 The new year is coming. How can I get poppin', all right? What's gonna be relevant? What are the new things that I should be doing? What are the old things that I should be doing to make my music move in this next year? And marketing moves so fast. I think a lot of artists miss out on the things that already turned the curve. You gotta stop doing that. So for this conversation, we wanna talk about overrated music marketing tactics for this year to come. What you think about the playlist name? Are you gonna overrated with that one or no? Yeah. You talked about it. Yeah, it's overrated, bro. Okay. So what we were talking about pre-show is I was saying that it's still a relevant conversation for artists at a certain level. If we go back to my zero to 10 example, I'll keep using super relevant conversation between people from like a zero to like a three. You know what I'm saying? I think the higher you get, the more you start to either have discernment for playlisting or you start to understand more about how it fits into the overall marketing infrastructure. Right? And so what I've come to see playlisting as is it is one, just a social proof builder, right? Hey, this thing was gonna do 50,000 streams. Let me put an extra 100K on it. So I look nicer to my investors or to that booking agent I'm talking to or to that, you know, that I don't know that product guy that wants to maybe give me a sponsorship, right? Let me do things that make the numbers look big to people who are not able to get full context in this space. Right. And then on top of that, it's a bragging moment. Like once you talk about like getting into like editorial playlist, right? Not like the necessarily running a meal like third party plays, but like, you know, like your most necessary or you know what I'm saying? Like those editorials, those are more like bragging moments, one within the industry, but then two to your audience because their audience typically doesn't understand what hoops you have to jump through or somebody around you had to jump through to get you on those. So it's cool to say, hey, I got it on most necessary. Great, you know what I'm saying? Go listen to it. Oh, that's great. Great for you. Write some good celebratory moment within your fan base. Outside of that, those two things it doesn't hit. It never hits like people needed to. And I'm talking about at all levels, bro. Like I was telling you off camera, one of the biggest things that changed the way I looked at playlisting was I had a Ari's homie get into a really big playlist. It might have been like Teardrop or something. Like it was huge. And like, they let me look at their backhand looks and what came from it. And the string spike to drop off looks exactly the same as when you get an independent playlist. Right? So I'm like, oh, this issue isn't even a bot playlist issue. It's not an independent curator playlist issue. This is just an issue across playlisting as a whole. You know, because like Teardrop was a massive playlist. You know what I'm saying? It's a pretty big playlist, especially in that space. So it's like, you literally can see it. The spike, then the curve drop off. And then it's back to probably just his core audience. Maybe a small bump in the floor from like new people coming from the most part. Like it didn't go back to, things didn't go back to like, you know, exactly as they were before the playlist. But like the increase in the floor was like very, like small compared to like what they saw during the spike. And so that completely changed the way I looked at playlisting. Cause I was like, okay. But I watched everything else in a moment. You know, he's on it. I'm watching him get, you know, these people reach out to him and congratulating them. And you know what I'm saying? Offering all these things, the social proofing aspect of it, right? Hey, this big platform thought you were important enough. So maybe I should see if you important enough with some shit I got going on. You know what I'm saying? So I saw that aspect of it. And like I just saw like, like I saw the social proofing part of it kind of get put into play. And then looking at the analytics is like, okay, this is the fan aspect of it. But like they came in, it's cool. They drop off and go about whatever. I don't think he ever got crazy. Like other platform engagement from being on it could be wrong. I actually do remember seeing one comment on one of his YouTube videos that mentioned seeing him in the playlist. So that was pretty cool, right? Like, but even that goes back to the fan brag moment, right? This has got like, oh shit. This is my favorite artist, bro. He's an XYZ playlist. He's the cover of XYZ playlist. Like those are typically the only two moments where it seems like playlisting cares. Celebratory moment, if you're trying to be a social proofing or something. Other than that, shit does not matter. Overwrite it. Stand on it. I'm gonna go 100% and I think the problem is the lack of culture with playlist. When I say that, I mean, if you look at a brand as a playlist, brands have trouble scaling and maintaining culture and taste, all right? I mentioned this earlier on another episode and if you're not really looked at as a true curator, why will people continue to follow? Most playlists, people get into because of convenience, not out of a cultural pool, you know? So if I see the R&B playlist on Spotify, A, R, E and B, you know how they flip titles and stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm in the R&B mood today and I wanna check that out. I'm gonna follow that playlist, right? But it's not because of true culture and I'm not looking at it and checking on it repeatedly like I might with somebody who's a taste maker that I like on TikTok that says, oh, this music is good and they're already putting me onto new artists, all right? And there's an association in context of telling me why I like it, right? Like Sean C saying I like or don't like this because X, Y and Z, all right? So there's that element that's missing from almost everything as you scale up it becomes really difficult to maintain that with artists, right? That's how people always graduate into selling out in some way, but then on the other side of it it becomes even more difficult when you're a faceless brand, all right? So you're just a, you're really a graphic. That's what you are to me on Spotify. I don't really know anything about you anywhere else. I probably only follow you on Instagram, anything else like that. There's no lifestyle I associate. It's just a fucking graphic, all right? So why am I gonna keep checking up on this playlist? So it makes it difficult and if you talk about these editorial playlists you look at the benefit on Spotify side the benefit is there for people to continue to go to the playlist cause it's like, yo this playlist is really powerful. So we can keep churning and adding to this playlist and focusing on building this playlist because it's bringing us more activity on the platform and that's exactly what we want. However, Spotify finds benefit in that but they aren't limited to benefit from just that. What if that doesn't work? What if that's too hard? What does Spotify also get benefit from? Well, you follow me another playlist on the platform, right? So yeah, there was this general R&B playlist but now it's Valentine's. So I'm just gonna pop up this Valentine's day photo and it's gonna have some other same artists possibly and you're gonna follow that playlist and it's still my playlist and I'm still getting the listenership, right? So I don't really care as much about building a culture around a single playlist. Spotify is in constant sales mode, right? That's why they're always changing the covers, right? Changing these names with something clever to constantly attract you in because they know the user can get a little lazy and they're gonna find the thing that pulls their attention in at the moment. So they have to recapture attention again and again, refreshing these headlines. That's what you see now on Netflix and these other platforms too where they'll have five, six different covers. It's like, oh, okay, he's seen this cover like five times. Let him see a different character and think it's a different movie for a second. You know what I mean? Because we're still gonna get the benefit as long as you stream, period, you know? So that culture is in there, which makes me think the stronger culture I've seen around a Spotify playlist editorial specifically was the rap caviar. That was what I was aware of, right? I feel like it was kind of weakened. And that was what I was about to ask you, what is your insight or thought on the power of rap caviar today versus what it was before? Yeah, I'd never thought about this before, but just thought about it because of what you said about the faces brand thing. Yeah. At the time when rap caviar was really popping was when what's his name? Tumah Basa was the one running it. And he was the one Spotify curator that we knew was over it, right? And then he leaves and then it goes back to every, now every playlist on Spotify is faceless now. Yeah. So I think that's what happened. You are, you are right. Now, of course a lot of the consumers don't necessarily know who Tumah is, but he was such a strong face in the industry built up, you know, people, he has so much face card in the industry that 100%, he was a curator and influencer within the industry that in many ways influenced the outer industry. Yeah, it's the same way with what was it? Carl Sherry and Apple? When Apple, yeah. And now he's at Spotify now, right? I think so, yeah. So it was like that, these were the two playlist brands where I could go find the person that made it and like follow them on Instagram or meet them at a conference where I versus like today, I don't know who updates Teardrop, you know what I'm saying? I don't know who updates most necessary and maybe some intern, you know what I'm saying? But we'll never know. And so yeah, I think that's what kind of killed it off. It's like that cultural tie that's kind of like failed by the wayside because artists wanna partner with a person, not an entity, you know what I'm saying? People wanna partner with a person. Yeah, people wanna partner with people. Yeah, exactly. Like be able to have a face attached to it. So yeah, but I've never thought about that till you said the whole like people thing. And then today, I mean, there are individual curators that are front facing. Maybe they're like TikTokers or YouTubers and things. And usually those players are the best playlist. Like they have the most engagement. You see like high scale impact relative to like whatever you may have had to pay or do to get onto the playlist. You can see the impact carry over into their audience, right? So you could very much so hit a TikToker for a promo post on their page, getting their playlist and then see the effect that that whole line is having on that fan that found you from them. I saw your post, when his players listened to it, I thought that she was fired and boom, I'm back, right? And so I do think like, playlists thing still has its place in music. I do think if we could really graph out all of the music marketing things you could do, like I would put it on there. I do think there's a time when it makes sense. I just think for most rising artists, it doesn't make sense. One, because you probably are not getting on the playlist that can have that type of impact for you. And then two, the biggest one to me is that it fucks up the rest of your marketing infrastructure build. Because now you're getting all this traffic in so fast from this like relatively unreliable source that you can't accurately fine tune like the other parts of your machine, right? It's like we had a campaign once where I remember we were building out the artist's ad funnel, nothing crazy, maybe like a $500 ad budget. And then in the beginning, it's easier to see because like you got zero streams and you go to doing 100 streams a day. It's very clear to see like where that's coming from, right? But then the artist gets into a playlist and then it jumps out to doing 10,000 streams a day. And now I can't see where the ad phone is having an impact, right? I can't see where my influencer strategy is having an impact. I can't see where my content strategy is having an impact because you overrided it with all this playlisting traffic. And so I think that playlisting for a majority of artists makes sense when you have other legitimate parts of your fan funnel built out, right? Like you have your content influencer, whatever that looks like for you, if you can see a very clear correlation between you doing this thing or a thing and Z output being made and you have tried and done up to see that it consistently works, at that point I can understand when the artist wants to do playlisting. Yeah, I equate that to constraints and marketing. That's how we look at it, right? When we think about scaling the company, we marketers, right? We can market our ads off, create all kinds of viral campaigns, cool campaigns, we can do that. But what does that matter if our infrastructure isn't built out and there's no business set in place that can capitalize off of the marketing that occurs, right? And then there's no operations within that business that truly can fulfill to the scale of the marketing. So we're constantly at this ebb and flow, oh, let's build the infrastructure to a certain place. And then we can scale using all types of tactics, playlisting will fall as a part of that, like one of the top layers of scale in what your analogy is, right? Because you have your infrastructure just enough in place, the initial marketing, and then you have the marketing that's like, I'm gonna go bigger, right? But when you think about those tiers, it's always starting with, well, hey, do I have enough infrastructure in place? And if I'm marketing, is it overrated to start it now or is it overrated to start it later? Because that's what this whole list comes down to, right? Like it's not, none of these things are useless, right? But their usefulness comes down to when they're executed. Yeah, 100% context. Context is everything. That's like my motto, man. That's like my life motto for real. Like I hate things out of context. I hate being taken out of context. And those nuances make a massive impact. Let me take a quick second to say, if you're an artist trying to blow your music up or if you're a manager, a music professional in general, trying to help an artist blow their music up, I have something that's a game changer for you and it's completely free. As you may know, we've helped multiple artists go from zero to hundreds of thousands of streams. We've helped multiple artists go from hundreds of thousands to millions of streams, chart on Billboard, GoViral, all of that stuff. And we've now made the way we've branded multiple artists and helped them go viral completely free, step by step in Brandman Network. All you have to do is check out brandmannetwork.com. You apply, it's completely free. But the thing is, we're not gonna let everybody in forever so the faster you apply, the better your chance of getting accepted. Brandmannetwork.com, check it out, back to the video. So with that being said, let's get to the next thing that's a little overrated. Chikori, put them on game in terms of these TikTok influencers. Where are we with TikTok influencers? Yeah, TikTok influencers are super overrated. So I do wanna preface it by saying this, I do think that you can have a successful TikTok influencer campaign. I just think the way that is typically thought about is super overrated, right? So before we've kinda looked at TikTok influencers as the magic button, relatively cheap, compared to other influencers, the organic engagement is usually five to 10X what it could be on other platforms. And then the possibility that this idea could, or there's the idea of this one influencer post could just spark a whole bigger thing in terms of like a trend or something like that, right? Which all that stuff is possible. It's still very much so possible. It just happens a lot less, right? Like I think back to what, 2019, 2020, when we were doing TikTok, where it was like some viral shit, like damn near once a week versus today, where it might be some super viral shit, like once every like three months, you know what I'm saying? Three, four months or something like that. The relative to like how big the platform is now. And so I think they're overrated in the sense of creating this massively viral moment. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it takes a lot more for that to happen and it's going to happen a lot less and it's gonna continue to keep happening a lot less. Now they do still have their uses just I think a regular marketing tool. Like if you're looking at a dollar cost average of the amount of attention you get for the money you put into it and you're just looking at it like a regular brand awareness campaign or maybe judging it from the same way you judge your YouTube influencer or Instagram or other social influencer campaigns, right? Then there is still value there. Nobody gets a YouTube influencer post hoping like thinking it's gonna go viral and change everything, right? Like you don't get an Instagram influencer post and think like, oh, this one post is gonna just spark everything off. It might, you know what I'm saying? There's a hot chance that it could. But I don't think most people are planning their campaigns necessarily with that being the end goal. They're planning to get a little bit more strategically and logically. And I think that same level of discernment and thinking needs to be applied to TikTok influencer campaigns for it to be effective. If you're looking for like the old school, let me just pay 30 motherfuckers with hello followers to post and this shit should go viral and credit trend. Sorry to say, probably ain't gonna happen that way. Now if you're like, hey, here are six influencers who I feel like audiences represent who I wanna speak to and I don't expect their posts to go viral but just speak to the right people. Yeah, that still makes sense, you know what I'm saying? That still can have an impact. Overrated in the context of creating like these magic moments like they used to. There it is. There it is. It's just misplaced expectation. And at one time, it was rightful expectation. Yeah, 100% right. Because that's how they got that opportunity. That's how TikTok start popping. It's like, yo, I'm hearing that people are blowing up over there every day. What's going on? Let me get into the house now. Yeah, no, it's not so much. But the cool thing about it when we talk about the brand aware side that you talked about is if you look at these relevant influencers, right, you can still get your image built within that community. You can still start to create this social proof effect of someone's willing to actually physically do something to my music. That's so different than you running an ad on the music video itself. This person is socially saying this is okay, right? To show love to this thing. Even if they took money for it, like as people are aware, some people are doing paid campaigns, the fact that they were able to take payment because so many people are turning down horrible music. So someone doing something physically to your music is still amazing content for you. And it is cheap when you compare it to, hey, I need to hire some people to shoot a video for me and bring them out in my city. And we're gonna meet at this location and set all these things up. How much do I owe you, right? The way somebody with no following would think a lot of times and how much they would ask for would end up being more than just somebody who has 50,000 followers on TikTok. People with 50,000 followers, you could pay them $50. 25, some of them and get away with it, right? And they're still shooting content. And now you can use this content in so many other ways and catalog the experience and narrative of your song, all right? So I think that is an underrated, no, an overrated thing in terms of that expectation, but 100%, like what you said, man, it's still valuable and please understand this, right? Like the regular marketing stack, virally is something that has to be engineered but is never the primary expectation, right? It's the icing on the cake. It's the icing on the cake, that's what you want. But you don't expect it as if, hey, I deserve it because I did these things. Today, we still have some artists that feel like, oh, because I paid five influencers and spent $2,000, I deserve to go viral. And if it didn't go viral, it's because of the marketers fault or because the influencers did something wrong, they didn't post it the right time. It's not that, it's a lot of other elements that we're not gonna get deeper into because it isn't a solely TikTok segment, but yeah, just know that everybody's feeling it. It's not just you. But you touched on a really important point too. I think help the way we look at TikTok influencers and that's looking at them is work for higher content creators. Right, because now the bang of the buck is strengthening. I could pay you $100 and let's say the post only gets 1,000 views and I might feel like, hey, that wasn't enough return from the brand awareness perspective, but you as a creator made me an amazing piece of content. I still think the video was dope. And then I have all these ideas on how I could use it in my ads maybe, or maybe you pay some other pages to repost it and do whatever with it. And then that doubles, triples the value you got for the payment. And I know, because we were right there at the front of the gold rush for TikTok. I do want people to understand that, bro. We speaking from being at the front of the line, like watching how it kind of changed from down out. And yeah, that to us, I think that for us was a big game changer once we kind of sat down with it. Hey, like if that post does great, cool. If it does new great, we need to be looking at the actual content and what we can do with that so we can strengthen the bang we got from it in terms of the audience kind of makes it weak. So yeah, I just want, I don't want people to sleep on that part because that shit really does. Like you can get your brain and think of it that way. The brand awareness I get is the bonus, but I'm really paying you for the content and what I plan to do with it after that completely changes the context of like the TikTok influencer campaign. Every time. Every time. Every thing. Part of the interruption, I have to take this quick commercial break to let you know that we are sponsored by me because I signed myself. We signed ourselves. It's this brand man network. That's why we're calling no labels necessary because no label, nobody else is necessary for us to get the train moving. So if you could just subscribe to show appreciation, we'd really appreciate that. Back to the program. So next we have selling merch overrated from a standpoint of selling merch via ads when you don't even have a fan base. Okay. There's a lot of people who have done merch sales, trying to offer something for free to create a fan, right? And I understand the funnel and I know that it's worked in some dynamics when you have a lot of funnel knowledge and you break down all these things and you've seen some level of success by offering something for free and now you have this fans information and now you're giving some stuff on the back end. I get that so many people have done it, but most people don't see the greatest results out of it. Here's why. Because one, how are you selling merch to someone who doesn't know and care about you? How are you trying to build your fan base with merch? It doesn't make sense, right? Okay. And a lot of people are doing that or still think that that's like a thing. Now, here's a sub tier to this. Another thing that I think is overrated is merch that reflects your music and your face directly. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like, no. Yeah. Today, you have the ability to build a lifestyle and a messaging around yourself. And if you just allude to that lifestyle message and vision that you represent for people, you can build an entire brand that doesn't even have your face on it that's popping. Like, I know an artist, she told me that she made like 300, 400K in merch last year, but she doesn't even associate herself with it anymore. Like people don't even know that she's behind it because it represents a larger message, right? And now she's almost just like a spokesperson for the brand and it's how people see her along with some other people that they'll have put on the stuff, but they don't even know it's her. It's like the golfing model. Yes. Yes, exactly. So don't sell yourself short. Represent something greater and you can always have these small capsule launches that are more use specific, right? That's built around this special tour, built around this special album and it's limited, right? And done in that time, you do it and take away, but you have a larger merch brand that can sell at any time, any day as long as somebody reps the message. You know what I mean? Yeah. For me, I'm just about the artist making money as soon as they can and reducing the friction. Again, never saying, not ever saying, I'll never drop merch with my face on it or with my album cover on it or something like that, right? It's just understanding that you can flip the model and make money and build a brand and a culture regardless. And then next to that, right? Your merch brand, right? The company that you own can do a collaboration with you as an artist. Yeah, yeah, and I agree with that. Because I think the important distinction is using merch to grow. Because I agree, but if you're not in a position to where you think you can sell the merch, you should not be pressing on merch. Even if your context is, hey, I got a show on Friday, it's gonna be 50 people there. I think I can get 10 of these off. Cool, I will understand that situation. You know what I'm saying? Like go for it, why not? People be drunk at these shows, man. They might drop 30 or 40 out of nowhere. They will. But yeah, if you are in a position where you don't think, I was gonna get like, if I don't think I can sell at least double my inventory, I won't do it. Like that's how we used to look at when we did shows. Like, all right, we wanna press up 40. Do we feel like we could get off 80? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. If yes, then let's go for it. If not, then let's keep building and keep trying to build demand for it. And I know a person that worked out really well for us about time we did drop merch, like it should just fly in the fuck off, you know what I'm saying? I'm big on that, by the way, creating those type of parameters mentally. And the sole reason is because our feelings are usually off. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're bad thermometers for what really is. So we need to create that wiggle room. Yeah, I can do double, triple that just so we can hit that number sometimes. Yeah, yeah, bro. It's like I'm shooting for the top, but I'm big on that. Yeah, it's like the music video conversation all over again, like the money to produce it and then to not make the money back is gonna be more detrimental than if you just didn't do it. You know what I'm saying? And you focus that energy on something else. And like the rare situations where like, I think merch giveaways can produce like a new fan or like very, very slim to none. Merch is typically better. It's just a pure monetization vehicle or to reward people that are already your fans. You know what I'm saying? Like you give that free t-shirt to the person that's already proven his loyalty to you, not to this person you trying to convince to go listen to your song on Spotify. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't have the same impact in that scenario. As the person that has been listening to you, he gonna get that shirt? I'm like, damn, I'm gonna go buy another one for my sister or give me a hoodie because this shit is fire. The person that you gave it to to check you out is already looking like, man, he had to give me this $40 t-shirt or however much it costs for me to go listen to his music or to even give him a chance to check him out. They're not seriously gonna check you out. Oh, they might, but it's gonna be more so I like pity. You know what I'm saying? Like you kind of like bought their ear, you know what I'm saying? But that's basically what ads and everything else is and it's much cheaper, you know what I'm saying? So it always comes back to cost, bro. It always does, but it comes back to cost. Always, man, always. Cause cost determines on how long you can do it or not. That's what it is. Now, speaking of ads, another thing that's overrated. Cheap ads. Cheap ads? Cheap ads are overrated. Okay. Why are cheap ads overrated? Because I hear again and again and again, oh man, I got my cost per click down to this. I got my cost per click down to that. But what does that really mean? Running ads are more than just getting your cost per click down. Ultimately, the whole function of running ads is about the return on your investment. So if I'm an artist marketing my music video, I got my cost per click down. Many people are clicking over to the landing page, but then they're not clicking to watch the video or stream the song. What does it really mean to have a low cost per click? Or if I'm getting fans in, I don't know, 12 different countries and however many different cities, what does it really mean if I got one fan in 500 different cities? But I had a really low cost per click, but I didn't really tell them where to target so I could get a low cost per click. None of that really makes sense cause you're not building a fan base in a specific area enough for you to be able to capitalize on it, right? So it's always like the starter marketer is looking at cost per click, right? That's like the first thing that you kind of are trained to look at, but over time, you have to adjust to have a legitimate strategy. And honestly, marketing without a strategy is overrated, right? But that's what most people are doing. That's really what it comes down to. It's the difference between the team that came to us last year and they were like, hey, I just wanna be able to target these two or three cities, find the two or three cities that are making the most sense for this artist and who's responding best and then when we find that, well, I wanna find the best city and do a show six months from now, all right? Oh, okay, that's really targeted and it might be more expensive to do that. Usually it is. Usually it is, right? 100% because you're targeting in a specific place, maybe more than ads. It could be other activities that you're doing, but you actually can get a return on your investment. So that $1,000 that you spent there and it seemed like you got less out of it, might actually be a better return than this $1,000 I spent worldwide and I have no idea how to get my money back. So don't obsess over something being cheap for the sake of cheap, right? Or doing whatever marketing activity for the sake of doing a marketer activity. What are you looking to get out of it and what is it creating for you that you can then leverage to get to something else? Yeah, nah, I agree 100%. 100%, man. Like even at this point, our marketing team, I mean, we take what the ad platform is the same for cost per conversion and clicks into consideration, but we're typically doing our own manual calculations for cost spent versus like smart lean conversions, right? Yep. I mean, well, I guess it's in brand mail. People don't know we use one called Tondin, like you're able to see what the CTR is on there. And so I'm training the team to like, hey, don't look at Facebook saying it costs you 10 cents a click. Look at your calculations across the clicks on your smart link and do your math on that. So you really might be at 40 cents, a true conversion, you know what I'm saying? Something like that. But that typically is more impactful because all the cost per click really tells you on the campaign is one of two things. Either you're, whether or not you're targeting to a really saturated area or how good your content is, right? Cause typically the better the content, the cheaper the cost per click is as well, right? Like good content plus the right audience, cheap ads, right? Good content, bad targeting, not a cheap, maybe they're not a cheap, right? Bad content, either those markets is gonna suck, you know what I'm saying? So typically that's how we look at like, the cost per click is letting us know, are we pushing it to the right people or are we pushing, or is this piece of content like the right thing? Other than that, it doesn't really tell you much else. Most of your other fan data or listen to that is gonna come from like your DSPs and like your smart link data and things like that. That's gonna tell you like true, honest to God, like behavior patterns amongst the people that you're targeting. Because it's also very possible to have a cheap ad that doesn't convert well to the music. We've seen that, right? Your ads doing 10 cents on the front end. Look at a smart link, they got like a 4% click rate. And it's like, okay, well, something, there's some gimmick about the content itself that made people click over in droves. But then once they got there, they were like, oh, what the fuck is this shit? I don't want this, right? I'm not here for this. It's like, it's the equivalent of like, I'll see a lot of artists who like to use like skits and things as advertisements. And that's typically the issue there. It's like, hey, all these people are clicking because they thought this shit was funny. And they got to the other side and like, oh, this shit from music? Oh, hell no. It was like, no, I'm going, I'm going back to where I came from, right? So it's like, you end up being in a much better position like training yourself to look at like the cost per back end even doing your own manual calculations, you know what I'm saying? Versus going like, oh, Facebook said I got 20 cent cost per click. Oh, okay, this is good. Because like, no, that 20 cent ad could be producing a lower quality audience for you than that $1.50 ad. Like we've had a campaign like before. I remember there was one campaign we did for R&B artists. He had an ad running to the US that was doing maybe like a $1.18 cent cost per click but it had like a 90 something percent click rate on it. So like, it's like, these people are expensive but they're very high quality people. Like that damn it almost always going to go stream something. He had a similar ad that was, I don't remember what it was pushing to maybe like, I don't even remember, I don't even throw that on the country but it was pushing somewhere, no, US. And I remember the cost per click on it was maybe like 30, 40 cents but it was doing like a 40% click rate on it, right? So it's still pretty good for like the cost of it. It's like, but these people, the audience of people that's hitting for whatever reason are not as high quality as the more expensive ad that we're pushing out. And so I think that's always something that has to be taken into consideration. Like, is this, okay, you've established that this audience is cheap but are they quality, right? Because in most instances, you will be better off. Like I said, I would much rather have the $1.15 cost per click with the 90% click rate than the 40 cent, you know what I'm saying? Cost per click ad with the 40% click rate. And then work from there to figure out how can I make this $1.15 cheaper. Exactly, because that's much easier than the reverse of it, right? Like how do I make these people like this thing more? Yeah. Right, because like I said, usually we can go like, okay, it's expensive because, you know, but well, this video that we're using for the ad is shitty, bad content. Go make some new content, right? Maybe the next video knocks it down to 70 cents or something, right? So there's always like a way to process like what is the issue on that end as long as we can at least see that people like the end result, which is music, you know? So yeah, I agree with you, bro. I've been waiting for that topic to come up in the group. So I didn't know how we was gonna ever bring it up. You know what I'm saying? But yeah, okay. Man, hey. Now it's way too important. It's way too important, right? We all want to graduate together and you know, even we have talked about getting a cheap cost per click at one point in time. But you know, I think it's important to make sure the community keeps elevating and understanding that it's so much more to this marketing than that, right? It's full funnel. Yeah. Now when I say it's hard to people, I don't even say cheap, I say good. We're looking to get you a good cost per click, you know what I'm saying? 100%. Because good can be subjective. Exactly, exactly. Cheap is not the goal. Winning is the goal, right? Now what gets you there? Yeah, pass. Now, getting on platforms too early, overrated. Matter of fact, I switched it up. I should just say getting on platforms early is overrated. But too early is especially overrated and that too early is people asking about rumble right now, right? It's another new platform. And I know that there's this first mover advantage when it comes to should I get on TikTok, should I get on Triller, should I get on Dubsmas, should I get on Rumble, should I get on Discord? All this stuff, you're like, I heard that if I get on this platform fast and then when everybody else comes, I'm gonna blow up because I took advantage of it before everybody else. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, slow your roll. Not necessarily. There's multiple factors because you still have to do it to a quality where you actually win on that platform, one. But you do get some true excessive gains when the platform grows, if you are at that top and the platform grows in the way that you think, right? That you think, that's the important part about it because many of these platforms aren't gonna grow at all. Not to what you think they are. And here's my issue with the first mover, FOMO mentality when it comes to artists. If there's a new platform that comes out and you abandon everything you're doing on your current platform to put most of your effort on this new platform, what if that new platform doesn't exist anymore? What if I said, yo, I'm not going to make any IG videos, I'm gonna start doing everything on Triller right now a couple of years ago and that was your MO. And then what happened when Twitter wiped out or Triller wiped out? Gone. Gone, right? You built this fan base that you can't even tap into anymore that's completely irrelevant and now you're out on the game. So what I say is you can dabble and test some things, but especially as a new artist with limited resources and needing to focus, focus on getting good at a platform, like for real good at a platform. Like anybody can invest in YouTube at this point and be pretty assured that it's probably gonna be around for a minute, right? It might be harder to grow on YouTube now that it was so long ago. However, if you get really, really good at YouTube you know that there's gonna be a positive outcome, right? But some of these new platforms be real for instance right now, you can get really, really good at be real whatever that looks like, but you don't know if be real is gonna be here in 2024. You just don't know, right? And that's cool, that's that risk but you gotta understand that that risk is there and as a new artist, right? With less resources and your time is really meaningful that risk is so, so dangerous to take. But I get it, I get it, right? It's a shiny new thing because you already been losing on another platform. So let me just gotta go find another platform to win. Yeah, I mean it's like you said like the key is the balance, you know? Cause I do think artist should set aside maybe at least 10% of energy to try things out as you see it and come across it, right? Give it a little bit of credence but I think the important thing is not championship which artists do have a really bad habit of just completely abandoning the ship, brother. Oh, this shit moving like crazy. I'm going over here. It's like, whoa, whoa, hold up man. Instagram is still doing fine. You know, it's not 30X but you still doing pretty good over there. So, yo, hold up real quick. You remember that person, how many of you talked to her directly or if I just told you about her? Remember the person who was like, I went from 13X and now I'm at 5X and they were complaining. They were getting a 5X return. I do remember that. Yeah. That's the mentality that you're basically talking about. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I forgot about it. That shit was crazy. We're talking about money, by the way. You were making 15X your money that you were putting in ass and then they went down to 5X and were complaining. Yeah, that I get. That I understand what you're saying. But it's like artists have a typical have a really bad habit of like jumping ship, you know what I'm saying? Cause I think a lot of them are looking for like one vehicle to focus on. So they are chasing, you know what I'm saying? Different vehicles like, this could just be the one. It's like, nah, the reality of it is it's probably gonna be the two or three. You know what I'm saying? For you to really build things out. And I think the more comfortable artists get with understanding that like the more of a true content infrastructure they can build where it's like, hey, I do have my one or two bread and butters and every year I take some time out to go try a new platform for like three months. And if I like it, I figure out a way to integrate it into what's going on. Right, if I believe in it and I think it's gonna be here, I figure out a way to integrate it. And if I don't, at least I didn't kill off my fucking core infrastructure. You know what I'm saying? Like, and I'm still good, you know what I'm saying? To say the least. So I think I can sound that, it's over already. Cause it just, it becomes a new conversation every time a new platform come up. Oh shit, this new platform hit. How can we use it? It's like, damn bro, that shit been out for three weeks. Like let it hit the world first, bro. Let's let the users get into it and so we can study them and see, bro. Like, I don't know. Like it just hit the app store. Like I said, like three weeks ago, bro, like, you know, so I already got people asking about be real strategist. I'm like, bro, I don't know. Leave me alone. It don't fall for the vision of the founders of these companies that they're selling and they're marketing, right? You're on a professional side. As a consumer, you can taste and look, sop up that Kool-Aid however you need to all day. But as a professional, this is your career. You can't just be like, oh yeah, they're selling this vision and they want this to happen and that sounds cool. So a new thing is challenging these other platforms so I should hop on it. That's not how you have to think about it. Again, it's a risk assessment. What am I losing by going to this new thing or putting all my effort or how much effort should I put towards that platform? That's what you should be asking and that varies based on where you are in your career, right? If you haven't gotten the internet at first, you know what I mean, if you haven't gotten the internet at first place, the risk is pretty low, right? For whatever you try, just go try something. You start, right? That's the news. But even if you've already invested and you have like 500 followers on IG, that's a level of investment that matters, right? Then let it on 200K, 500K, whatever, whatever. So all these things are something to keep in mind and with me, I'm still the person that ultimately says, try to master one platform before you try to get on all these platforms. And I know that we are in a space where you can just copy and paste your reels, right? To TikTok, to YouTube Shorts, to choose Snapchat if you want to. But at the end of the day, the nuances and the way the platforms think are different, right? The way they act as a whole are different. So you might copy and paste onto other platforms, but your priority platform should be the platform you focus on, the minutiae, get into the details, right? Understand what they like, what the response rates, how much you should be creating content, how hard is it to get a subscriber or a follower? What are the things that you need to do on that platform in the description or caption to get people off platform? Like all of those details for that platform is gonna be different for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever is out there that you wanna think about. So if anything, at least think of it from a model standpoint. If I have one priority platform that I'm truly paying attention to top to bottom, and then I might have content that I can copy and paste and redistribute on other platforms. And hopefully I do get some gains over there, right? But I'm not gonna allow that stuff to take my eye off the ball of whatever this priority is. Yeah, 100%. I agree. Websites. Websites, websites, websites. Artists, I hear the right thinking that people tell y'all to do or that y'all share among the community. I gotta have a website. I gotta have a website. I gotta have a website. I disagree. You don't need to have a website. You can have a website, 100%. I'm not gonna say don't have a website but the fact that you think you need to have a website to grow your fan base and all these things, especially as an artist starting up, I don't think so. Now let me break this down. One, we talk about resources. Part of your resources is not just money. It's time, effort, right? Your actual attention span. So you already have to do all this other stuff on social media that's gonna create fans, right? That you already probably don't wanna do because you just wanna create music. And you also have to create music, by the way, right? These things already have to occur. You might not be somebody who can build a good website or you might use these templates but how are you gonna get people to this website when you're really trying to get them to your music? So they don't matter at this phase of your career like that. But then let's get to the elephant in the room, which is a big thing that so many people say I need a website for. I need a website because I wanna own my own information, man. What happens if Facebook dies tomorrow, they have another shutdown or some weird political stuff happens and all of a sudden I can't access my followers on IG or whatever happens on Twitter, on TikTok or any of these platforms. And we know, it's been some times where we actually have not been able to get on Instagram. It's been crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, do you actually have to have a full website for that? No, right? Not at all, especially today. Maybe this is more relevant and easier to talk that way before, but today, there is literally these link tree style smart URLs that allow you to collect somebody's email, right? Or, and this is an easier hack and probably my most suggested in that category, there's a lot of these email platforms, right? Let's just say MailChimp, right? Aweber, Drip, a lot of these platforms now have a form feature, right? So you got your email platform so you can collect everybody's emails, but you just create a form, whatever you're trying to sell is that single small landing page that collects their numbers, collects their name, collects their email. That's all you need. You don't necessarily need a super official website domain. You don't even have to have your name. It can still be, you know, I don't know, brandmanshawnaaweber.com. Now I know it doesn't sound as sexy, right? You want to have your official thing, but when we look at the actual statistics, the effect on click through rate at that stage, especially of your career, the numbers don't really play out. Like it doesn't make a difference, right? So a website is something that you 100% can do and it's not going to hurt you outside of the fact that you might not have time or not, or you might not be good at it or you might not know how to arrange it, but the most important thing that most artists are trying to achieve who are thinking about it correctly when they think, oh, I want to have a website or something, they're thinking about, oh, I want to have some, have data, right? Control space. Some kind of control space, but you're not doing much through your website, what you're really talking about is you want to have the information, their phone number, their name, their email. We have all these things with text me if you want to, that can get people's number right there, right? If you want to get access to my new exclusive video, just text me or send me your number, whatever, whatever, if you want to merge. There's so many ways to get that stuff. So it's overrated, not completely ineffective, but it's highly overrated and it's time that people look at the other ways because it's cheaper, saves you a hell of a time and when it comes to pixels, most people aren't even really using pixels to the extent that it really makes sense. Most of them let you pixel anyway, like most of the smart link providers at this point get the option to pixel them. Yeah, the smart links and the email people, providers let you pixel now. So that's not even a strong enough point. I literally just had this argument with someone like a week ago, bro. Somebody on the conversation call and they were like, yeah, I'm about to make a website. I was like, why? Why doesn't it make sense, bro? Because at least you going back to that zero to 10 argument, if you're anywhere between like a zero and like a four, no one cares about the website. I argue you could get away without a website up until like a eight, you know what I'm saying? Like for real, for real. Cause I think about artists now, I know now that they're doing millions of months and there's millions of streams that do not have websites, you know what I'm saying? They're funneling people maybe to some type of community. Like I said, back in just collecting phone numbers and emails and things because they don't want to do that maintenance. So this is another platform to maintain, which is the part of I think a lot of artists don't think about, like this is, it comes with the same level of maintenance as your Instagram account or your TikTok. The only difference is you're paying for it. You know what I'm saying? It's like you're paying to do it and you're, I also think it goes back to the artist not thinking about the end consumer. You know what I'm saying? Like you create this thing because it looks nice to you. You feel like it makes sense in your funnel, but most for like music consumers today, really only probably go to our website to like buy stuff, maybe merch, tickets, you know what I'm saying? So if you're at a point where your audience isn't ready to be monetized or they're not buying things from you, then they really don't need a website. Like, because like you said, everything else that you would use a website for can be done with like one or two other platforms for free or relatively cheaper and with a lot less like work put into it. Take you all of five minutes to make a smart link, making a good website gonna take you a minute, you know what I'm saying? Like it's gonna take you some time, so. And look, keep, be clear. The data is the thing that matters, not the website itself. Because, you know, Amazon servers have gone down and people's sites have been done away with too. So that's still the same theory that you think you're moving away from.