 Everybody talks about fan base when it comes to music, but people don't realize an artist's success really comes from a series of deals, the back end of your career. That's why you see so many artists pop and they have great moments, but they never actualize the level of success that they could or should have had. Now what do I mean by this? I've seen so many artists' lives or careers get ruined by people on the back end, teams on the back end or deals that they were in. So in this video, I'm gonna give you six contract tips, six contract tips that you should keep in mind as an artist because you can't foresee what you don't see and don't have the experience and that's what trips people up. Now, before I get into these tips because they're gonna be extremely helpful, I've helped multiple artists negotiate hundreds of thousands of dollars, et cetera, et cetera. All that good stuff. However, I, Sean, brand man Sean, am not an attorney or lawyer, whatever you wanna call it. So take this advice as something to consider and speak with your lawyer whenever you're talking about a deal. Don't come back and blame it on me, whatever happens or don't happen, but I can promise you these are things worth considering. The number one, my tongue has slurred a little bit. Thing number one is the sunset clause when it comes to music management. Now most people don't know what a sunset clause is. Typically in music management, you know, you might give 10%, 20%. It's a commission-based job. However, what happens is a lot of times when an artist and a manager disband, things go wrong or you wanna move on for whatever reason, there's a sunset clause that basically means that my 20% if I get 20% from you as a manager will become 18%, 15%, 10%, 5%, 0% over time. So you just got out the agreement with me this year, but I still might be making money from you two years from now. That's something to be considered. Now a manager of course wants this clause there, but you might not want that clause there because why are you still making money off of me when you're no longer working with me and I gotta hire a new manager. So I just thought I got rid of this person who was making 20% to maybe hire somebody else that I only need to pay 15% or maybe I'm paying them another 20%, but now you have to account for I might be paying 30% in the time that this person is slowly dwindling down on their deal, manager number one. You can have sunset clause by the way in other deals as well, not just a manager deal. All of these things actually are like Tetris. You can build it however you want to, you make it fit as long as both sides agree, but that's something to be aware of. It happens and a lot of artists aren't ready for that. Now, number two is the control of your marketing budget. Control of your marketing budget breaks down in a lot of different ways. People do a big deal, they get a big marketing budget and they're like, this is gonna change the game for me. I've never had this amount of money that I could spend on my music. However, it's not that easy. Uh-uh, I was gonna say sometimes, I'm gonna say most times what I see most artists get into is a deal where they don't have full control of their marketing budget. In many cases, almost no control. Now, you might not have the leverage to get full control over your budget, but this is what it looks like. Let me make sure I don't skip one of these points. One, you, how much money can you spend out of your marketing budget without the label, without the distributor, or whoever's giving you the money for approval? That means if I see an influencer, I see a song, I see a moment and I have a vision and I wanna spend it on marketing, I don't have to go back to figure out like, is this person agreeing with me to spend this 5K? Because the worst part about it is a lot of times, a lot of these people aren't great marketers. They're in these positions and they're able to fund, you know, somebody else's marketing and they're just waiting for something else to pop, but they don't understand like what might be cutting edge and the new thing, or they might not understand your niche completely. So you might see something and it could be a big moment for you, but you have to be able to sell, right? Somebody else on why it makes sense. And boy, I can tell you, those are some stressful moments when I've had to convince other people or be on somebody else's behalf or, yeah, let's just say that. When I've had to work on anybody, the artist, the label, the manager's behalf on trying to convince one of the other stakeholders on spending more money, while the moment is moving, it is a stressful moment. And you don't wanna be that as an artist because I feel the stress as someone who isn't, in many cases, necessarily gonna like have pain outside of the fact that I really wanna win and I really like to create moments and it's gonna suck because I still got moments that haunt me to this day where I'm like, Brad, I could have been so much bigger if it wasn't for X, Y, and Z's decision-making, all right? So please understand control of a marketing budget really matters. You might not be able to get full control of your marketing budget. However, a percentage, give yourself a percentage, really try to negotiate having a percentage of your marketing budget that you have full control of up front, not during the deal and asking them because you want it to be on paper. Now with that being said, break it down. Maybe it's partial, but also whose team gets used for what services? Because what you'll see a lot of distributors or labels do, they're like, ah, when it comes to advertising, we're gonna spend all that money ourselves because we want access to the data or a plethora of reasons. We hired this one ad person that's gonna work ads for everybody's campaigns. There's a lot of reasons that it might go one way or another. However, we've had managers that are like, yo, our labels are mindless and we want to be able to spend the money however we want to spend it because they have no idea what they're doing and they come to the agency and then they try to convince the label based on all the things we've achieved saying, hey, these guys are really capable, please give us some money and they get a little bit, you know what I mean? Like, again, a big moment could be happening and these people will still be stubborn with the moment and now you're in real time selling them to use a team that's not their team. If your control is not around the team that gets used, that can be a tough thing because you might end up spending a lot of money on people who don't know. You might spend a lot of money on team, oh, no, dang. You might end up spending a lot of money for something that could work. You might be putting a lot of money in the hands of an incompetent team. That could be the labels team. You could be the incompetent team yourself, by the way, just putting it out there. However, that becomes a legitimate argument. Does our team have control? Does our team, can our team be used for the marketing and even if you have to approve it, it has to be approved by you, but we're gonna be the ones who get used for ads and things like that. It's something worth discussing and thinking about, all right? Some people don't have any leverage or any team to give it to where somebody doesn't have an agency that they were working with beforehand, but it's in your best interest to try, to try as much as you can, but it's very hard because most labels and distributors are going to want to use as much as their resources as possible. It works, sometimes it doesn't, depends on the artist and situation. Now, moving on. So tip number four, publishing, masters, streaming royalties, merch, what am I talking about? These are all assets that you get to negotiate and there's more, by the way, but the point is everything is up for negotiation. People think if I go into a label deal, I have to give up everything, right? This 360 is automatic. There's so many label deals that are literally just, your streaming royalties basically, right? And they're like, yo, we don't care about anything else if it's not boosting the streams. That's something to be negotiated, but you also have other assets. If you want more leverage or you want to get those people more involved and they care more about you, you might say, hey, well, I can give you a portion of my merch or I can give you a portion of my publishing. Publishing, be very, very careful about that, that publishing and giving up any of that. Be very, very careful about that. Be very, very careful about giving any of your masters up, but especially that publishing. Now, but all those things are negotiation pieces and your goal is to figure out what this person is trying to achieve. What is their risk that they're trying to navigate? Because that's a big part of it on the side of, I use the term label, but I use that term lightly because I've known people who are like label labels, major labels, got indie labels. And I know people, artists that are doing deals with a single person who is starting a label or has a good amount of funding and they say I wanna invest and you have to keep this in mind if you want an investor, right? If you want me to invest, I want as much as my money back as possible so I need different pieces of this business because I'm trying to hedge my bet. And I might not even have all the resources to turn you up like a lot of other labels. There's a lot of people who want investors and investors are that type of scenario, barely can get anything rolling for them. And I wanna say be very, very cautious about that because again, you are giving them pieces and they might give you a certain amount of money. However, if you don't have a certain level of understanding and resources yourself, then that could come back to bite you. There's a difference between strategic investment, right? And just financial investment, right? And the goal is to get both of them together. So let me explain that really quickly. Financial, hey, y'all got money, here's the money. And I add zero other value to the business, just the money, that's all it is. Strategic investment might be, yeah, I might not even have any money but I got connections, I have knowledge, I have resources, maybe I can create the content for you or something like that. I got a platform, whatever that is, there are strategic investment that's valuable beyond the money itself. And then of course, the marriage of both is beautiful. That's when you have a lot of these labels, that's how they end up with some leverage because I have resources and I'm giving you money, right? That's kinda how you wanna think about it. And if you go for just financial investment, boy, make sure you have a vision, you have some clarity, maybe you have the right team or knowledge on your team from some other way or space or places, you got some consultants, whatever you're working with, just make sure you're able to compensate for somebody taking money or pieces of your business without bringing any additional asset to it at all. All right, but that's all to wrap up point number four. Every single aspect of the contract can be negotiated, every little asset, every percentage of something that you're negotiating can be increased, decreased, completely taken out. So you can say you can get 2% of my merch sales, 5% of my merch sales, 30% of my merch sales, you can get 2% of my publishing, 5%. So even when you don't wanna give away all of something, maybe you can give away just a little bit that makes them comfortable and you comfortable and you determine if it's worth it from there. Now, let's move on to number five. Before I move on to number five, actually I just wanted to give a reminder that this is a part of my Saturday video series, I'm doing a video every Saturday this year and a huge part of being encouraged and creating new videos is y'all subscribing. So if you're watching this and you're not subscribed, please subscribe to the page and also feel free to make recommendations on topics that you would like to see me speak on in the future. Next week, I'm gonna go really deep on some management stuff that y'all really, really, really need to know. All I ask is if you wanna make a topic recommendation, one, please be subscribed and two, don't just ask something general about how do you grow your fan base, et cetera. We have our regular video series for this. This is for me to go deeper behind the curtains into the nuances of what people who are actually in the game experiencing from a day to day and those real situations, not, hey, I'm just trying to get some fans. All right, now back to number five. Number five is time. Every single one of these contracts, time is a part of it. So be mindful of how much time goes into it. Is it a one-year, two-year, three-year contract or is it project-based? Because that's another thing to negotiate, right? If I say it's two projects, then cool. It's two projects and that can happen in one year or that could happen in three years, depending on how fast you do it. If it's a time-based contract, then maybe it's three years regardless of the amount of projects and usually people are gonna attach projects to it because they don't want you to just wait it out. But then there's also other aspects of the contract where people will say, I'm gonna get this revenue stream, like royalties for five years, 10 years, et cetera. Pay attention to aspects of time and if they match up with what you want to envision for your future. And last but not least, number six, options. When there's an option in your contract, make sure you understand who's option it is because I remember the first time when an artist brought up an option to me and he was like, oh yeah, I got an option after a year. My contract's 12 months, then I got an option on whether or not it continues. And then looking through the contract and going through the situation and I'm like, yo, bro, you don't have an option. They have an option. It needs to be clearly communicated that if you're in this deal for a year, the year is over and they decide whether or not they keep you for a second year or not. That's their option. It's an option in your contract but don't go around saying I have an option because technically you don't. You don't control whether they get rid of you or not, whether they keep you for a second year or not. So you can create certain options like that for yourself. It's something to think about. What do I want an option on in my contract? An option to increase. An option for me to have access to more budget, right? There's all types of options you can think of and trust me, you might not hear stuff as commonplace in certain contracts but this is why there's so many people in the industry that are like happy and then also sad and they're dealing with the same person because one person came in with leverage or one person came in with a lot more thoughtfulness in how they built their contract versus another. Blame it on yourself because it's what you negotiate. So options are extremely important. The typical option, the standard option is more so, hey, I have you for two projects and I have an option for a third or two songs and options for a third or one song and option, right? That's a typical term but there's a lot of different options that you can speak of or triggers contingencies that could actualize based on however you wanna structure the contract, right? There's, for example, you can make it milestone based. That's the biggest one. I'll leave it at that. I kinda touched on that and some of the examples I gave when I was talking about this but milestone based is gonna be the second go to in a lot of different options. That being said, if y'all have any questions or just wanna chop it up about any topic, you can hop into No Labels Necessary Group and check out our free courses and our conversations where we're talking about stuff like this all the time. Just check us out at nolabelsnecessary.com and join the group, it's free. And if you're already in, you already know how to get to us so just stay tuned and watch this next video that pops up wherever it's gonna be. See you next Saturday.