talk about all their big accolades and you're like, every one of those records in the back is fake. It's so funny because obviously most people don't get trained to know that but like they're always selling themselves and this is another one on our list as gurus, mentors every fucking time, every fucking time they say it. And I think one of the best rules because we wanna give you a bunch of rules to follow to know things. When somebody is proclaiming they are a mentor or a guru, you should know that that's basically like saying snake oil salesman. Matt, do you think that? So I just wanna wrap up on this fake awards thing real fast because there's a whole other side that Jesse didn't even touch on. So fake gold records cool but there's a lot of like fake companies out of LA especially that will send like every new artist they can find on Spotify, they'll scrape the emails or whatever and they'll send them emails and be like, you've been selected for the awards. Yes. You know, all you have to do to be entered is to pay a small fee and like it's very weird. I went to one of these ones, it was very strange. Bunch of new name artists who paid to perform at the industry showcase which seemed to mostly have people working at like weird scam companies and you have to pay to get into the party, the same way you have to pay to like be a Grammy member but also go to the Grammy event and they try to like portray it as a baby Grammys or whatever and like most of the time it's just, no, you know and ultimately when it comes to the awards stuff like first of all, if strangers aren't coming to your shows you did not get nominated for anything. Second, if you go and look at the previous winners in your category or you know and you haven't heard of any of them, like at all that means it doesn't matter. Yeah, I think one thing to always remember when people are like, oh, I want this award. It's like, if someone sees you have no monthly listeners and no stream ratio, no follower ratio which everyone knows how to do, I think, you know it's always the easiest thing to be called out. Derek Quiethouse has a thing that he's interjecting that I think it's important to put it here is that he agrees gurus are overrated I think he's right that I may have cast a little too wide a net on mentor. There is real mentoring things. I think it's really when somebody brands themselves in their name, so like here's a good example is the mentor that's, I've never seen someone who brands themselves in the first title as the mentor that's not scamming. And I know you don't do that, Derek. Yeah, and ultimately like you and I do have I want to point out something here. Jesse and I do have mentoring programs. Well, I do not. I just consult. I don't consider that mentoring. While I think it's good to mentor people, I don't like to call what I do mentoring because I don't think it's worth it for people to pay as much as I cost for on an ongoing basis that actually need mentoring. Yeah, no, that's fair. I think the last thing I would like to say though is that like even like a funny thing is, I see all the time 34-time Grammy award-winning producer. You'll see like that all the time, it was mixed by this 35-time Grammy nominated person. While that's very nice, it really does not do anything for you because everybody in this business who's experienced has learned that credits are easy to get as well as like Grammy nominations. It's like that can mean that that person did that 30 years ago and their sound is so out of date. It just, I have to say, I think awards are some of the most like amateurs value them. Professionals really go, okay, yeah, that means nothing if like, you know, it's one thing if you are Billy Eilish and you won Best New Artist, it's another thing if you were nominated for Best Engineer for a Comedy Album and that means that you put up one fader. Yeah, and this is like one of the things to realize is that very frequently, especially in the producer-engineer world, this is not to talk shit, I understand why they do it, but anyone who has any affiliation with a Grammy-winning record throws that in their resume. And like- We could talk today about what a scam the Grammys are one day. Good Lord. Let's move on to Gurus. Oh, yes, yes, let's move on to Gurus specifically. That's really the one, especially, I think Rick Rubin promoting this book has really brought on a slew of like people who think they're Rick Rubin because they read that book and then call themselves a guru because they wish they had his clout and oh, oh, oh, oh, I like this comment, Grammys. More like the scammies, but don't. Matt, where would you like to start with Gurus? Here's my take every single time. There's three things I know that we're gonna do this vacancy style. Three things that we can send. Oh, I feel like I'm watching TikTok again. Three things I notice that are kind of defying the fake guru thing. And for the record, if you do a consultant call with me, I will teach you stuff bacon spit style improvised. It's very entertaining. But the first thing is, is there content sort of music business adjacent and only hate content or is there actual advice? Because if you actually watch a lot of these people on TikTok, and this blows my mind, but there's a couple people who are pretty obsessed with Jesse and I because they're very jealous. We should make the clarification. When he's saying people are pretty obsessed, we're saying that there's an industrial complex of people who do what we do, who basically throw shade TikToks at Matt and I all day long and we have a text thread, but we just laugh at them. Yeah, but the point being, what I noticed with a lot of those people is look at someone's content and figure out if it's all industry news, hate and mindset tips, but no actual advice, then that guy is not real. Like I definitely have content that's some of the content is mindset stuff, but Jesse actually had a really good rule of thumb the other day where he said to me, we were texting and you were like, if it's over 20% mindset, it's probably bullshit. And I think that's basically accurate. You know, is like mindset stuff is important, but that's like some of the lowest hanging fruit. Like if someone can't like give you a meaningful advice that clearly is being used, then it's probably a scam. The other thing, the other two things, two, who do they work with? What you'll notice is a lot of these guys can't concretely be like, oh, I work with X, Y and Z. You know, like that's why like when I do my like sales videos I'll be like, hey, here's who I work with. So you can see I'm legit. And that list is like a bunch of big names. That's to like help you understand I'm real because a lot of these other people trying to do stuff do not work with anyone anyone cares about, you know. And like ultimately if I was gonna hire someone would I wanna work with someone who's like doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business for big bands or someone who's weird and doesn't, you know, like allegedly helps indie artists. So whatever. And then the final thing I think is like is this has this person actually been doing this for a long time? Because you saw this especially during COVID a lot of like gurus just popping up because I just needed to figure out a way to make money and they were in a band once, right? But it's like, what's that mean? I may have ghost written some of their content before I launched my YouTube channel. Did you really? Have we never talked about that? I do wanna put out Derek has another great comment here quite a house recording. There's also another such thing as a Grammy award winning studios, studios don't win Grammys, people do. And that is when we talk about music business scams that's like one of the funniest things because like I keep talking about the Van Halen greed M&Ms thing which a lot of people get wrong. There's a great Harvard business review article where everybody makes fun of Van Halen because they would say we wanna dress or filled with greed M&Ms but what people don't understand about it is that that would tell them how much the venue took their needs seriously. And if they saw that there was just M&Ms in there they'd hire 10 more people to work on the venue because they're gonna need backup. If they saw there was just a few that were different colors they would hire two more people. And if everything was fine they would just go about their day and know that this venue has their shit together. I think one of the things like a good example is I had to hire out of studio recently in Vancouver for a thing to do with an artist I'm working with. We needed to do a remote session where we commented to the person in Vancouver. And I saw Grammy award-winning studio I'm like we're not doing it there. I know that that is a green M&M of bullshit that that person's totally lying. Yeah, absolutely. So just keep those things in mind. Yeah. Cool, play listers. Oh yeah, all right. Let's get it. This one I think has some nuance. So I particularly have been thinking about this a lot because there's been a TikTok I wanted to reply to from venture music about this. One of the things I think that's very weird and it's often a debate Matt and I get into is that some people talk as if the genre of music they work in is a monolith of everything. Playlists in hip hop, pop and EDM have become that if you can find a good one you are the world's greatest detective. But in plenty of other more obscure genres there are so many cool playlists you can submit to. I work across a ton of different genres and I see all the time people being like there's only scammers and paid play listers. And I'm like, that's true in your genre but it's not true in so many of them. Yeah, I think that the way I always described it is like play listing if you find a good one and even if they charge you but it's a good one you're fucking set, right? Cause I have a client, a small Stoner Rock client who gets like 50 streams a day on a song cause he just found the right playlist and his music is the exact right fit, right? And if you're like really leading into a certain niche and then you go look up all the playlists in that niche and pitch to everyone and you do some research to make sure those playlists are legit, yeah, that's awesome. But what you definitely see happening a lot is people bodied playlists a few years ago and that was a lot easier, built up a bunch of followers and then charge people to be on it. And it's like, you should be able to, if you're not sure about a playlist, like literally go DM some of the smaller artists on that playlist and be like, yo, is this legit? Should I give this guy money? Which is a good way to start up a friendship I might on. Absolutely, yeah. There's definitely valid playlist out there but I think there's also a lot of noise and I think venture music and that TikTok, if I remember it correctly does kind of address that and does like the golden age, like here's the thing, ultimately, is the golden age of playlisting is over? Yes. It used to be that like, if you really did the homework and ground it out and you were like right in the right niche of a niche you could get on like 10 sick playlists that all those fans were on and you could just fucking do it and get your 10 to 1000 a month listeners and I worked with artists who are in that exact scenario but then they put out a new album and they were like, oh, the golden age is over. We're not getting added to more stuff. Yeah, for a while. That's just what it is. We should also make a caveat. The golden age of user playlists is over, whereas editorials are still, I would argue, strong as ever for sure and doing your editorial playlist pitch is still one of the most important things you can do for your chance to do it because that is an unbelievably seismic event many times when you get those, especially early in your journey. Cowboy to Story asked a really good question. How can artists be expected to try a bunch of bad playlists before you find a good playlist? And that's kind of why Jesse and I are saying like it's probably not worth the time and effort in most cases because unless you like are really like sitting there with playlist supplying, like looking and trying to figure out like what is and is not legit and like hitting people up to figure out if it's worth it, it just seems like a much ado about nothing. So I have a caveat here that I've been starting to change my mind about in the two last two weeks. I got hit up by a guy named Aaron who makes this website called artist.tools and I've been messing around with that a bunch and that has very good bodied playlist detection and it's very, very affordable compared to chart metric. I will say, so like one of my consulting clients called me after they got, I think 100,000 plays from bots and then asked me if they were fake plays and the site didn't detect that. But for the most part, what I've been doing like when I look and I can see that a playlist is clearly bodied from chart metric from what I know, they've been pretty damn good with detecting it and like I feel like for the money it is accurate enough that you're gonna get rid of a lot of headaches from the jump if you're using that site and it's, I can't remember how much money it is a month. I'm sure I could look it up right now while you talk. What do you call it? It's a really good tool. Yeah, the point being there are tools, you know but like I just, what I'm trying to say is I see fewer and fewer people in 2023 really popping off from user playlists. You know, it's not the same as it was two, three years ago. So I would just avoid this one by and large. Yes. Yeah, well, I would avoid it if you're if you're in the bigger genres but if you're in obscure genres, I think it's still a good example. Yeah. Like if you're into like a lot of the stuff I'm into the like broader hyper pop stuff that the scamming just isn't a thing. Like I literally, I'm in those playlists all day. Most of the more legit fans, a lot of them have emails and like it's not a bad community. And the same thing even with like what's called the more dirty punk stuff is like still really good, but like truly some genres are cursed. So I think it's really you got to learn what's right for your genre which is I think also the same thing as for submit hub is that there is people that submit hub works with for so well on some genres and for some it is a just set the money on fire because that at least it'll keep you warm type thing. Absolutely. Now we have one that Jesse and I argue about all day. Well, actually that'll be good. Well, but I mean, it's the context I think we're going to agree on which is that if you see Instagram ads and it says I'm going to grow your Spotify you have someone who's selling you bots in a scam. Do you disagree? I just launched a Instagram ad because I was trying to test some stuff but broadly speaking, yeah, basically couple things here. One, most people telling you they know how to do ads do not actually know how to do ads. And this is why you look at the client base. Two, anyone who tells you if you give me $1,000 I will get you exit out of streams with certainty is also scamming you. You could give someone a ballpark estimate of how many streams that will get you, that's fine. Or what a best case scenario looked like with that budget that's completely tolerable. But you should not be, but do not hire someone who's saying, oh, $1,000 for 100,000 streams. I actually had someone play himself. It was so funny because he was like, oh, I'm trying to decide between you and this guy who's like clearly a scammer. And he was like, if I gave you $30,000 how many streams would I get? And I was like, well, here's what happened over here. You know, but I can't guarantee that. He's like, oh, this guy guarantees. I'm like, well, that's cause it's bots. I think that's like the thing is like people who speak in absolutes in terms of ads are fucking with you. Cause like think about it this way going in to doing an ad campaign with whoever I have no clue how good the song is how good of the video content they have to market the song is what the artist's reputation is in the scene a lot of the time, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And all those things are dramatically gonna impact if an ad is successful or not, right? So I would just keep that in mind. The other thing I would keep in mind is like not all ads are fits for all types of artists. You know, that is to say I'm talking to an experimental artist right now. And like, I don't know. We gotta figure out like, cause I don't know streaming ads are gonna work for someone who does like 10 minute long experimental percussion things, you know? So we gotta find something that we gotta find some we gotta find another solution that fits for them. You know, same with like sales ads. I think people see, this is why I don't talk about them that much. Like, you know, I do sales ads where we're getting 20, 30 times when we put it, that, you know, but that's for major pop artists who you've heard of, you know? Which I've always said is the only people I think Facebook ads work well for is people with a very stable- Like I can't, you know, I can't go get 20, 30X return on ad spend for anyone in this chat, you know? Just cause that's how it is. So the point I wanted to make here was much less about that just like we should blanketly ignore everyone with Instagram ads. But if you're finding somebody through an Instagram ad, if you're not talking to three of their clients who said that they did not know this person beforehand and they're doing good work, you're gonna get scammed. And one of the best rules in this business is I don't hire anybody unless I have three endorsements from them from somebody first. That can be an accountant. I just hired a new virtual assistant two weeks ago and I had to get endorsements for that. I think it's a really big thing that like I know it sounds annoying to have to contact those people. It sounds annoying to have to say to the person I need three references, but like it roots out so many things, and especially since you can get, I hate to use the word, but it's totally real is that you can lose your fans also like get shadow band and get your streams deducted on Spotify. And they will basically tell you you don't exist if you overbought your profile. So it's very much worth it to just say I'd like three references. Yeah. Anyone legit can just do that in a minute. Millennial Animal says everyone wants skinny jeans, but they don't fit everyone. And I would say you haven't been to Brooklyn lately, buddy. Those are out of style. Oh, Silent Script said next it'll be Grammy winning playlist. I'm looking forward to the day that a playlist is good enough to win a Grammy personally. Definitely not Luke says, would you suggest Spotify ads? I have never spoken to anyone who has liked a Spotify ad. Matt, have you? Assuming you mean the like on platform of Spotify ads yet those don't seem to do anything. Yeah. I've never seen anybody who said that. I got good ROI from that. And even that goes to my clients with million monthly listeners to the smallest of them. Derek, Quiet House Recording has a question that says, do you think that ours with 400 million streams on two or three songs and not more than 50,000 streams on the rest of the songs is signs of bots or astroturfing? Funny enough, that's a huge discrepancy. But like if we were saying 7 million to 50,000 what I often find is more often than not that is somebody who is doing a lot of quantity of releasing music and the quality disparity between their songs is often terrible and not always that. Or in all honesty, one of the ones I saw recently was just that some of the songs hit on TikTok and some of them don't. Yeah. And then the other thing is like I manage this sort of radio rock band Autumn Kings and who I've talked about with Jesse extensively and some of their songs are a lot higher but it's just because those are songs that were the perfect fit for the hard rock workout playlist or were the perfect fit for discovery mode. They just like, sometimes you'll see someone whose song hits the algorithm in just the right way where it's just like, oh, this has constant play through. This has constant whatever. So it just keeps getting fed to people. So yeah. I mean, I even think of too that if you looked at my friend's teen suicides profile they have an insane disparity because some of their songs hit on TikTok. I think another one was in like a movie. And then the ones that weren't like they're in a lo-fi indie folky band most of the time and sometimes I've grown your songs. They're all over the place. And so it makes it, I think much more the sign of bots is like when you see the weird countries that this person should have no following in that are bot countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. Like when that's a lot of the monthly listeners that's the clue to me a lot of the time. Jason Mom Premier says, what about passing fires in your local area? I think that's one of the greatest tricks right now is that everybody's so obsessed with online that fires go very far. Yes. The cue show has a question but we're gonna address that in a little bit here. It's two away. So we're coming to that one. Right. Okay, yeah, we're moving out a good clip actually. So Matt, was this yours or was this mine? Sinks. I think this is yours. Okay. Because it has a typo. Do you mean when I did this to 2 a.m drunk that I misspelled things? It's like the dark secret of the Jesse Bigger. The dark secret of that nice friendship is that it's the rarest thing in the world when we're both awake at the same time to text back and forth. Both awake and sober. So anyway, I think one of the biggest bullshits sold these days is I will teach you how to get sinks because sinks is still the last part of the industry that is 99.9% of the good stuff there is so gate kept and made all about a relationship. And this is because sinks largely are that one person is maybe two is asked to curate some choices for a song and a show and you have to be on that person's radar. And it is a very, very difficult thing to get to the right thing. Which is the other thing too is that's why those people usually make good relationships with labels. And this is one of the last benefits of why when everybody's like, why would you sign to a label today? Well, sinks are a lot of money and a lot of time it's labels who have the relationships with sink houses and that's why they sign to it. It's literally a conversation I have constantly. Matt, what do you see here? A couple layers here. So I think that there is some legit stuff in sink that people are not taking advantage of enough. Especially if you're a very certain type of artist like my friend ex Jay Will who's kind of a sink influencer on TikTok. He tends to have a lot of really good advice and I've spoken with him a few times but I think the difference is that like he's someone talking about like oh, music libraries and stuff. And like when you look at the approach of like and I also, the main guy in Autumn Kings is also just like right to spec. And it's like that you need to understand is a very, like writing for commercials is a very different game than being like a touring artist. And you can make a lot of money that way, but a lot more of it, that's a lot more like writing and producing your own song every day and then having 20 songs submitting that to a library than writing another 20 songs submitting that to a library and doing that, right? But the people who are like, oh, I won't get you in movies. You just have to pay me this monthly fee, not it. Yeah, well, particularly I feel like there's all these courses that pop up and that are like, I will teach you to get sinks. And it's like, oh man, like $2,000 of this. And it's like, I feel like that that's where we get into the thing that I really don't like about courses, which is just that they're often predatory and cost towards what a musician can afford versus what they get out of it. And that's the stuff that makes me very not happy about them. Yeah, so let's pivot into this because this is our next thing and the Q show is asking about it, is like, you should not, if you're just starting out especially, do not go for the big investment. That means if you're putting out your first single and you have no audience, do not go and hire the $3,000 song mixing engineer. Do not go and hire the $5,000 PR. Do not go and pay for a $10,000 course because most of these courses are bullshit. Jesse, do you want to elaborate why? Most of these courses are one things you could find watching YouTube and TikTok in a matter of hours, if you just did some searches because that's where their research assistant copied it from. Fun fact of why I started my YouTube channel, a very prominent YouTuber was reading from my book and I got mad and started making videos. That person also I should say sells a course with literally paraphrases of my book and I know it's like sometimes you could be like, oh, well, all this information is the same. I came up with some of these terms myself and this person literally has just adjectives switched from my fucking book and I could sue and do cease and desist and embarrass them all day if I wanted to but really the better thing to do is I try to put out what will obsolete them anyway which is people will just get enough information that they won't buy their shitty course but the point being so many of these courses also never get updated. They're so out of date. One thing I should also say, what people do all the time is they will send me these people's courses and of course I have to look after I get this email and I can't fucking believe how inaccurate the information is for what they're charging. 2,500 fucking dollars for a bunch of stuff telling you to use services that have been about out of business for two years. It's fucking unbelievable. Yeah, no, I mean, it's basically that. It's basically, because look, between I think we can say 2016 to 2020 was kind of the death knell. There was this huge like get, become a millionaire selling courses thing on the internet and a lot of it was fueled by this guy Russell Brunson who actually does have a lot of good advice but I think it got distorted and turned into a lot of a larky and. That's been a bit too long you're saying about larky. I know I've been at my parents but the point being these courses, you have to realize that the vast majority of these courses are just a bunch of PDFs or like some videos and they're done by people whose content that they put out for free is and I'm not trying to blow smoke up my own ass or have Jesse's ass, their content that they put out for free is not as valuable as Jesse and I's content. One of them paid me once to write like a guest article and then they turned around and they dumped it down so much. I was like, what's, and it was a pretty like basic article in the first place, you know, and I was pretty shocked but like that's consistently the thing is like, what they're doing is they're trying to prey on people and charge exorbitant prices to get them into their course that they haven't updated in the three years because people would rather spend money when they realize that people would rather spend money than actually act on stuff because they feel like by spending money and buying this course, they're making progress in their music career. Yeah, that is 100% dead on it. And I think like the other thing too is like part of what makes them predatory is you don't see what's in the course until after you've bought it and then you have this shit sandwich of lack of effort of their research assistant, just paraphrasing other YouTube shows. And now the funny thing, Matt mentioned Russell Brunson and what Russell Brunson does is he tells people to take other people's expertise and then sell them in these courses by creating funnels because Russell Brunson runs the GRIF that he owns the best tool for making funnels, which is called click funnels. And so he's basically selling all these morons to go into chat GPT and saying, please paraphrase this video so I don't get sued for copyright and then assemble it in a PDF and then sell it to you for $2,000, like the greatest secrets of all time. There is literally so many of these around they're all advertising or they have YouTube channels where they try to use that as the funnel to sell it. And it's when people say, where's your course? I always say, not happening because I ain't doing that. Can I tell you the other thing I genuinely don't understand about courses? And this might partially be like how I was raised or whatever, but like, I've never really seen a course that was better than like this book or if you want, oh, I love this book. I know. This book is like my life. But like, or Jesse's book. Like, like this is the thing is like all these people writing courses have basically taken their information from a few core sources, right? That are like music industry books, but more specifically, and this is important, a lot of them are just taking it from general business books and adapting it to the music industry. But guess what? All those business books, which will help you if you sit down and buy like the 10 best business books, that's if you bought, if you went and bought hard cover 10 best business books, that's like 350 bucks if you have Amazon Prime. Like, and that's cheaper than all these courses. And that's gonna be dramatically more value. Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, let's move on to the next one. Matt, this is yours. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just a quick one. This ties into the course thing. This is just something I've seen a lot. It's also just scam books you see a lot. Is this, this term you'll see is the new music industry. And you'll see so many people who will be like, how to get rich or how to get fans in the new music industry. They have been using the term the new music industry since I got involved in the music industry 13 years ago. And I'm genuinely confused about like when this new music industry started because I was going through some old stuff and I found something talking about the new music industry from the mid 90s, which we would have described as the height of the old industry. And it's just like, oh, so that grift just has kept going. And so that's just a scam term that triggers me. That's all. So here's a fun thing. I should also say, somebody's asking for our thoughts on a specific person. They clearly showed up late. We will not be discussing specific people because we don't want to be sued. My thing is this, obviously I have a book called The DIY Guide to the New Music Business. So Matt said this at one point and I have caveats, but then I thought about it. So why did I first name my book that? I ran Facebook ads and Google ads as a test and saw what got the most clicks and then named my book, What Got the Most Clicks. And using the new music business gets a ton of clicks, which is why people do it. But funny, I took it to heart what Matt was saying, which was that it's just like, it's become so played out. And I've been rewriting that book and that is not in the title of the next edition. I've made 10 editions of Get More Fans and the next one will be basically the same book at its core, basically the same skeleton but with what's called a lot of muscle implants, some Elon Musk hair, some nice new fresh coat of paint. That's like genuinely crazy because Jesse's book like changed my life when I was 19. I want to keep this going. Somebody asked, I can't find the comment how what ratios you use to spot inorganic listens. And what's interesting is you can't really use as fixed ratio because the number disparities get different at different levels and they're different across genres. So dance artists and hip hop artists get so many more streams than rock, but they also seem to bot at much higher levels because honestly those botters are making so much money they grind harder with paying for the bots. And what I mean by that is, so let's say I had a playlist that I was scamming with called Trap Heaven. Whereas if you were an indie rock band and it was indie heaven, I could pay for 2,500 streams on bots and you'd be like, okay, that was worth the $10. They did it and I kept five. Whereas charging $400 to be on Trap Heaven and throwing 150 for 200,000 streams that makes that artist feel worth it. So you have to use lots of different things. What I always just say is I've watched enough and I have enough tools and I can look at the location data that if I look at follows monthly listeners and their streams, I have a pretty good bullshit detector that I've honed over the years when it comes to each genre, but I apply it to each genre. Matt, what do you see there? Ultimately, I think the only thing that really matters is how much money are you actually making? How many tickets are you actually selling? How much merch are you actually moving? That's what matters. Now we're gonna move into Vanity Metrics and Joachim Chavez asked a question. An artist in my scene I'd never heard of has huge monthly numbers for our genre. I'm usually high YouTube watch numbers, but has no label on their Bandcamp numbers or nothing. I don't understand it. And that's because of Vanity Metrics. Do you wanna get into that, Jesse? Sure, let's go. You start. Yeah, so I mean basically this ties in to sort of the ads that we talked about earlier, like or the budget playlists. It's like, and what Jesse just said, smart motherfuckers, the people you wanna be working with, see right through if something is bodied or not. Or they see through if, oh, this person got on a bunch of good playlists in the good old days, but they're not actually worth any tickets or they're not actually gonna sell any units, right? They're just a playlist artist, right? And that's fine. I work with super legit artists who get a lot of playlist streams who can't really sell that much. They're still trying to find other, but they need to find, and that's great because they get a monthly paycheck, but they need to find their own path to profitability, essentially. I guess what I'm trying to say is like, you can go and pay for fake followers or whatever, but if that's not real, that's not real. And but people still pay for it. And that's what you'll see is you'll see, there's an artist like this in New York who has like 50,000 Spotify Monthly's, 30,000 Instagram followers, whatever. Jesse and I have talked about them. And it's just like, yeah, but bro, like when's the last show you played? How many people showed up who you didn't know personally? Hell, how many people showed up who you didn't know personally? Eight. You know, like clearly, you know, people see through it right away. And maybe you fool someone one time, but immediately after that, the words are gonna get out that you're a fucker and that nobody should fuck with you. I think just the other thing with the Vanity Metrics is it's like anyone worth their salt sees through the bullshit. I think some of the indicators in that comment were necessarily true. Like I see all the time artists who like are doing well on one platform and not band camp or another because you if you look and see like, you know, a good example is there's an artist I really like when I go to their Spotify, they have 1,000 monthly listeners, but their YouTube does great. But they are like, they make fucking credible videos. So if you just looked at metrics, you'd see that you gotta always look a little deeper. But anyone I know, even the dumber people in the music business, I know know how to look for that stuff. And I think that's the thing is, is like people all the time are like, oh, well, if I don't have my numbers, I can't get to show it's like, well, the answer to get your numbers up is to do authentic things, not inauthentic behavior that people are gonna see through and that is just gonna cripple you. And it's just really the thing, you're in an era of the music business where like I will never say you can't do bots because obviously big artists do bots, but if you get out of proportion with your bots and it's easy to get out of proportion with bots and you have no authentic listeners, the thing that makes like when you see the vice thing about like gonna using bots or whatever, it's like, well, gonna had a hundred million plays that were authentic and then added to it with bots. And it's like that proportion just added 10, 20% which helped juice it a little. And like you anything at all, since you have no authentic listens, doesn't do anything for you except forget you flagged and then get you shadow banned. All right, Matt, promoting your music in weird countries as your note here, speak on it. We touched on this a little bit, but you'll see a lot is people, you'll see this, this is one of the most common ways you see playlists getting bought in or you see like those guaranteed stream things going is like they go and they'll say, oh yeah, we'll get you a playlist. But if you go look at those people on that playlist, like all their streams are from Guatemala, you know, or Indonesia or whatever. And it's the same thing, like you can get a lot of streams quickly with ads if you're targeting countries that you're never ever gonna play, but or where they have these massive bot farms, but that doesn't benefit you. That doesn't give you anything, you know? And that's really all I'm trying to kind of address here is like, just look at that, you know, or even if you see, if you work with someone, you see all the streams come from a specific place. I remember we hired a playlist or once and all the streams are from St. Louis and the artist was from San Diego. And I was like, come on, like don't lie to me. Yeah, fun time. You know, so just keep that in mind. I don't know how much to add to that. So I think a good one to get to next would be record labels and management companies you pay to be on. Never have I ever. Now, Matt and I get into lots of discussions where I'm like, you said this thing as an absolute, here's an exception. I'll tell you what I've never heard an exception to. Anyone being happy with a manager or a record label they paid to be on. Matt, have you ever heard of that? For the management company side, yes and no. There are definitely managers out there who are on salary from the artist, but that's usually set up in a way where everyone in the band, everyone in the company is on salary and so it works a little bit differently. I was gonna say that that's a difference. Like the difference I think is is paying a good example. I get a lot of calls. This guy says he'll manage me for $1,000 a month and no percentage and a percentage. And if they are agnostic about your music, they will do that for anyone. That's when it's bad. Whereas what I think is fine at first is, for example, I had to call somebody the other day and they're like, I'm paying my manager until there's income coming in. That's a totally different story. It is like they're in this until there's 10% or 15% a month to take. Then they're on salary to compensate for some of their work. And they're investing more time in it to the point that it's basically minimum wage. Totally different story. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. And again, and sometimes you see, you know, like look, like I manage artists. Sometimes you have to take a rate cut on something because you're trying to like, you're trying to just get it over that hump because you know that like, we're gonna get to this place. If we keep doing this stuff, you need to keep paying your bills. I have to have other ways to pay my bills, but if we keep doing this stuff and you can pay your bills next year and play 200 shows, then I'm gonna make a ton of money. That's a separate game. The record labels you pay to be on thing is like a really big one. You see a lot where people will try to be like, oh, let's do this, that or the other. And it's like, especially a record label, you pay like a monthly fee to be on, like nah. Like some labels, now what will happen that is legit just to be clear, if you're with a smaller label and you wanna do vinyl, for example, sometimes the label might be like, yo, we don't have the money, but if you're willing to help fund the vinyl, we can distribute it, you know? But usually in that situation, you didn't pay to be there, you know what I mean? You just, they wanna do a joint venture with you and they have distribution, et cetera. But again, all of this stuff, right? It might sound confusing because all these scams were pointing out exceptions to them, right? But like, look, this is why you build your community. This is why you get more connections in the scene so that when someone offers you a deal you're not sure about, you can go hit up six friends who are assigned to small indie labels and be like, we gotta offer this deal. It does this seem like something real? Yes or no, you know? Because like sometimes I see deals that throw me that I'm not necessarily sure I'm comfortable with. But guess what? I go to Jesse, I go to like four or five more of our friends and I go, hey, this is what was offered. It seems atypical, but this actually would work. But like this is why you build community so that you can know this actually does seem legit, even if some of the things don't seem like they're completely logical, do I do it? This is also a good thing for the advice and why it's so important to have a lawyer who understands your genre, like people all the time be like, well, can I use your lawyer? And I'm like, my lawyer works in Emo and you're a dance group. They don't know the standards of what record labels offer in dance. You need a lawyer whose head's in the game seeing the standards of your dance every day if you're a dance person who's being offered a deal. The standards across genres and across this business are all over the place because no one knows what anything costs. And you see so many different things which is why you have to do exactly what Matt just said, which is reach out to other people and be like, yo, these numbers look concurrent with what you see these days. In fact, even two, if you looked at an Atlantic records deal from 2009 compared to 2023, you wouldn't even recognize it. I have done that. And it's the thing is like you need somebody who's current with standards that are current and what's the going things because also lawyers are always inventing new scams to get their clients weird things. And that's how you get situations like if you guys Google victory records problems in contracts, you could read some of the biggest scams you'll ever see in the history of the music business. Jesse, do you wanna cowboy destroy brought up two good scams? Do you wanna touch on those first or do you wanna touch on our last thing? Have you ever heard of that paying a label to mix and master a label? Well, be one thing if the label is a mixer and mastering engineer who does it, that'd be fine, but I've never heard of that otherwise Matt. Correct. I like that there's, I'm looking down at my phone to look at the comments and as I look, there's an ad for a scam company being played on the stream. Hell yeah. So sorry cowboy destroyer, I do wanna answer your question. So yeah. So broadly speaking, like you do you see these producers who get like a distro deal with the orchard and then they try to like, be like, oh, I'll put you out of my label if you pay me. That seems like kind of a scam in my opinion, but also the other way this question could go is like, sometimes your label might just straight, might just not give you enough money to pay for someone to mix and master and then you just need to go and pay someone yourself. You know, it just to get sketch, if they didn't give you an advance and then they say, you need to go work with this person. They might suggest someone, you know, or they might have someone they have a bro deal with, like Ripple Music, a label I own a piece of, we don't usually give a lot of advances, but like we do have like people we recommend you work with, but we try to be very clear that like, getting Tony from Moss Generator to master your record is a strong suggestion because he's done a bunch of other really good late records in that niche. Go do what you want to do, but this guy will do it at a bro rate. So just, you know, cause he's our friend. So just keep that in mind. You know, the other question Cowboy Destroy asked was talk about the people on TikTok asking you to play their song for money or paying for reviews. I have to tell you that in the YouTube reactions, I have consultation clients where that has been a very big thing for them with a great ROI. One of my good friends who I, is my neighbor, they paid to be on a YouTube reaction thing recently and they're banned at their peak at 40,000 month please. Like they have fans, they can play, but that literally like got one of their songs from like 10,000 streams to a hundred thousand because it was a perfect thing. It was a perfect fit. The song is like kind of got some shocking lyrics and the reaction to it was really well produced, but like paying I think 200 bucks for that was amazing. I'm not against all what I would call astroturfed gatekeeping of influencers. I mean, let's be honest, I do Spon Con on this fucking channel all day long. I'm living my life and Matt's living his little Spon Con life too. It's how we make some of our money. That doesn't mean that the people we make these videos for aren't very happy. I say authentic things. I say what I believe, in fact, the video I put out today, I mean, literally I put a caveat in there about all sorts of things. I don't think that that's necessarily an always bad thing. I would just make sure yet again that they've been doing these things and it's been getting numbers. Absolutely. Couple of things here. Two more good questions that came in. Do deal memos allow you to spot scams or do you need a detailed contract? And so with that, deal memos in my experience have generally allowed me to spot a scam. Obviously you wanna have a lawyer go over the contract and make sure it's still basically what it said in the deal memo. A good caveat to this actually is one of the reasons you have to watch the contract too is you say, I want this changed and Matt and I will tell you, like we've lost weeks of our lives of progress to things because the record label says, okay, we'll change that and then you get a revision and that revision's not in there. Is the same fucking percentage that they said they would change is still sitting there or it jumps back a version and comes back in with the old percentage. Like you gotta remember. I just real fast. Yeah, go ahead. People who don't know a deal memo is basically before you get your contract, before the label pays a lawyer to make it. Essentially what you're doing is you're getting like 15, 20 bullet points that are like these are the terms of the deal. And they send that to you to kind of agree to a principle before they make a contract. And then the other one that came up was about paying for press. So I want to point something out here. And here, Hillary King talks about a metal band getting solicited to pay for a feature in a big hip hop publication. And here's the thing. A metal band paying for a hip hop publication, that's what it is. A metal band was randomly solicited to pay for a feature in a big hip hop publication. So here's the thing. Blogs and stuff like that, unless you're very big, do not get clicks. Paying for a review on a website, even a big website in your genre, if you're an unknown artist, it's not gonna convert anyone. And I've seen it happen time and time again where I used to write for a really big website in metal. And I wouldn't charge anyone for that. I would just do premieres because it was people asked me to, whatever. But I would look at the SoundCloud numbers after, because you do the premiere in SoundCloud or the YouTube video. And it's like, oh, this got you an extra, 35 views. And that was like one of the biggest metal websites. And that's not because that metal website is a scam. It's because people aren't checking out new artists on small blogs, big blogs or whatever. I think that's an interesting thing because it's yet again some nuance. Like one of the things I see over and over again, in fact, I can talk about this example because he's let me is, Ryan, my partner is in a band called Super Bloom. And I remember he said that like, they didn't get a lot of streams from a premiere, but then what it was, was it was all the right people who heard it because then he got hit up by tons of managers and big opportunities. Some publications are absolutely fantastic. And some are not influential at all. I mean, a good example. If in Emo, if the alternative is tweeting about you from your account, there's gonna be so many people who check out your stuff that are influential people in the business, influencers, play listers, that it's gonna start getting the ball rolling. And literally the best record I've worked on in months is up on this Pro Tools right now. And it's one of those artists that like, they championed and now they're signed to a big label. We're doing a remix and a remaster. And this band's probably headed for really big things. Yeah, yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is that that never comes from a paid placement somewhere. So we have one more point here, which you actually added last minute, I think. So do you wanna go into it? Ah, I did add this last minute, I remember. Okay, one of the ones I see that's really funny that's been going around and like, Matt and I have been talking about doing this all summer. And it was like kind of like collected the scammers over the course of the summer. But the funniest one I see rising now on my TikTok, you know, the thing I'm addicted to is people who use vocabulary intimidation. And what I mean by that is they say terms that no one would ever fucking use so you feel stupid like you have to learn from them. The funniest thing is, like one of the things I've learned so much over the years. Now let's remember, my day job is I have to make podcasts and articles that communicate very complex things. A good example is yesterday I literally had to explain why unemployment is so low, inflation's high, but the economy is considered the best that's ever been in America. Yet it doesn't feel like it's so many people. Not easy to do. You do not do that by talking about stag-fla-fation-minsky moments in all these terms that are gonna intimidate people. You do it to bring in. But what a lot of these scammers do is they try to intimidate you by making you feel like you don't know things and you then have to pay them to do it. Yet again, unfortunately, like we said, Russell Brunson, not all bad, Techniki unfortunately teaches people to do, which I think is yet again predatory and scummy and I don't like. But my general rule of thumb, if you feel like you're moderately knowledgeable and somebody is saying lots of big words that they'll teach you the secrets to, they're fucking scamming you. Yeah, and it's like, one of my goals is one of the biggest moments I had, kind of like understanding how bacon spits needed to be was my grandma doesn't speak English as a first language, still has a really strong accent when she speaks English. I only speak French to her. And she was like, oh, I watch your videos and I like them because I can understand everything. And my grandma is like an 80-year-old woman from Florida who's never played an instrument in her life, or from France who lives in Florida who's never played an instrument in her life, right? But like that was like a moment where I was like, oh, like I need to keep this fairly straightforward English because I have a big international following, you know, and I'm trying to grow internationally. And also when I'm taking meetings with high-level managers from Poland, guess what doesn't play when you're dealing with a scary Polish death metal manager is trying to use a term like evada or something because they're just gonna hate you. Like nobody at a high level in the business is like trying to show off all the vocabulary words they know, right, like straight up. Like in fact, one of the best compliments I ever got from one of the highest level managers I work with was like a manager who works with arena artists was, you know, and he's in his fifties, and he said, you know, Matt, what I like about you is you can explain tech stuff to me and I don't feel like an idiot. And that's like the point, right? Is that like my grandma can like get something out of Bakersburg that like guys over 50 running the music business can be explained social media concepts because of I'm doing it simply. Anyone who has to try to overwhelm you with that, you know, a smart person can explain something complex to a six-year-old. That's what it is. Yeah, and I think in general of the things I find, you know, it's like a really funny thing. I am literally, I get a lot of things wrong. One thing I never get wrong is when I see a YouTuber come onto the scene and they condescend people about the things they do. Now, granted, I jokingly will make fun of musicians and condescend the dumb things they do, but it's to play up the humor on the channel of this and make people feel better about not doing some things. But like, if you condescend what you're explaining tech and they're like, you know, you truly, I can see that your channel is not gonna grow instantly all the time. And I've never been wrong about that when I see the person who tries to vocabulary, intimidate, try to show off how smart they are and try to make people feel dumb for that. The one exception I may say is like Edgelord Metal explainer channels, but that's a different story. And the reason somebody like Finn does so well is he tries to present information in a way that everybody's gonna understand, no matter what their knowledge level. Yeah, anyway, the point being, it's stupid. People who try to make you feel stupid are insecure about their own stupidity. I think that that is a great place to leave it. You can follow me at Jesse Cannon. You can follow Matt at Baconbits online. We're gonna do some broad Q&As after this, I think we discussed Matt, but I think this is it for our theme streams of the summer here. We'll be doing some other things, so you should follow us so you know when we do that. Absolutely, and it's at bacons.bits just for the record. Yes, yes. Thank you everyone for watching. Follow for more. DM for private consultation. That's right. All right, thanks. I said the thing. You said the thing, that means it's done.