 Like fans, like feeling like they have control over your career. Fans are wild, bro. Y'all have to think about it. If you're ours that has fans, you know where I'm coming from if you're ours with no fans, bro, listen up, right? Fans like to feel like, if it wasn't for me, you would not be here today, right? I think we all in our head have this weird, fancy life. I stopped listening to this motherfucker tomorrow. He falling off. You know what I'm saying? And so that's why I go back to, like, giving them real choice has a lot of positive benefits, even if you decide not to listen to them and take into consideration what they're saying. But even just giving them the illusion of choice is very powerful because, like, they become emotion connected to it. They start to feel like it's their project. And then you're just feeding into that fantasy of, like, hey, I need you to survive, which you do. You do need them to survive. But like that individual, you may not need to survive the way they feel like you need them to survive, right? But it's like playing into the fantasy, you know what I'm saying? Because I've seen RS do that where it's like, hey, how many times have we seen RS be like, hey, I want you to pick my next single. Here go five options. They made more than five songs, you know what I'm saying? Like, they have hella songs out. Why they only give you that five illusion of choice? Right, these are five songs I already feel like anyway I was going to run with. You know what I'm saying? Me and my team been arguing about it. Shit, we were all on the same page. You would have never got this choice, but we're not. So, hey, I'm going to let you all decide, right? But as a fan, we just go like, oh, he made these five songs. He can't decide which one. Yeah, one down, one down, one right. And it's illusion of choice, bro. Illusion of choice. Not even whenever artists like ask things, I'm like, bro, you don't really mean this, but I'm going to participate because you at least, you at least made me feel like you needed me in this situation. Much appreciated because fans' desire for that is growing. Yeah. I don't think that existed as much before, right? People were cool of just witnessing what the artist does, right? It was almost this mysticism about it, which is why, you know, artists grow up feeling that today, like wanting to operate in a time that doesn't exist, like, oh, I should be so mystical. And I should just create this thing that the world isn't all of, but the world isn't all much these days to be honest. It's a different temperament with the fan bases because people see so much and then people are so, I don't even want to say full of themselves, but it's just, it's just so indifferent because they've seen so many different things. So what you really want to experience, or I mean, what you're really dealing with is now a fan base that went from, hey, I'm cool of witnessing what this artist does next. I wonder what's going to happen to a general market temperament of this is a RPG, everything is a RPG. I want to be a part of it. You know, I want to be a part of everything, gaming, likes, comments. Everything is receiving my feedback and functioning as a result of my feedback. That's the perception and that's what people are accustomed to. So if you give me the opportunity to that, it's funny. That's not even as cool anymore. You allowing me to vote on the song, that's novel, great marketing and made me feel amazing back in the day because you gave me the opportunity to vote on the song today. Not so much. I might feel more invested and feel like, oh, this person is a good person. But I also feel like I'm kind of supposed to be involved in this process. There's a sense of entitlement in today's current fans, too. So, you know, but it does have a benefit. I think like it really does have a benefit to allow them to be involved somewhere along the lines. Yeah, you just made me think about something that we've kind of touched on before and other points, but artists are competing with content creators, right? And a lot of content creators, like just general content creators, usually have no issue with letting their audience drive things, right? So it's like, if I'm a fan and I commented on Brand Man Showing Video, you should make a video about playlists and you make a video about playlists. And then I get on this Twitch stream like, yo, you should play the new, I don't know, Pokemon game. And then he turns that shit on right as far as playing it. And then, you know, I go, I don't know, comment on like my favorite Instagram comedian, you know, you should make a joke about X, Y, Z. And then he got a skit about it. At this point, bro, I'm just, I'm just one naturally assuming I'm amazing. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm killing it, bro. I'm I got these motherfuckers up. But then, too, it almost starts to feel like, hey, you person that won't give me that choice, like, how dare you when so many other of my favorite creators at least give me the option to be a part in some way or another. And like, YouTubers are notorious for doing it. YouTubers and streamers, like, I feel like a notorious for giving their audience, like, some of that type of input into what's going on. Like, our whole YouTube landscape is like, hey, man, put some shit in the comments so I can read and think about what the next video is about. So we've been trained to think that way for, I mean, at least with like the last, like, seven, eight years of YouTube, at least, you know what I'm saying? We already talked about the impact that the YouTube landscape has on just, you know, content consumers as a whole, you know what I'm saying? So I didn't think about it as you said that, but it's like, yeah, bro, every other creative aspect of my life or, you know, creative person in my ecosystem probably has given me that type of choice that in one way or another. And you, music artist, you person that I see a couple of times a month won't even let me pick something for you for crazy. I'm not going for that, you know what I'm saying? Because that having at least the illusion of input for a fan. Allows them to feel like they have ownership of some of the process. Right. And I've been a part of this. And now that I've been a part of this, I want to support it more as it comes out, because I am not just supporting him. I'm supporting me in a way. I'm a part of this vision. Yeah, this is my shit. This is my shit. So his world is my world. And now you have people invested in your world and they're going to help you grow it. They're going to show up to concerts more or buy things more. Hey, I was a part of saying that you should come up with t-shirts or a certain type of t-shirt instead of doing a dead hat. So now when that t-shirt comes out, I'm like, yo, I want to be a part of it. But, you know, there's also something that, you know, I can pull from tech, which is, you know, the core product versus features. And the differentiation is the core product is what people come for. All right. It's serving a specific need or behavior that they'll be consistent and use. But then the features is like that shit that it's cool. It's a bell and a whistle, but people don't actually use it. All right. It'll be like me saying, man, I would love if Instagram went back to chronological order and the Instagram adds it to a different feed, which they have and I still never click over there. You know what I mean? It's a feature. It's really cool. And then if you put it on my main feed and made it my only way, I would actually do it, but it's not actually a core product enough where, no, I'm not going to use it unless it has this thing, right? Or it's not as functional or useful. So that same applies when you're listening to your fans. You can get a lot of noise. Part of that process is building the skill of understanding one, how do I differentiate between stuff that they're just saying and that's just like them being off the cuff and being careless because they can say something. Like you said, fans, people love to talk to you these days and give their opinion and they feel like it's their responsibility almost to make sure the world here is their opinion. Yeah, a lot of fans are stupid. I stand on that. It's genius as they might be. You know, I also stand on that. A lot of them are stupid. Oh, there's genius and stupidity, right? Because sometimes you don't know enough not to say something and that something might be, it might, it might click at the right time and the right space, you know what I mean? But this doesn't mean you smart just because you got one thing right. You know what I mean? But 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 of 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 going to 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. I want to play this quick snippet from Brock Hampton to really get this conversation popping. It's interesting that we embrace the audience as much as we did and like allow them to be a part of the the painting. Yeah, give them the paintbrush. And I think that was good and bad. But when it was good, it was great, really, because then you're kind of like all building like this. Like collective together. All right, so. Like he acknowledged period, there's the good and the bad of having your fans be involved. So I want to touch on. Some of the good and some of the bad from the perspective we've experienced in things as content creators in general, but then also maybe some of the artist's nuances in particular. Now, one, just being a creative is yourself. You have a vision on how you want to do things. So then you talk about all these pieces of feedback that you're getting. And you're like, no, that's just not the way I want to do it, because I'm creative and I have this vision. If I do everything based on what you say, I'm no longer creative. I'm pure marketer or business person, just reacting to the best form of feedback. I get that, right? So you're trying to sell your vision, not find somebody else's vision and follow that. But, you know, getting that other side of the fence. You want to make sure what you're doing connects. And if you're too far off. I mean, what's the point of doing this whole thing? If you want to do it as a career, right? If it doesn't at least connect with people to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah, right. And like fans, too, usually try to point you in the right direction, especially when you're growing and, you know, they don't really have a reason to dislike you yet. A lot of times like fans are viewing it from their vanity point and they may even be paying attention to the conversations that other fans are having that you might not be seeing. And so they're like, I'm telling you, man, go this way, you know what I'm saying? Go this way, right? And so, you know, I think I've seen instances before where like the audience is steered, the creator or the artist and completely in the right direction, you know what I'm saying? And I do think I've also seen times where their feedback held the creator back, right? Like it's almost like too much noise coming. And like you said, the artist starts to lose confidence in their idea. Damn, they don't like my idea. They just want me to do what they think is a good idea. And it discourages them a little bit, right? But, you know, you said something like a long time ago that made me think about it differently when you kind of talking about how tech works, right? And you told me that, you know, in tech, they believe in just like getting the product out there really fast to get a lot of feedback on it so they can tweak it. That's what makes a lot of sense, right? Like I have this thing that I think will work, right? Based on whatever my experience is or my viewpoint is. And then I get hundreds to thousands of feedback from the people I'm trying to sell it to, right? And like I said today, people are very vocal, bro. People have no problem telling you what they think should be better about the thing that you're doing for them. So it's like, I have this thousand people, my focus group telling me that, hey, if you did this thing, this should be crazy. And, you know, I just think it's valuable, right? It's like, why not get that viewpoint from the people that you were trying to get the purchase of things you're trying to do? So I can understand there being certain elements of an artist's career that maybe they don't want to let fans in, right? Like maybe it's like, hey, I don't think they should necessarily be sitting with you in like the writing room, right? But there are also some artists I've seen do like live writing sessions with their fans, right? So, but I could understand an artist going, now I don't want you here when I'm in the initial creation process, maybe once I have a framework for it, and I don't know where to go or, you know, I got three visual concepts for it, I don't know where to go. I can understand like giving them a ladder of choice and making them feel like they have complete autonomy over the situation. I think that sometimes is a happy medium. But like that was saying, like I think there's enough good that could come out of it that makes me believe that artists should trust their fan base majority of the time, unless you just have like a trolling as fan base. Like a DJ academic fan base or something, you know what I'm saying? Well, they just like to fuck with you and steer you wrong because they think it's funny, you know what I'm saying? But if you have fan bases and like that, which is the most artists, then like, yeah, you know, let them at least give them the illusion of input, you know what I'm saying? Because that can go a long way.