 How do you blow up your music? That's the question that artists are always asking us. But the thing is, the marketplace is always changing. Trends are always changing, especially year to year. So in this video, we're gonna break down how do you blow up your music this year? But actually more specifically, we're gonna talk about how do you glow global with your music this year? I'm Brain Man Shine. And I'm Cory. And this is yet another episode, no labels are necessary. All right, all right. So we gotta talk about blowing up your music globally, right? Around the world. Instead of just your local market this year and there's reasons for it. Because people, again, always ask us how do they blow up their music, right? Cool. But I think people need to understand the argument for why they should focus on going global first. Yeah, please tell them, Sean. There's a couple reasons. Number one, it's easier to go global than ever. In many cases, it's cheaper to go global. And three, if you focus on the right platforms, you can go global and local at the same time. But when you focus so much on going local, you actually miss global opportunities. So I wanna touch on multiple things. One, we're gonna talk about the ad side of what going global looks like. We're gonna talk about the influencer side of going global. And then we're also gonna talk about on the organic content that you post on your page, artist generated content. What does that look like if you wanna go global strategically, all right? The PR, what does that look like if you wanna go global strategically this year? And then we're gonna sprinkle in a little case studies throughout this situation, all right? Now, let's start, I think, with influencers. Because influencers, I think, are one of the most direct ways people can think of going global. What do I mean by that? Oh, this person's Australian and they're in Australia. This person's in the Philippines, this person's in Russia or whatever, right? So there's a direct line to it. But this case study, I think, clearly shows why going global is important. And we're gonna start with JID and then we're gonna get into all the other ways and strategies that you can focus on going global. So influencers slash user generated content, the part that you can't control as much. Because user generated content is just influencer content that you didn't pay for. That's the way I see it today, right? That's the only difference. Because we will pay somebody who only has 10 followers if we see a need for it, right? So influencer, what really is an influencer or what is a regular user? Did they get paid or not? JID had the song surround sound that was out for two years, all right? They're not pushing because they don't have any reason to it this point. It did what it did. We've moved on. You know how artists are. Y'all focus on something else, especially if you had that level of success. You ain't thinking about pushing the song two years ago. But you had this one guy in the Philippines that wanted to create a viral song for whatever reason he chose a viral trend. He was focused on creating a viral trend, right? And doing something cool. But why did he choose surround song? I guess he had heard it before. Ooh, that actually takes me back to something else. A side value in his conversation. And he did it. He actually did a little study, got the concept from a videographer or a photographer or somebody like that, right? And then applied it to the campaign like with his own creativity. There wasn't not the campaign. The song with his own creativity posted a really dope video. That video took off, right? He's in the Philippines. And I think he did it with like his classmates or something like that. But guess what? Not only did it take off in the Philippines, the next thing you know, the people in America become aware of this trend. And then we translate this into American language, i.e. twerking. And then it takes off in our language as well. You can never imagine people twerking to that song. You're right. You're right. In a million years, I see it has been thrown into the song. But where there's a wheel, there's a way, baby. Where there is a wheel, there is a way. They want to do it to everything, but they just don't know how they couldn't figure it. I was like, double dutch, how can I twerk to this shit right here? And then they finally saw, all right, there it is, right? That happened, like, but you clearly saw how something can be global and then impact local. And that song took off. I should have asked Zeke when I talked to him last, how like streaming, how much that impacted. But I feel like he alluded to it was a lot. I mean, we know it's a lot for sure, but like, I want to know the specific number. With that being said, a quick little side thing. And we experienced this earlier on. This is the impact of getting your music out there. This is the impact of targeting and getting some, getting your name in certain people's mouths and being on the radar. That guy, that Rando, respectfully, out in the Philippines, only was able to choose Jit's surround sound because he was already aware of that song. Like, he did something random that was great, but he had to be aware of it first. And that's the impact of when you start getting your catalog and your name out there, now people know it. And in that situation, they chose that song. What we saw early on, this is where I first made this observation on TikTok. I remember when we got Charlie D'Amelio to, she posted to this girl's new song, the song literally had just came out, right? This influencer campaign, we were working. It was one of our first ones. And it was like, well, how did Charlie even know? Cause it barely has any views. We barely had anybody post to it yet. It was very clear that she had seen the last song that we got popping with her, cause we took that song viral. So now she was on her radar. That simple. And next thing you know, you had Charlie. Now Charlie wasn't Charlie Charlie, but she was still clearly on her way to being Charlie. And I think probably already on a number one on the platform. But that comes from, once you're in somebody's universe, you never know when they might do something that might benefit to you. Yeah. And you never know who is a fan. You know, we talk about this all the time. You might have a video with a thousand views and you don't know who contributed to that, a thousand views. Yep, exactly. So that's it. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. All right Sean. So I can assume naturally that the next question of the listener is, how do I find these influencers? You know, I'm in LA. You know, I'm in Atlanta. I'm in Doofenshmirtz, Wisconsin. How do I find these influencers? How do I find influencers in the Philippines? And so one method that we have done, very simple, but go find other artists that are popping in these countries and go to a TikTok, go to an Instagram and look at the influencers using their sounds. Because I can assume that if I find this J-pop band, you know what I'm saying? And it's moving and it's got some numbers. And I can assume that there's going to be Japanese influencers making videos to the songs. And now I can use that artist's catalogue as a directory. Right? And the great thing about influencers is that, to your point earlier within the Charlie D'Amelio situation, the more of them that you connect with, the more of them that you start to become aware of, either because your algorithm going to start feeding them to you, or because that influencer, the influencer that you connect with will point you in the direction of more people and be like, hey, if I'm making a bag and I see that I can get my homie a bag, hey, my homie over there got 400,000 followers. He's also out here in Japan. Go talk to him, he'll go his email, you know? Because influencers love helping each other make money when they actually like each other. So that is in our, well, I will at least say my personal opinion has been one of the easiest methods that we've used to find influencers. I don't know if you got anything else that you want to add to that. Instagram, I went into the platform and typed in country and music style. Filipino music or Korean music or German music or something. And then you'll start finding these platforms that are posting these types of artists. German rap platforms, just like there are US rap platforms. There's Korean platforms, just like there's Afro beats platforms. And you can sometimes see the people that they're following and interacting with and use that as a jumpstart too. Hey, this German rap music page follows this guy that has 200,000 followers and he seems to be German in Germany. Then I'm gonna reach out to Bro and, like you said, use him as my catalyst and use him to help me find other people. You find agencies as well that connect because when you, especially like when you're, let's just say from the US looking out. Agency, agencies in the United States are stupid expensive, all right, the prices that they charge you. But it can still relatively be cheap when you reach out to some of these agencies in Brazil and some of the other countries, relative to our dollar, I can't speak from every country and how they look at some of these countries, but I've had some situations where I'm like, ooh, like, all right. This actually helps because it's hard to reach out to a lot of people that I don't speak the language fluently with anyway. So the agency really perfectly packages that for me and y'all actually are affordable. So it makes a lot more sense that way. And I do also like that you touched on like using, like using, let's just say looking up Filipino music or something like that on Instagram because whether or not that actually impacts, I don't wanna say this, whether or not the artist is big in the country that you're looking for, there's also this other element of, which is just a diaspora that exists potentially in your country of people from that other country. All right, so you don't have to just target the country directly. Sometimes you can hit the diaspora that exists in your country and the pages and still speak in your language because then they would be in your language but you're touching these other cultures and then use that as an entryway as well. And that kind of like bleeds into PR, by the way, like bringing up the pages like you did, Corey. So I do wanna like just solidify that point because the first point was more so influencers and user-generated content in terms of how you expand. The second one is like PR pages. So for instance, like in Germany, there is a page, I think it's called Like I Used to Love Her or something like that, and that's like a play on of like Common Head, this song, I Used to Love Her, like it's hip hop, it means hip hop basically. But it's a German page and they post a lot of hip hop, like there. So you know when people come probably from America, like there are so many managers and people I know of some sizable artists that follow that page, it's like, okay, there are pages that are almost like the plug in their foreign marketplace that all the, let's say American artists come through whenever they go there and they wanna promo and reach that market. So some of that stuff is already established from a PR standpoint, whether it's on social or blogs or something like that. Yeah, it makes me think of when 69 started popping, right? A lot of people don't know that 69 got his start on a Russian platform. Oh yeah, F them. F them, yep. FCK them, yep. Yeah, they were basically like the four shooters of their time, but for Russia, right? And you know what I'm saying? One good take on that channel and some good marketing and he was up over there. And then we started to see that translated over here and see a point, man, this is what I've seen. It's primarily a US artist issue. US artists tend to not be aware that other countries also have music platforms. International artists seem to be more aware, right? Like they tend to speak more globally. It's typical American ignorance, man. They just know what's going on here. Yeah, yeah, like I just got done helping. There was an artist in our gold member program that was in London and she also wanted to build in London because she was there, but she also wanted to build in France. And I didn't know this, but France is like a couple of hour train right away. So she's like, I can get there pretty easy. Let me build there. And within a weekend, we were able to find like 15 different music blog pages that were all French focused, right? So she started to run a campaign on those platforms, you know, and doing what we talked about, taking different headlines around the videos, putting them on the pages. And there was one post she made and the fans started saying that she looked like some popular French actor. And we had never heard of that actress, but I was like, hey, they think you look like her and that resonates. You should use that in your next post. So then the very next post was like, yo, who knew that whatever the actress name is started rapping? And that shit hit because, you know, people from the post in France really thought that she was that French actress. And it went from there, so. But my bigger point is that there are a lot more of these platforms in other markets than you may be aware of. And to Sean's point, what is beautiful about them, outside of just the access that they give you to that market, he is the price. Like I can't even lie about that. Like we're talking about like, I don't want to give away any platforms prices, you know, but it's not uncommon to hit a popping US platform and the minimum might be like a thousand, you know, for like a promo post, you know, like that's not uncommon when you start to talk about a lot of the top tier platforms. You can sometimes find platforms in other countries that'll be the exact same size and be like a 10th of the price. You know what I'm saying? Like I just used the Instagram page that's in Brazil. The other day that had like 300,000 followers and they're only charged me like $70 USD. And I don't know what that translates to in Brazilian money, but you know, I was like. Wow. I was like, oh, like that's all you want. You know what I'm saying? Like I was prepared to at least give you like four, five, you know what I'm saying? That's what you wanted, but $70 USD, yeah, let's do it. And that goes back to Sean's earlier point about why sometimes the strategy is so important. Outside of, you know, extending the audience from where you live and outside of just taking advantage of a new market, sometimes it really just boils down to bang for buck. Yup, exactly. Exactly. And before we get into the last two, you might focus a little bit on the third one, but last two strategies when it comes to going global, whether that's the content that you create personally and put on your own page or advertising. I want to speak on another case study that kind of pulls a lot of this together, which was Russ, right? He pulls the first half of it together. So you talked about his last marketing campaign. Before we get to that marketing campaign, I want to remind people, which we can speak on his artist-generated content, he would be posting his music videos over and over again on Spotify, not on Spotify, good Lord. It was YouTube back in the day before he got on SoundCloud, all right? That was when I first discovered him. He was just a bunch of videos. And I happened to meet him. The only reason I actually checked him out because I met him at this show. And I thought he was dope. And I was doing a couple like interviews at the time. It was like this random series I was trying out, just literally for fun. I wasn't even in the music industry. He was just for fun. You want to remember? No, not even close to it, bro. Yeah, it was just... Bro, I used to be doing stuff, bro. Like, I was a video editor, and he was like, oh, it was a whole another world. But... So I just like, yeah, man, I thought you were dope. Well, I'd like do a little interview or something or whatever. And he was like, oh, man, you appreciate it. I'm about to go to Paris. I was like, Paris. And again, he was just a random guy in the room. This was before he was Russ, Russ. And I was before I was anything where near. So for me, I'm used to going to college shows and stuff like that. I wasn't used to hearing an artist saying, they're going over there, like somewhere for real, for real. This sounds super legit. At that age and time, he could have been doing the worst stuff in Paris or not doing nothing legit at all. And to me, just because he was going somewhere foreign, it would have sounded like crazy. But later on, I heard him reference more about early, he would say early on, man. Yeah, I hit overseas first. And I would go to shows and do shows. It sounded like he was actually getting paid and everything. Even if I think about that little short conversation that we had. Like, so his artist generated content, in this case, it was just his music back then. Of course, it'll look a little different, but his music and music videos he was doing back then, allowed him to go global first. And then he capitalized on that and continued to run that up until eventually he hit in America. And another instance that I never would have been aware of, it was for some other client. I don't even think this guy became an official client. I think I just advised him a little bit. But apparently Russ is racially ambiguous. You don't necessarily think he's black, right? But you can even kind of try to skew that. Does he have some black in him? Not necessarily, but he's racially ambiguous across some other sets of races, right? And apparently there was some country, I think that was in the Middle East area, if I remember correctly. Either Africa, but I'm pretty sure it was Middle East. And they thought Russ was from there, right? Because of how Russ looks. They just kind of made the assumption or something like that. And maybe he referenced some chick and Russ leaned into that too, a little bit. I'm apparently, that's what the guy said. He felt like, and I can't remember if he was like hating in the way he was saying it or just speaking in reality. But he was like, yeah, Russ is like obviously kind of leaning in or allowing people to think this way, right? Was he or not? I don't know. But that's what I kind of thought about when you talked about the girl with people relating her to an actress that she didn't even know. But then, oh, let's lean into it. Like Russ just being global or whatever, might have had the same thing if he probably realized people thought he was from there and then let them think what they think. I'm never gonna explicitly say yes or no, but let that vibe be what it is for a period of time. So all that to say, when things begin to happen globally, like you'll find your end as long as you start the exposure portion of things. So that's why I wanna talk about that, but I know you got all this great info and there's a rollout and anything else. Well, even before I get into that, cause you brought up a couple good points that we probably should have touched on at the top of the pod, but some of the benefits of the international marketing from like an extrinsic standpoint and other than just, you know, you possibly getting a 10 times return on investment in terms of your viewership, but it's literally the mentality around you, right? It's different in other markets. I've seen this with artist friends before, I've seen this with clients, where as soon as they start getting a first couple of fans in another market, they be all over them. Yo, when you come into Brazil, right? Like how can we get you to Brazil? Their perception of you is vastly different than the way that people in your home market might view you. And what I always tell artists is that the reason behind this is, it's easier to sell an image to someone that's far away than it is to sell an image to someone that is right down the street from you. It's like, if I'm rapper A, and I want the world to believe that I'm rich, you know, cause that's a common trope within rap. I want everybody to believe that I'm, that God already got it. I don't need his music shit. Who gonna believe that first? The kid in Brazil that just saw you for the first time on a YouTube video, or the person that's in Atlanta that sees you pulling up to the Chevron in your Toyota, you know what I'm saying? It's a, it's a difference. And I don't really say that, you know, it means that in a bad way, but it's like, but it is a lot easier to get someone to buy into you when it is a lot harder for them to access you, because they don't get all the answers to everything that they think about. Like if you just kind of like the LaRef situation, he just leaves them wondering and lets their mind go wherever it goes. And a lot of times it goes in a particular direction that's beneficial to you. It's a lot, it's actually the closest you can get today to that allure that artists used to be able to accomplish. Exactly, yep, exactly. And then, and the things that are, that would typically be boring about some of your stuff to someone in your market becomes exciting to these people. And I'll give you an example. If I see an Atlanta artist put a video out the day shot in Atlanta, I'm like, oh, that nigga downtown, right? Like he right by the Waffle House. Exactly, I know exactly what street he on. It don't hit the same for me because I drive down a lot of those same streets every day. But somebody in South Africa to them it just like a cool city somewhere in the US. It's just a cool spot. And they're like, oh, that's what Atlanta looks like. Oh yeah, that's cool. So like even things about you that you might think are boring or maybe that people in your home market are like, that don't work. You know, like don't shoot in front of that bridge. Everybody shoots in front of that bridge. But then it becomes like, well, what if I hit people that don't know about the bridge? They're not gonna know that everybody's shot here. They don't know that every rapper in the city comes to this bridge to shoot their music video. You know what I'm saying? So like you can even kind of mold it a lot differently. And like, you know, in reality, man, for like 80% of artists, a lot of your first opportunities are gonna come from people outside of your home market. Like that's just the reality. A lot of your first fans are gonna be people that don't live nowhere near you. A lot of your first paid opportunities are gonna be through people that don't live anywhere near you. You know what I'm saying? But then that goes back to the first point I made about the perception of you. Yeah, you just said that real quickly and I didn't want it to get brushed over because I think that's a very important reason for the why. And Russ's situation also ties into another point that we've been saying for years and that's that blowing up internationally while making it seem like you're blowing up domestically is one of the biggest dark secrets of the music industry. Yeah, yeah. Like there are so many artists where you will look and be like, damn, this motherfucker moving. He got 10 million streams in a week. But what he's not telling you is that 9.9 million of that came from Germany and Russia, bro. And to be fair, why would he tell you that? All that matters is, are they real? If they're real, beautiful. Don't just get caught up in like no fake stream box or something like that, but yeah, I mean, yeah, it makes a lot of sense, man, because it's like it became very popular trope and rap to like, oh, she a foreign or exotic, right? That type of thing. And you know, there's a lot of dudes who into that, but I'm not into the idea of exotic for the sake of exotic, but I know there's like a thing, right? And exotic is relative. You go to a different country, the exotic chick looks different. The exotic guy looks different, right? Because it's what we used to, exotic is literally just what we're not used to. That's all it is, right? And that speaks to the point of what you just said. It's like, oh, we're showing something that one side is familiar with, but the familiar here is different there. So like use it, look, if you feel like you're boring, use your boring to your advantage. And the only way you can do that is show somebody who ain't seen it before. Like, like, you know, it's like taking a girl on a date, bro. You know, like you probably take her to that one spot all the time. She gonna get sick of it. It don't matter how good the food is. It don't matter how nice down Beyonce's, you know, you don't took it there 20 times, but you take it, you know what I'm saying? You live, yeah, I mean there to the same spot. You know, she gonna be excited, bro. This is how the game go. Hey, or you can take your girl to the, you could be predictable for a few months, just to strategically, you know, surprise and spice things up. What I like to do, well, what I like to do is take her to the same restaurant and just sit on a different side. So I'm like, hey baby, last time we was in the restaurant, we was on the left side of the bar. This time we in the back by the fire pit, it's different. It changes the experience, it's a whole different vibe, you know what I mean? When you get people walking by us last time, we come people watch. Yeah. Hey, you know, I let that R.E. man be between y'all. But the rest situation, the rest case study, I was saying that the last big marketing push that I noticed from him, where it seems like he was actively pushing the message was around that international tour that he was doing and that situation that he did in Egypt, where he was like the first person to like perform at like a pyramid or something, something like that. And what was interesting is that, I mean, that's the narrative in itself that's strong, that's not US focused, but he did push it in the US and people in Egypt were probably like, you know, I'll focus perform here all the time. But people in the US are gonna be like, damn, that's five, rest is performing in Egypt. And he's the first person to do X, Y, Z in Egypt. You know what I'm saying? And that goes back to something that you said, you can take the same story. You know, it'd be not interesting here and be really interesting here. It could be not interesting there and be really interesting over here. But the international focus was the focus of it. And I think that, you know, if you look at a lot of rest of stuff, his early career was him, you know, despite the things that we talked about, was bragging about how much he was, you know, dominating the US market with the music, right? Well, I think even for him, and I could be wrong, but, but I think that now he does want to highlight how much more global he is and that people may even think. Let me show y'all that I really get to. Yeah, cause I mean, there might be people out there who are like, bro, I mean, I've seen the comments online. The only people that listen to rest is 16 year old white girls. And then here go Russ showing you a crowd of grown Egyptians jumping up and down to his music. You know what I mean? He showed all that shit up, you know? So, but I think it's interesting that, like you said, I do think it's one of the deep dark secrets of the industry, you know, how can we pop this RS off over here but then make it look like they're popping off over here? You know, can we put them in the right places? Because, you know, the average consumer isn't about to go log in the Spotify and look in the back end and, you know, see where shit came from. They're not doing that, but they gonna see, hey, you got 10 million streams in a week and I know about you in the US, I'm gonna assume that majority of that 10 million came from here. The music industry on all sides is built off of perception-based leverage, all right? And how can I flip this perception of leverage into real leverage and then use the undue perception based on my new leverage to get some more leverage? It's just doing that over and over again. Now, because we gotta do this interview, I don't wanna spend too much more time, we got last two points, artist-generated content. We touched on that with Russ, right? He posts on YouTube, he's blowing up somewhere else. The only thing, point I wanna make, right? When it comes to artist-generated content, that means you post it yourself, well, how can you make sure it's worldwide, right? It's not like you can target it, like if you can with ads or look for influencers in those countries and stuff, like you can with influencers. Well, it's more about the platforms. When you are on YouTube or TikTok, those platforms more naturally go global organically. TikTok, especially. You have no idea who's following you or where they're from. That globalization, those walls being knocked down is actually a part of the platform. Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree. But, and it's something to think about, but it comes down to access, and so one thing I do think is important to think about when doing international marketing, or not even think about, but to do is a lot of research. Cause there are cultural nuances that come into play, you know what I'm saying? Like, especially when you're scaling it. But, and even just thinking about it, right? Cause to your point, TikTok and YouTube are two of the biggest platforms internationally. Why? Because they're two of the most accessible platforms. And that's to everybody, you know what I'm saying? Like, everybody can't get Facebook. Everybody can't get Instagram, but you know, majority of the world got access to YouTube. So it's like, do you want a better chance of hitting the majority of the world? Then yeah, YouTube, Instagram, no. YouTube, TikTok are more than likely gonna be great places for you to start. And then the last thing is ads. So ads, just say this, we have our worldwide ad strategy, the easy thing to do, right? You target worldwide, basically, or a set of countries. You don't have to literally just target worldwide. But you start, you could even just select a few different countries and then see which cities started to hit. And you use that to then figure out where you're gonna double it down with ads, figure out where you're gonna actually double down with influencers. Basically, figure out which countries are worth learning. Unless you already got a reason, like we've had some artists that, oh, I know I wanna target back home, like something like that. Which there's a player, you know what I mean? It's like you said, you know, you put all this together. It's a really easy international marketing strategy, at least to my marketing guru brain, right? You set up your worldwide ads. You let them run for a week or two. You see, Brazil is over indexing for me. So I'm gonna cut out all the other countries, scale my ads to only target Brazil and maximize there. Let that get going, let it get hot. Maybe go pick up one or two other ad platforms and set them up to run to Brazil. Let them get hot. Then you go find your influencers, right? You start finding these people in these markets that can post your music while also finding the pages that can post your music that speaks to this audience. And then at that point, you really just rinsing and repeating until you are, of course, able to make certain real world moves, like going to that market for a show or like a brand opportunity or a collab and you know, things like that. And like, you know, all that stuff put together is a, or sounds like a pretty well put together marketing plan, but in reality, it is a very powerful and effective marketing strategy for growing someone in an international market. And we know this because this is literally our strategy and we do this all the time. That is a fact. I'm Brandon Shawn. And I'm Corey. And we out. Peace.