 A lot of artists are about to make more money than ever before. You need to make sure that you are one of them because this opportunity is one of the biggest moments in music history for artists in making money in the last decade easy. And it's not about a new tech platform that's gonna help you monetize your fan base. It's not about a new strategy to use to monetize your fan base. It's one simple thing that could occur. And it's a real possibility because a bill has been put forth before the US Congress that aims to force streaming services like Spotify, Apple, et cetera, to pay artists one cent per stream. And I know that doesn't sound like a lot of money, but you have to think. We're basically coming from half of a cent to one cent. Every streaming platform I know doesn't pay the exact amount, but we're talking about half a cent to one cent. But there's also other aspects of this that you gotta keep in mind. And this is a big lesson and we're gonna talk about three primary things that you need to know whether this happens or not because it'll change the way you do the game. All right, first and foremost, Corey, this is something I think most people are missing. Okay. All these catalogs that have been bought over the last five years. Oh, Paul McCartney or insert name, 400 million, 70 million, you see all these numbers. Ooh, these artists are hitting a lick. And that's a lot of money. But think, if this happens, the day that you can do nothing, but your money doubles, now it starts to make sense why, oh, of course I'm gonna invest in these catalogs because I'm aware not only of what the worth of the catalog is over time, I know that it could be a simple bill that gets passed that doubles the amount. Not even the work that I can put in by pitching it to sink deals, by figuring out how to monetize fans and listen to ship. My investment just doubled overnight without doing anything, but maybe taking one of the Congress members out to put some Chick-fil-A. Now that's a good point because it's something I hadn't thought about either personally. But then when you think about a bill of this magnitude, there's no way it made it that far and then the powers that be on that side didn't know it was about to get there. And you might be right, that it might have been a problem that we can either fight this or we can just make sure we're on the right side of history. Yes. That's what this shit does inevitably hit. Yep. And this is the problem with selling off your assets and it makes it so difficult music. Of course, artists, I know many of y'all might not even be in a point where it makes sense to sell your music or someone has an offer that's big enough for you. You're not at that point in their career, but trust me, even understanding this mindset because when it comes to your music, the value, right? It looks like it's linear to most people. Oh, I'm making $100,000 a month or $100,000 a year and you multiply that by about 10 years and it might get a little bit lower and that's how they're thinking about it. But the future of art is not fixed, right? The problem that we have when it comes to art and monetizing art is at the end of the day, it's this intellectual property, that's the core of it. And we haven't even had the technology to be able to properly monetize most of these years. So you have all these other industries that win and you can monetize it because it's very easy. Oh, I have a cow, buy my cow. Oh, my cow makes milk. Here's the milk that my cow makes. You gotta buy it to get it. But the intellectual property is something less tangible and we've been building these tools over time that starts to make it possible to track and capture more value in it, right? The internet messed up what we could get because the cow that you traded in the terms of music before was a CD, right? Then it got digitized into an MP3 but it was still gated in some level. Piracy happened, bam, floodgates open. Now we had to develop the ability to track it. So because of that, the amount of money that you can make in the future, right? You have no idea. Cause all it takes is one thing to happen, a bill all of a sudden. Oh yeah, no, they need to be making at least this much. And then outside of a bill, a new form of monetization that happens because just like TikTok popped up and all of a sudden everybody wanted to monetize, like consume through short form. There could be something that happens that makes people want to buy differently from artists, right? Or consume music in a completely different way that raises the value, right? So there's all these things and I just never want people to undervalue themselves. And I know you have to make a decision based on the number you can get and at least have a plan for the money that you get if you do this out of sale. But just know, man, these people are investing this money, not even just for the calculation of what you're making today and what that looks like over 40 years. That's the downside. That's the floor of the investment. Okay, we know we'll at least make this much, but they're really investing on that upside. We're gonna guarantee ourselves to make money and potentially make something that we can't even imagine. Yeah, it's interesting too. Cause like I said, calculating future money is so tricky. Cause there's another element to it. I don't think any artist really thinks about very few. Maybe once it's been here for a decade or longer, probably think about it, but I don't think new artists think about it. And that is the impact that you have on the next generation of music and what that entails, right? So I have two really good examples that are happening right now. One, we saw what happened with swag surfing when the Super Bowl came around, right? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Huge moment. It is a cultural landscape, insert, I mean not a cultural landscape, but a cultural, what am I looking for? Artifact in certain ways in the black community. That song comes and has a massive cultural resurgence because of Pat Mahomes and The Ties of Him. And that's something that like, you know, when they made that song 10, 20 years ago, no way they could have seen it. Hey, 20 years from now, the fucking top NFL quarterback is gonna want to use this for his song. Another great example I think is like currently, I know Sexy Red just sampled like a Hurricane Chris song for her newest single, right? This is like her big single, right? And it's like her come back after the pregnancy. This is the one you can tell the labels like really invest in everything in. Once again, you know what I'm saying? I don't, I feel like it's hard to believe a world where a young Hurricane Chris saw that 20, 10, 20 years from now and a new pop in ours is gonna sample me and now I'm making the bag off of that. And like, you know, especially now on the way that music works I think it's really, it's not hard for artists to see the potential for their future impact. I think a lot of them go pay attention to it because it requires them to pay attention to other artists. You know what I'm saying? So you kind of miss like the impact you might have or you might miss like, hey, like there's this guy in my fan base telling me how much he loves me. It might be this 14 year old kid that eight years from now samples me and blows the fuck up and now I'm making money off of that. So like, yeah, you're right. It's like all these intangibles, some that you can kind of calculate for like you said streaming and royalties and things like that. You can make a safe, like educated guess but then there's all these other intangibles like you said, new platforms, new tech impact on culture. Fucking, you know, how many times have we seen sync companies pick up songs from yesterday year and just, you know, re-blow it up? So it's all these things that basically made me agree with you. You know what I'm saying? It's like, yeah, I just feel like it's hard for me to envision a world where as an artist, like, you know you already sacrificed so much to get whatever you get. And a lot of times it's not a lot. And because it's not a lot, that will make me feel like more artist. I mean, I would just stick it out and see where it goes. You know what I'm saying? Like, you weren't about to cash out crazy anyway. Why not see what a momentum goes if you just keep running out, you know what I'm saying? I want to drop a quick note for anybody who has a fan problem and not just any old fan problem but the type of fan problem that we encountered after helping a lot of artists go viral, have a lot of success, get a lot of streams but still not being able to know who exactly are my fans? How do I reach them? How do I actually leverage that to sell merch, go to a show? Because that's where Spotify leaves us without knowing who our real people are. Same for social media. If you've had this problem, I'll tell you how we've been solving it. And our agency for a while now and the pro version is just now being released to be accessible to any artist or manager out there. I'm talking about Forever Fan. A lot of the campaigns and successes that y'all have heard us talk about on this channel have been powered by that software that's made finding and understanding your true fan simple so they support you with their pockets because we all need a little money in this music thing. And now they're making it available to our audience for only $1 at foreverfanmusic.com slash no labels. No labels with an S at the end and you gotta put in the code no labels zero two. All right, now look, the DSPs, the social media platforms, I think they've shown us how much they care about artists for a while now. So at this point we can all play naive or actually do something about it. Bet on yourself at foreverfanmusic.com slash no labels. And again, put in the code no labels zero two to get initial access for only $1. Let's get back to this episode. That's what you actually are touching on a life strategy that I have. I don't believe in sacrificing discomfort for comfort. I'll sacrifice discomfort for abundance. But just comfort is one step away from discomfort. So I might as well stay in this space. I'll be real disappointed by laying back in discomfort. It's not enough, it's right on that line and that's how people end up caught because now you're like two steps away from discomfort and you're always fending that off. It's like, now I need to be in abundance. I might as well wait it out and get a bigger upside because while I'm used to this and if I slide back five steps, it's like, well, shoot, man, I got plenty of comfort over here. I could keep losing. But that's point number one, right? The value of your music can change just like that. Like the value that's able to be captured which is the most important part because there's so much untapped value in your music. But here's point number two. So just a basic Google. These numbers can always change but title's average payout per stream is 0.1284. All right, dollars by the way which means that's one cents, 1.284 cents. That's above where it's going. They're already above, right? So that might drop a little bit not that you're relying on your title streams too much. Right now they're saying Apple music is 0.008 which so 0.2 more it would be a stream. Amazon music is 0.004. That's less than half a cent Spotify is 0.003. YouTube is 0.002. Pandora is 0.001. Deezer is 0.001. So those two would literally 10X, right? Well, would Deezer be affected since it's not a US? Well, I'm assuming because of just the way they have to do laws and like if you're getting streams from that space any streams coming from the US because this is US specific, right? That's another note, right? But what's the important point of that? Like what's point number two? Predictability, right? Because you have no way of knowing it's very hard to track like I'm getting this much money from this platform just because I got this many streams. Yeah, we have these platforms that are capturing it and telling you like from a day by day but just from a like simplicity I'm a new artist in the business. How do I really make my money? Oh, okay. I know if I get X amount of streams on all these platforms I'm getting paid the exact same amount. Yeah, true. All right. So I can predict, I can do the math that oh, if I get 100,000 streams I'm making $1,000. And many of y'all have done 100,000 streams. That's a lot more achievable. You know what I mean? To get to that $1,000 versus having to do 200,000 streams to make $1,000. So, and then shoot on some of these platforms basically that's saying you have to get near a million streams just to get $1,000, which is crazy. All right. So to have that level of predictability changes the business model from the investor standpoint like oh, I wanna pour more in here. I can invest more in these artists even indie artists cause things seem to be a lot more predictable which allows me to take a little bit more of a risk. And then from an artist standpoint it helps me build my lifestyle around this a lot more because right now at best artists are being paid out like waitresses. Like oh, I might get this amount in tips today. I might get that amount in tips today. How much is this platform paying me? Oh, they're saying they're paying me .003 on Spotify but what if the person is streaming me from a different country? What is the person that's streaming me from the free tier versus the premium tier? The payouts are not the same. You know what I mean? So that's when we get to the next level though. Next level is people don't talk about this other part of what this thing says. So you say the current rate of Spotify is .003 to .005 and they're gonna be mandating that if you're in the US you are paying out one cent per stream. Two X, that's beautiful. But the statement goes on to continue and this is according to one of the reps to leave in Bowman, I think I'm saying that right or to live in Bowman something. Y'all know what I'm trying to say. The royalty would be funded through platform subscription fees and a 10% levy on non-subscription revenue and is designed to ensure artists receive a minimum of one penny per stream. Now, there's even a little bit more of this but I'm gonna hold on that. This stuff is actually more surprising and more interesting than y'all think. Everybody wants to go to the headline but where's the money coming from? Platform subscription fees and I guess if they're doing it for free, free tiers, a 10% levy that they're gonna collect and create a pot for non-subscription revenue because you can't just say, oh, everybody listens for free and we don't have subscribers so we can't pay any money out that way. Okay, that's interesting. Now, I saw a comment where somebody said something that's pretty true, they said it as a joke but eh, they're like, Spotify subscription's about to be up at $50. What do y'all think about that? Maybe not 50, that's probably gonna hit at least 25. I'm not looking forward to it. All right, so that's the joke, right? But the reality of it is if y'all don't think that it won't be felt by either the consumer or the artist, boy, you are sadly mistaken, all right? Not gonna be felt by the company. The consumer, ooh, the company has to be a little touchy with that. We don't wanna lose this customer because really, that's the only reason the artists are coming to us anyway so they have a priority over us, you know what I mean? So, okay, artist, look man, y'all want these strings, right? So we gotta make sure they don't have to pay too much on the consumer side. How are we gonna impact you as an artist? And why I say, if you didn't understand these basic economics before recently, as an artist, if you've been active over the last six months, you should understand this by pure example of what happened with Spotify cracking down on bots. And, oh, distributors, you're gonna have to pay us. We're gonna have to pay y'all, what? Hey, artists, Spotify said that y'all gotta pay up because y'all got all these bots going on. You're like, wait, when did Spotify say that? I thought Spotify said that y'all, no, no, don't listen to that. Spotify said that y'all, the artists have to pay for this. Like, it's a messed up game of telephone, right? The company is always gonna pass down the price, right? If you get taxed in government and say, oh, will we go up from 5% tax to 7% tax? Well, hey, when you get that French fry as a consumer, you know, when it went from a dollar to $1.07, it's like, oh yeah, cause they're getting like, we're not gonna pay for it. Yeah, that's what's so interesting about it, man, cause the discourse I've been seeing around it, it's been two mentalities I see, right? I've been seeing a win is a win mentality, right? So, you know, fuck who'll get fucked over in the crossfire, a win is a win. Okay. And then the other side of it- You should debate that, is there a win or is there a loss? Yeah, and I've seen, you know, the other side of it being artists that feel like this is a win against like the major system, like this is a win against the powers that be, those eyes in the sky that dictate everything from above. But with like everything you just said, makes the latter point not true, right? It's like, it's not really a win against the industry because, you know, the labels are gonna make sure they're not getting, I mean, to them, they're like, we also made more money and we ain't gotta come out of pocket to make it happen. Great, it's a win for us. Yes. Like you said, Spotify, Apple, title, all of them are gonna be like, you know, we're not really trying to take on that call. So it's really not a win against the major system. It is arguably a win in some senses, but it's really, it's really a smack against the consumers, you know what I'm saying? And what is interesting about it is, you know, artists talk from the standpoint of it making the art space better and you know, how much happier and things are to be, which is true. But the side of it they don't think about is that fans don't pay attention to all the shit that is making you feel that way. So the average fan probably doesn't know that the tertiary and payout rate, you know what I'm saying? Oh yeah. Don't know, don't care. Exactly, don't know, don't care. So all I know is that I wake up one morning, I unlock my phone and I see, you know, a little notification saying, hey, you're probably on Spotify, going up to 25, 99, whatever the fuck it goes to, I really feel like it's gonna hit $20. My, now I'm forced into position, right? I'm not sitting here thinking like, oh great, artists are getting paid more. No, I'm thinking like, damn, bro, this should just one up $16. That's, that's, you know what I'm saying? Every month is now damn near three months what the streaming service payout is compared to what I was used to paying to. Now I have to make a really tough decision. Do I pay this money and let Spotify, you know, dig me over like that? Or do I find something new to do with, you know, with my time and my energy? Do I, maybe I start watching more movies. Maybe I start looking at more YouTube, you know, TikTok a lot more. I don't know, but it puts the fans on like a really precarious situation. Like I said, I don't, I don't want to use it as an example to say like it shouldn't be done. But it's a side of it. I don't think music artists are thinking about it. You brought up a really good point that I hadn't, I hadn't got to that conclusion yet, but I think I was on the way there. But it's like, all right, artists get paid more, streaming platforms raise the price. People are naturally going to leave because of that. Now the overall streaming pot goes down. So then like, I can see a world where artists are getting paid more money per stream, but it's still making about the same or less because so much of the consumer base got ran away. I could, I could see a world where that kind of happens. Well, there's, there's something that I'm going to read the rest of it that might touch on that point too. There's, there's some more there. There's definitely some more there. But, you know, will assist, will a statistically relevant amount of fans leave streaming platforms, DSPs in particular, that will be interesting to see. But I think that what's important to consider, like this, I think that at minimum, this is a win regardless because it's showing artists as legitimate working, working class. Yeah, I agree with that. To acknowledge artists as a legitimate working class that deserves to be paid is a huge win because the perception of it alone, right? Takes things from, hey, artists are only celebrities and why are we even thinking about them in that way? Like, we don't need to think about how much they make or what they should make or anything like that to know these are people that there's multiple tiers of and there's people who are working hard and need to be able to fund their lives because if the minimum wage can go from $7 to $15 out of McDonald's, because inflation is happening in real life and they haven't caught up. That does mean at some point, if we're looking at artists as a working class, that means that minimum wage needs to be lifted. Yeah, that's your point, that's your point. So that perception is extremely valuable for an artist. Now, with that being said, that's some reading to do. The royalty would be paid out proportionally from a central fund with a cap placed on how much individual tracks can earn to ensure a more equitable distribution of payments. So what they're saying is you will make more compared to previous iterations of you, but there's no ceiling on how much you can make. It's basically what they're saying, right? Like you gonna get paid more for the same amount of work, but we gonna stop you at some point or stop it at some point. That's the part that's weird, right? Because they don't define the cap yet, right? And then not defining a cap doesn't allow us to do like a legitimate breakdown or projection, but I don't imagine that they can cap it. They can't just cap the amount of money you're making. They can't just say, all right, he's only gonna make a amount of, he's only gonna get paid for his first million streams and he's not gonna be paid for any streams after that because you still have to get paid for your streams. Like legally, unless they change that law, they can't change that part of it, right? So I'm thinking it has to be the amount that there's a cap to. So it's almost like, let's, let's give you a fast track to minimum wage. And once you're at minimum wage, you're on your own. Something like that, right? So it will fast track you to the equivalent of, let's say $15 an hour for an artist, whatever that looks like from a streaming perspective. But then after that, maybe it's gonna end up dropping to, all right, whatever those regular rates were, or some new renegotiated rate. That's all I could think of. But that cap is a real thing. This isn't infinite. So you're probably not gonna be able to be like, oh man, this person has a billion streams. Well, what's 1% of a billion? Oh snap, they got, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's not gonna work like that. You can't just be like, oh, 10 million off of that alone. It's so interesting, man. Cause it's so much, it's so many nuances borrowed from like the Instagram creator fund. You know what I'm saying? It's so interesting the impact that meta creating that program had on everything goes, right? Cause it taught these platforms that man, people will work really hard if the cap is a big number that sounds unachievable. Cause when we think about what meta, when meta first announced, yo, we got a billion dollars for a creator. Most folks are like, that shit was gonna last. Cause the billion saw like a lot. It sounds like a lot. You're like, man, this shit gonna last forever. That shit was two and a half years, bro. Yeah. A billion dollars burnt through in two and a half years. And it's really interesting the impact that that model had on, even though they didn't even continue to do it. It's like, you saw other platforms look at it and go like, man, that kind of worked. Like people, like that two and a half years, you got exactly what you want. If it craves of working overtime, working hard, giving you some of their best ideas, you know what I'm saying? A couple people got to float themselves up out of bad situations and give us a great case study and a great, you know what I'm saying? Story to tell. Yup. And that's the only direction I can see that going. It's like, hey, like you said, hey, you getting a penny per stream until you hit this amount. And then when you hit this amount, yeah, it draws back down to whatever the normal rate was. Yup. That's so interesting, man. Cause that's crazy. Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be something else, man. Something else you touched on earlier is people thinking it's a win against the powers that be. Like this just goes into improper math, improper thinking. And I remember I dropped a video more recently and some people were like, oh man, this dude must be a plant because he's defending the labels by basically saying that in this particular battle, y'all are on the same side against TikTok. No, paying artists more is paying artists more. You are an artist. Doesn't matter that there's somebody in the fight that you don't like. They happen to be on your side. You ever heard of the enemy of my enemy as a friend of me? That's all it is. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that any of these labels care about your heart, your soul, your family, not even your music. No, no, I'm not saying any of that. It makes me think about the superhero movies where there's such a big new villain, they're like the hero and the old villain for like the team up to stop. That's exactly- They squad up for it. They're just like, dang. So we're gonna take this shit down and once it's done, we back to being enemies before the next two and a half hours of this movie but we gotta do it. We gotta do it. That's exactly what's occurring because they get paid from your money. So they need to get you paid more so they can take more. That's all it is. It's all it is. Now, of course, on the other end of it, the artists who are independent, they just benefit from all of the upside, right? And even the artists who are signed, you're making a bigger portion assuming that your deal is fixed because it'll be wild. The- That's like a second payout on the abrasion. Yeah, the exact same amount. It's like, oh yeah, like you got a cap on the proportion. That'll be wild. So assuming then, right? If you got paid, if you had a 50-50 deal, right? If it went from a hundred dollars paid to $200 paid, you are now making still double the money, right? So all artists are gonna benefit regardless. Now, the labels, where y'all went in the fall on it, labels should benefit as well. Anybody, the music industry will benefit from it in some way. Now, where are the hidden costs? That is the question that we have to constantly ask. What does it look like on the fan side? What is the pressure point where you can't go beyond that threshold because it's gonna make that number of fan payout go way lower than you want to, right? But then also, how much can we put on the artist? How do we even figure out? How to take money from the artists in this equation? Cause that's something that the industry has been good at, like the different actors. Like how do we figure out, you know, how we can tell, okay, we can't go direct. We gotta get two steps ahead. Ooh, okay, we're gonna build these new platforms that force the artists to pay us or whatever on the load. Nah, I don't get out of that. It's not a bag that anybody is ready for. But with that being said, with that being said, man, like where were artists put to build? Like that's, I think that's the resounding question. And who is eating the cost? All right. Who do you want to eat the cost? Who do you want to eat the cost? Is it a win? Is it a loss? I think it's still a win regardless cause it's a great step in the right direction by understanding that there's a new opportunity for a middle class of artists and artists who are doing it alone and having this type of relationship versus you're getting signed through an investor. And it requires a completely different perspective of the system. So with that being said, you got any final points? One last thing I did think about, I wonder how it was gonna affect the distributors, cause there were a lot of distributors. I wouldn't even say a rumor cause I've seen it with my own eyes, but there was some distributors paying one money and other distributors for the same amount of streams, which I never understood what love for anybody to make that make sense to me. Paying artists more? Yeah. I don't want to say the ones that is, but like our friend Sam, for example, showed me one time. Like he showed me his statements through one distributor and showed me things or nothing. He was getting paid more money for per stream through one than the other. And I've seen that in a couple of other examples. And like I said, I don't completely understand how they're able to do that and make that work. But now it makes me think of like, oh, they were doing that as a sales advantage. But now the playing field is about to be leveled across the board. Cause it's already hard enough for a lot of those companies to differentiate themselves anyway, just based on where shit is went. That might have been the last thing you could do outside of tech shit is like, hey, I can pay you more money. But then if it's like, the fixed cost across the board, you know, assuming based on what we saw, and I just, it's gonna be interesting to see how they handle that. That was the last thing I was thinking about. The only thing I can think of in terms of answers, potential answers, and you know, maybe people who are watching have the exact answer is on one end, you know, I would want to get granular are all the streams coming from the same places that they're paying out for, you know, like what countries, et cetera, et cetera. Did it just happen to stream? Cause you know, you're not controlling that exactly. All right, what did that look like? How big would that gap be? And then on, cause I don't know, you know, those numbers shoots also, how big was that gap? Did you, was it pretty big? Oh, it wasn't crazy. It was like enough to where like... You would notice, okay. You would notice it, but it wasn't like crazy. So maybe that accounts for it. In some cases though, cause that doesn't sound like this is his, cause I think he probably would have like just came to this conclusion, you know, he definitely would have. But you know, some distributors have the agreements where some of them are taking a certain level of percentage and then the other ones, right? So you got the 10% to 5%, like, oh, you just pay me a fixed cost forever. I don't care what happens with your career cause you're just going to pay me $20 a month anyway. Like there's all different iterations, but then you had that. But yeah, man, I, I think that distributors where they're labels, oh, we're happy we're making more period distributors in terms of fixed value ads, it just consistently goes into shoe customer service, basically marketing and branding straight up. And then on the back end, like how much can you sell the story of what we could do for you if you got to a certain level, if that's something you care about? I think it's always gonna fall into those buckets because all these distributors are eating the exact same value ads. Like once you get to a certain level, it's like, all right, we're both going to allow you to get paid faster or see what your numbers are on this platform. One might do it first, but the game evolves so fast. If it's good enough, then all the competition will copy it because you can't ignore a legitimate innovation that's going to change how the future works. Just like everybody, like there's a lot of features that detect platforms would have that were different. But when TikTok made that short form video hit, everybody was like, dang, okay, we're gonna have to just do this one. It just is what it is because that's the new form of communication. Same thing that's happening with these distributors. And I just didn't say that to go back to, yeah, I think that game is a very hard game because it's fragmented and you just have to keep figuring out what's our advantage for the moment and they have to keep evolving. But artists don't care about distributors and the games that they got to play, but keep a note of that because y'all can watch out for what that looks like and maybe stop overthinking. There goes the point for the artists. Stop overthinking which distributive you all use. I'm not saying that it doesn't matter at all and you might not find a better experience, but some of y'all got like 20 distributors. Let me text this one, test this one, test this one. And now you all messed up trying to figure out how do I even log in to distributor number nine because I lost the password. It's a lot, you overwhelm yourself for no reason. You know what I mean? You'll be better off having one egg and watching the hell out of that egg than having 20 and then you turn around and then one gets stolen by a wolf or something. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's a good point. And that's where we can leave it. This is yet another episode of No Label's Necessary podcast. I'm Brad Manshaw. And I'm Gory. And we out.