 What's up, what's up, what's up? I'm Brandon Shawn. And I'm Corey. And we are back with episode number 18 of No Labels Necessary. You can catch us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple every Tuesday, Thursday, wherever you listen to your pods. Why we call No Labels Necessary? Because No Labels are necessary for us to build what we're trying to build. And you can't box us in with any kind of labels. And the people who listen to us and rock with us, we feel that y'all are the same. We attract the same, like mines attract. So let's get into the type of content we like to talk about. We already know music content, business content, marketing strategy. And today, as always, we have to start with some advice. A little bit of advice. A little bit of advice, right? So we're going to get into our Rate That Advice column. And I want to know, of course, what y'all think about it. This is from our boy, Nipsey Hussle. He has some great game for y'all. But there's some nuances we want to add to it on top of that and how you can apply it to yourself. So check this out. Nipsey, go ahead and drop them gems. You're like, regardless of what they say, you're in a good space because you never sold the album. So when you go back to negotiate a deal, you don't have a sales issue. They don't have to cop your respective sales, which they think you might do. And you from the post, you from LA, you got a big market. You know what I mean? They're going to prepare you to artists like, you know what I mean, that have sold humans on the West. And that's going to impact your negotiation. Whereas if you just, if you go indie and sell 20,000 humans, they're going to base your deal off of that. And I'm like, damn, that's good information. I never thought of that. So I made sure that I didn't go to retail until I did my deal. When I drop pressure, hmm, always gems on gems from Nipsey. You know, there's going to be hella post-Nipsey, post-humans Nipsey gems to come from years. And I think with this one right here, first of all, it has 50 cent again. How many stories do we hear with 50 cents around some kind of game for people? And it works. And it works. And one, y'all need to hear this not only as an artist, but then this applies in different ways as an influencer. There's so many things to break down. So let's just start here. The advice itself. I don't know personally how relevant that is today versus when Nipsey first got that advice. And I'll say what I mean by that. One, Nipsey, let's just say that was 2012 or something. I don't know. Today, the industry is a little bit more aware and a little bit smarter. Because what he was talking about is actually a bad way to judge it. And the industry is notorious for sometimes being slower to judge things properly. So if you drop these albums, what's the difference between an album and a project for the artist themselves? Like today? Maybe the amount of attention to detail around it. The amount of attention to detail. How much they kind of emphasize it. Because it's kind of like burning to our brain as consumers. That album means like, oh, it's about to be some big shit coming. Exactly. Exactly. It means it's something more serious. Yeah. But beyond that. Same thing. Same thing. Same thing. Same thing. Right? Now, of course, we can get into more details where it's like, oh, OK, there might be a bigger marketing budget. But generally speaking, if you're an artist that has no resources or very little resources and you're dropping all these mixtapes, nine times out of 10 when you drop this album and you aren't signing it, you haven't gotten any additional investment, you're still just dropping the same project with maybe more attention to detail. You made it more serious. There's nothing else to truly judge it on. So that's an unfair judgment to just say, oh, now that you call that album, I'm going to compare it to the rest of the world, right? However, the reality of the game kicks in and that just is what it is. And you got to rock with it. So it's important to understand these nuances, because that same thing transitions to any of y'all who are influencers too, right? I remember talking with J.O. and he's cool with d***. And he was talking about how he wasn't on TikTok yet. So this is probably like 2020 when we were talking and helping J.O. advise him on some of the stuff he was doing with TikTok. And then he was talking about all his other friends who were trying to get on TikTok. And he mentioned he was like, d***, he's not trying to get on yet. Why? Because TikTok was paying influencers to get on TikTok, right? Yeah. And he didn't know what his numbers would look like when he got over there. So what was he doing? Holding out so he can get the biggest check possible based on his footprint in the rest of the internet, right? My YouTube followers crazy. I've been spending all this time developing this. My Instagram page is going crazy. I spent all this time developing this. But if I go hop on this new platform, I have no idea what it's going to look like. So I'm not going to try to get any money after the fact. And plus you now have that leverage. I'm on the platform already. So what can you say? But as long as I'm not on that platform yet, you can imagine and speculate what my numbers could do for you. So he was holding out and not getting over there until he broke bread with TikTok to get onto the platform, which TikTok was doing heavy when they were, you know, when we start hearing about TikTok crazy, a huge part of it was they were paying a lot of influencers to be on the platform. So that same thing is what I think about when I hear Nipsey say, yeah, don't call it an album, right? Because all it does is change the context that they can argue against. And that's what goes into negotiations a lot of times. We know the reality is you shouldn't look at this artist who doesn't have X, Y, and Z resources and try to say his album should be judged with, I don't know, Dr. Dre's album or whoever was popping in with Kendrick's album, right in the West Coast at that time. You should be saying based on his resources and he's performing this way, this is how we should judge him. But nah, from a negotiator standpoint, you're gonna argue in your favor. Yeah. I don't know, other albums in the region, they do X, Y, and Z. So here it is, this is all we can pay you based on the numbers. A big part of this advice is basically maintaining your leverage and understanding where leverage comes from on the other side of the table. Yeah, and semantics. And semantics. And semantics, by the way, like semantics play a big part in it. I do think about, at least in the context of what he said, going back to it might be a little dated, because I think today, if an indie artist came into the situation and was like, hey, I sold 20,000 albums, indie, that today would be impressive. Back then, yeah, that would not be impressive. Exactly, that's why I started with that question. So I do think it could kind of flip there, but yeah, the biggest thing I got out of it was understanding semantics and the way people are gonna perceive things based on what you call it, right? Because all of this is a change of words, but this is a mix. Oh, that's cool. The pressure just dropped a little bit. I'm judging you a little as harshly. Oh, you called it an album? Well, this is what I'm typically used to seeing happen around an album, whether number wise, resource wise, and everything else. And I didn't see these, so therefore I can say, you did not have a successful album, right? Like you said, the argument would be, but I didn't have those resources. But yeah, semantics, bro, all of it goes back to semantics. And who has enough leverage to play with the semantics the way they need to, and bind you to that shit? That's how I look at it. Exactly. Exactly. And then to be fair, Todd Moskowitz, the guy he mentioned, gave him the advice that he should have dropped the album, probably was coming from a standpoint of what he thought might have been Nipsey's best interest when he said that. Based on the way Nipsey talked about it, right? He didn't give any kind of bad tonality like he might have been somebody who was trying to like play him, right? So he's probably giving him good advice, but then you always have to understand the reference point of good advice, right? He's an industry person. He's in the game from a different perspective of the artist, right? So he might be thinking to build Nipsey up and give him leverage for one thing, but 50 Cent's like, yo, as the artist and the entrepreneur type, you are like 50 Cent is himself, and you wanna look at things this way. So it's always interesting to take note of who you're getting advice from and how they're choosing to give advice, because I'll recognize that as well. Like a lot of times when I'm giving somebody advice on a one-to-one basis, it's like, all right, so what kind of advice do you want? All right, there's different levels on, are you trying to play this game, this game or that game? Once we understand what game you're trying to play, then I could cater advice based on my understanding to what that looks like, right? He's like, oh yeah, you know, you just trying to make money short-term, you trying to own things in the long-term. Do you have publishing leverage? Do you like, you want to tour heavy? You want not want to tour at all? All those things matter. So like, who you're talking to matters a lot. And even when you're getting well-intended advice, you still gotta think for yourself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. At the end of that day, I know a real right or wrong answer, right? Like you said, like, both of them could have been giving him advice from with the best of intentions, that just kind of pulled in different directions based on what those people went through. But I feel like that's the biggest thing people need to understand in music. Because there are no right or wrong answers. There's always going to be things that happen that on paper don't make sense. Then it happens. And you know, people like to point their finger back, oh, you said this wasn't going to work that way, or it should have worked this one. It's like, well, sometimes I'm not fucking this wrong, bro, this is how this shit goes, you know what I'm saying? Like, because I think we said a couple of episodes ago, but like most people in music, I don't really know too many people that speak in absolutes. Like most of us are speaking from, hey, this is what I experienced. Right, like this is what I went through. This is kind of been my path that I walked. And XYZ things happened when I did ABC. You know what I'm saying? And not saying that if you do ABC, XYZ would happen, but this happened for me. And so I think that's always important for people to remember when just picking and choosing who their advice is coming from. Like, there's a context of what they've been through, match up with what you might realistically be going through, right? Like if I'm taking advice from an artist who has been in the label system all their life, and I'm not an artist in the label system, right? They might only be somewhere that applies to me versus an artist that is in the label system. I'd be like, yo, this motherfucker spinning. You know what I'm saying? Like this motherfucker, genius. You outside of it might be like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, like the things you're saying don't make sense to me. And even vice versa, right? Like there are people in the indie spectrum that might give advice that like label artists are like, nah, bro, like that shit is not going to fly. Like within the operation that I'm in and what I'm kind of building in. So I do always think that's the biggest thing is like music is about combining, taking all the information you can get and like piecing it together for what makes sense to me. It's like a puzzle, you know what I'm saying? Like, all right, this from you make sense, the rest of it don't. This from you make sense, the rest of it don't, but together I got my answer. You know what I know what I need to do. Exactly, that's the tool for life right there, man. Because your ship is your ship and nobody's ship is going to look exactly the same. And I always say people struggle with the fact that they got trained in a school system where there is a A, there is a B, a C or a D. And one of those is right. Yeah. All of them ships could be right in music. Yeah, exactly. All of them. It's all about you. Every single option can work. And look, maybe only one of those options works one time, but damn, it worked one time for somebody and they're winning and it was right for them. That's the reality about how, you know, this thing works, but it's frustrating when you're used to things having to be this absolute right one answer and then you hear four or five different things. And you're like, oh, this person must be wrong because this other person said that or whatever reason where this person's more experienced or they have this title in accolades and you'll be surprised at how many people who had the titles on accolades will be so wrong, at least in your situation. That's partially why the new crop always rises up, right? Because they're doing what's modern to people who didn't want to get on streaming and social media because they hated that and they didn't have to do it. That allowed more people to pop up and they were right for that time and their advice, which also reminds me first, let's go ahead and rank this advice. Me, I'm gonna say a 10 out of 10 because of how we interpreted it. Yeah, okay, so Dan, that might be the first 10 out of 10. Yeah, but to me, it's that important though, right? Like he had, cause he had all the makings, right? You had two different people, both qualified but there was better advice. Also, he was able to stand his ground, right? Got this advice, now I'm not gonna do that because I got this other insight, right? And was able to stick to that insight and recognize that's the best advice. So it's not just what he said, but also how it's presented and recognizing everything at work. I think that's a perfect example of how artists need to be able to move to find success in the industry. Yeah, I mean, I guess when you look at it that way. I guess when you look at that, I give it like a eight. Give it a eight? It ain't 10 out of 10 for me. Only cause of the situation. Like I said, the number break now, I think wouldn't apply to today. A part of me feels like if you came into a situation today with what he was talking about, it might be a bit more strength behind it then. Right. Trying to give him the high back. That I agree with. Yeah, I started with that block today. So I try to go for principles, not the details because the details are flexible, right? I think the principle 100% applies. But yeah, now today I am popping in the artist. So we're not saying, so yeah, let's clarify that. Why you said it was a, 100% we are not saying don't call something an album, right? Or do call something an album. Well, I would even say that. Don't call something an album until you feel like you have the resources to make it appear like a big moment. I would stand on that. Well, that, yeah, see, that's still the same bite. So you're still agreeing with the context of it, right? Well, we're saying the way you will be judged is likely not to be exactly the same though, because people have more context and they don't expect any artist to do that. But know what, I'm gonna still pull it back though and say because of the negotiation aspect of it. Yeah, nah. Just for that alone. One, you wanna make it appear that way. And two, the negotiation leverage, I'm gonna have to 10 out of 10 all the way around. Fuck how people see it in the game they can and will. They will still play that game. Don't get me wrong. They will see you as a better op and I judge you harshly, but they will still play that game because they can, right? Now, not everybody, because you have some people who are more fair and that's probably when people, you know, you might get in an agreement with if you're like, all right, this person makes more sense. But if you let them, they will use that against you. Because why not? Yeah, too many points to use against you, not to use something against you. You're never gonna 100% get out of that. Yes. You could be, oh, you sold 100K, you toured 12 cities, but you only got 20,000 followers on Instagram, man. We can't fuck with you. It's like, damn, okay. That's the way it goes, man. That's the way it goes. So keep that in mind, right? Just put that in your pocket, right? Just to be aware of what the other person on the side of the table has to negotiate with, right? In terms of how they see you, not with their own leverage, but literally how they can manipulate your leverage, which I was arguing with somebody the other day, and it was about like the law, right? Illeg in versus social society. I think legal, like government, right? True law should be very objective and we should culturally shame people into the behaviors we want, right? But it shouldn't be legally in action, right? You know, it's shame is like a loose word, or kind of being tongue in cheek, but we know that culture, generally speaking, sets up a lot of the outcomes that happen, all right? Whatever the law may be, all right? A lot of times we try to make them go hand in hand, but now things are so different, all these diverse thoughts. So law can't follow it all. Law has to be objective, right? Culturally, we can push people to what we want to. And my whole point of that was, well, this guy I was talking to was like, well, nah, we should make the law like this, we can't make it objective like that, or you can't think of it that way. And I'm like, if you get a lawyer, they are going to tell you, hey, this can be interpreted to the worst case scenario, and they are going to adjust the messaging for the worst case scenario, because even if you don't think it's going to occur, your lawyer is going to say, because this does allow for that to happen, you need to eliminate that possibility. Well, they're not, right? A good lawyer will do that so when y'all are signing y'all contracts, that's the type of stuff that they're looking for. And you always have to be thinking about that, right? Yeah, we're in this good, you have some people that, you're just in a different type of agreement, the relationship might be there, but still just generally speaking, you want to make sure you eliminate that. So that legal conversation made me think about this, which also comes back around when we look at contracts and negotiations, it's like, whenever you're looking at the details, it's like, it sounds crazy to say the extremes. You're like, oh, you just being skeptical, but then the situations that we hear about all the time are extreme. They're extreme. You didn't adjust for the extreme, man. The extreme is possible. Just because it's extreme doesn't mean it's impossible. Yeah, but I was thinking about this the other day, just with going back to that whole, no right or wrong answers, whatever, whatever. It's like, you could have something and be like, this doesn't work 98% of the time. And I was like, damn, what about that 2%? You know what I'm saying? What about that 2% that it does work for, bro? And that 2% comes along and there's nobody talking to them because 98% of the time, this shit don't make sense. I haven't had to think of an answer for you. You know what I'm saying? Talk to you, put it through a situation. I always think about it, bro. Like, yeah, no matter how much something doesn't work, there's a small group of people that will work for it and you should be prepared. Like move as if you won't be that person, right? But in the back of your head, be prepared for it. It's like going viral, bro. Like you should move every day like you won't go viral. But if you do go viral, you know what I'm saying? You better be ready to shift gears and move quick. Shift gears 100%, 100%. You know, you don't expect to get in a fight, but if you do, right, you better know how to swing back. Part of my interruption, but I know that many of you guys are planning your new year, trying to figure out what steps are you gonna take to make sure you blow up or take your career to the next level, whether you're a manager, artist, or label. I'm sure you can get benefit from planning, we all can. Now, with that being said, you may have been aware, but me and Jacory are doing one-on-one calls for the holiday period for 50% off. If you want to schedule a call to speak with us where we can go deep into your specific marketing plan. These talks are great, but getting into your specific marketing plan, listening to your music, see what's relevant to you, go ahead and schedule at the link in the bio. There's I think maybe four days left by the time this releases, all right? Let's get into it. But no, I won't even go ahead and direction. All right, next question, next question though, we actually have a really dope conversation that we wanna highlight on the Bram and Network space where Lucky Deddy, I hope I'm saying that right. Is it Lucky Deddy or Lucky Deddy? I'm going Deddy. All right, Lucky Deddy, you gotta let us know how we say this, man. But our video's not effective anymore, all right? That's the question. And there are a lot of commentary in this space. And many I agree, but let's get into this breakdown. As of lately, I've noticed my shorts on YouTube have gotten far more organic engagement than any of my actual visuals that I've spent money to shoot. I've been able to gain more subscribers from my shorts than actual videos as well. Based on this experience and what I've heard from different sources, it seems as if it's better to post content for your music than to shoot actual videos for some until you have an audience that is truly engaged in your visuals. It's more cost efficient for me. And this case plus attention span is so short now. What are you guys thoughts? I mean, I think touched on some very quality points right there, all right? So let's just start there before we get into some of these thoughts, right? The biggest thing to always speak to people about when it comes to this is the cost effectiveness. Yeah, the cost, bro. All right, what's the number one thing when we're talking to artists that they typically complain about? Money. Money, money, money, bro. So why would you do something that's gonna cost you money? Like you have to think about is I have this machine, all right? And it's not the best machine. So I have to make proper decisions, right? You know, I can build a car around it, but I'm not gonna be able to, you know, go off road with this thing. I need the road to be smooth. So I need to manage this as much as possible. What am I gonna do? Am I going to spend money to get, let's say I need to drive from Atlanta, New York with this car, all right? It's gonna take more gas to go off road in all these winding directions. And then do I have enough money to fill the gas tank up enough times? Probably not, right? It's, I just, I got just enough. So in this life, when it comes to your resources, especially when you have very, very minimal, you need to focus it, all right? Music videos, they have, I don't wanna say zero return because we just talked about, there's always the other, you know, percentage. But the chances of your music video going viral, very low. The chances of your video going viral without marketing even lower, all right? And we're already talking about being in a position where we're worried about money. So you're probably not gonna have money to create a high quality video and do marketing. Yeah, all right? So cost is gonna be a huge thing, let alone the fact that most people that I see still are paying too much for their music videos in my opinion, all right? Now that's just my opinion, but I think a new artist shouldn't be looking at 5K for a music video, all right? You can barter and they say, oh, my cost is 5K, 13K, whatever, whatever. If y'all are bartering, I mean, kinda is what it is. You didn't have to come out of pocket and maybe you gave them a service or whatever or they felt like you have clout. So you gave them insight to, you could post their music video, I mean your music video on their page, all those type of things, cool. But yeah, you don't have 100,000 fans and you're paying a temp of $100,000, don't make sense, all right? Yeah, and it lowers maximum ROI on spam, right? Cause I look at it, just because of the way these socials are set up, most of the artists are promoting their music video through snippets of the music video, right? Yes. So it's essentially, let's say I pay 5K to make this video that I now chop down to five or six snippets to promote and I get whatever impact out of it. I don't know, let's just throw, no, let's say you get 10,000 streams of views out of it versus let's say you, I don't know, pay someone to make you five or six TikToks around the video or around the song and that costs you, I don't know what a videographer would charge without, let's just say like, let's say 200 an hour, let's just say that, it'll take you three hours to shoot all those pieces of content at $600, right? Yep. And then that same output gets you the same 10,000 streams, 10,000 views. One costs you 5K, you know what I'm saying? The other costs you $600 to get it, right? So the potential for like the bang of the ROIs, I think is much higher when focusing on the short form over the long term, over the music video, music videos are something that artists for the most part get, right? Everyone doesn't have the most amazing creative vision when it comes to their music videos, but you understand for the most part like where music videos fall within the artist ecosystem is social proofing, right? You are popping enough artists, or you take this seriously enough that you're producing high end assets on the back end, like all the artists who I watch to take it seriously do. But the name of the game right now is short form content. That's something that most artists don't understand. And so it's like, hey, you can, you always know the vehicle for a music video is there. Like there's not gonna be a point in time where like someone, they may be less effective, but we're always gonna be accepting of music videos, right? That's never going away. So I always look at why not spend the least amount of money to get the same impact while also learning how to figure out something that you don't quite understand, but has the chance to have five to 10X to return for you then like a one music video drop might have. You understand? See that right there is something that makes me think of the fact that Chris Brown, we just talked about not dropping his music video to how many years later? Longer, sounds like four or five. Four or five years later, we just referenced another track where the song, the music video didn't get created to probably like six or seven years later. Like Jacory said, your music video can come, right? Most people on the industry side, more the executive side, they're pretty savvy and look at music videos as something that we're willing to invest in once the song takes off, because now it makes sense. But why are we putting all this money behind something that we don't even know if it's gonna work? So let's hold back. It doesn't mean never, it just means not now and then never if it doesn't hit, you know what I mean? So, okay, you drop this music video, things take off, bam, let's go ahead and build more around the world in space of this particular song that's moving. But like you said, as well, people don't quite understand short form content. And I think one thing that's not being taken seriously when it comes to short form content is literally treating it as serious as a music video, right? Artists are missing that opportunity like crazy by just not being creative. I'm baffled at how many times I've had to ask artists to be creative. It's like, this is what you're supposed to do. Like don't leave that creativity in the doll. And then all of a sudden you're just a normal person, Clark Kent everywhere else you go. When you're thinking about the video concept, you're thinking about your TikToks, you can be that creative, you can think about your brain, you can think about what you wanna present. But then of course you have to figure out how you cater that to the platforms. And it sounds weird like, oh, I don't wanna have to understand the TikTok algorithm, da, da, da, da. But generally speaking, even musically people are adjusting their music for the platforms and the times. People make shorter music today because of the times, right? It's still a social algorithm of sorts that you're adjusting to, right? The way you mimic your hooks to some of the terminology you use, all of that's there. You're all ways using that. So don't take that mentality, just think about it as, okay, there's certain types of things that work on these short form content platforms. How can I maybe break five mini clips into something that still represents something as a whole maybe, right? So maybe they tell a story throughout all those clips, but they still stand separately. And if you get this content creator videographer like that, who is like, hey, how can we think about this specific snippet together and create a 30 second snippet that makes an impact, right? Communicates the video. My vision presents the song in a hard way. Bam, we do that. And then how can we do that again? It kind of reminds me about Duckworth when he did the series promoting his live, no his streaming, his live streaming show where it was a commercial series and everything built off of each other, right? You can build off of everything in that same way. So I don't know, man, I just want artists to be more creative or I just wish they realized they can be, but there's something intimidating when it comes to the short form. Maybe the quantity that it requires or maybe just the fact that this isn't this artist specific platform. Like music videos, you think, oh, music artist, right? But you're now looking at what everybody else is doing. So you leave your artist box and you're like, whoa, I'm a fish out of water from that perspective, but you don't have to do that. You could think I'm an artist, right? A visual artist, a music artist and I can project whatever world I'm trying to create through that. So I think that would help if more artists kind of took that mentality towards and had some people on their team that could think it short form content and something that we can really build on and represent our brand with versus just trying to follow a trend to go viral. 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. Yeah, it's like the LaRussell model with him and his content person. Now, I was actually gonna say that man, it's like you go back to the 5K music video. It's like one 5K music video is three months of a retainer from a good content person, you know what I'm saying? You can find the content person for 1500 a month and they really help you get that shit down and it's three months of development versus like there's one video that you still have to figure out how to market and you still don't have the skill sets to push it forward with the content, right? So I even look at it like that because going back to it, the video is always gonna be there. You always have the option as an artist to come back at some point in time to make a video. We as music consumers don't really care, you know what I'm saying? Like it's nice when we get it but if we're being real about it, like if you put your consumer hat on, even for other artists, like how long do you care about that video, right? Probably for about as long as you care about a TikTok or as you care about an Instagram short or real. But the difference is that short, that real, that TikTok costs you probably, you know what I'm saying? Two to a hundred times less than that video costs, you know, depending on your resources and where you kind of are with things. So yeah, I agree with that, bro. It's like that long-term impact, like it's really something anyway you can make a much longer-term impact for the cost of like one music video. Bro, add on top of that, are you even thinking about your favorite artist music video like that? Maybe your favorite favorite favorite who's dropping and they have the full rollout, you know, the top, top tier. Most of the music you hear today, you're not thinking, oh, I wonder if this has a music video. There was a time and that was how we thought, right? Dope song, I wonder what the video looks like or if they're gonna have a video, that's immediately what you're connecting it to. That's not the connection. What does your mind go when you hear a song that you like? When I hear a song I like, the first thing I do is, well, the first thing I do is I go to that page. Well, y'all actually me do it back. But with someone, I just found this, I was like, so. I would say it's two ways to look at it. I don't know who this is and then the other way is I know who this is already. And this is my first time hearing that song, the new song from them. So let's start with, I don't know who this is. All right, so I don't know who it is. So I found them, the first thing I do is like a look at their account and I try to gauge like how long they've been doing this. Like is this one video I came across like a flu or they had really been like killing this shit. And I just like scroll through, maybe look at five or six videos. I'll click over to like their Instagram, maybe look at a couple posts. And then from there I go to Spotify and I try to see like how big they are musically and where the song is at. That's typically where I stop unless I see something about a music video on their page and then it kind of splits. If I like the song enough, I go watch the video. If I don't like it enough, I'm just like, oh, I just really like the song. This is cool for now. Let me add it to my library and maybe a couple of listens later, I'll finally be like, okay, let me go watch the video. You know what I'm saying? Because the video I got. Are you even automatically looking for the video or is that if you saw that a video existed? Yeah, like if I just am scrolling through the Instagram and I see a clip for it, I'll go, okay, let's go look at a video for it. Probably still not going to watch it right now. You know, like I'm gonna just listen to it a couple of times. The video's about attention span. Like a song you just throw it on the background video, I got to watch that shit. You know what I'm saying? Like that's two to three minutes of my life I'm giving you and I take that shit seriously. So that's typically the process. And then I'll listen to the song a couple of times, maybe like once or twice. I'll talk to see if I like it as much for real as I thought I liked it from the clip. Cause they don't get talked about enough. But you know, sometimes brother's snipping on the internet be the best part of the song. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And you'll listen to it, you'll be like, okay, what the fuck is this? Like, nah, I'll just go back and just follow him bro and take some time. I'll support from the sidelines. I ain't gone really streaming a couple of times. Now if it's somebody I know, now actually ours I do know my first thought is that I have a music video. I usually go look for it there. Yeah, like if I know you well enough, I'm like, oh shit, I'm gonna be out of video for this. I go look like, I ain't got a video for this? Okay, well, same process. What else have you been doing? What's your spotlight looking like? What's your socials look like? Why do you think you do that if you know them already? I think, And we say know them, are we talking about, you know, kind of you just know who they are, know them or you're more of a fan? Kind of know who they are to feel like somewhere in that spectrum. Like if I am familiar with you, even if I'm not a fan, I'll still go and watch. Cause at that point I still look at like research purposes, you know what I'm saying? Like I'm still keeping up with what's going on. We're just like, just kind of seeing like how one side of, you know, a certain spectrum maybe move in compared to like the side I'm paying attention to. And if it's a fan, like someone I'm a fan of, yeah, I'll go watch it regardless. If I'm a fan of ours, like I pretty much like, if I know it exists, I'll go check it out. You know, if I know it exists and it doesn't cost money, I'll go check it out. That's the type of thing that I am. And so, but with those people, you ask why? I think it's because like the trust has already kind of been built, right? So if I'm still a fan of you, then that means that you've consistently given me things I like from you. So I'm assuming that I'm gonna like this thing that I see from you. And then a part of it too, cause I catch myself falling for it, but we always talk about how fans are really just people that like feel like y'all would be cool if y'all like met in real life, you know what I'm saying? They feel like y'all would be BFFs and like y'all would get a drink together and just be like the best of friends. I do look at a lot of arts I fuck with like that. I can't even lie, like if I'm in like, go really probably the coolest fuck to hang around but I go watch this video. I fuck with her brother, let me go watch this video. So her, she get the extra view, you know what I'm saying? Let me be the bump in the algorithm that get this shit going. So a part of that is me taking part in like fan culture and just being like, cause I like participating in art career as a fan because we're usually the ones behind it. You know what I'm saying? You don't really get to be a fan. You know, he's like, you like, I can't think of her name like the wizard. You like the girl peeking behind the curtains on the wizard bar. I was like, I'm tired of looking behind the curtain. I want to be on the other side of it for once, you know? I want to be wild and amazed and majoritized and shit. So I do it just to like be able to participate in the fan experience. It's funny you say that because I at one point had an opportunity in the NBA, like from a work standpoint, after I'm in music. And I literally said, my music industry has experienced has ruined my music fandom. I don't want to ruin another thing that I just love for the sake of love. It's not that I don't enjoy music, but it's definitely a completely different world and perception. And I so envy sometimes the ignorant consumer. Bro, so much, bro. Sometimes I get upset because I'm on the inside of some of the ignorant stuff. They say why certain stuff actually happened and da, da, da, whatever, but just the ability to enjoy in that pure ignorant way, right? And build the narrative and world that you want to, whether it's true or not. Man. Bro, it's beautiful, bro. I do miss that. Yeah, bro. And people ask me a lot of times like, man, how come you guys never reach out to some of your favorite artists that try to do campaigns? And I'm like, because I want them to just stay in my favorite artist. I don't want to like, I don't want to be calling Travis Scott's a quiesce. I don't want us to get to that level. You know what I'm saying? Like, no, bro. I want to stay behind the persona and see everything through the lens of what you intended for us as fans to see. I don't want to be sick of this by the time it comes out because I've been listening to it for the last six months. You know what I'm saying? Helping you prep for the roll out. I can't enjoy the whole without the same at one moment. Yeah. I actually have an artist on me that did this recently. Like he's always sent us leaks of new music. And like outside of him and my friend, like I'm a big fan of his music. And maybe like a month ago, we were at one of his shows and one of my friends was like, bro, you ain't seen me in the leaks in a minute. And he's like, yeah, I was thinking about it, man. Like, I feel like I'd be killing y'all fan experience. And I don't want to do that. Y'all is like, I'm not sending y'all leaks anymore. And like the rest of my friend group was like, man, that's fucked up, bro. What the fuck? Me, I was like, thank you, bro. Because yes, like, you really have any kind of like killing it for me. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't get to enjoy in the moment, like the rest of your fan base does just because I'm your friend. Bro, that's fucked up. You know what I'm saying? I want to go through the rollercoaster like everybody else going through the rollercoaster. You know? So I care about that, bro. And like you said, but there's some trauma in your music enjoyment experience that comes from working in the music industry. And I don't want that across the board. So when I do come across the artist, I can just really ride the fan rollercoaster and just truly be a part of the fan experience. Like I would do it. Like I'll take part in it. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm a, I'm a, I'm a receptive fan, but I'm that person that had to show like you tell them to lift their handle and I'm lifting my handle. I'm that, I'm that person, bro. Like, you know what I'm saying? You got me through the process. I'm right there with you if I like you enough. You know what I'm saying? So that does affect the way I kind of go but like a new artist, I think I'm more so looking like for reinforcement that I can trust that decision on whatever they're going to try to push me to. And the easiest way to get that is typically the music. Right? Like you make a good song. I trust you. I trust your judgment a little bit more, right? You told me this shit was hard. I want to listen to it. But that shit was hard. You just got five trust points for me. You know what I'm saying? You ain't at zero no more. And I trust you a little bit more. Right? And then maybe I keep seeing other things from you and I'm like, okay, you know, it's building up the trust point. And this video was hard to go two more trust points and it's real hard to go two more trust points. And like now over time, as you're telling me to go do things and check out more things. And if you've built up enough trust points, the decision for me to decide whether I'm going to do it is a lot snappier. Like I'm like, no, I'm going to watch this shit now. Versus like, let me add this to my watch later and like come back in like three days and see how I feel about it. Right? The one that gets me to watch it immediately has built up a lot of trust points. The one that it takes me some time, you know, they might have some because I didn't make the decision immediately not to watch it, but they don't have enough to make me go check it out in the moment. You know what I'm saying? Like, and there are just some artists who you've watched for so long and have seen builds so much like their trust fund with you is like crazy. You know what I'm saying? Like think about someone like a J. Cole or Kendrick but he's had 10 years to build up his trust fund with me. You know what I'm saying? It's like this point is like, I've seen enough in you over 10 years that I trust whatever you're telling me to go check out versus this little who the fuck ever that I just learned about yesterday. Bro, you got five points. It's gonna take a lot for you to just make me jump at shit immediately. You know, because you ain't got there yet. It's just the reality of it. No bro, that's exactly how it works. I have plenty of things outside of music that have worked like that where I have people who did not trust what I told them to do and they were like, damn man, I should have listened to you or a dang I should have listened to you sooner. And then that kind of thing happened again and again and again and again. And now they're like, yeah, man, you know what? Whenever you tell me, I get right to it. I'm like, I'm surprised you did so fast. It's like, yeah, man, I learned my lesson over time. When you tell me about XYZ, just go ahead and get on it. And that has nothing to do with music but that's literally what's happening with everybody that you build trust for, right? You can, the more trust you have, the less time it takes for them to act on whatever you're trying to direct them to do next. Yeah, yeah, I think that's underrated. Like the building the trust factor part is completely underrated because I think artists tend to think of the process of becoming a fan is like super linear, right? Like you heard the song, you liked it, like why are you not a fan? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And it's like, that's not enough. It's like, because the fan relationship is about how much I trust. One, just your music opinion and taste, right, like your style. And then it becomes about how much do I trust your lifestyle and then how much do I trust you as a person, right? And like you're able to kind of clear fan expectations at each level. Like you have a, you have more than likely a very successful long-term career, right? And then if you're not able to clear fan expectations in certain levels, like that might be something that will hold you back in certain areas, might be why you're like hitting certain ceilings, right? Because maybe I completely trust you in your music output. Like you make amazing music, but then every brand deal you've ever done has been trash, you know what I'm saying? So I don't trust you completely when you telling me to go buy certain products. Because you suck over here. Or maybe like your content has been amazing. Cause I've seen some artists, I've seen some artists that make amazing content and then you get to the catalog and it's not that great. So it's like I trust your judgment over here, but you're amazing at this, but this thing over here ain't one of my trust yet. So it's typically like that, right? Like you're building up trust factors with your audience, like each of these kind of different categories, like your music, your creativity and then, I guess your affinity to certain products as you get more into like, you know, flipping your brand for monetary purposes and things and like it's just underrated like how much like trust is a big thing, like all that shit. The more you say that, the more I think about how the fan relationship relates to dating and marriage. Yeah, a hundred percent. Like it's literally over time, I like you for one thing, you might have brought me in for your looks, right? Now it's about the conversation and the part that they never want to talk about when it comes to especially marriage is that day to day work. And you think, man, I gave you all of this, how come you can't give me the benefit of that on this? Or this, like why are we arguing about this now? This little thing is so small, but we've done all of this other stuff and I'm showing you the love, all those things are in place, why are we arguing about this small thing? That's how fans are, right? I just fell in love with you in terms of this song. Man, now you got two, three songs. You know what? For the people who really kill it, they might have a whole album and it's a moment. Yeah. But is that next album going to hit though? Is that next album going to hit though, right? It's like, dang, bro, y'all, I gave you one of your favorite songs. This is legit one of your favorite songs. Why are you- Should change your life. You should just be streaming this next thing off the strength. Yeah. Why do I still have to market to you for you to listen to my next song, right? That's how I might feel as an artist cause that's the kind of feels in a relationship where you're like, dang, why I still have to convince you and whine and dine you why we still need date nights? Like, why are these things still happening to happen? Look, I don't got the answer for all this shit. But it is something about human nature, bro. You can't stop. The work continues. You got to keep putting that work in. And I think so many artists think of making it, right? As the point where you get to stop, you know, where some people might think of marriage as a point that you get to stop. Bro, that shit don't stop, bro. Just take it from me. None of that shit stops. So never end in grime. Never end in grime, you know what I mean? The only thing that changes is the way that you look at it, your perspective on it, you know what I mean? So you can change your perspective in a positive direction and say, you know, I'm investing, you know, instead of I'm grinding, you know what I mean? I'm building. You can use all those positive type of terms, but, you know. And the day is working. The work is the work. That's all it is. So, you know, artists get used to that. And that's why we speak so much on building systems and understanding the game because how many times have we heard people say, oh man, I got a label, but the label didn't really do anything or I expected things to just take off but they're still where they are. Or I still had to work so hard for certain things to happen. These are all things that you're adding to your machine. Just look at yourself as you having a machine. You have to have the machine and the people on your team add to the machine and have a function to it. The deals and partnerships, they're all adding to that machine, but the machine is still the heart of it. You are the engine, whatever that looks like for you. And the further things get away from the heart of that engine, the less, I don't want to say less impact they have because they might have some great impact because it could be a big investment that comes from the outside, but the less responsibility they have at the end of the day, right? You can say whatever the agreement said, but hey, if I got a business and you're employee number 100, no matter what that agreement was for employee number 100, you know what I mean? That's nothing like the person who's right up under me or whatever, you know what I mean? Or my own personal shit responsibility and leadership or whatever, right? That's the way it goes. So let's get back to actually some of the stuff that the people said in the group, because I think there were a lot of dope personal experiences from the artist and managers in this community. For example, Asia Milano said traditional music videos aren't needed as much as they were 15 or 20 years ago or moving into short form content. I think they're important in the sense of looking legitimate, but out of all the things artists should be focusing on, I think quantity of content that resonates with people is going to lean towards being more important than a flashy music video. My favorite part of what he said is sense of looking legitimate. And you kind of alluded to that yourself, right? It's just like, hey, I take this thing seriously and people are trying to gauge, do you take yourself seriously? Are you just another influencer, right? Right, one of these random people who just decided I want to make one video, or are you truly an artist? Because once you can tell somebody's truly an artist, now I might think about, oh, are they on Spotify? Or are they in these other places? Do they have tours? And that's something that's always been important, right? Having a certain level of seriousness in terms of your appearance as an artist, but I think that's more important today than never when you have so many people who are doing music but aren't not necessarily that serious. Yeah, taking it seriously, yeah. This other one says, let me see, Jermaine Gump said, I think today's audience likes music videos but not as much as they did years before. Adrian Milani was correct today's video is short form. Yep, so agreeing right there, you don't see too much ahead, but I think it's interesting that Jermaine used the word like, right? Do you think people like music videos less now? No, I mean, I don't think they like them less. I think the attention span for them is a lot shorter because of how much video content we're being served. You know, it's like at this point, every social media platform is video focused, you know? So like your whole day is you watching many movies, many music videos, you know what I'm saying? Short snippets of longer interviews but you're literally consuming video content like. Yeah. For as long as you decide to be on the internet. And then the music video is just another piece of video content, you know what I'm saying? So that's like, bro, I've been watching, I've been on Instagram since 10 o'clock, it's 12, that's two hours of video content. I just saw your new music video release post 30 seconds ago, bro, I'm burnt out. Like I don't feel like, well, I was about to go hop off and like go outside or something, you know what I'm saying? Go get some fresh air like. Bro, I just left work. And we got some new skills that we need to gain. So they sent us some video tutorials. You know what I mean? I just sent somebody a video clip explaining or asking them a question. They sent a question back. We just got off a Zoom call. It's all video, life is video, you know what I mean? So I definitely agree with that. We get a lot more burnt out on that today. And Johnny Rayborn, by the way, you know, these comments, again, this is Brandman Network. It's our free community, brandmannetwork.com. Check it out. However, everybody can get in. We want to make sure we keep this quality. And, you know, if you want to hop in, make sure you hop in sooner than later because we don't know how long we'll be taking people for free at least. Johnny Rayborn said, short form content fuels long form content. That is a fact. Like you already kind of, you just said it, Jaquory. You want to say something before I finish? Nah, man. I said finish before he was about to hit a spot on. All right. In your new formula, more people will see your shorts as an intro before they ever see your long form. But once they like your short term, they will swing over to your long form. Yeah, that's why I want to take away from my boy, Johnny, because that's pretty much it, bro. Like we said before, because we first started noticing it with TikTok, where the example I give the people is, think about your, the average music video is probably like three to five minutes long. And so in that amount of time, someone could have watched five to, let's say, 20 TikToks shorts reels from you, depending on how long they are. Let's say five to 20 somewhere in there. So that means in the same amount of time as it takes me to watch one video, I could have went through multiple videos of you, had the trust factor built up a little bit faster. And I now want to watch longer form content from you because I was able to get into it, get that trust from you so quickly. Like I said, we see it with TikTok. One of the biggest places that people convert to from TikTok is YouTube, right? So it's literally, you are training your audience to fall in love with you through 10-second snippets, 20-second snippets. They're naturally going to be like, damn, do you make longer form content? Can I see some other stuff from you? And so there is a human element to it where I think we're kind of programmed that way. But then he touched on the algorithms of moving towards that. We read off Leo Cohen's plans for YouTube a couple episodes ago. And in that report he literally said, his goal is to make shorts be a vehicle to push people over to the long form content. He wants to have that line built clearly between audience short form to long form. So we know that the platforms are getting ready to focus on that, or at least YouTube is getting ready to focus on that, which means at some point the rest of them will also start to focus on that. So that says a lot about how you as an artist should be thinking about your short form to long form content pipeline. Like even going back to like, we're not saying never do a video, we're not saying it's impossible for them to work. We're just saying that their structure in your system as an artist is much different than it would look like 10, 20, shit even like five years ago, you know what I'm saying? Like to be real. But yeah, it's like, if I'm looking at your TikTok and if I don't like these five 30 second videos that you put up, I'm going to assume I'm not gonna like your music video, right? It's like, here was a chance for you, like going back to what you said, here was a chance for you to show me your creativity and why I should listen to you and things like that in a very short, digestible manner for me. You know what I'm saying? This is a very low risk way for me to decide if I like you or not versus me going to watch a five minute video from you. You know what I'm saying? And so if you can win me over here, I'm naturally going to assume that I'm going to like everything else that I see. Whether I'm wrong or not, right? Like, oh, I'm right or not. But I'm naturally going to assume that. And I think that's how most people look at it coming from short form. Hey man, I've been 10 of your TikToks in a minute and a half and I liked eight of them. Yeah, I go watch a video. Like I'm assuming I'm like what I see over there versus like you have nothing for me to gauge it off of and you just want me to assume that shit on the other side is nice? Well, I don't know you to trust you enough like that, right? Like to assume that. So no, I'm not going to. So yeah, but it's literally just the vehicle. No, if your fans are, well, no, not even your fans, potential fans, the consumer, they're those people that are like, yo, you got to come to me. Yeah. All right, you want to have a relationship? I'm not going to ever holler at you. I'm never going to be the one that walks up to you in the club. You're going to have to walk up to me no matter what. I could think you look the best in the world, but you got to walk up to me, convince me. And like you said, right? Going back to the creativity point, this is your moment, right? You got a split second, right? How do you look? How do you smell? How are you like projecting yourself? What kind of talk game do you have? And I bet let's have a longer conversation where I'm going to look at everything else. People are doing this already themselves. We already do this anyway. The thing is, it's just broken down, right? A lot of the stuff that's happening on the internet today is not as different as we make it seem. It's just that now we have a way to technologically separate it into the boxes that we naturally do in our thought process, right? So now, oh, okay, short form. That's the teaser, long form. All right, that's the full-blown thing. And then the sales process, like all that's there in everything segment. So we're thinking about things in these very specific segments. We're thinking about niches versus just trying to go big and hit everybody and make the world hear us because it's accessible to make each of these things a profession, is that accessible? Or a legitimate route to build. And Eddie Hart, he dropped something. And I think this is a great way to round this whole conversation out. He said, I think taking a phased approach is the way to go. I agree that building an engaged fan base that's ready to consume a full-length music video is better ROI than using that music video to build that fan base, right? So I'm gonna deliver it to you when they're ready, not use it to build the fan base, all right? That being said, you can leverage a music video by chopping it up into pieces of micro content with a text overlay laying out the day of the shoot or something to deepen the song's narrative with a call to action to watch the whole thing. I'm starting to resent something about this. Could actually do a ton for driving views of the music video itself, some food for thought. All right, I like some of that food. I'm not eating the whole plate though. What we just talked about, being creative in your short form content is the antithesis of just taking my music video and chopping it up into pieces. And we know that we do it. We know that many other people do it and we know that it works, right? Yeah. But until somebody starts to think beyond that and just say, bump, music video and just chopping it up into pieces and says, no, I'm going to just create short form content and keep it like that in these snippets. We're not gonna see people truly see it as many games as they can from this. Yeah. All right, we always talk about doing something contextual to the platform but you also have to be contextual to the format. So if you take that time to think, hey, I wanna make it specifically for this format, whatever that looks like, that's going to be better. You can chop up your music video but it's not going to be as great at the end of the day as saying, hey, what does this look like for this 30 seconds? It's 15 seconds. What does it mean? I can think about my call to action. Now, with that being said, there's another hack, so to speak, that I think more people could take advantage of. You can shoot your music video in a way that's aware of the moments that make the most pop. All right, if I shoot my music video in the way that takes into account the fact that, yo, this is a really dope moment. So I need to shoot it in a way that's gonna be cut for social media but also works in the context of the whole music video then now taking snippets isn't that bad or diluting things because what happens is reverse engineering in a very organic way. You are basically saying, how can I make the best product possible? And we know the best products are always the most marketable at the end of the day. From an organic standpoint, the product itself is the marketing itself. So if I say, oh, I'm creating this really dope concept but now I'm not just shooting it in this typical way, I need to make sure this person's closer to the screen or all these things are in the shot at the same time because if I do it vertical, then it's gonna look off. It's gonna look off, right? You take all those things to an account at once, then you're gonna save yourself a hell of a lot of money actually, which we don't talk about enough but also you're gonna give yourself a marketing asset that's gonna go a lot farther for less money but really quickly on that a lot less money thing, spending more time upfront saves money, point blank. And I think one thing that people rob themselves of is trying to create certain things so quickly in terms of their content, that they don't spend time on the front end saying, how can I be super creative on the front end so there's really dope moments in here? So it just pops cause it's a great music video versus I shot a music video, now how can a marketer that I hire get really creative with this piece of content to figure out how do I make it something worth commenting on? But you can do that by making it something worth commenting on upfront. You can plan out your shoot so it doesn't take five, six hours, right? Like all those things that you do ahead of time, spending more time on the front end when it's cheap and you don't have to pay for the team, the videographer and whoever helps needs to be the spot that you're paying for, spending that time on the front, laying out all the shots, right? Understanding what's gonna pop, where are you gonna get the most out of it? Doing that upfront is going to save you so much money, right? And I don't think we promote the actual craft side of it enough because, you know, one, that's not people don't ask us enough, right? They don't know what we'd be doing on that side of things or how we think about that side of things. But that is the X factor a lot of times when you look at these teams that are really killing it, it's those little details as well. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And even said Eddie's point, but that's like three pieces of content max in your rollout, you know what I'm saying? Like I said, one good snippet with that headline CTA, a little making of video, maybe one blank one, you know what I'm saying? So you can get that. And that's it, bro. That's three pieces of content after your whole rollout. So yeah, I agree, man. I agree with everything you just said. Well, part of the interruption, I have to take this quick commercial break too. Let you know that we are sponsored by me because I signed myself. We signed ourselves. It's this brand man network. That's why we're calling no labels necessary because no label, nobody else is necessary for us to get the train moving. So if you could just subscribe to show appreciation, we'd really appreciate that. Back to the program. With that being said, we got a deep dive we want to get into. Something that's really, really important for the year coming up, all right? Now, when we say the year coming up, what could we be talking about? What's important? What's so important? Look, everybody wants to figure out the new year is coming. How can I get poppin', all right? What's gonna be relevant? What are the new things that I should be doing? What are the old things that I should be doing to make my music move in this next year? And marketing moves so fast, I think a lot of artists miss out on the things that already turned a curve. You gotta stop doing that. So for this conversation, we want to talk about overrated music marketing tactics for this year to come, all right? Now, let's start off with websites. Websites, websites, websites, artists. I hear the right thinking that people tell y'all to do, or that y'all share among the community. I gotta have a website, I gotta have a website, I gotta have a website. I disagree. You don't need to have a website. You can have a website, 100%. I'm not gonna say don't have a website, but the fact that you think you need to have a website to grow your fan base and all these things, especially as an artist starting up, I don't think so. Now, let me break this down. One, we talk about resources. Part of your resources is not just money, it's time, effort, right? Your actual attention span. So you already have to do all this other stuff on social media that's gonna create fans, right? That you already probably don't wanna do because you just wanna create music. And you also have to create music, by the way. All right, these things already have to occur. You might not be somebody who can build a good website, or you might use these templates, but how are you gonna get people to this website when you're really trying to get them to your music? So they don't matter at this phase of your career, like that. But then let's get to the elephant in the room, the big thing that so many people say, I need a website for, I need a website because I wanna own my own information, man. What happens if Facebook dies tomorrow, they have another shutdown, or some weird political stuff happens, and all of a sudden I can't access my followers on IG. Or whatever happens on Twitter, on TikTok, or any of these platforms. And we know, it's been some times where we actually have not been able to get on Instagram. It's been crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, do you actually have to have a full website for that? No. All right? Not at all. Not at all. Especially today. Maybe this is more relevant and easier to talk that way before, but today, there is literally these link tree style smart URLs that allow you to collect somebody's email. Yeah. All right? Or, and this is an easier hack and probably my most suggested in that category, there's a lot of these email platforms, right? Let's just say MailChimp, right? Aweber, Drip. A lot of these platforms now have a form feature, right? So you got your email platform so you can collect everybody's emails, but you just create a form, whatever you're trying to sell, it's that single small landing page that collects their numbers, collects their name, collects their email. That's all you need. You don't necessarily need a super official website domain. You don't even have to have your name. It can still be, you know, I don't know, brandmanshawnaaweber.com. Now I know it doesn't sound as sexy, right? You wanna have your official thing, but when we look at the actual statistics, the effect on click through rate at that stage, especially of your career, the numbers don't really play out. Like it doesn't make a difference, right? So a website is something that you 100% can do and it's not gonna hurt you outside of the fact that you might not have time or not, or you might not be good at it, or you might not know how to arrange it, but the most important thing that most artists are trying to achieve who are thinking about it correctly when they think, oh, I wanna have a website or something. They're thinking about, oh, I wanna have data, right? A control space. Some kind of control space, but you're not doing much through your website. What you're really talking about is you wanna have the information, their phone number, their name, their email. We have all these things that it takes me if you want to, that can get people's number right there, right? If you wanna get access to my new exclusive video, just text me or send me your number, whatever, whatever, if you want to merge. There's so many ways to get that stuff. So it's overrated, not completely ineffective, but it's highly overrated and it's time that people look at the other ways because it's cheaper, saves you a hell of a time. And when it comes to pixels, most people aren't even really using pixels to the extent that it really makes sense. And most of them let you pixel anyway, like most of the smart link providers at this point give you the option to pixel them. Yeah, the smart links and the email people, providers let you pixel now. So that's not even like a strong enough point. I literally just had this argument with someone like a week ago, bro. Somebody on the concentration call and they were like, yeah, I'm about to make a website. I was like, why? Why? Doesn't make sense, bro. Because at least you were going back to that zero to 10 argument. If you were anywhere between like a zero and like a four, no one cares about the website. I argue you could get away without a website up until like a eight. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like for real, for real. Cause I think about artists now, I know now that are doing millions of months and there's millions of streams that do not have websites, you know what I'm saying? They're funneling people maybe to some type of community. Or like I said, back in just collecting phone numbers and emails and things because they don't want to do that maintenance of, this is another platform to maintain which is the part of I think a lot of artists don't think about like this is, it comes with the same level of maintenance as your Instagram account or your TikTok. The only difference is you're paying for it. You know what I'm saying? It's like you're paying to do it and you're, I also think it goes back to the artist not thinking about the end consumer. You know what I'm saying? Like you create this thing because it looks nice to you. You feel like it makes sense in your funnel but most for like music consumers a day really only probably go to artist website to like buy stuff maybe merch tickets, you know what I'm saying? So if you're at a point where your audience isn't ready to be monetized or they're not buying things and they really don't need a website because like you said, everything else that you would use a website for can be done with like one or two other platforms for free or relatively cheaper and with a lot less like work put into it. Takes you all of five minutes to make a smart link making a good website gonna take you a minute. You know what I'm saying? Like it's gonna take you some time so. And look keep, be clear. The data is the thing that matters. Not the website itself. Because Amazon servers have gone down and people's sites have been done away with too. So that's still the same theory that you think you're moving away from. So with that being said, let's get to the next thing that's a little overrated. Chikori, put them on game in terms of these TikTok influencers. Where are we with TikTok influencers? Yeah, TikTok influencers are super overrated. So I do wanna preface it by saying this. I do think that you can have a successful TikTok influencer campaign. I just think the way that is typically thought about is super overrated, right? So before we've kind of looked at TikTok influencers as the magic button, relatively cheap compared to other influencers, the organic engagement is usually, you know, five to 10 X what it could be on other platforms. And then the possibility that this idea could, or there's the idea of this one influencer post could just spark a whole bigger thing in terms of like a trend or something like that, right? Which all that stuff is possible. It's still very much so possible. It just happens a lot less, right? Like I think back to what 2019, 2020 when we doing TikTok where it was like some viral shit like damn near once a week versus today, where it might be some super viral shit like once every like three months, you know what I'm saying? Three, four months or something like that. The relative to like how big the platform is now. And so I think they're overrated in the sense of creating this massively viral moment. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it takes a lot more for that to happen and it's going to happen a lot less and it's going to continue to keep happening a lot less. Now they do still have their uses just, I think a regular marketing tool. Like if you're looking at, you know, a dollar cause average of the amount of attention you get for the money you put into it and you're just looking at it like a regular brand awareness campaign or maybe judging it from the same way you judge your YouTube influencer or Instagram or other social influencer campaigns, right? Then there is still value there. Nobody gets a YouTube influencer post hoping like thinking it's going to go viral and change everything, right? Like you don't get an Instagram influencer post and think like, oh, there's one post that's going to just spark everything off. It might, you know what I'm saying? There's a hot chance that it could. But I don't think most people are planning their campaigns necessarily with that being the end goal. They're planning to get a little bit more strategically and logically. And I think that same level of discernment and thinking needs to be applied to TikTok influencer campaigns for it to be effective. If you're looking for like the old school, let me just pay 30 motherfuckers with hella followers to post and this shit should go viral and create a trend. Sorry to say, probably ain't going to happen that way. Now if you're like, hey, there are six influencers who I feel like audiences represent who I want to speak to and I don't expect their posts to go viral but just speak to the right people. Yeah, that still makes sense. You know what I'm saying? That still can have an impact. Overrated in the context of creating like these magic moments like they used to. There it is. There it is. It's just misplaced expectation. And at one time, it was rightful expectation. Yeah, 100% right. Because that's how they got that opportunity. That's how TikTok start popping. It's like, yo, I'm hearing that people are blowing up over there every day. What's going on? Let me get into the house now. Yeah, no, it's not so much. But the cool thing about it when we talk about the brand aware side that you talked about is if you look at these relevant influencers, right? You can still get your image built within that community. You can still start to create this social proof effect of someone's willing to actually physically do something to my music. That's so different than you running an ad on the music video itself. This person is socially saying this is okay, right? To show love to this thing. Even if they took money for it, like if people are aware some people are doing paid campaigns, the fact that they were able to take payment because so many people are turning down horrible music. So someone doing something physically to your music is still amazing content for you. And it is cheap when you compare it to, hey, I need to hire some people to shoot a video for me and bring them out in my city. And we're gonna meet at this location and set all these things up. How much do I owe you, right? The way somebody with no following would think a lot of times and how much they would ask for would end up being more than just somebody who has 50,000 followers on TikTok. People with 50,000 followers, you could pay them $50. 25 some of them and get away with it, right? And they're still shooting content. And now you can use this content in so many other ways and catalog the experience and narrative of your song, all right? So I think that is an underrated, no, an overrated thing in terms of that expectation, but 100%, like what you said, man, it's still valuable. And please understand this, right? Like the regular marketing stack, virally is something that has to be engineered but is never the primary expectation, right? It's the icing on the cake. It's the icing on the cake. That's what you want. But you don't expect it as if, hey, I deserve it because I did these things. Today, we still have some artists that feel like, oh, because I paid five influencers and spent $2,000, I deserve to go viral. And if it didn't go viral, it's because of the marketers fault or because the influencers did something wrong, they didn't post it at the right time. It's not that. It's a lot of other elements that we're not gonna get deeper into because it isn't a solely TikTok segment. But yeah, just know that everybody's feeling it. It's not just you. But you touched on a really important point, too. I think help the way we look at TikTok influencers and that's looking at them as work for higher content creators, right? Because now the bang of the buck is strengthening. I could pay you $100, and let's say the post only gets 1,000 views and I might feel like, hey, that wasn't enough return from the brand awareness perspective, but you as a creator made me an amazing piece of content. I still think the video was dope. And then I have all these ideas on how I could use it in my ads, maybe, or maybe pay some other pages to repost it and do whatever with it. And then that doubles triples the value you got for the payment. And I know, because we were right there at the front of the Gold Rush for TikTok. I do want people to understand that, bro. We speaking from being at the front of the line, like watching how it kind of changed from down out. And yeah, that to us, I think that for us was a big game changer once we kind of sat down and was like, hey, like if that post does great, cool. If it does new great, we need to be looking at the actual content and what we can do with that so we can strengthen the bang we got from it in terms of the audience kind of makes a week. So yeah, I just want, I don't want people to sleep on that part because that shit really does, like you can get your brain and think of it that way. The brand to where inside get is the bonus, but I'm really paying you for the content and what I plan to do with the after that completely changes the context of like the TikTok influence campaign. Everything. Every time. Everything. So next we have selling merch. Oh, overrated. Overrated from a standpoint of selling merch via ads when you don't even have a fan base. Okay. There's a lot of people who have done merch sales, trying to offer something for free to create a fan, right? And I understand the funnel and I know that it's worked in some dynamics when you have a lot of funnel knowledge and you break down all these things and you've seen some level of success by offering something for free and now you have this fans information and now you're giving some stuff on the back end. I get that so many people have have done it, but most people don't see the greatest results out of it. Here's why. Because one, how are you selling merch to someone who doesn't know and care about you? How are you trying to build your fan base with merch? It doesn't make sense, right? Okay. And a lot of people are doing that or still think that that's like a thing. Now, here's a sub tier to this. Another thing that I think is overrated is merch that reflects your music and your face directly. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like, no. Today, you have the ability to build a lifestyle and a messaging around yourself. And if you just allude to that lifestyle message and vision that you represent for people, you can build an entire brand that doesn't even have your face on it. That's popping. Like, I know an artist, she told me that she made like 300, 400K in merch last year but she doesn't even associate herself with it anymore. Like people don't even know that she's behind it because it represents a larger message, right? And now she's almost just like a spokesperson for the brand and it's how people see her along with some other people that they'll have put on the stuff but they don't even know it's her. It's like the golfing model. Yes. Yes, exactly. So don't sell yourself short, represent something greater and you can always have these small capsule launches that are more youth specific, right? That's built around this special tour, built around this special album and it's limited, right? And done in that time, you do it and take it away but you have a larger merch brand that can sell at any time, any day as long as somebody reps the message. You know what I mean? Yeah. For me, I'm just about the artist making money as soon as they can and reducing the friction. Again, never saying, not ever saying I'll never drop merch with my face on it or with my album cover on it or something like that, right? It's just understanding that you can flip the model and make money and build a brand and a culture regardless. And then next to that, right? Your merch brand, right? The company that you own can do a collaboration with you as an artist. Yeah, yeah, and I agree with that. Because I think the important distinction is the use of merch to grow. Because I agree, but if you're not in a position where you think you can sell the merch, you should not be pressing on merch. Even if your context is, hey, I got a show on Friday, it's gonna be 50 people there. I think I can get 10 of these off. Cool, I understand that situation. You know what I'm saying? Like go for it, why not? People be drunk at these shows, man. They might drop 30 or 40 out of nowhere. They will. But yeah, if you are in a position where you don't think, I was gonna get like, if I don't think I can sell at least double my inventory, I won't do it. Like that's how we used to look at when we did shows. Like, all right, we wanna press up 40. Do we feel like we could get off 80? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. If yes, then let's go for it. If not, then let's keep building and keep trying to build demand for it. And I know a person that worked out really well for us about the time we did drop merch, I should have just flying the fuck off, you know what I'm saying? I'm big on that, by the way, creating those type of parameters mentally. And the sole reason is because our feelings are usually off. Yeah. Yeah. Like, we're bad thermometers for what really is. So we need to create that wiggle room. Yeah, I could do double, triple that just so we can hit that number sometimes. Yeah, yeah, bro. It's like, I'm shooting for the top, but I'm big on that. Yeah, it's like the music video conversation all over again, like the money to produce it and then to not make the money bad is going to be more detrimental if you just didn't do it, you know what I'm saying? And you focus that energy on something else. And the rare situations where I think merch giveaways can produce a new fan are very, very slim to none. Merch is typically better. It's just a pure monetization vehicle or to reward people that are already your fans. You give that free t-shirt to the person who's already proven his loyalty to you, not to this person you trying to convince to go listen to your song on Spotify. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't have the same impact in that scenario. As the person that has been listening to you, he gonna get that shirt. And I'm like, damn, I'm gonna go buy another one for my sister or get me a hoodie because this shit is fine. The person that you gave it to to check you out is already looking like, man, he had to give me this $40 t-shirt or however much it costs for me to go listen to his music or to even give him a chance to check him out. They're not seriously gonna check you out. Oh, they might, but it's gonna be more so like pity. You know what I'm saying? Like bought that ear, you know what I'm saying? But that's basically what ads and everything else is. And it's much cheaper, you know what I'm saying? So it always comes back to cost, bro. It always does. It comes back to cost. Always, man, always. Cause cost determines on how long you can do it or not. That's what it is. Now, speaking of ads, another thing that's overrated. Cheap ads. Cheap ads? Cheap ads are overrated. Okay. Why are cheap ads overrated? Because I hear again and again and again, oh man, I got my cost per click down to this. I got my cost per click down to that. But what does that really mean? Running ads are more than just getting your cost per click down. Ultimately, the whole function of running ads is about the return on your investment. So if I'm an artist marketing my music video, I got my cost per click down. Many people are clicking over to the landing page, but then they're not clicking to watch the video or stream the song. What does it really mean to have a low cost per click? Or if I'm getting fans in, I don't know, 12 different countries and however many different cities, what does it really mean if I got one fan in 500 different cities? But I had a really low cost per click, but I didn't really tell them where to target so I could get a low cost per click. None of that really makes sense cause you're not building a fan base in a specific area enough for you to be able to capitalize on it, right? So it's always like the starter marketer is looking at cost per click, right? That's like the first thing that you kind of are trained to look at. But over time, you have to adjust to have a legitimate strategy. And honestly, marketing without a strategy is overrated, but that's what most people are doing. That's really what it comes down to. It's the difference between the team that came to us last year and they were like, hey, I just wanna be able to target these two or three cities, find the two or three cities that are making the most sense for this artist and who's responding best. And then when we find that, well, I wanna find the best city and do a show six months from now, all right? Oh, okay. That's really targeted and it might be more expensive to do that. Usually it is. Usually it is, right? 100% because you're targeting in a specific place, maybe more than ads. There could be other activities that you're doing, but you actually can get a return on your investment. So that $1,000 that you spent there and it seemed like you got less out of it, might actually be a better return than this $1,000 I spent worldwide and I have no idea how to get my money back. So don't obsess over something being cheap for the sake of cheap, right? Or doing whatever marketing activity for the sake of doing a market activity. What are you looking to get out of it and what is it creating for you that you can then leverage to get to something else? Yeah, nah, I agree 100%. 100%, man. Like even at this point, our marketing team, I mean, we take what the ad platforms are saying for cost per conversions and clicks into consideration, but we're typically doing our own manual calculations for cost spent versus like smart link conversions, right? Well, I guess it's in brand mail. People that know we use one called Tondin like you're able to see what the CTR is on there. And so I'm training the team to like, hey, don't look at Facebook saying it costs you 10 cents a click. Look at your calculations across the clicks on your smart link and do your math on that. So you really might be at 40 cents, a true conversion, you know what I'm saying? Something like that. But that typically is more impactful because all the cost per click really tells you on the campaign is one of two things. Either you're, whether or not you're targeting to a really saturated area or how good your content is, right? Cause typically the better the content, the cheaper the cost per click is as well, right? Like good content plus the right audience, cheap ads, right? Good content, bad targeting, not a cheap, maybe they're not a cheap, right? Bad content, either those markets is gonna suck. You know what I'm saying? So typically that's how we look at like, the cost per click is letting us know, are we pushing it to the right people? Or are we pushing, or is this piece of content like the right thing? Other than that, it doesn't really tell you much else. Most of your other fan data or listeners is gonna come from like your DSPs and like your smart link data and things like that. That's gonna tell you like true, honest to God, like behavior patterns amongst the people that you're targeting. Because it's also very possible to have a cheap ad that doesn't convert well to the music. We've seen that, right? Yeah, it's doing 10 cents on the front end. Look at a smart link, they got like a 4% click rate. And it's like, okay, well, something, there's some gimmick about the content itself that made people click over in droves. But then once they got there, they were like, oh, what the fuck is this shit? I don't want this, right? I'm not here for this. It's the equivalent of like, I'll see a lot of artists who like to use like skits and things as advertisements. And that's typically the issue there. It's like, hey, all these people are clicking because they thought this shit was funny. And they got to the other side and like, oh, this shit from music? Oh, hell no. It was like, no, I'm going back to where I came from, right? So it's like, you end up being in a much better position like training yourself to look at like the cost for back end, even doing your own manual calculations. You know what I'm saying? Versus going like, oh, Facebook said I got 20 cent cost per click. Yeah, okay, this is good. He's like, no, that 20 cent ad could be producing a lower quality audience for you than that $1.50 ad. Like we've had a campaign like before. I remember there was one campaign we did for R&B artists. He had an ad running to the U.S. that was doing maybe like a $1.18 cent cost per click, but it had like a 90 something percent click rate on it. So like, it's like, these people are expensive, but they're very high quality people. Like that damn it almost always going to go stream something. He had a similar ad that was, I don't remember what it was pushing to, maybe like, I don't even remember. I don't even throw that on the country, but it was pushing somewhere in the U.S. And I remember the cost per click on it was maybe like 30, 40 cents, but it was doing like a 40% click rate on it, right? So it's still pretty good for like the cost of it. But it's like, with these people, the audience of people that's hitting for whatever reason are not as high quality as the more expensive ad that we're pushing out. And so I think that's always something that has to be taken into consideration. Like, is this, okay, you've established that this audience is cheap, but are they quality, right? Because in most instances, you will be better off. Like I said, I would much rather have the $1.15 cost per click with the 90% click rate, than the 40 cent, you know what I'm saying, cost per click ad with the 40% click rate. And then work from there to figure out how can I make this $1.15 cheaper. Exactly, because that's much easier than the reverse of it, right? Like how do I make these people like this thing more? Yeah. Right, because like I said, usually we can go like, okay, it's expensive because, you know, well, this video that we're using for the ad is shitty, bad content. Go make some new content, right? Maybe the next video knocks it down to 70 cents or something, right? So there's always like a way of the process, like what is the issue on that end, as long as we can at least see that people like the end result, which is music, you know? So yeah, and I grew with you, bro. I've been waiting for that topic to come up in the group. So I didn't know how we was gonna ever bring it up. You know what I'm saying? But yeah, okay. Man, hey, nah, it's way too important. It's way too important, right? Like we all want to graduate together. And you know, even we have talked about getting a cheap cost per click at one point in time. But you know, I think it's important to make sure the community keeps elevating and understanding that it's so much more to this marketing than that, right? It's the full funnel. Yeah, and then when I say it's hard to people, I don't even say it's cheap, I say good. Like we're looking to get you a good cost of a click, you know what I'm saying? 100%. 100%, exactly, exactly. Cheap is not the goal. Winning is the goal, all right? Then what gets you there? Now, getting on platforms too early, overrated. Matter of fact, I switched it up. I should just say getting on platforms early is overrated. But too early is especially overrated. And that too early is people asking about rumble right now, right? It's another new platform. And I know that there's this first mover advantage when it comes to should I get on TikTok? Should I get on Triller? Should I get on Dubsmas? Should I get on Rumble? Should I get on Discord? All this stuff you're like, I heard that if I get on this platform fast and then when everybody else comes, I'm gonna blow up, because I took advantage of it before everybody else. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow your roll. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. There's multiple factors because you still have to do it to the quality where you actually win on that platform. One, but you do get some true excessive gains when the platform grows, if you are at that top and the platform grows in the way that you think, right? That you think. That's the important part about it because many of these platforms aren't gonna grow at all, not to what you think they are. And here's my issue with the first mover FOMO mentality when it comes to artists. If there's a new platform that comes out and you abandon everything you're doing on your current platform to put most of your effort on this new platform, what if that new platform doesn't exist anymore? What if I said, yo, I'm not going to make any IG videos, I'm gonna start doing everything on Triller right now a couple of years ago and that was your MO. And then what happened when Twitter wiped out or Triller wiped out? Gone. Gone, right? You built this fan base that you can't even tap into anymore that's completely irrelevant. And now you're out on the game. So what I say is you can dabble and test some things, but especially as a new artist with limited resources and needing to focus, focus on getting good at a platform, like for real good at a platform. Like anybody can invest in YouTube at this point and be pretty assured that it's probably gonna be around for a minute, right? It might be harder to grow on YouTube now that it was so long ago. However, if you get really, really good at YouTube, you know that there's gonna be a positive outcome, right? But some of these new platforms be real, for instance, right now, you can get really, really good at be real, whatever that looks like, but you don't know if be real is gonna be here in 2024. You just don't know, right? And that's cool. That's that risk, but you gotta understand that that risk is there. And as a new artist with less resources and your time is really meaningful, that risk is so, so dangerous to take. But I get it. I get it, right? It's a shiny new thing because you already been losing on another platform. So let me just gotta go find another platform to win. Yeah, I mean, it's like you said, like the key is the balance, you know? Cause I do think artists should set aside maybe at least 10% of their energies to try things out as you see it and come across it, right? Give it a little bit of credence, but I think the important thing is not championship, which artists do have a really bad habit of just completely abandoning the shit, bro. Like, oh, this shit moving like crazy. I'm going over here. It's like, whoa, whoa, hold up, man. Instagram is still doing fine. You know, it's not, it's not 30X, but you still doing pretty good over there. So, yo, hold up real quick. You remember that person, how many of you talked to her directly or if I just told you about her? Remember the person who was like, I went from 13X and now I'm at 5X and they were complaining. They were getting a 5X return. I do remember that. Yeah. That's the mentality that you're basically talking about. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I forgot about it. That shit was crazy. We're talking about money, by the way. You made a 15X your money that you were putting in ass and then they went down to 5X and were complaining. Yeah, that I get. That I understand, I understand. But it's like, but artists have typically have a really bad habit of like jumping shit, you know what I'm saying? Because I think a lot of them are looking for like one vehicle to focus on. So they are chasing, you know what I'm saying, different vehicles like, oh, this could just be the one. It's like, nah, the reality of it is it's probably gonna be the two or three. You know what I'm saying? For you to really build things out. And I think the more comfortable artists get with understanding that, like the more of a true content infrastructure that can build where it's like, hey, I do have my one or two bread and butters and every year I take some time out to go try a new platform for like three months. And if I like it, I figure out a way to integrate it into what's going on. Right, if I believe in it and I think it's gonna be here, I figure out a way to integrate it. And if I don't, at least I didn't kill off my fucking core infrastructure. You know what I'm saying? I'm thinking I'm still good, you know what I'm saying? To say the least. So I think I can sound that it's over at it. Cause it just, it becomes a new conversation every time a new platform. Oh shit, this new platform hit. How can we use it? It's like, damn bro, that should have been out for three weeks. Like let it hit the world first, bro. Let's let the users get into it and so we can study them and see. But like, I don't know. Like it just hit the app store. Like I said, like three weeks ago, bro, like, you know, so I already got people asking about be real strategist. I'm like, bro, I don't know. Leave me alone. Don't fall for the vision of the founders of these companies that they're selling and they're marketing, right? You're on a professional side. As a consumer, you can taste and look, sop up that Kool-Aid however you need to all day. But as a professional, this is your career. You can't just be like, oh yeah, they're selling this vision and they want this to happen and that sounds cool. So a new thing is challenging these other platforms. So I should hop on it. That's not how you have to think about it. And it's a risk assessment. What am I losing by going to this new thing or putting all my effort or how much effort should I put towards that platform? That's what you should be asking. And that varies based on where you are in your career, right? If you haven't gotten the internet at first, you know what I mean? If you haven't gotten the internet in first place, the risk is pretty low, right? For whatever you try. Just go try something and start, right? That's the news. But even if you've already invested and you have like 500 followers on IG, that's the level of investment that matters, right? Then let it on 200K, 500K, whatever, whatever. So all these things are something to keep in mind. And with me, I'm still the person that ultimately says, try to master one platform before you try to get on all these platforms. And I know that we are in a space where you can just copy and paste your reels, right? To TikTok, to YouTube Shorts, to choose Snapchat if you want to. But at the end of the day, the nuances and the way the platforms think are different, right? The way they act as a whole are different. So you might copy and paste onto other platforms, but your priority platform should be the platform you focus on, the minutiae, get into the details, right? Understand what they like, what the response rates, how much you should be creating content, how hard is it to get a subscriber or a follower? What are the things that you need to do on that platform in the description or caption to get people off platform? Like all of those details for that platform is going to be different for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever is out there that you want to think about. So if anything, at least think of it from a model standpoint, if I have one priority platform that I'm truly paying attention to top to bottom, and then I might have content that I can copy and paste and redistribute on other platforms, and hopefully I do get some gains over there, right? But I'm not going to allow that stuff to take my eye off the ball of whatever this priority is. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I agree. What you think about the playlist, man? Are you going to overrate it with that one or no? Yeah. You talked about it with- Yeah, it's overrated, bro. Okay. So what we were talking about pre-show is I was saying that it's still a relevant conversation for artists at a certain level. If we go back to my zero to 10 example, I'll keep using super relevant conversation between people from like a zero to like a three, you know what I'm saying? I think the higher you get, the more you start to either have discernment for playlisting or you start to understand more about how it fits into the overall marketing infrastructure, right? And so what I've come to see playlisting as is it is one, just a social proof builder, right? Hey, this thing was going to do 50,000 streams. Let me put an extra 100K on it. So I look nicer to my investors or to that booking agent I'm talking to or to that, you know, that I don't know that product guy that wants to maybe give me a sponsorship, right? Let me do things that make the numbers look big to people who are not able to get full context in this space, right? And then on top of that, it's a bragging moment. Like once you talk about like getting into like editorial playlist, right? Not like the necessarily running the meal like third party players, but like your, you know, like your most necessary or you know what I'm saying? Like those, those editorials, those are more like bragging moments. One, within the industry, but then two to your audience because their audience typically doesn't understand what hoops you have to jump through or somebody around you had to jump through to get you on those. So it's cool to say, hey, I got it on most necessary. Great. You know what I'm saying? Go listen to it. Oh, that's great. Great for you to write some good celebratory moment within your fan base. Outside of that, those two things, it doesn't hit. It never hits like people need it to. And I'm talking about all levels, bro. Like I was telling you off camera, one of the biggest things that changed the way I looked at playlists and was I had a Aries Homie get into a really big playlist. It might've been like Teardrop or something. Like it was huge. And like they let me look at their backhand looks and what came from it. And the string spike to drop-off looks exactly the same as when you get an independent playlist. Right? So I'm like, oh, this issue isn't even a bot playlist issue. It's not an independent curator playlist issue. This is just an issue across playlist thing as a whole. You know, because like Teardrop is a massive playlist. You know what I'm saying? It's a pretty big playlist, especially in that space. So it's like, you literally can see the spike then the curve drop-off and then it's back to probably just his core audience. Maybe a small bump in the floor from like new people coming from the most part. Like it didn't go back to, things didn't go back to like, you know, exactly as they were before the playlist, but like the increase in the floor was like very small compared to like what they saw during the spike. And so that completely changed the way I looked at the playlist. And I was like, okay, but I'll watch everything else in a moment. Yo, he's on it. I'm watching him get, you know, these people reach out to him and congratulating them and you know, offering all these things, the social proofing aspect of it, right? Hey, this big platform I thought you were important enough. So maybe I should see if you important enough with some shit I got going on. You know what I'm saying? So I saw that aspect of it. And like, I just saw like, like I saw the social proofing part of it kind of get put into play. And then looking at the analytics is like, okay, this is the fan aspect of it. Bro, like they came in, it's cool. They drop off and go about whatever. I don't think he ever got crazy like other platform engagement from being on it. Could be wrong. I actually do remember seeing one coming out on one of his YouTube videos that mentioned seeing him in the playlist. So that was pretty cool where I like, but even that goes back to the fan brag moment, right? This is a guy like, oh, shit. This is my favorite artist, bro. He's an XYZ playlist. He's the cover of XYZ playlist. Like those are typically the only two moments where it seems like playlist and cares. Celebratory moment, if you're trying to be a social proofing or something. Other than that, shit does not matter. Overwrite it. Stand on it. I'm gonna go 100% and I think the problem is the lack of culture with playlist. When I say that, I mean, if you look at a brand as a playlist, brands have trouble scaling and maintaining culture and taste, all right? I mentioned this earlier on another episode and if you're not really looked at as a true curator, why will people continue to follow? Most playlist people get into because of convenience, not out of a cultural pool, you know? So if I see the R&B playlist on Spotify, A, R, E, and B, you know how they flip titles and stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm in a R&B mood today and I wanna check that out. I'm gonna follow that playlist, right? But it's not because of true culture and I'm not looking at it and checking on it repeatedly like I might with somebody who's a taste maker that I like on TikTok that says, oh, this music is good and they're already putting me onto new artists, all right? And there's an association in context of telling me why I like it, right? Like Sean C saying I like or don't like this because X, Y, and Z, all right? So there's that element that's missing from almost everything as you scale up it becomes really difficult to maintain that with artists, right? That's how people always graduate into selling out in some way, but then on the other side of it, it becomes even more difficult when you're a faceless brand, all right? So you're just a, you're really a graphic. That's what you are to me on Spotify. I don't really know anything about you anywhere else. I probably only follow you on Instagram, anything else like that. There's no lifestyle I associate. It's just a fucking graphic, right? So why am I gonna keep checking up on this playlist? So it makes it difficult. And if you talk about these editorial playlists, you look at the benefit on Spotify side. The benefit is there for people to continue to go to the playlist because it's like, yo, this playlist is really powerful. So we can keep churning and adding to this playlist and focusing on building this playlist because it's bringing us more activity on the platform. And that's exactly what we want. However, Spotify finds benefit in that, but they aren't limited to benefit from just that. What if that doesn't work? What if that's too hard? What does Spotify also get benefit from? Well, you following another playlist on the platform, right? So yeah, there was this general R&B playlist, but now it's Valentine's. So I'm just gonna pop up this Valentine's day photo and it's gonna have some other same artists possibly and you're gonna follow that playlist. And it's still my playlist and I'm still getting the listenership, right? So I don't really care as much about building a culture around a single playlist. Spotify is in constant sales mode, right? That's why they're always changing the covers, right? Changing these names with something clever to constantly attract you in because they know the user can get a little lazy and they're gonna find the thing that pulls their attention in at the moment. So they have to recapture attention again and again, refreshing these headlines. That's what you see now on Netflix and these other platforms too where they'll have five, six different covers. It's like, okay, he's seen this cover like five times, let him see a different character and think it's a different movie for a second. You know what I mean? Because we're still gonna get the benefit as long as you stream, period. So that culture isn't there, which makes me think the stronger culture I've seen around a Spotify playlist editorial specifically was the rap caviar. That was what I was aware of. I feel like we're kind of weakened. And that was what I was about to ask you, what is your insight or thought on the power rap caviar today versus what it was before? Yeah, I had never thought about this before, but just thought about it because of what you said about the faceless brand thing. Yeah. At the time when rap caviar was really popping was when, what's his name? Tumar Basa was the one running it. And he was the one like Spotify curator that we knew was over it, right? You were right. And then he leaves and then it goes back to every playlist on Spotify's faceless now. Yeah. I think that's what happened. You are right. Now, of course, a lot of the consumers don't necessarily know who Tumar is, but he was such a strong face in the industry, built up, you know, people, he had so much face card in the industry that 100% he was a curator and influencer within the industry that in many ways influenced the outer industry. Yeah, it was the same way what was the car sharing Apple? When Apple, yeah. And now he's at Spotify now, right? I think so, yeah. So it was like that. These were the two playlist brands where I could go find the person that made it and like follow them on Instagram or meet them at a conference, right? Versus like today, I don't know who updates teardrop, you know what I'm saying? I don't know who updates most necessary and maybe some intern, you know what I'm saying? But we'll never know. And so yeah, I think that's what kind of killed it off. It's like that cultural tie just kind of like failed by the wayside because they were like, artists want to partner with a person, not an entity, you know what I'm saying? People want to partner with a person. Yeah, people want to partner with people. Yeah, exactly. Like be able to have a face attached to it. So yeah, but I'd never thought about that till you said the whole like people thing. And then today, I mean, there are individual curators that are front facing, maybe like TikTokers or YouTubers and things. And usually those players are the best players. Like they have the most engagement. You see like high scale impact relative to like whatever you may have had to pay or do to get onto the playlist. You can see the impact carry over into their audience, right? So you could very much so hit a TikToker for a promo post on their page, getting their playlist and then see the effect that that whole line is having on that fan that found you from them. I saw your post, when his players listened to it, I thought it should have fired and boom, I'm back, right? And so I do think like, playlisting still has its place in music. I do think if we could really graph out all of the music market things you could do, like I would put it on there. I do think there's a time when it makes sense. I just think for most rising artists, it doesn't make sense. One, because you probably are not getting on the playlist that can have that type of impact for you. And then two, the biggest one to me is that it fucks up the rest of your marketing infrastructure build because now you're getting all this traffic in so fast from this like relatively unreliable source that you can't accurately fine tune like the other parts of your machine, right? It's like we had a campaign once where I remember we were building out the artist's ad funnel, nothing crazy, maybe like a $500 ad budget. And then in the beginning it's easy to see because like you got zero streams and you go to doing 100 streams a day. It's very clear to see like where that's coming from, right? But then the artist gets into a playlist and then it jumps up to doing 10,000 streams a day and now I can't see where the ad funnel is having an impact, right? I can't see where my influencer strategy is having an impact. I can't see where my content strategy is having an impact because you overrided with all this playlisting traffic. And so I think that playlisting for a majority of artists makes sense when you have other legitimized parts of your fan funnel built out, right? Like you have your content influencer, whatever that looks like for you, if you can see a very clear correlation between you doing this thing or A thing and Z output being made and you have tried and done up to see that it consistently works, at that point I can understand when the artist wants to do playlisting. Yeah, I equate that to constraints and marketing. That's how we look at it, right? When we think about scaling the company. We marketers, right? We can market our ads off, create all kinds of viral campaigns, cool campaigns, we can do that. But what does that matter if our infrastructure isn't built out and there's no business set in place that can capitalize off of the marketing that occurs, right? And then there's no operations within that business that truly can fulfill to the scale of the marketing. So we're constantly at this ebb and flow, oh, let's build the infrastructure to a certain place. And then we can scale using all types of tactics, playlisting will fall as a part of that, like one of the top layers of scale in what your analogy is, right? Because you have your infrastructure, just enough in place, the initial marketing and then you have the marketing that's like, I'm gonna go bigger, right? But when you think about those tiers, it's always starting with, well, hey, do I have enough infrastructure in place? And if I'm marketing, is it overrated to start it now or is it overrated to start it later? Because that's what this whole list comes down to, right? Like it's not, none of these things are useless, right? But their usefulness comes down to when they're executed. Yeah, 100% context. Context is everything. That's like my motto, man. That's like my life motto for real. Like I hate things out of context. I hate being taken out of context. And those nuances make a massive impact. But we appreciate you guys tuning in for this episode, episode number 18, I'm Sean. And I'm Kory. And we out. Peace.