 There's a new middleman who's getting y'all money, bruh. A new middleman that y'all don't see coming, but he there and he slick and it's hard because middleman on the block. Everybody gets assassinated. The pandemic overshadowed what the tax plan was supposed to be. And then I'm looked up at it and I was like, later when I saw it, I said, what you saying? Like 58%, that said 58%. And I said, what, you my partner? The IRS is my partner now? I don't know. Or you get his Yankee hat? I'm going to his. I found that. That said the Eminem show? That is what it says, bruh. I don't quite understand what that means because Eminem definitely wasn't there, but maybe that is a, I don't know. I'm about to look him up. Okay, I was a brother. I've not heard about that, but that does not sound like Eminem laughing in the background. No, that wasn't, that definitely wasn't. But as always, man, 50, the ever entertaining, but also dropping some interesting and real stuff. And a lot of artists have access about taxes and amusing marketers is slightly different on each side, right? What you're doing as a marketing agency or record label and what you're doing as an artist. So this was a perfect clip, right? Because tax season is coming up. And it's funny because the pandemic showed up. Because the pandemic showed a lot when it came to taxes. Like we saw a lot of people leave New York, a lot of people leave California, all right, going to these states. And what I thought about is, you gotta be aware who's getting into your money. Yeah. All right. And the way I wanna position this is the new middleman. There's a new middleman who's getting y'all money, bruh. A new middleman that y'all don't see coming, but he there and he slick and it's hard because middleman on the block. Everybody gets assassinated by this where it started, bruh. So we get put on the map and get put on the target list. Hey, man, all I'm saying is this is crazy. We've been like, oh, man, we're cutting out the middleman, the labels, they don't really have as much control anymore. Da, da, da, da. One, I think some of that is overblown, right? And it's not as much of the artists fighting and the labels not being able to get control as it is. There's a new way that the label can get their money, right? And things that they have to adjust to, right? They see it coming anyway. There's marketplace change, right? It's always gonna get it back. But the other part about this is the reason that y'all say y'all don't need the labels is because there's a new middleman. The new middleman is what y'all are saying is empowering y'all, but we can't find a way around it. And that's these tech platforms. Okay. How much of your money does TikTok get when you get a rose? 50%. 50%. 50%. How much do you know when you get a super chat? How much they take? Actually, I don't know. Probably about, I would guess around the same. You too, bro, gotta be about the same. They take 30%. Okay, okay. Less, all right? But if somebody gives you that money from an iPhone, it's another 30%. Damn. Right? All right, you just lost 30 on 30 before you even touched your money and you still gotta split that shit with Uncle Sam. Bro, that makes me think of, I had a situation where I had to send my roommate a rent and I sent it to him with PayPal. And by the time the money hit his account, she was under, she was under by a girl. I was like, damn, wait a minute. I got to send you another 50. I just sent you money 10 minutes ago. What do you mean you ain't got enough? What do you mean we short? That hurt, cause you knew better too, bro. I did know better, bro. I didn't, I didn't think about it in a moment. I was like, I was here. It's already set up. Let me go and send it over to him. My cash out done exist. Oh man, yeah, come on, bro. But this has been the lima that artists are now facing, right? And nobody's thinking about it. Nobody's talking about it yet. 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. This is the dilemma that artists are now facing, right? And then nobody's thinking about it. Nobody's talking about it yet. But as a content creator, these other platforms that are empowering you are taking from your streams, right? They're there. Now you have more control than you might have when the label or more information than you might have with a label. But your distribution is going to be taxed more and more over time. It's the virus, we plant and then we spread, all right? We got y'all addicted to us and we up that cost every single year. We make it harder for you to reach your audience so you gotta pay more in ads, right? We make it, we give you ways to reach your audience, though that do work, but you tax you for that, right? So we look at the great opportunities to stream from your room, right? And make money, get donations. Great opportunity, right? The argument, my argument, right? I'm the company, because I always like seeing it both sides. It's like, hey, bro, you don't gotta pay for gas. You don't gotta go through the stress and headache, right? All these things, you gotta fix costs. You really don't have employees. You chose to have employees. You really can make money without employees, right? There's sides to it, right? But these costs are right now, hitting costs that aren't fully being addressed. Partially because there's some artists, well, there's still a lot of artists and creators in general that haven't experienced it yet on a level that they care where they're relying heavily on that. And then the other side of it is, I don't think just enough people are taking it seriously yet. Right now, it's not enough people who are trying to say, hey, I'm quitting and gonna become a content creator. I think there's enough, actually. But we haven't seen that wave of people going back to work yet, or coming out like, hey, I really don't got it like y'all think I do. We haven't seen enough of that yet for people to realize, nah, this is another potential dead-end in that regard. You still gonna have to figure out how to fly before you hit that dead-end wall, right? So, because you got the streaming, you have, anytime you give money to the platform, they're gonna take a money period. I don't care. Sticker, stream, subscription, badge, all of it, bro. All of it and your fans don't know and the crazy part about it makes it harder for you to tell your fans to be like, no, don't give me money this way, give it to me that way. One, cause the platform like TikTok is gonna say, whoa, whoa, whoa, man, quit telling people to do that cash-app thing, all right? YouTube isn't as bad with that. But TikTok like, nah, y'all gotta do it this way. And it's inconvenient for them. And that's the thing, inconvenient, right? And we know higher friction means less conversion, period. All right, it's like, oh, okay, I'll donate next time then, or when I'm like at home. My cash up or down, I got you later. Like that type of thing. So you gotta take the money anyway and let that transaction occur because it still deepens the relationship even though you made less money than you wanted to. And then try to lead people to these additional routes. So there's a middleman coming and we've been demonizing the labels for the past 15, 20 years. The creators, at some point, are gonna turn on this new savior and look at him as a new middleman. Yeah, bro, that's gonna take the revolt of all the OG TikTokers. It's been tens of millions, 20s of millions. Maybe some of them in the hundreds of millions. Like you said, it's gonna take one of them. Come on, go like, man, this TikTok shit, don't pay what you think. I remember when the credit fund first started and there was a lot of credit it's posting their payouts from them in like multi-million streams and that started the conversation. And then it should die down because like you said, we're looking at like, okay, well, I don't get a million views in my videos anyway. So shit ain't gonna affect me, you know what I'm saying? Regular consumers are like, I'm not even a creditor. I never planned a joint credit fund. So I don't care that you made $40 for a million views or whatever. I don't remember the guys be there, but it was something crazy like, it was some low shit. And so yeah, man, like sometimes I understand because I would TikTokers like that look probably looking at like, yo, we give you this audience so fast. Hell yeah, we taking 50% bro, ain't no way. Bro, you think I'm about to put you in front of a billion people overnight? And I'm not taking none of that. Come on now. YouTube, that's probably why that price is lower because like, yeah, we're giving you the access to the audience, but it's a lot harder to grow on YouTube. I would be pissed if I had the, we had to work as hard, we worked on YouTube, but I'm gonna take 50% of a super chat? Like, come on, bro. You know what I'm saying? Like, that was me that did that, right? You didn't give me, I had grinded this audience, but you didn't give me that shit. So sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't get it. But yeah, bro, I give it another three years. Three years. Yeah, another three years. Because like I said, not enough people at the level yet for it to trickle down. I think at least another three years. Yeah, and you still have these increasing costs. What does it cost for your merch more? Are you gonna give them a lower quality shirt for the same amount of money? Right? NFC shirt. This is how taxes work, right? It's like when taxes happen to government taxes, somebody's gonna fill it. That's the problem. People are always like, these people should get paid less money or these taxes should lower these. It's gonna be pushed somewhere, right? It's like, oh man, we taxing food, warm money, either the price of it, the bread is gonna go up or the business is just gonna eat that cost, right? How many businesses are trying to eat that cost? They're like, we're not trying to eat those costs. But you don't eat bread anyway, man. Hey bro, gotta have it, gotta have it. Like think, as an artist, are you really trying to eat these costs? So it's the game that you're constantly playing and it's a part of it, but it's gonna be interesting, especially as artists, right? You still are gonna have maybe the manager that you have to share a percentage with and those percentages have stayed fixed, right? It's like, you're not gonna see managers saying, oh yeah, I wanna take 2% instead of 10%, you know what I mean? Because the rest of your costs are going up. Anything, it might go up too, but it's gonna at least stay fixed. So you got the same fixed cost with new added variable cost, right? Or increased variable cost. That's never a good mix, right? So, hey, artist, but there's a new middleman in town and we all gotta answer to him in some way. We answer the hours every Tuesday and Thursday. Hey. Two and a half. So it was like, hey man, like we just gotta figure out how to navigate that because then you're also gonna still have your 3% that you're paying the payment processor on Stripe or PayPal or whoever. That'd be the one, bro, the payment processor. Hey, always, you never gonna avoid that one. We're gonna charge me to charge money? That shit is crazy. Unless you're just gonna have everybody cash up you and you know what, that's the reason we don't do that. Yeah, bro. That's such a business model, bro, yeah. We're gonna charge people to charge money. That shit wild, bro. Oh, man. But those are just the initial thoughts on it. I think it's something we'll cover and we should get into more. Over time, but to end this out. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this clip, then you should watch the full episode of No Labels necessary that it came from and it's gonna really blow your mind. Check this clip right here.