 What's up? What's up? I'm brand man Sean and I'm Corey and we are back with a no labels moment in time. This is not a episode, but it's an experiment that we want to do. We just want to go over some quick clips and y'all let us know if y'all like this format. Subscribe if y'all hear something y'all like, but we're just going to go through a couple of facts and clips. And today the subject, the common theme seems to be these clips are going to help you rethink your music career for the better or for the worse, but there's something that you need to be aware of. All right. Now the first snippet courtesy of Dan Runsey founder of Capital says around 40% of artists who have appeared on billboard charts have never made it back on the charts. People clown when hit wonders, but they've been a huge part of the business. And that's saying two things right there. Number one, a one, most people don't make it back. All right. There's a good amount of people that don't make it back again. We're just talking about making it back once, let alone twice, but 40% are making it back once. So that's an accomplishment as itself in and of itself. Hard to really clown people when you look at it like that. But the second part, which is a little interesting and I can't see an artist being comfortable being in that position for most artists, but people clown one hit wonders, but they've been a part of the business. A huge part of the business. You know what I'm saying? That's just like, Oh yeah, you know, one hit wonders. We need that extra revenue. We want to get the superstar, but we don't want to give away that 40% of the revenue that's coming from these single hits as well. So that's just a part of the game from the industry side. And it's crazy when you like putting a number on it because, you know, people like to shit on one hit wonders as if the world would just fall apart if there were too many of them. But it looks like the industry will literally fall apart with one hit. It would literally crumble at its core and wouldn't be able to support the people who want to put together, I guess, other more hits. You know what I'm saying? I don't know, but I was just having this conversation with somebody last night about how how one hit wonders need more respect than the industry. But I literally just had this conversation. It's crazy. It's crazy, bro. It's crazy, man. Now, with that being said, moving on to another topic, Joe Budden drops an interesting insight on why it's so hard to even get in the one hit wonder space and how managers play a huge part of this overall success of an artist's career. He enchanted my entire life. Everything about my life. And I'm saying that as somebody who actively searched for managers. I let the audience know that certain positions are just tough to fill because they're so important and they require so much trust. Managers, one personal assistant is another business accountant like there's a few of them. But all your artists out there that are having trouble finding a great manager, a manager that fits with you don't feel so bad. Joe Budden said that's the norm, right? Managers, assistants and accountants. And, you know, based on what we know, it's very true. Yeah, that's up. The one plus one is equal in two. You know what I'm saying? As I think about it. Yeah. So, you know, it's supposed to be hard to find these people because the level of trust that's a part of that position. How many personal assistants done scammed and schemed on somebody took some money off on the side? How many accountants didn't even file people's taxes? Had them behind bars because they were behind on their taxes, right? So these positions are some key positions that are more difficult, but the impact on them is high. And I had a lot of bad experiences with management, which is probably why my career looked the way that it looked. Because it was real late when Sherry told me, I don't care how good you are as an artist, you're only as good as your manager. How you feel about that statement? You're only as good as your manager? I agree for the most part. Why? I think there are some artists who can out-talent their back-end situation. Very few of them. I've had to put a number on it, probably less than two percent. So I do know there are, you know, I'm speaking about an anomaly. That's why I say like, but I don't know. I feel like I think that I've seen situations where it felt like the back-end setup of the artist wasn't as confident as you thought they should be in that situation. But then looking back on it, like, I'm also only sending it through the lens of the artist, you know, so who knows what kind of kind came from that. But for the most part, I agree. Like, I think that 98% of artists would never be able to out-create or out-talent the either lack thereof or possible incompetence in their back-end infrastructure. It's a very hard thing to just like out-create. I like that you just went beyond even management but also back-end infrastructure in general because that could be your label. There's these invisible strings that are holding you down, you know. The artist is like that toy in the box. You open the box and you're like, oh, let me just pull out. It's like, oh, shit, something's holding it back. Those are visible strings and your manager could be that invisible string. You're labeled the way to deal, the business setup, how invested they are, how competent they are, all these things contribute towards you're able to just go ahead, hop about that box or rip me out of the plastic, you know. But a lot of situations are the opposite, right? Where look, that thing ain't coming out. It's for whatever reasons. So I definitely agree with the statement and you have to realize, right? The talent is the talent, but we know the business. We say, oh, it's 20% music and 80% business. Well, if the manager has that much to do with the business side, right? They are the key piece. Sheesh. And plus, we saw, we did see how Joe Budden's career went. He said, look at my career. He definitely had a volatile career. And then I was trying to find a manager, right, who saw my vision for where I wanted to go in media and content and not so much music. So think about that. I'm approaching people saying, hey, I don't want to do what I'm known for. And I don't want to do what I've only done my whole life. Like you're asking somebody to see a lot of vision. And Ian did that. He understood that. I guess coming from his Howard Stern tree. And he nurtured that. Alright, so I'm about to put you onto something that's going to make your life so much easier. I got a platform for you because if you want to be able to text your fans, we got you covered. If you want to be able to put a link in your bio that's simple and you don't have to switch back and forth. We've got you covered. As a matter of fact, if you want to be able to promote your music, we've got you covered all from this platform call forever fans. As a matter of fact, users who use this platform have already seen 10 times the amount of shares of their music. That's how you know they're real fans and 2.5 times the amount of followers on Spotify, which we know that contributes to boosting your algorithm. The forever fan strategy is a strategy that goes beyond just creating some trending sound going viral because most people focus on getting views for the day. But what matters the most are fans for life. Check out foreverfanmusic.com. So again, your management situation is something that is one of the major obstacles. You got the fact that it's already hard enough to be successful and even get one hit on the charts. Then you have a management situation that's difficult to find which has a huge implication on your level success. Here in this clip right here, Simba talks about how the established people in the music industry can also restrict and hold you back saying the old heads, the whole heads, they're trying to run a number up on the young folks. A lot of these old producers listen to me. Y'all talk all this, we won't hip hop to come back. And the minute we get in the studio with y'all, y'all want $100,000 for a beat. If you want this to come back so bad, why are you taxing so much? Way to beat. One beat. Bro, you're gonna spend a weekend with a producer and y'all get like five songs. Y'all in the Airbnb kicking it. You talking about life. We didn't smoke and talked about each other's kids. My son and FaceTime me. I'm like, what's up, man? Woo, woo, woo. All right, man. Let's get this music out of our thing. We should do the video. Next thing you know, it's time to do the business. The label didn't call it yet. He won 80 grand a beat and a point on each. And he wants to own the master. And he, ooh, that's a high as tax right there. It just ate Popeye's chicken together for a whole two days. Wait, how long does it take to do a beat? Five minutes. Wait, five minutes to a beat? Man, I think there's two sides to this story. All right. I think he already spoke for the young heads and we can expand on that. But the old head side of it is yo, I'm come from an era where we were getting a hundred K for a beat easy, 250 K for some of these beats. And I was getting at least 30 K on the low end. I've talked to some songwriters and beat makers before that come from that era where they at least were getting 30 K on the low end and they weren't even a big name. So then for me to think that I'm just going to get this thing off of five K, you know, a couple of hundred dollars. It's hard for them to shift their mind to them. So some of them 80 K is a discount. 80 K is the number that they feel like might be respectable based on the fact they can't get the number that they expect. They think, oh man, I should get 150 K. Dang times ain't like they used to 80 K. I should be able to put that out there and see how buddy feels. Then on the other side, young folks be like, offended as fuck. 80 K. What? What? 80 K. But Denver said, I want points on the project and having massive. That's crazy. That's like the old school music industry mentality kicking in. But I do see the old head side of it too, where I think price is a reflection of how confident you are and how successful the artist will be. Because if I think for a fact in my heart, that Lil Sean is going to be viral and hit millions of streams, I'm probably going to work some things out, work more of a situation where you're probably getting points and stuff. No money for that. You're going to try to make it favorable because you want to be attached to that shit. And I've seen, I guess, newer old head producers kind of, and they're not really old head black. Producers has been around for a long time at this point, but haven't really reached the old head status. I see them doing it with batches of new artists where they're just casting a wide net in a sense that, okay, I know, if I get another young thug, another whoever, another whoever, then I'm good, right? They're playing that game, which like you said, is much different than, you know, the, I guess, the 90s, 2000s, you know what I'm saying, kind of era of it, where it was like, hey, I'm just doing a couple of big records a year, you know what I'm saying? And like I made 100k a beat, you know? So that's really all I need to hold me over. So I do think it's have acclimated to the times and then have like, how much does that producer really believe in the artist? Cause all the other shit that Simba talk about is just sales, bro. Like I'm giving you Popeyes chicken and put my son on the FaceTime too, but if I think it's 100k check on the table, you know what I'm saying? Like I'm just, I'm just risen up. I got to raise you up. So I get it. But to Simba's point, yeah, but it holds the genre back. It's like, if you really want these newer artists to thrive, especially if you are aware how of the circumstances of 99% of newer artists today, then you have to understand that by you doing that, you are either leveling off of your possible impact on the new genre or you're killing off the genre completely. You know what I'm saying? One else is either you stifling it or you choking it and murdering it all together. I can agree with that. I can agree with that. Now, that being said, that's another way that that's self-inflicted. We're restricted. We are restricting ourselves, but on the other end, something that artists also have to deal with. It's fake streams, fake streams, fake streams. And there's different sides of it. Some artists want to partake. Some artists want to avoid, but the labels, the distributors definitely don't want artists, particularly indie artists, to be able to partake in the fake streams. So recently, believe what you see, baby, Empire Spotify, Amazon Music, and more team up to form a global task force. Aim that eradicating streaming fraud. Why, why, why would they be so interested in doing this? Well, number one, the stream payouts work on a pooling system, right? We're getting not just the amount of streams that I get are going to result in how much money I get is going to be my proportion of the overall streaming pool. So I could say I got 50,000 streams, but if Jacory did 100,000 streams, that means I'm a third of that pool. But if Jacory only did 50,000 streams, we both got the same amount of streams. Oh, we are half and half of the overall pool, meaning that I'm actually going to get paid more. This triggers along the way, right? So with this being said, that means those fake streams, they fuck up my pockets. Yep. All right. Because they are getting paid for these fake streams. Yep. So the labels are trying to figure that out, but how can we, I feel like the labels are like, well, actually, let me look deeper here. But what I actually expected, you don't see no labels in here for real. You see the distributors, right? Because the labels, and we kind of need the fake streams here and there, you know, that's a little gray area. The distributors are the ones that get that impact. Spotify and the distributors themselves. Well, the DSPs and distributors. So those are the ones who are trying to figure it out. The labels just got their hands behind their back. Like, we don't got nothing to do with that. Yeah, which is going to be interesting, man, because it could start a little war between the distributors and the labels. If I'm a distributor, I feel it. It's like we the ones that catch the heat every time. Yep. Spotify takes songs down or, you know, royalty checks don't get paid out correctly. Like, we catch that backlash. Y'all don't catch that backlash. They run into this show kid asking like, well, if I got a million streams last week, why am I checking only for 20,000 streams this week? You know what I'm saying? This week. So I don't know, man. We might see a real life Little Avengers battle. You know what I'm saying? The DSP Avengers versus the label Justice League. You know what I'm saying? Like, see who come out on top of that shit. I think we know who that is. What? Labels. Oh, I mean. They going to find their way about it. Yeah. Because it's market share control. I'm not giving up anything that's going to lower my market share. Like, man, we're already trying to squeeze the dollars anyway. Think I'm going to let you take away this bot form hustle I got? Give it to you for next. Not a chance. Now with that being said, in other news and another industry, the unicorn social app unicorn means it's a billion dollar company valuation called in real life. You guys don't know what it is. It's basically like a off the grid, off the internet event type app, right? It's about coming together. Unicorn social app in real life got shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake. 95. That's crazy. There were 20 million users that they were reporting again and again. 95% of that was just a million of it was only a million were real. That's crazy. That's crazy. Right. And this is with investors. Billion dollars value evaluation. They got their last investment that they got was like a hundred forty seven million from SoftBank, I believe and they're finessing all of these people because that wasn't their first fundraise, by the way. Right. This is probably series. I don't even know what series that was maybe let's just say see I'm going to make some up but y'all don't quote me on that. Y'all go look up for real. The point is like, hey, everybody's finessing with these digital numbers and metrics that we can move on. It ain't just music. Just saw a scam recently where people were moving the stock numbers around people invested in this hedge fund and then the hedge fund was able to manipulate these numbers and made people think that they were real when they weren't and was able to get 500 million up off of them. The interesting thing though with it being a specific app because the hedge fund preys on the less knowing right like a hedge fund scam and the bots are like a gray area where or just a black hat area where you have people taking advantage and they have to like not get caught. Yeah. It's interesting. You see some shit happening like this with investors where I have to sell these highly intelligent people but there's still these gaps. All right. You can still catch somebody slipping and more of a story is these bots exist everywhere or these these fudge numbers are always going to be a part of the game and it's not just the music industry because a lot of times we get too focused on the music industry but any of these industries have their their bad actors. That's what just doesn't make sense to me with this is like I said it went through multiple rounds. It's like no one at any point was like man this is a social media platform. We should look into that like because the music equivalent to me would be like an artist making it to like number one billboard hit and then we learn that 95% of that fan base is paid. People like how did you like nobody nobody went to like any shows or when I just kept going to festivals. All right fair enough fair enough air to my log then there was a lit piece of content and I guess it's at least a million people on it. That's enough to make something look right active because I remember Tiktok was having similar allegations like last year. People were trying to sell a good amount of the platform as users with faith. So I guess it's like yo well there's billions of people on here and like yeah like 800 million of them are fake doesn't matter when they're still 200 million real people. It's like you know I guess there's a there's a point in there somewhere. They are the established artist that has real fans but I'm still going to do some fake stuff on top of it and it's easy to keep this jig up because a million real people. I got a million real people and you see some real activity only trouble is here they got direct valuation off of it versus artists is just a little bit more vanity. Yeah that's why it's crazy. No I don't know I just feel like all these investors are investing social media platform you would think that's on the checklist of things is let's verify the you will be surprised if it slips through man and these these companies and a lot of it speaks to the biases and yeah I'll just leave it the bias that many of these investors have and they say oh we have all these strict ways of figuring out and I mean and fleshing out the best people and the best companies but then things like this will happen and it's not a new thing is a lot of these that happen in Silicon Valley. I'm like who are you really filtering out because if these people are getting through straight con artists are these people with Elizabeth Holmes the we work guy. There's a lot of folks that we work. Yeah we work I do. Oh he's that's that's a different episode. That's off the grid. Y'all should check out the we work doc on Netflix though that guy's all time for Nestor and I'll leave it at that. So should we not be working. We should be working. Should we work or we work. Probably not. That's just a test clip for no labels necessary y'all know what let us know what y'all think about this format. We're going to do another test format very soon and we're just trying to experiment see what you guys think that's it. That's all I got. Give us our comment your commentary. I'm Brandon Sean. I'm Cory and we out peace. Appreciate you for watching. If you like content like this you'll love seeing our music marketing strategies that we use as an agency to actually blow up artists to millions and even billions of streams that are available for free at no labels necessary dot com and the cool part about it that's going to really make you love it is we don't have to be all entertaining and add all this fluff just to get some use that we do on YouTube. We get straight to the information. There's play by play in courses that give you a breakdown of every step that you should do to get success and you have the ability to have communication with us. We get on live talks a lot of cool things for members and it's free just to hop in. So check it out right now at no labels necessary dot com.