 How much money do you think you need to be spending per song to be considered a professional level artist? Not an upcoming artist. I'm talking about an established Grammy Award-winning level artist, because we actually have a Grammy Award-winning artist that broke down how much they are spending on one single song. Exactly what it looks like. Every single line item. And we got some indie artists who did the exact same thing. When you see these numbers, you might realize I'm not spending enough. Or might realize that I don't even have that money to spend. But this is gonna give you an idea of where you should lay in this equation and help you figure out how you wanna move with your career and how much money you can make off of it. This is another episode of No Labels Necessary. Check this out. Money Long dropped a bomb on IG. Miss Money Long. Miss Money Long. She's a Grammy Award-winning artist. For those of y'all who do not know, hours and hours came out the gates. It's been maybe two years now since it first light hit and popped. But she's been writing for, you know, the goats of the industry for a while. You're talking about Rihanna's. What's the California King song like that, right? Wait for real? You know him. Yeah, she wrote that. Exactly. She's one of those. Her pen is very, very strong. Oh, damn, why are you sure? Exactly. So when she talks about how much money she's spending on music, right? She's spending it as an artist, by the way. Not like, oh, this is just the more business-savvy label. And I don't care too much about my music. So I'm going to just spend bare minimum. But just someone who comfortably thinks and feels as an artist and wants to spend. I think that part, I'm important because there's artists who are on different sides. I'm just going to create. And I'm going to own every part of the process. I might be the mixed engineer, master engineer, the singer, the writer, the co-writer, you know what I'm saying? Be my own manager and spend as little as possible. No, she's a traditional artist in that way. Whereas she stays in that artist bag for the most part. And she broke it down like this, $1,200 per 12-hour block minimum plus engineering fees. That's already out the gate a lot of money for artists. But maybe you got your own studio. Yeah, maybe you got an engineer that wrote with you and, you know, do it for free. And this is the thing, right? I think all this is going to have to be taken to account. Don't worry, we're going to get into the indie artist numbers as well, like an actual indie artist who broke his numbers now for a different part of the equation, though. There's a certain level of quality that's required in different genres. I want to say that out the gate, right? To be a top-level R&B artist, we're talking about traditional technical quality. You're not going to be able to have horrible mixing. You're not going to be able to come out like X did in then. That's fine. You know what I'm saying? And take over. It's not a thing. We haven't yet to see it. Is it impossible? You know, everything is possible, I guess. But different genres have those different requirements. It happened in our lifetime. Exactly. So when you look at the level and the quality, that's going to determine the level of equipment and or fees that come along with competing at a certain level as well, especially when we talk about Grammys. That should be taken into account when looking at her numbers. $5,000 or $30,000 for production. $10,000 and up for established producers with quantifiable success. This is the good part right here. Like these extra notes that she made, I want you all to hear that, all right? $10,000 and up for established producers with quantifiable success. That's your Zatovans, your Metro Boomin, your Turbos, you know what I'm saying? These are the names. People that they're a brand in and of themselves. So just letting you know, she's giving you a perspective. If you want to work with certain different type of people, that's what it's going to look like. Then she goes $500 to $7,000 for mixing. Higher rates for established mixers with access to specific equipment and sonic quality. That makes sense. This is where we get to it, right? Because if you're going to have, so to achieve a certain level of quality, you're going to need certain equipment, period. It's no different than, oh, I got a certain level camera. Oh, I got a red camera. I got my first starter cannon or something. And those people, they're going to try to make their money back. So I got to charge higher fees because this is an investment to buy this equipment or to even get access to this equipment. Yeah, I'm trying to think. Who will be talking to this? Oh, Erko. Erko said that when we went to his studio. He said something like, I can charge without charge because I have like certain speakers and floors and things that you're not going to see in the average studio. Yeah. Okay. And best believe, I know a lot of y'all might think, ah man, people are just finessing and things like that. The quality difference is very real. Yeah, 100%. This is very real. I was personally messed up for a good minute. It was. Bro, I was very... Yeah, I was there, it was. I was very mad. I could not consume music the same or I was hurting by the low level of quality that I realized that I lacked in my music listening experience, bro. I get goosebumps just thinking back to it. We were listening to, so Erko, shout out to Erko, man. If y'all don't know, he's mixed, no, like a lot of people, Jay-Z, DMX, the lead, Kanye, so Travis. We were listening to... Praise God. Praise God. Yeah. Of which album is that? I almost said Life Pop, Donda. Donda. So he mixed that album, right? We're listening to that. I've heard the song before. Yeah, great song. It's like, that's all. Bro, you hear it there? The way it affects you emotionally. It's a whole... This is how music is supposed to be listened to. That should just hug you. Exactly. I feel like I can just sit there and just chill and listen to music. In the same way, someone go listen in a little hammock and chill outside and read a book. I could just sit in that studio, get a comfortable chair and just listen to music. Yeah, 100%. That's how crazy it was. So point is, it's a huge difference. And he even talked about him being able to listen. The level of quality of his equipment allowed him to even mix faster because he doesn't have to work through all these issues as much because sometimes you correct one thing and now you can hear all these other sounds and it's like, it's this entire noise and dirt that you have to work through. Now it's just crystal clear where the problems are. So there's very real, real, real things that get worked through when you pay for people with these equipment. And I suggest anybody, if you have the opportunity to go to a high quality studio, right? Maybe it might not be the best of the best, but just find something better than yours and then slowly work your way up the ladder and it's gonna be continuously like a journey. Like, okay, I need to, for the art of the music, like I need to try to continue to make this more consistent of experience. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, that's when it's a difference between a good sounding song and a song that's an experience. Cause that sure as hell was the experience. Yeah, that was a multi-million dollar studio here. Multi-million dollar studio. Mastering. $500 to 5K for mastering, depending on the number of songs needed, right? Which I think we all know and we all know that there's tools like, I'm not gonna show anybody's particular out. Yeah, I know it. You know what I mean? There's automated tools, right? That you can just throw your music in, $20 and AI will make it sound better for sure, right? And a lot of y'all, I suggest y'all use that, not try to pay somebody 500 to 5K until you start getting to that level you can justify it. Just no different than for the pie, some episodes we've used to free Adobe AI. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, we've used Adobe AI. Oh yeah, I remember that phrase. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. I mean, it still gets used sparingly if a mistake occurs. But that's why I compare it to 1K to 50K for single album artwork, depending on the quality of images you choose to produce, including editing and graphics. Shout out to the graphic designers. 50K for album artwork. That shit is crazy. Especially in today's age, right? So we're gonna go, generally speaking, the lower end of this, because we know ain't none of y'all paying that, right? I wouldn't know who is paying that. I would love to know. Well, you said a scenario that I think made sense, talk about that one. I could see it being, if you were working with a culturally relevant artist and you wanted to buy one of their artworks to be your artwork. But at that point, you basically, it's like buying art, you know what I'm saying? Right. It's like I own it and I get usage rights to it. So in that very specific scenario, I could see it. But I couldn't see an artist commissioning like a, even like a really good graphic designer. I could be wrong, man. Graphic designers don't come in the comments, man. I'm new to this, I'm learning. I can't see an artist going to like a new, no-name graphic designer giving them 50K for it. I can't see that. It's hard to imagine someone paying $50,000 for single or album artwork to anyone that gets called a graphic designer. But, you know, I hate the bad shot, man, but I've seen artists argue with graphic designers over $200 artwork. I've seen it. I've seen graphic designers get finesse over $100. This is what I'm saying. This is what I'm saying. 50K? If you get to that level, people aren't calling you a graphic designer anymore. They're calling you an artist. Yeah, definitely. Like, so that's clear. A good example would be just to clarify on what you said. If I paid, I'm gonna say Basquiat, because a lot of people know who Basquiat is, right? To make a custom work for me, right? To be my album artwork. Yeah, like his time, there's a lot of value already associated with him. He's a part of the marketing at that point. Yeah, and he's a part of the marketing. That makes a lot more sense, right? The closest example I can think of, of that is obviously Drake's cover. Him as a kid with the clouds. What album was that? Nothing was the same? That was it? Okay. I suck at album names, so I didn't want to say it at first, but cool. That's a good example of it. We not paying that, though. She says 1K on a low end. That one, I know for a fact, people paying $50 and using AI. Future didn't even want to pay it, man. You know what I'm saying? Future went to Getty. Got his most iconic album artwork for probably $20. Shoot, Drake's post with the Holly Berry Slime was more relevant than the actual single artwork. That was Getty in me, too, right? Yeah. Okay. And now I know our Getty wants to get paid. $5,000 to $150,000 for a music video. Now $5,000 is a consistent number I've heard and seen a lot of times for artists that I believe shouldn't be paying $5,000, but neither here nor there. Let's read her fine lines first. This only applies to actual videos with a concept and storyline not standing in the middle of the street rapping and singing. So she's saying, y'all basic ad videos. I know y'all gonna say y'all $200 or I'm cheaper than that. It was like, nah, we doing like BitBoy stuff over here. That's basically what she's saying. But even those videos probably gonna be at least 1,500, 2K. You can get some hot qualities standing in the middle of the street videos for like 2K. Yeah. Yeah, if you're talking about with the camera cameras. Yeah, exactly. So I would say, yeah, we've seen like 15K as a consistent for the ones that even got a little bit more concept for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you might find a buddy or somebody who's on their way up. So you catching why they're low. That's always the thing. But just normally being accessible, finding somebody who's already proven and you see a catalog that's established so you can trust them, you know, to help bring out the best in you because you don't have to direct every single idea they can hear your stuff and make it better or actually do what you see when you tell them. That's gonna be this. It really is. And the ones with a team, I think that's important to note, you know what I'm saying? Cause like people don't think about that when you're shooting a video. Like there's possibly four or five other people, sometimes more. I've heard rumors that like Lyrical Lemonade having like 12 niggas on set, you know what I'm saying? They got to get fed, they got to get there. You know what I'm saying? So like that goes into some of these higher costs as well. It's like you paying for the crew plus the storyboard and the quality, all that stuff. And then zero to unlimited in the marketing. So we just gonna leave it at that. Like zero to unlimited. We already know you could be completely organic, but if you're paying money, you can, you decide when you stop. There is no fixed costs for the marketing. And visualizers are low key irrelevant. Just make a video with your phone if you're that unsure or your art of your art. Or if you don't have a large budget, don't spend money on this, in my opinion. Don't spend money on visualizers. I think I agree with her with that, because what do we consider in a visualizer? You know, like the little eight second loops with the music playing in the background, you know? Cause I see what she's saying like, cause if we're assuming that the average, decent graphic art, decent to really good graphic artists is already she lined it up one K to 50 K for artwork. They probably charged at least 500 to two to three K per visualizer. You know, let's assume it's a bundle. I get artwork and some visualizers cause I already got the files for the artwork. That's a lot when I know I could just go whip out my iPhone 15 and some make a cool little eight second loop. And then that'll do just as good in most cases. So I kind of, I kind of feel her. I kind of see what she's coming for. That's what we're talking about, yes. But I've seen some dope visualizers where let's just say it's a photo shoot that's moving, right? Like there's enough aesthetic that set, right? It's intentional. It's just not, oh, I'm in some random location outside. And then I'm just recording off the phone. But I think it's valuable for your branding. If you do have like a, a significant POV on what your brand should look like to do a short visualizer, right? Again, it doesn't have to be expensive though. Like I think you can get those off a free or $200 a less with the right person because you are only trying to basically catch a shot and take it in for, like you said, eight seconds, maybe record 30 or two minutes just to have more content to work with. Yeah. But yeah, I've seen some dope loops though, where I'm like, all right, this actually adds to the video. I think the problem is most people aren't with the image that they capture. It's not, it's not worth it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think too, I mean, I guess even kind of coming from maybe where she's coming from with the money, I think in some instances, it will make more sense to pay for the visualizer than the video. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Cause it's like, I could spend, you know, to her point 5k to 150k for a video, I could spend 500 to 5k on a visualizer. And, you know, we already know that most consumer audiences are paying more attention to short form content anyway. So it's like, if I just need something to just, you know, help me pad the numbers or get a little extra boost in the YouTube algorithm or to your point have a little bit more content to post. Yeah, I'm going the visualizer open music video route. And we're assuming that we're going to hypothetically do all of it than y'all feel. Right, right, right, right. Well, she's probably doing all of it. Yeah, exactly. Now again, on the high end, her, her budget is going to $242,500 for one song. Yeah. And her whole point was like, this is why it's so hard to make money back. Yeah. That's why she dropped it. Right, this is just for one song. Now imagine an album with 18 songs on it, even 10 songs, if you want to operate at a level consistent with major label support, do the math required from the perspective of the artist is challenging to deliver the vision at the level you see it in your mind. If you don't have the resources from the perspective of the financiers, it will be foolish to spend money where you don't have a clear picture of how you're going to get that money back and do a whole episode on that. Let's take this, put it to the side, and then mention a couple of other things. Cardi B said she was paying like $600,000 a show for a show, her show production, right? Her set production. So you think, oh, she's getting paid this much for a show. It's like, she's really getting paid this much to put on a show. Yeah. Yeah. They're not making that money back, right? So, of course, if you're performing at that level, you're doing it that way because you've got to maintain brand. That's the only reason you want to do it. All right. Of course, you've got the art, well, you also have the artist side. I have my artistic vision, but then I also have a brand that I have to stay consistent with, and I need it to be a certain level of lit, I need a certain level of reliability, which means I can't pay the cheap person that everybody like, oh, I could just get a nigga for that, but this amount of money. Yeah, you can, but if you're in business long enough, you'll start to understand why people don't just get old bruh with who's only for $200, $500, $1000 or whatever. Right. Reliability becomes huge. Expertise becomes huge and even more meaningful when the stakes right raise. Right. But starting off, you know, cut the corners that you can or move with the budget you have, taking that to the indie side, then you have the Russell talking about these shows and this is an old post. We talked about it before, but I just, it was a great time to bring this back on February 26th. All right. And on February 25th, 2003, he had a couple of shows. One in Seattle. He made $8,176. One important he made $8,652 for a total of $16,829 and 40 cents. All right. All right. Great numbers. That sounds great. Y'all would love to make that for two nights as an artist, right? Well, let's cut to the chase. Collectively, the venues out of that $18,000 cost $4.8,000. Then he had to pay for the staff. All right. The flights to get there. He doesn't live in these cities. And collectively, his expenses added up to $16,722.99, just in case you forgot how much money he made. $100 more than that. $106 more than that. All right. He netted $106 and 41 cents on these two shows before his profits split with the entities. ENTL, what is a promotion company, I believe in this case. $53 per person. Now, why would you want to do this to yourself? Why would a business want to break even if it's a better question? All right. Because that's what you have to look at yourself as a business. Promotion. Promotion. Yeah, promotion. Promotion. Like the business side, the ENT legends, they get to say they had LaRussell, right? They helped him put on his shows. That's a part of their growth. All right, when they start pitching other people, because the other people are going to say, oh, man, yeah, they they brought LaRussell to the city. So one, they know that their trust already to bring other people to the city and then other artists are more willing to work with them. Great for their business. Long term. Now, LaRussell, why would he want to do it on the artist side? Again, promotion, but what is his promotion requirements or benefits? One, just to show he's active, he's out there getting shows and doing shows. Yep. All right, if you talk to the manager, they're always going to be talking about the hard tickets, right? Got to prove we sell them tickets. Established that we can actually sell some tickets, right? But this is all an investment, breaking even in the meantime, to hopefully make more money in the future. Right. That's all it comes down to. Yeah, and I would say, too, with LaRussell's model specifically, he probably made some money off of merch, you know, get him out of merch. He's very reliant on merch. And then he's big on content to see your point. He probably goes on. I get this shit documented and I can get this to be a 20 K 50 K view video that makes other motherfuckers want to come to a future show or, you know, his Pagola show in his backyard backyard with the expenses are lower because it's my house. Yeah, exactly. So I could I could see ours like him being like, yeah, this is because break even is great. We talk about on a really old episode. I don't remember what ours we were talking about. Yeah, I can't think of the girl that was talking about the production costs and moving to set around where, you know, we were like, bro, putting a tour on let alone, you know, a couple of shows like this, like you damn near lucky to break even breaking even is good. You know what I'm saying? Like it's very hard. Yeah, very hard, bro. Like I was in awful just the shows. We're not even talking about like whatever the merch profits. You know, how they kind of cover this stuff. So like all in all, I would say like breaking even and up is the win. You know what I'm saying? Losing, you know, saying like even if he had lost like a couple hundred dollars on this because of like those, you know, seemingly tangible long term benefits, we can still call that a win, you know, like let's say like, worst case he had lost like a thousand dollars or something. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Going through this whole process. Then it's like, OK, you got a thousand dollars to go, touch the people, sell some merch, collect some ticket data. You know what I'm saying? Get some content and then, you know, show your team that we moving forward. That's a good thousand I spent. Let people feel the pockets of momentum. That's a real thing. Yeah, exactly. He got. Totally $1,500 in marketing expenses that you put up here. Those are ads, by the way, seven hundred and twenty dollars on the Seattle ads and eight hundred thirty four dollars on the Portland ads. He's targeting those specific areas, I assume, when he's about to do the show. That money would have been a lot more if his content game wasn't so strong. I don't know how many people were at each show, but if it took just knowing what I know from running ads, selling outshows, all that stuff, if he spent eight hundred and thirty four dollars, he without content to get the number that he wanted to that actually came out, I would not be surprised if it cost at least five thousand dollars. Yeah, good. Can you go back up and see how many tickets he's already sold? Yeah, you got on here. Oh, let's see. So four fifty three. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Yeah, three for Seattle. I mean, he said the average ticket cost was 18. Let's assume he was getting 10 of it was costing him ten to fifteen dollars, a ticket sale from an ad perspective, then that will be what, like seven twenty. I don't feel like I hate doing math live, man. Niggas be calling us up on our math. You can do the edit, man. Yes, I even even if he was let's say he was doing ten to fifteen dollars a sale. That means like roughly seventy to ninety years tickets would have came from the ads and then the rest would have came to your point from probably content, word of mouth, you know what I'm saying? She like that. How many tickets is it total? That's what I want to see. Seattle's four fifty three. Four hundred fifty three. Yeah. Yeah. So if it was something like that, we're assuming he doing ten to fifteen a sale, you know what I'm saying? From the ads, it's costing him ten to fifteen to get one ticket sale then. Yeah, like even in that case, seventy to like a little under a hundred tickets would have came from the ads. So shit to your point. Yeah, that's crazy. Like that's, you know, more than seventy five percent of the tickets being sold through content and word of mouth. Content word of mouth and also the Russell's done a great job at collecting phone numbers and yeah, all that stuff, too. Yeah, phone numbers is still the number one way when it comes to shows. If you want to sell out, you got to get people's phone numbers. Now, with this being said, one dope that Russell put these numbers out here on the end sale. Now, if you go look at his numbers, his numbers are public in terms of his followers on Instagram at this time, he was, you know, of course, smaller than what he is today, but they're not majorly different right now than when they were earlier this year. Yeah. Like so you can go look at his Instagram. You can go look at his Spotify right and get a real get a real vibe of what it looks like. Matter of fact, let's just look it up. Let's talk about the fact that most artists fail to understand that it doesn't take forever to monetize your audience. We had an artist literally begin to take off and make $20,000 from his brand new audience in the same month. But how is that possible? It's because we're in a new era, baby. Yes, you want to continue to build a relationship over time, but the first time you make money from your audience can happen today. If you understand the new age music marketing funnel for artists. So if you want to hear about this approach and how you can apply it to yourself, I made a completely free video to watch at www.nolablesnecessary.com slash monetize. You got to make sure you put the www or if you're on YouTube, you can find the link in the description and check out how we help monetize artists for completely free. I promise it'll completely change how you see things. Currently, this number is imperfect because it might change, you know, might have just went up for whatever reason. But 317,000 monthly listeners. All right. And then if you go look at this IG, he's probably somewhere around like 750, 800,000. Now he's at 975 Kato. I didn't realize he almost to a milli. That's it, man. Shout out to Russell. Shout out to Russell, bro. Shout out to Russell. So with this being said, you're seeing these numbers of somebody who was killing it on social media, which goes back to money loans point, though, the difficulty of making music and then profiting from that music. The Russell is running really lean, really smart, really indie. He's not spending these numbers on his music. I can tell you that he's not spending 240,000 per track. Yeah, you know, I'm saying the high ends of her estimate, probably not even the low end if we just added up all the low ends of her numbers. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great point about his situation. I think when we talk to him, a lot of those pieces to the puzzle he has in house. Yes. And that was the big point where I'm like, all right. And when I said money loans, like the traditional artists, artists, not an entrepreneurial artist, because some I think, you know, I want to go into a whole topic because this I feel like it should be a be a whole topic and thing that gets talked about. A lot of times there's these really entrepreneurial artists that give all this inspiration to artists that are not the same animal as them. Preach, brother. You know what I'm saying? It's like, yo, I get what you're saying. You can do X, Y and Z and artists that is not that artists understand why you're inspired by them. But if you look at everything that they do and their moment of hustle, their way of looking at business, y'all actually don't look the same. And if you peel back the layers, it sounds very much so like some of the executives that you don't like how they sound. But you're not assuming you're not consuming it the same because it's an executive. You just got an artist saying it and you're like, oh, that sounds amazing. That's inspirational. But their minds, the way they're doing what they're doing, the numbers they're doing is because it's a little bit more business than you would be comfortable with. Some of y'all. Yeah, and if you need proof, go look at the comments on this video. I guarantee you it's gonna be somebody gonna say 240K for a song. That's ridiculous. Somebody gonna come back, come in back and say, no, brother, just mix your own songs and learn graphic design and cut your cost there and that artist gonna respond back. But the artist shouldn't have to do all that. We should just be allowed to make the music and decode your proof. I swear to God, I scroll through the comments. I bet y'all gonna see it. And this is the spectrum that you have to decide where you wanna fall. Exactly. All right. How far leaning are you gonna be on the artist's side without any business? How far are you gonna be on the business side and how much of the art are you willing to give up? Because undoubtedly, it's proven throughout time, it's very hard to be in full blown creative mode and full blown business mode. All right? Especially when you're coming up and have minimal resources because money long touched on it. Like, you know, what did she say? She said something about your creative vision. From the perspective of the artist, it's challenging to deliver the vision at the level you see it in your mind if you don't have the resources, right? So we're not talking about a Kanye who has hella resources right now. And as an artist, if you're constantly growing your vision, you'll hear Kanye still be like, I don't have enough money to do what I want to do. Right? So you have that challenge and that's the artist space and I actually told the artist this. Even if you have to start off with more of a business acumen side or if you're an artist and have to submit to the level of business that you can currently do, that's cool because if you're a real artist, in my opinion, the business will never be able to catch up to your vision. Like, you're always, you wanna do more, you're gonna see more and you're gonna be a bigger and bigger vision or just different things that you will want to do. All right? And it's very hard to actualize exactly how you saw things in your head because a lot of times technology don't even exist or the amount of people that might require. So there's always gonna be restrictions at one point or another. Yeah, that's the thing too, man. Give a little support to the not so creative artists that they catch a lot of flak but they might just be counting pennies and be like, man, sometimes to your point, vision is costly. Yeah. People don't talk about that, bro. Vision is costly. And sometimes having no vision will save you a couple of dollars, bro. You keep it simple, you keep it light. You know what I'm saying? To the money-lone's point, you go seeing in the middle of the street. You know what I'm saying? We've been sending them, what's that platform called? It's not off the radar, but the platform where they just be rapping in the middle of the street with the light hanging down, bro. Them shit's going viral. It's not the most creative idea, but that should go. And I think it's important as an artist, especially looking at these numbers, to also understand when do I turn on my super creative brain and I go all out in my creativity and then when do I possibly tone it down a little bit so I can afford to get to that next big creative idea. Yeah. And I say, artists I love y'all because I love people and artists are also people. But with that reminder, with that reminder, it's a people problem out of artists problem. I think we box things in and artists sometimes look at the music industry in a negative way and then allow that to make them feel impressed and put them in his rut and make them feel like they have this unique problem where this money is creating this issue. But ultimately it's just going through the fight to experience your artistic freedom. Yeah, that's a great point. Because they think it's a money issue and what it really is, is this is an industry but everybody really values their skillset. So you look at numbers like this and someone might go like, man, 7K for mixing is crazy. Set it to a mixing engineer that's been working on his craft for 20, 30, 40 years. You know, I brought up the point that I thought like 50K for a cover would be crazy. Let's talk about artist devalue and artist. Oh man, hey, mixing is an art, baby. For producing is an art. All of it is, yeah. Every aspect of this is art in a sense. The marketing is art, the production is art, the mixing is art, that's actually a great point. All of these are the more artistic sides of the art. We record the whole episode and really call it out. Because somebody started looking at the marketing costs and be like, man, that's crazy. I jump out of my seat and start making some points. You know what I'm saying? I can assume that every position on here would make a similar case if an artist was like, nah, this is too much, this is crazy. And so that's the... And every one of these people can get in their bag, including great marketers. And the same way artists will complain about pop artists. And when I say pop, I mean like popular or viral artists, all right, having an audience that doesn't understand the real shit, you know what I mean? And that the audience, oh man, y'all don't appreciate the real music like mine. Y'all like the basic stuff. The engineer would be like, oh man, yeah, you only paying for that because you don't appreciate the real good stuff. I hear all the BS and issues in this. Everybody can do that. It's like, you don't know what got missed, right? So everybody, when you're not in your own bag, you're gonna miss it and have some level of ignorance. But again too, you're fighting for your level of freedom and what, for your creative vision of art and life. That's what everybody is doing. Yeah, the whole industry is going. Not even just the industry, bro. Oh, you mean like literally everybody. People in general, that's what people are doing. Everybody like would like to work like that. I'm not making the money that I wanna make and I wanna make more money. And why do I wanna make it? Because I wanna be able to live in this space that's the life that I wanna live. It's the same version. The life we design is an art work in itself. And artists, I think, I don't know, I think I'm just growing more and more tired of the victimization mentality. We, I don't even say we, but they get pushed on artists. Yeah, not us, but like it gets pushed on artists so much. And there is a fine line between empathy and what's the word I'm looking for? Bullshit? No, disempowering. Okay. Like you can tell somebody something, you could be empathetic that somebody might have a harder reality, right? Of what they're going through, like the circumstance. You can have empathy for somebody's circumstances, right? You can also speak on to make somebody aware of their circumstances if they aren't fully aware of all the issues of their circumstances and obstacles. However, if it gets repeated and programmed into them, right at some point, you disempower them because you're making their obstacles bigger than they are, all right? Just the vision, the focus. It's like a rock being close and now you bringing that shit right to my face, right? And now it becomes a bigger block because mentally I'm thinking about this versus how to get around it or like just being free and thought in general. Some people don't see the obstacles and that becomes their advantage because they're just ignorant. You talk about the blissful ignorance of the youth sometimes or just somebody who's coming from the outside and they change the game because they weren't in the game and aware of the problems. So like we programming and everybody's like, everybody's evil, everybody's evil. Artists are broke, artists are broke. Everybody's trying to take money from artists and like it just, I don't know, man. I should get on my nerves. No, I agree, man. Cause it's like, you know, with us being on the marketing side which marketing a lot of times is one of the more expensive costs of song promotion just putting the song out in general. We will see that, right? What I learned that there will be some artists who will see, let's just say like our cost, they will see it and to them there will be just this wall that they feel like was insurmountable. Like I'm never getting over this 2K, this 3K, whatever. And then you could see some artists be like, okay, that's how much it costs. I ain't got it, but at least I know the number now. I know how big the wall is and how I got to climb. And you know, I've been sending this for a long time, man. Like one of my favorite things to do in the music industry is to break the rose tinted glasses of artists. I've been sending for a long time. Anybody's ever taught to me one-on-one, you've heard me say it. And this is probably one of my favorite episodes because I can only imagine how many glasses just shattered shit from the intro for real. Matter of fact, your rose tinted glasses broke, dropped the googly eye emoji in the comments, man. Let me see how many more focus, you know what's on the spiral eye of emoji with the like, it's like the, sorry, you don't talk about it, look dizzy and shit. But that tells you a lot about an artist and sometimes tells you a lot about, like I don't know, looking back on clients that I see now that are successful and I think about earlier conversations with them when they were smaller and had less resources, they were always like that type of artist. Like they would hear a number and instead of letting it discourage them, they'd be like, oh, this is gonna cost me 50K to do? Cool, at least I got the number. I know how I need to shoot verses to your point, getting all in their feelings about it or shit, maybe not even having the information and being at a disadvantage because you don't realistically know how much it costs to get certain things done. So there are artists out there who let these numbers discourage them and take themselves out of the race and there are some artists who just see this as like a game and it's like, cool. Now I know what I need to do. Thank you for letting me know how hard the wall is. Now I know that I can't just climb this shit out of my hands. Let me go get some pig axes and some ropes and all that shit. No, that's perfect. Beautifully said, that's a perfect place to end it. This is yet another episode, another episode that was necessary. I'm Brandon Sean. And I'm Colby. And we out. Peace.