 What does it really like for a songwriter in 2023? We talked about this in the St. John clip, not too long ago, but here's another artist going even deeper on publishing in general. I guess, well, actually he's a songwriter. Like that's his thing, his thing. So I wanna play this clip and then let's just talk about it and break down some more numbers for y'all. Money, do you think is generated from a million streams? $4,700? Roughly $4,700. Of that revenue, publishing revenue, $8,900. Yeah. Which means on a hit record, you're literally dividing that money amongst five, six other collaborators. And we don't get that money for a year to a year and a half. So what generally happens is we'll do what? 200 songs a year and in those sessions we're not getting paid to show up. We gotta get our own door dash. We gotta pay for parking. And you're launching blindfolded half court shots trying to make a basket so you can make an $800. All right. So, minus $800, minus 10, it's back. So he actually said a couple of things. And if y'all don't know, this guy is a two times Grammy award-winning person. What is actually, what is said on the video? He won two Grammys and he's a hit writing songwriter and producer. The more important part is the way he broke down fees and the process. So we know that it's a gamble in terms of if a song is gonna do well or not. It is gonna hit a million strings or not. And he talked about how much the money, money the song makes, but then you break it down to publishing. $800 in that particular scenario that he's breaking down. Now you add in, I work with multiple people. So are we busting it down 50%? Cause I mean, you worked on it or are we busting it down some of these bigger records? One tenth, cause it's 10 different writers on this thing. And the funny part about it is he's like, in this whole time I'm paying for my pizza, my parking, like this entire process, not knowing it's gonna happen. So I have expenses coming out for a gamble. And that's why record labels move the way they move. It's cause I got expenses constantly going out and I need to make this money back in some way. So I gotta limit the risk that I'm taking and increase the possibility that something's gonna keep this thing moving, right? So I like the fact that he brought in those personal expenses into it. Cause I think we don't even think about that enough or that's not enough of part of the conversations. Like, what are you doing in this meantime? And how much is it costing you in the meantime before you make that money back? So really you make that $800. Let's just say you are the only one in that category. Did you just break even to pay for your pizza and parking over that period of time? All right. And whatever else it took for you to maybe fly out if you had to fly out. Yeah. All right. Uber over there. Uber over there and especially over in LA, that'll be $200 down and back. Sometimes some trips I've taken and then the worst part is, you know, you're waiting a year to get that change. You gotta get the money to get that. That's the most disrespectful part. That's the way the industry works. I didn't understand that shit. I remember when I first learned that I wasn't in the music industry yet. And I'm like, I don't understand. Because, you know, I'm still in, at that time, I was working a job, got paid every two weeks. No, I might have been still like bar teams. I'm in a job and I was happy because I had two different jobs that paid me two every two weeks. But it was getting paid every one week because they were staggered. I was living that kind of life. And I'm like, bro, you doing what? You getting paid quarterly, maybe yearly. In some of these cases, I don't understand. This makes no sense. The first time we ever got hit with a net 90, that shit made me angry. I was like, 90 days to get paid for this work I'm doing today. For you? For you, yeah. No, this is your marketing. That all makes sense? Yeah, exactly. So I get it, man. I 100% get it. And then to his point, it's like, man, you don't really have that clarity of what's gonna work because, you know, I've met lots of producers and songwriters that spend these same amount of fees, you know what I'm saying? I'm working to the music that never comes out, right? Entity doesn't put enough juice into it to make it go as far as it needs to go to recoup for you. Like so many different things that affect the success of the song that have absolutely nothing to do with or is absolutely out of your control as a producer slash songwriter, you know what I'm saying? And so then it's, I don't know, it is interesting, man, because I did have this same conversation about, you know, should songwriters get paid to be in the room with a songwriter on your mind. She would sound like she feels like songwriter should get paid like some type of hourly work fee just to be in the session because of that. Like I could come, your argument could be, hey, you spend 10 hours on this session, this shit come out, blow up, you know what I'm saying? You make a million, but it's like, I could also spend 10 hours in this session, took me $50 to get there because I spent 30 on lunch and then y'all shelf this shit and I get nothing from it. So I understood where she was coming from with that. I don't know if other songwriters and publishers or you know what I'm saying? I don't know if it's like, that's something they're like actively fighting for, you know, personally, but it like makes sense when you think about like that context of it. Well, also when you got people to that argument being inefficient with their time too. So you showing up late, you just chilling, drinking, got the henny in there. Yeah, so I'm just waiting, hopefully something comes out and you just wasted an extra four hours when this could have been a six hour session instead of a 10 hour session. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, then I do get it because we've all seen that, you know what I'm saying? I've been in some session on this shit for 45 minutes probably. 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 when you relate this to the other conversation about the copyright royalty board, so these stats, let's read this out. The royalty board accepted a music industry wise settlement that will improve songwriter streaming rates in the United States from January 1st, 2023. The settlement known as Phone Records 4 will see songwriters and music publishers pay a headline rate of 15.3% of a giving interactive streaming services but that's about 2027 so it's gonna work its way to that point. Now, it's gonna start at 15.1% and then increase to 15.2% 2024 here and then slowly from there go up 0.05%. So what does that mean? That means literally shoot away inflation is working down. It's gonna be moving slower than the pace of inflation so you're really just breaking even at where you were before, you know what I mean? And it's already long overdue. Like this hasn't been changed in a minute. So you're still just trying to catch up. It's like, oh, I've been getting paid $5 an hour and then you fast forward 20 years and people should be making maybe $15 an hour or something like that, right? Well, I'm trying to catch up with this immediate jump and even when I make the median jump, I'm not gonna be caught up and still slowly lose ground as inflation occurs. So a win, no, but you know what to me, right? All around win, but you know what I said, right? I said the argument goes back to sports and what you see again and again. You have NFL, NBA, they're pretty favorable. The MLB, they're pretty favorable in comparison but the NFL especially notorious, their agreements that they have for such a dangerous sport doesn't make sense. People not getting healthcare, your contracts not guaranteed, all of these things but you have a union or I forgot what they call it. They might not use the word union but y'all have this collection of all the athletes, right? And y'all come to these agreements, they do holdouts and strikes and we're not gonna play this season until we come to an agreement. So they've done this time and time again, they're still not getting guarantees. Why is that so hard? Because some of these players is weird. It's the middle class that suffers the most which goes into society as a whole. The upper class, you got some of them that are willing to say, hey, I'm gonna take a stand and try to increase this number for everybody because and I got the leverage and clout. Those are the ones you need the most, right? But how inspired are they? Unless they're just Mother Teresa and MLK. I'm only gonna fight but so hard because also because I have so much leverage and I'm in these great positions and we kind of built a relationship with some of these guys. Like I'm in good standing and I don't wanna mess up my situation and make it too rocky by trying to fight too hard or too dirty to help the little guy in this scenario, right? So I'm not gonna hold out for so long but here's the crazier part because a lot of people like to go to the people who have money or people on top and blame them the most. What you see is the ones on the bottom and this is strictly more in the sports especially like in a field right now and then we'll relate it back to the artists but this is the same thing. The ones on the bottom understand that there's a short time span to capitalize and like the average career might be three years for a lot of people or I need to prove myself and get on this team. So a lot of those guys actually don't wanna hold out too much either because individually it's like what am I gonna do? Take a stand for the future guy because stopping this shit right now will actually mean I never make money because I lose my opportunity. So those guys are damn near fighting harder than the people who got the most money and the people in the middle are kind of just in the middle never coming up because you got the big guy who's already a big guy and he leveraged in a little bit of his weight but he not gonna fight for you to get everything you need and he had the little guy that's like look bro I can't think about tomorrow like that. I'm trying to think about today to make sure I get the money that I need to get and yeah, 300K might not seem like a lot to you but that's a whole lot of money for where I'm at right now. So it's that hard to bring together these organizations where in football it's very obvious everybody who's in the league, right? These are the players. These are all the people who matter. You're either in or you're out. All these people are on a team. And music, who is actually truly in music and a professional? I don't know Drake. Right, we got our stars, those people that we know and some of the people they're connected with but what are the terms? Do we just say, oh, you have to be in a label for us to have a meeting and then try to come up with some terms and try to improve these terms together because there's a lot of artists who are just starting out today and they consider themselves pursuing it professionally. Like what, how do we know who we're in this boat with? At least those athletes know who they're in the boat with. I might not like have the artists. I don't know if they're on teams or like if they're really serious about this shit are we on the same level? How are they handling their business? Cause agreements are so different between people. Like so it makes it really, really hard for artists to orchestrate something that is impactful for their own rights, publishers, whether it's on the published side, whether it's on a general deal side, whatever it is. The thing that has been most beneficial for artists has not been artists standing up for themselves as much as we like to push this narrative of the Indian that's what's bringing the leverage. The thing that's been most beneficial is the advent of the internet bringing on social media and these things that literally changed the landscape.