 I feel like artists are going to have to start just in general looking at themselves more like creator first, maybe not creator first music artist second, but maybe it'd be like a little bit of a 50-50, like I should be looking to make just as much money and flip as many opportunities on my credit side of my brand as I'm looking to do on my music side because the reality of it is maybe that your music side may never truly be lucrative enough to compensate you the way you want to be compensated. But the doors that opens up for you in other areas does, right? You got a million followers on Instagram because your song went viral. Now you can afford to charge $30,000, $50,000, maybe more, probably more than that, right, for influencer posts, right? Music may not have been the thing that directly paid you that much money, but it opened up a lot of doors for you to make more money off of other things around it. Like, look at Drake. We had the conversation on the last part about Drake being more into flipping brand deals, and, you know, well, we had the conversation about how we don't think bigger artists are as stream-focused as smaller artists are. They're not really caring about the revenue because they just need the numbers to flip into brand deals, right? Drake has that deal with their sports betting company that's probably paying him a shit ton of money, so he just needs to keep the procession of, hey, I have fans so that way these other entities would give me a lot of money. Now I feel like that's how artists as much as they probably don't want it to be that way, right? Like every artist in their perfect world, everything would be taken care of off of just music. In the perfect world, or not even in the perfect world, 10, 20 years ago, that was the perfect world, and almost every music artist had, right? At least from a money perspective, not everybody else, but the reality of it is like music is, I think moving away from that, because music is starting to get looked at no differently than just like other forms of content that we consume, and your Netflix movies, your YouTube videos, things like that, you're just used to getting for cheap, you know what I'm saying? Like you're just getting for cheap, and then those companies find other ways to flip the audience into more lucrative opportunities, and I do think music is moving towards that, where it's like, hey, artists five or 10 years from now, you could have a song with, I don't know, let's say a billion strings on it, and a billion strings might not pay the same as it is paying now, or, you know, well, I guess there weren't strings before. Bro, this is why we have to have that conversation about IP, right? Because you basically just made artists akin to Netflix, the movies, and all things like that that are coming out. So an artist, at best, is not just, you know, a creator of music, them themselves is a true legitimate IP that can be monetized again and again in so many different ways, which brings me to, did you watch the rereach it? You did? Cool. That's all right, because we're not going to have time to talk about it here anyway, and the forefront ain't great. I'm watching the night though, I swear. The forefront, you need to watch both of them, because we're going to do it, we're going to talk about it Monday or whatever. Yeah, yeah. That one, at least watch three, bro, because four is going to be like, why am I watching this shit, bro? Why he got me watching this shit? So, but with that being said, though, right, we talk about the squeeze, I just looked this up because I was like, know what? I bet the other side is getting cut through as well. Inflation cuts into merch and vinyl profits, even as sales skyrocket. It's nothing worse when you're making more money and less money at the same time. Such a conundrum. It sucks, man, it sucks. And that's why, you know, Sam talks about the, it's like the zen happiness. Remember, he went to like $40 million of sales a year, but found that he was making less money. And he could have figured a problem out there, but he said, no, I'm just going to make six, 10 mil and make the same amount of money for the same amount of effort, because top line. So this is what we've encountered. We've seen this before, right? And ads, well, you know, it's a very similar business model. So I'll break it down like this. Imagine that your customer acquisition costs is $5 and your product cost $20, right? Great. $15 made per, per sale. And it's like that. As long as you spend $100, all right? You spend $100, customer acquisition costs is $5, which means you got 20 customers, right? $15 profit off of each of those, right? So what's that $200, $300, right? Yeah, $300. So but next, that next 100 customers, right? All of a sudden, your customer acquisition costs shot up to $15. So now you're only making $5 per customer. You're making more money because you're getting more sales, right? You're making more top line revenue, but it's more expensive. But now you only get $5 per customer, which you customer acquisition costs 15. So, dang, you only got four, six, really like six customers, right? So you only made $30 on that second. You just made $300, right? Yeah, you made $300 on the next $100 though, you only made $60, or did I say $30? $30, right? So that's what artists are experiencing themselves. Hold up. Had to take a quick break, kept on getting a little phone call. But what I was saying is, so that's what artists are experiencing is like, even if you're getting more and more sales, which feels great, you're making less money per sale. Now you're working harder, right? Because you have to work harder to get more sales. Let's make that clear, right? Like I said, you spent $100 to make $300, but you still had to go put in the effort to spend that second $100, but you only made $30. And then you spend more and more money and less and less is made. And next thing you know, you're breaking even. So now I'm getting five times the sales, but I'm not making any money at all. That's what people are creeping towards. And that's why the frustration is so great. It's like, dang, like I can't work myself out of this hole. Yeah. A lot of times people are like, oh, we got to figure out how to work harder. We just grind, grind, grind. I'm gonna dug it out. If you can't work yourself out of the hole because supplies have increased so much. That's a really, really frustrating place to be. So I do empathize with artists from that standpoint for sure. And you know, we're seeing across everything. I just saw an article with about houses, costing or, all right, especially to get something built, but then the supplies are lower quality. So people are getting houses built. Exactly. More expensive for low quality stuff. And the houses are falling apart. So imagine that frustration. We're seeing it everywhere, man. And I can, the stress of I lost money in music. I usually go to touring and merch. Those are the two things. And both of those are now withering away. Where do you go from here? And right now, it seems the option for most artists is just like, just tread water, stay above water as long as possible until this phase goes. Right now, I think the biggest thing is, hey, where you got to go hard online. It's content, content and maintain your brand. So when the moment opens up, you can cap as much as possible. But you got to figure out how to make it do this phase. But you can't stop getting your brand out there, connecting with people online, through content in general, private groups, live streams, whatever that looks like for you at your level. That's the only solution I see right now. Of course, we can do some math and come back with maybe another one on our future pod. But is there any, I don't know, solution that you see? Because I did what she had, some type of solution in mind. Yeah, same. I mean, I feel like you hit a nail in the head, man. Art is going to have to be a lot more digital savvy. And look at building up the free components of the top of the phone, pretty much. Yeah, you can keep doing these things that pay for these people to come. You know what the solution looks like to get people over to your product for free. You're going to have to start doing it. And then like I was saying earlier about, I really do think, a long term that art is going to have to start thinking more like content creators and influencers. And just look at, like you were saying, look at themselves as a Netflix, a Disney, a larger brand entity that's more so looking to build a big IP catalog, necessarily more so than a major music career. That's right. I don't think a lot of people are going to like that. I don't want to hear that. But that's where I see it going, bro. Music today is no different than any other piece of content we consume. Not to the consumer brain. Every other piece of content is relatively inexpensive, bro. I can watch it. Every movie in the world for $9.99 on Netflix. It's crazy. So it's like, if we as consumers are being trained to think that way about creative products, not even about the music industry, just about every other creative industry, it's naturally going to trickle over the music. Music isn't any exception. You know what I'm saying? Like we want to watch my movies on Netflix, log into Ticketmaster. Damn, they want $300 for this ticket. Damn, that's crazy. I don't know about that. You know what I'm saying? Like when I could maybe go to another RSI like and say, like, oh man, he's only selling, I don't know, tickets to this online show for $8. Like I wasn't doing that tonight. Anyway, I throw this up on the TV while I'm eating dinner or some shit. Right. Like I think it's going to move into a lot more of these almost like low ticket easy to put together offers that artists have to do rather than like you said they lean towards more with considered the hot tickets, the concert tickets, the merch, the bonus things like that. And they use that to kind of like make up for it and get a lot more into just fan nurturing and reselling rollout. How many times have we heard just different business coaches talk about how many businesses lose money and typically they're not focused on the existing customers. They're always looking to bring new people back into the fold. It's like, yeah, you could either go spend that $15 to bring in a new customer or you could take that customer that you already spent $15 on and figure out how to set him, you know, instead of $20 a t-shirt of $50, another $50 product and another $50, another $50, another $50. So that way now it becomes it costs you $15 to get a customer that spent $200 with you. Right. And then the margins look a little bit different. So I don't think a lot of artists, a lot of artists don't tend to be fan focused, especially when it comes to months that usually more like new people. I need new people. I need to keep getting bigger. I need more and more people to know about me when in reality you could flip them like, okay, maybe I'm not going to spend the money to get more people to know about me. I'm going to spend the money in time to figure out how to get the people that do know about me to spend more money on me. Rather than trying to bring a new person to fold, it's only going to buy a $20 t-shirt. That might be where he stops because I haven't laid the groundwork for them to be upselling to things that make them more profitable as a customer. Yeah, man. Like he said, they don't want to hear that though. They're not going to hear that. But I think there's some more solutions we can come with and a future part as well. Time will tell. But I think the movie model is the way to go with that. Appreciate allure for being the martyr that she is. Appreciate you throwing that out there. I just want to take a quick second to say thanks for watching. And if you want to learn more about marketing and branding and blowing music up in the music industry from people who have done it and continue to do it, go ahead and hit that subscribe button before you click to the next video. Hit that subscribe button now.