 All right. So if we scroll down to the note that Lord has left, you said she sent this out on an email, right? To her fans newsletter newsletter. All right. She says basically for artists, promoters and crews, things are at an almost unprecedented level of difficulty. It's a storm of factors. Let's start with three years worth of shows happening in this is a reference to the pandemic and it has been crazy. I cannot, cannot disagree with that. Every event that I had been going to before the pandemic when I went to it, like the first one after this year, tripled in audience, at least ridiculous. And that's not even just music, by the way, like almost any event, right? One music festival is crazy invest festival is crazy. A lot of concerts I went to. So let me see. Let's start with three years worth of shows happening in one. Add global economic downturn and then add the totally understandable weariness of concert goers around health risk. All right. On the logistical side, though, there's things like immense crew shortages. Here's an article from something that was New Zealand. We can skip that. Extremely overbuilt trucks and tour buses and venues inflated flight accommodation costs ongoing general COVID costs and truly mind boggling freight cost to freight and stage across the world. Wait, to freight a stage across the world can cost up to three times the pre pandemic price right now. I don't know shit about money, but I don't know enough to understand that. But I do know enough to understand that no industry has profit margins that high. I'm gonna agree with you. You don't know much about money because their prices, they don't have that high profit margin. Their prices have increased too. That's why it's so high for them. But this whole pocket right here is why everything cost so much. This is what she's referencing. So the fans, like y'all are paying with y'all are paying, right? But at the same time, extremely overbooked trucks, right? Which means those people are hard to get a hang of, which means the prices have also increased because they can be far more selective with their work. You got to pay for this COVID costs and safety measures that you didn't have to pay for before, right? Which probably not only was it not fully accounted for because this is a new thing. So it's harder to account for it, but it's not as efficient as well, which means it's at the costlier side of the curve. Five years from now, COVID safety measures will probably be a lot cheaper because it's been done, you know, people have made it efficient, the plastic or whatever, you know, it goes into it just like it took a while for at home COVID tests, right? I was in the Walgreens the other day and now it's just right there. You can buy it, but before the government had to ship it. Yeah. So it's that type of thing. Things are costing more money, right? This is what the artists are dealing with on the same side. Let's skip forward. Ticket price would have to increase to start accommodating even a little of this. But absolutely no one wants to charge their harried and extremely compassionate and flexible audience any more fucking money. Nearly every tour has been besieged with cancellations, postponements and promises and let downs. And audience have shown such understanding and such faith that between that and the post COVID wariness about getting out there at all, scaring people away by charging the true cost ain't an option. All we want to do is play for you. So what is she saying right here? Bro, our costs have gone up significantly, but we can't charge the fans no more money, which means our margins have shrank crazy. We're making way less money for the same shit, right? Because, hey, what fans, you know, any fans that are going to pay three times the cost after we just went through the pandemic? Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough, that's a little tough cookie to be in a rock and a hard place. Yeah, bro. I mean, with that part, like I always respect artists for not wanting to charge their fans more. But I feel like as fans, bro, we're smart enough to understand that, like, sometimes it is what it is, right? Like, if you have an artist you care about and you like enough, it might shrink the amount of people that focus you because of that. But like, we going to get it. You know what I'm saying? But, but, bro, I think you missing a point, though. You can respect the artists for not wanting to charge. But I think the reality is they can't charge more. They think it's a cap on where they can charge. Yeah, it's a cap to anything like an industry cap. No, I'm like, yeah, but it's something that's why I say it probably would like, let's say I don't know how much her tickets were. Let's let's say her tickets were $300. I don't know. Sounds about right, right? Let's say she bumped into five. OK. So 300. Maybe she sells 20,000 tickets at five. Maybe she sells 14,000. Yes. You know what I'm saying? It's like, I do the math my head real quick. I might have actually just proved your point in doing that math that way of breaking it down. But I don't know, man. I feel like the people that that like you enough are going to be OK with it. And I mean, to me, it makes me also think about. Taylor Swift conversation a little bit. I know we keep going back to her, but I'm pretty sure an artist of her size is probably having the same issues, right? Because all the things that Lord mentioned being a part of the expense. That's that's that's that's Richard's problem. Like, come on, bro, like that average artist ain't don't even. I didn't I didn't even think about the cost of ship of stage. So the flyer stage across the world. I didn't like, dang, bro, you didn't just like get a local stage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. But. Taylor did a really good job of pushing everything back to violent Microsoft, right? So she probably is taking her touring and just lumping in what her marketing costs like, OK, it's going to cost me, I don't know, a million dollars to put this tool together. I'm only going to make that 800 K. I'm down 200 K. I'm that aspect of it. But if I get all these people with a Bob Vano, Bob Merch, Bob teacher, talk about me stream, then my upside on everything else jumps up 100 percent or something. And I'm good now. You know what I'm saying? She lose to that a little bit, right? Later on in this. But I think there is multiple factors for artists and why they can't just up the prices because. We can get deeper into this as we finish it out. But. All right, yes, we know in in product sales, there is an effect where you can up the price, have less customers and sometimes make more money now, not let alone just the same. Right. So that's a real thing. All right. So she might have those people who love her so much and they can come across the money that still go. Yeah. But. One artist have this brand impression that they have to be able to uphold. All right. Yeah. Certain fans, like people don't want to look like it's a money grab. Why am I paying this much to go to your concert? And we're dealing with inflation on top of that, right? Which is also another thing I'm compressing profits. So then you have a brand like Lord Royals. Yeah, you the girl that make Royals. Yeah, we don't mess with the Royals, but we don't we don't charge this check from the peasants. Like, come on, man, like, which I always thought that she was slick. It was like she was becoming a royal by a song that was going against Royals. But, you know, whatever, I'm like, it's a finesse. Y'all are being finessed. But like you can only you can only go up so much because. People it's good. It's just bad PR. Let's just put it that way. Yeah. I think that's what it comes down to. It's bad PR and should you stop your show? Should you just not go on tour at all? Or should you just make it more intimate? There's there's some arguments on multiple sides, right? And but I think as an artist, there's a good argument on why you want to break even and go ahead and do it anyway. But let me finish this before we get there, because she has a lot of a lot of stuff that she's revealing out of you. Number one, let's start in the second paragraph. Profits being down across the board is fine for an artist like me. I'm lucky. But for pretty much every artist selling less tickets than I am, touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt. For some touring is completely out of the question, even if they were to sell the whole thing out. Even if you sell it out, touring is out of the question. You can't do it. The math ain't math. Well, that wasn't her words. The math doesn't make sense, right? But the math ain't math. Understandably, all of this takes a toll on crews, on promoters, on artists. You'll notice a ton of artists cancelling shows citing mental health concerns in the past year, which that is been a huge thing this year. I ain't a lot. I didn't think about it till she said that, right? And I really think the stress of this stuff is a factor. We're a collection of the world's most sensitive flowers who also spent the last two years inside. It may be the task of creating a space where people's pain and grief and jubilation can be held night after night with a razor then profit margin and dozens of people to pay is feeling like a teeny bit much. All right. So she's saying they're going through it now. Now, let's let's be towards the rest of this. Me personally, I'm doing pretty good. Oh, Lord, Lord have mercy. Play on words, pun intended, God dang Lord. But I'm straight, though. You know, I was just empathizing with the peasants. Oh, this is a while. You guys have to come to shows in such a man. And you guys have come to the shows in such mammoth numbers. She's flexing. Oh, man, she's flexing. We sold out almost 20. But now this shit feels like a troll. I didn't even get to the end when we were when I was reading this before. We sold out almost 20,000 tickets in London. Like, what the hell and not have having crippling stage fright hanging over me for the first time since such a fucking blessing that you could tell me I had to cycle from a city to city and I'd still be loving it. But I'm not immune to the stress just a month ago. I was looking at a show that was pretty undersold and panicking only for it to sell only for it to still sell out the the remaining 2000 tickets in 10 days. Wild stuff. Yo, oh, bro, this shit just, oh, man, it gets funny. I wanted to put out I wanted to put all of this stuff in your minds to illustrate that nothing simple when it comes to the touring at the moment. And if your faves are confusing you with their erratic moves, some of this could be playing a part. And see, man, God leave, man. Oh, man. So you you already called it like earlier. Like I said, I didn't I didn't finish those last lines. It just got crazy, crazy, you know, the last lines how she like turned the tide. But you basically summed it up when you're like, man, this is like rich artist problems the way she she spoke of it. Dang, man. Oh, the way she words it makes it sound like I do think it is an issue that every artist is touring is dealing with. I got some artifacts. Art is homie touring right now that like I have one that's on tour that couldn't take his whole team because just taking his DJ and his tour manager put him at break even anybody else would put him in the negative. And it's like, damn, bro, I say he really took the bare minimum of people I need my tour manager and my DJ, everybody else. Yeah, I watched the ship Instagram. You know, so I agree. I guess it's a real artist problems. And she did allude to it. So it's something we got to get into. Right. It is real artist problems. Yes. The way she said it was like a rich artist problems. You know, so because you do have these people who are not like she said, they're not able to sell what she sold. And they don't have the fan base to she's probably not making anywhere near what she normally will make, but she's taking a lower profit. And then you're profiting crazy on the back end from maybe Merch and all these additional things. Why don't you want to say the back end? Because the merchants is factored into your touring, right? A lot of times. Yeah. But she still probably has additional things to continue to upsell and make money for where you have a lot of artists that, yeah, touring is not an option. And that was your way to build your fan base, right? You're in that that phase of your career where you should be touring as much as possible to add and connect with your fans. So then you can go on that next stage where, hey, I've made a song that's and got enough awareness for it or maybe a project, a set of songs that's gotten up awareness for me to do a small tour, connect with people personally, and then I could come back and hit a bigger lick with my music. And now not only can it do well from my marketing, but we have these real people in the world that we've connected with all over that, you know, can that they can make a deeper connection with me and support me on a whole other level, right? That's that phase. And it's like, how do I make that phase happen? If shit, the big artists are suffering. We've now squeezed everything we can out of it. So I haven't seen as many artists. I haven't seen as many of the smaller artists take advantage of touring like that. Just just because, right? And I remember Troy Carter said this, I was on this Zoom. This is probably March. No, March, let's just say in the first half of the year, like the pandemic had we had only been in the pandemic and like locked down for maybe a month or two. And we did a Zoom chat and, you know, everybody was like, oh, man, the industry is going to be locked down for another month or another month or three months, right? But people were thinking it was going to be good by the end of the year. Like a lot of people are still trying to spread that noise. I wasn't believing it. But it got validated when Troy Carter, he was it was on this call. It was so funny because YG had got on. I think I sent you that, right? And he was having like new problems, like using Zoom for the first time, trying to figure it out. Watching YG try to get up, make Zoom work was hilarious, man. Yeah, I put with YG. But he, Troy Carter was talking about how Live Nation was. He had talked to some people and basically he was like, yeah, touring. It's not going to be back till like 2022. And, you know, it was 2020. It was basically just like not a chance. So don't even think about it. And then even alluding to like big artists will be the first ones to return because yeah, a lot of times the opportunities for the smaller artists are through bigger artists anyway. Like I'm touring everything set up around the bigger artists in the industry. And then the rest of the touring kind of funnels to that. So that's a part of it. Yeah. So if you're not one of those, you really have to finesse to make this happen. All right. And we see this in any kind of marketplace when shit goes down, right? You have the top of the top and a bottom of the bottom survive. What I mean by that, if you look at clothing, because bottom of the bottom sounds bad, not exactly what I mean. But look at clothing or a provider for something, let's just say apparel. So you can go all the way to the bottom and look at a low cost provider and look at somebody like Walmart, the bottom of the bottom or city trends or something. And then you've got in the middle, right? These other providers. And then you go to Louis Vuitton, Gucci and up and up from there. Those people survive because they're the highest profit, right? Or highest costs for a specific audience. And then you have the low cost audience. But the middle class is always a part that gets squeezed out, whether it's middle class jobs or middle class companies because they aren't hard enough in an itch. You can't charge more because your customer base doesn't have that type of money and you don't have the brand to validate charging more. And you can't charge less because your operation is set up to be able to handle charging less, right? That's the issue that artists are basically figuring out right now. It's like, damn, us middle class artists are the ones that are suffering and us who are trying to become middle class artists are suffering. But you know, the artist who's still just in his bedroom like trying to make sure he can worry about tour problems, right? And like Lord said, my empathy, my, you know, my emotions are suffering. But from a profit standpoint and a sustainability standpoint for my fan base, I'm good, right? I'm going to be able to weather this storm. So that's really what we're seeing here, just the sheer economics of it. And it's kind of why it's like it's always scary to be middle class, bro. You got to figure out how to like get to one side or the other, whether we have the financial side of it in terms of huge fan base and small fan base, right? Then you have the middle class as well, where it comes to branding within a niche, right? So always reference Playwood Cardi because he's like just easy, bro. And it's very clear what that fan base looks like. And he's like the top of it, right? That niche, right? He's one of those guys. Now you can start adding Yeet there and all that, right? Who are coming in that same space. Those people are going to be good, right? But that niche is going to go away in some years, right? There's always the copycats, right? Those copycats, a lot of them won't be around. But the ones who made it to that top and where that or the people are going to be good, the people who are trying to play around, I'm just going to do this kind of sound because it's popular, but never really committing to anything and building a specific fan base. They're going to find trouble, right? And that same thing goes into, let me try to think of it. We thought we saw this in a kind of sound cloud space, right? Now, there was a lot of sound cloud artists. There was only a few at the top of that specific niche. A lot of people don't necessarily look at it. You know, a lot of sound cloud rap, quote, unquote, didn't make it to full blown commercial. But as long as you were the king of that specific moment, right? That specific culture, you'll always be good. Because as, you know, people aren't involved in that part of the culture as much over the years, 10 years from now, whenever they want to dip back, they're just going to dip back to the top. They're not going to dip back for the most part to like find a new person that they barely heard and didn't connect with. You know, you want your nostalgia at that point. So like, that's that's what this tour reminds me of, like, again, just the economics of it. And it relates to so much of what artists are going through. But like, bringing it back to lower again, though, because I feel like we got some more. There's so many other points that we can bring out of this. Is there something what were your first thoughts, especially on the second half? Can we kind of talk about the first half? Like, when she got into how much ticket she sold, just the problems that are going on, the crew, promoters, did you have any thoughts yourself? I mean, my my first thought was, I mean, she's right. Like, I talked to clients, got artist friends on tour, citing a lot of the same issues. Yeah. Second thing I thought was like, man, this is a also a genre specific issue, I think, you know, going back to it's like, I know, let's compare, like, rap to pop, right? Like pop concerts, you expect a much higher production value than you would necessarily for even a rapper of the same size. Sometimes I like, like, if I were going to see, I don't know, Lil Baby versus Tell Us With. I'm expecting Tell Us With concert to be the more the more cinematic production value, right? Like, Lil Baby can get up with some lasers, make some smoke, you know what I'm saying? Like, nice outfit on and like, you know, we could tell us we're going to have the costume. It's going to be, I don't know, dancers and all this stuff. You're not shipping the stage out. Yeah, shipping the stage out, like all this whole stuff. So I also think part of it is a genre specific issue. Rappers and rapping in general tends to be the most lean of all the music genres. R&B, pop, anything that needs some musicality elements to it tends to be the most expensive aspect. Like I met you with my friend. My friend only had to take his DJ and his tour manager. If he would, you know, an artist that needed a full band or some shit like that. I don't know what he would have did. I don't know how he would have made it work, but it worked out because of the genre and type of music that he made. So that was the second thing I thought was like, man, this is a pop artist problem, you know what I'm saying? At least at the level she's talking about it. Right. Third thing I thought about is like the way she expressed the message made me feel like it was more of like a like a ploy to get fans to buy tickets to the shows coming up. Let's talk about it. Because like I mentioned earlier, this was a newsletter sent out to her fan. So email only newsletter. So this message is really only being spread to people like you and me because we send the publications. I'm assuming smiling publication got word of it. And so it's not like she made like this big deal about it. Like she's trying to like change the industry or like rally everybody together to find a solution. We've run enough email phones before I know like, you know, most email phones you have an email that specifically is meant to appeal to emotion. Yeah, like almost every savvy email market is like, yo, that shit needs to be in that somewhere. Tug of their heart strange, you know what I'm saying? What it and what did this email prep for? One, like you said, empathizing with her for sales. Right. It's like, man, you know, she really struggling and she needs this because it's tough on her, maybe not as much as everybody. Right. But it's tough on her. And I think that's part of what the save face of, hey, I'm doing good though. Right. So I wasn't begging y'all. I made you empathize, but then I flipped it and I was like, I'm good though. I'm good. You know, don't worry about me. Don't worry about me. Yeah, sure. Girl was wrong. Oh no, I'm good. Shotty nah. Come on, you already know. So they playing that trick. But on the other side, what if something goes wrong? You also are preparing them for that too. Preparing you for if I decide to cancel any of these toys about it. I get it. You know, she's probably not selling a lot of tickets and she's going through mental health stuff, which are valid reasons. But yeah, like you said, like now I'm, I'm, it's not shocking. Now I don't feel a call off guard by because it's like, I'm a fan. I got this letter deep down, you know, it's a possibility. Every time I reached like that from ours, I'm like, oh, shit. You know what I'm saying? Like, oh, they're going to do it, bros. It's coming. Like they about to pull the rug out from underneath all of us. So that was what made it weird to me is I felt like, OK, she can't be trying to make it an industry conversation because I felt like a video or something that could have went viral a lot quicker. Would have hit harder. Like our clothes is only going like, I've really only seen this talk about like a handful of Instagram pages, all the blogs. She didn't really move like that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Um, now outside, like the industry, right? Industry people having this conversation. But consumers aren't having this conversation. And then they also made me think, like, what do we do to fix it? Are we saying that crews shouldn't be, you know, deserve to be paid more? Are we saying that, you know, like you were saying earlier, like these tour bus companies that now know, hey, bro, these motherfuckers really want to go on tour. I got all the buses. I can have the leverage here. What person in their right mind wouldn't charge more in that situation? You know what I'm saying? What business wouldn't? Wouldn't start to go up on their prices. So that's why I was saying earlier to me, the only only maybe it's a couple of different solutions. I see either brands are probably going to have to start being a lot more involved with touring, right? So let's imagine, you know, Drake and 21 Savage, her loss brought to you by a Coke. It's probably going to get there because the music industry is no stranger to just letting brands put their name on some shit for some money. Right. So that to me is probably like one of the more natural first steps. Second, the funnel is going to have to be optimized for something else. And I think tours are going to start getting looked at more as it's a necessary marketing cost, right? Like the same way, like your ads and your influences are going to your tour isn't maybe necessarily going to be the cash machine that it was five, 10, 15 years ago. Now this is just another marketing cost to put you on the road, to push these people to something else that we know we're going to make more money off of. All right, down right there as a digital market, especially digital first marketer, I can really, really resonate with a funnel that you might break even with, maybe even take a little loss, maybe not trying to, but you take a small profit or you break even to set people up for up sales, right? Get it, do it through and through day after day. Cool. My problem with that when it comes to music, I don't think they can take that, right? And the reason I say that is many people, most of the industry already look at the music itself as a loss leader, right? Which means we ain't really making money off of this music. That's our advertising, but we're going to make money from other routes, largely touring. That's why it hurts so much. So now you're talking about our plan B is now going to be to break even again. So I got to take them through two hoops just to get the hoop now, man. I need the money as fast as possible because production, create creative work is already capital intensive, especially at that scale. So I think that's really tough, man. Like I'm all for, again, yeah, doing that, but it got to figure out a way to not, not to just break even for sure. Yeah, not that. I just want to take a quick second and say thanks for watching. And if you want to learn more about marketing and branding and blowing music up in the music industry from people who have done it and continue to do it, go ahead and hit that subscribe button before you click to the next video. Hit that subscribe button now.