 There's been big indie news going on lately, like the industry is being shaken up, right? We got Kanye going indie officially and going number one. Usher announced that he was indie, right? And, you know, we know that these people are different types of indie, however, which we can have another conversation. But these people are starting to use indie as a part of their narrative. Somebody told me that French Montana was talking some indie talk relatively recently, right? Yeah. So here's there's some good and bad to a lot of this stuff. But we're going to start with the good because James Blake has also basically started talking that indie talk, that direct to consumer talk. If you all haven't seen, he partnered with a platform that newly launched, which probably means he has a little piece in the platform as well called Vault, which is basically a platform for artists specifically that that allows them to create subscription programs. He launched his own subscription program for five dollars a month for his fans. As a matter of fact, I go to the page real quick just to kind of read or James's page real quick to read what the offer was to his fans. So right now, what his offer is is straight up. Unlock unreleased music from my vault. There's five songs. And then the other thing is chat with me about the music straightforward. All right. Now there's a lot to unpack here, a lot to unpack here in this episode. But let's start first with one. This is yet another step of the indie culture being pushed forward. The idea of indie being pushed forward and direct to consumer more empowerment for the artist, because it's yet another platform. There's so many of these platforms at this point for all types of creators. And then now there's more popping up for artists specifically. And that just means you're seeing more people invest in that direction. Now, this also goes back to our country conversation. When you start seeing it become a big trend and it becoming a heavy, heavy conversation, we've been talking direct to consumer for years. We've been talking like having your own website or hey, you should monetize online, do digital events. We've been trying to push people on that heavy and we try to go even harder during the pandemic and people still didn't move. However, people are moving heavily now on this. You know what that means? That means there's investment being put in this. You see that there's big artists behind this. You see that these big artists are involved in a lot of these plays. So it's just something to be aware of that I'll touch on. But there is something that I do like about the James Blake vault situation that I don't see in other platforms. It's really just the nothingness of it. The minimalistic of it. I'm dead serious, right? Maybe it's because it's new and it might become, you know, really robust. But right now, all right. Unlock five unreleased tracks and chat with me about the music. That's specific about the music. Hey, don't be chatting with me about your baby mama or you like basketball or these side subjects, right? We're not here to be a friend or a community. I'm here about my music. It's in line with that message. Now, that might just be James's fault. I don't know, or that might be a philosophy of the actual platform. It's too early to tell. But I do like the idea for people who say they're really about the music and monetizing the music. This seems so far to be about monetizing the music, not doing all the other bells and whistles that a lot of artists say they don't necessarily want to do in the first place. Right. So, bam, do you want my music? Here's my music. You want to talk to me? Well, let's talk about my music. Too simple to start, too simple, but impactful starting points. Yeah, yeah. And it prevents you having to actually do the work that it requires in a lot of these other types of monetization routes, right? Where it's a lot more work to, like, really run a community. It's a lot more work to, like, have a pop and discord, like, et cetera, but here's here's some of the interesting side of this James Blake situation, right? The interesting side of the James Blake situation is the tweets that he had leading up to this, right? So anybody who knows James Blake, maybe some of y'all don't know. He's he's an artist that Kanye has described as like his favorite artist multiple times throughout the years, has a lot of dope stuff. But he's he's on that mystique. I'm only about the artist. I call him white European Frank Ocean. That's how I think about him, right? Like really dope at music. Don't be out there for the sake of it. I'm just saying, you know what I mean? Not all music, but from a brand positioning. And I give it to the artist. You know what I mean? I hope they give it to him, but I give it to him. I hope they do. I hope they do. But he said this, right? Something I keep saying they I keep seeing is if you're lucky enough to go viral, just use the exposure to generate income some other way. Musicians should be able to generate income via their music. Yes, they should. All right. I mean, James, you've already gotten quite a good amount of money direct off the music, I'm sure. But do you want good music or do you want what you paid for? I like that question. I like that question because he's implying well, if I only pay twelve ninety nine a month or I'm limited by the songs, it's going to force the music to be bad. That's what it sounds like, right? Or artists having to do other things is going to create worse music, right? Now, I think this does favor his type of artists more than anything. But let's continue this. And then he had a post that got reposted by Kanye. You know, kind of, you know, just be sharing a bunch of people's stuff, right? But he said if we want quality music, someone is going to have to pay for it. Streaming services don't pay properly. Labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral. Tick tock doesn't pay properly. And touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists. All pretty fair, fair, fair complaints, right? I think that's all fair. But here goes the issue. Here goes the issue. James, don't be talking, bro. Don't James don't. James does not tweet often. I don't really even remember a James Blake tweet like that. Being pushed into culture at large, right? So when I saw that, when you saw that, with many people who know James Blake, you already saw that we registered it as, OK, this is truth. There's a general artist complaints. But why are you saying that? Why? Yeah, I didn't get to why, honestly. I was just like, oh, that's interesting. Like even James Blake is saying something that's kind of random because James don't talk. But then once the platform launch happens, oh, this is a rollout. Yep. Of course. You got me. What in what in what in music is not a rollout? What do artists do? What successful artists moves and does anything that's not a part of a rollout? It doesn't exist. I agree. It does not exist. Every single artist. And I'm talking about your favorite indie artist that's successful. Any artist that you consider successful as an indie artist. They do not move if they are not selling something. There's always a purpose. Every piece of content they put like I from what I've seen when I've been a part of the conversations, everybody is they have to be just as mindful as you think about my brand. Right. Where am I committed to? All of these things, the strategies that we have to build, they all have domino effects and people decide, oh, if I'm going to do something, it has to build into something. You there and especially if they're not usually just, you know, like a Cardi B, like that's just what they always do. Oh, they might have got emotional and just posted on something like that's not their thing. Yeah. Every even social media post is meticulous. Yeah, I want people to understand too. Like it's not always selling a product. Sometimes a lot of times it is selling a product, but most of the times it's selling an idea. An idea is selling a lifestyle, a movement. Yep. It's selling you on themselves. Like there's always an end goal to with Smars, right? There's always an end result or end goal that we like to have. I was very ready just doing things just to just to do stuff. They didn't get to where they they are, like not doing that. Yeah. Now, what I would have been like, hey, man, so we need a slew of tweets and like activity just off some some basic random stuff going ahead of this. We got to create a precedent that this is just what you do. You are now, for whatever reason, posting, but it's only post before this have led to the to the launch of this platform. So then it becomes OK, you're really just kind of like building up attention to launch your program. And, you know, now you have a nice PR moment for for your platform. Which respect, like I'm sure is working, but that goes back to, you know, some of the ideas I've been talking about in terms of just calling the question what you see because the artists that complain about the labels today as we transition into this new trend, right? Like this, the the Indies having more power, the individuals having more power. I foresee five years, maybe maybe it's 10 years. But artists will be coming at artists the same way they come at labels. Yeah, 100 percent. Like I'm telling you, man, 100 percent. It's going to be a real interesting space. It's a real interesting space because y'all forget that artists have signed artists before. And artists have already had these issues of other artists. Artists have taken over the labels. Y'all forget. Or maybe most of you haven't done the math. Most of these executives started off as artists. Or at least had a stint. A little stint, a little stint, man. Now, a lot of these executives, like, especially if you go back to the old days, right? A lot of them started off as artists or engineers or producers. So don't think it's the label. Like it's like the people are the people, bro. Like, I think I forgot who said it recently. But I forgot who. Oh, no, it's our interview. We haven't released our interview yet. But Boogers, you know, Boogers, Russ, the diamond label man. He was like, like, hey, man. I'm not going to turn down a good deal. A good deal is a good deal, no matter where it's coming from. I can get a good deal or a bad deal from my neighbor or a label. Right? Like somebody can screw you over at no matter what job you're at or no matter what level you're working on. So that's something to consider. But overall, the idea of another one of these types of companies like the vault being pushed and more artists in general, right? Pushing for these ideas is it's a good thing. Right? I do think it's a good thing, right? But again, if we go back to the intentionality, Kanye moving the way he moves, talking to what Kanye will when you say selling an idea. Artists know, especially the top artists and especially when you get to a Kanye, they know the idea is the thing that we sell before we sell the thing. Yeah, facts. Yeah. I sell you that that these people are trying to screw me over and not create an enemy before I try to sell you this other thing, right? Or I sell you that. Hey, yeah, I'm independent now. All right. Before I try to sell you this other thing, like they get the stories out for a reason and it's something you should learn from. I'm not even saying it all like in a skeptical or negative way. I'm saying this is something that you are going to have to understand as an artist in general, right? Like that's just that's just how this works. But it also something is something you should be mindful of because you are being marketed to by other artists or even if they are marketing to you directly, because you might not be the customer like, all right, I'm trying to sell the vault or something like that. Like, yes, and you are somewhere in the direct line of sales. But sometimes you're just looking at ideas that an artist is trying to sell to their audience, but it sounds so good. You're getting swept into it and you're starting to move off of that. You don't even know, man. I had a marketing funnel going on for these guys over here. Like it's a whole nother thing going on. But you just think that it's the idea is pure to the idea itself. Well, I wish I had a direct example I wanted to give right now, but I want to make sure we don't spend too much time on that because we I got to read Sam's post. Let me take a quick second to say if you're looking for a music distributor that cares about educating their artists so they can get in a better position, you should check out Two Loss because every single Monday, they have office hours where they bring on dope people in the industry to hop on calls, give artists insights on the future of the music industry and answer some of the questions they have going on in their personal careers. So if you aren't a user of Two Loss or just want to have a little bit more information about them, go to Two Loss on Instagram. That's T-O-O-L-O-S-T Two Lost on Instagram. And it'll take you to everything you need to see and for me about the sessions and more back to this episode. So if you all don't know Sam, you know, go and watch his. Don't be. Don't go ahead and watch his interview. No labels necessary. I think we caught. Did we call him just down? I don't go Sam Levine. We probably get Sam Levine. We probably called him Sam Levine in the title. But he has a post and I think it was pretty interesting when he came to a response to this James Blake. Grant, I'll call it. James Blake in the importance of hard work as an artist. It's a lot to consider and wait. He said over the last few weeks, James Blake began a discourse on social media. His idea is simple. Artists shouldn't be expected to learn how to market themselves and instead should be free to create art and make an equitable living from that without expending time and energy on social media promotion. OK, that's what Sam said. He verily he very quickly followed up his viral sentiment with the announcement of a product launch for a music coded Patreon derivative called Vault, which, according to James Blake, will encourage artists to create their favorite most integral music, not just the big 15 second TikTok moment in another recent quote from him, which appears to be the foundational thing to his viewpoint. How do we sort this shit out? He says in a real because most musicians are not extroverts who are social media and branding genius. All right, I want you all to soak all that in, right? Take a second, Paul, soak that in and then Sam's continues. Both of those thoughts stood out to me and it's those ideas that I want to talk about. I would love all of y'all's response to what Sam is saying here. The first is the fundamentally old headed conception of so-called TikTok music, quote unquote, as being somehow separate from and inherently less artistically valuable than other forms of music. TikTok is music is worse than other music. That's basically what he's saying. He's saying it's offensive to artists pushing new boundaries and having unique breakthroughs on the platform to imply that they're not releasing their best work, that they're instead chasing an ultimately inconsequential garbage heap of content masquerading as music. And I know a lot of artists feel this way. Problem is, there's a lot of artists that aren't winning at all, that are that are feeling this way as well. Right. And like, so, and I don't say that even as a shot. I say that as like, you got to find, but you can't be mad at somebody for finding a way. And some of these things are personality differences, right? There's some artists that are going to win in certain errors. And we're talking about performance back in the old days where people were literally building their audience off of performance, especially the further back you go, that was like the way that was how you're going to build. We didn't have this crazy media. We didn't even have TV going in like that. Well, it's a lot of your artists that would suffer. Right. And then imagine somebody going, well, I mean, that's just dancing to the music just because this man could do a couple of moves. He could do all this little, this foot. Got a wardrobe budget. Yeah. He got a wardrobe budget and a cape and some, and some rhinestones. He, he can, like he doesn't have real music. Like, imagine that conversation. Somebody was probably having that conversation. That's a distraction from just recording the music. All right. We all like rewrite history in our own era. TikTok has created, this is back to Sam, a new paradigm of marketing media and fan connection where before visual media and world building was a one way street. True. Presented by the artist teams and then consumed by the fans is now turned into a world of reciprocal action and interactivity. I don't know, Sam. You know, I made that one up or maybe I just got to catch up, but I'm out of. There is no creative limitation on what will work on TikTok and the fact that anyone can tap into the vast audience reach of TikTok from their phone has opened up more doors to an artist than ever before. All right. So he does say, oh, this is good. This is good. I'd like to briefly note that here, that my belief that TikTok itself is a monolithic monopolistic nightmare, which has entirely too much control. All right. I'll let y'all go to Sam. We'll put a link to this on Sam's face. So y'all can read all that. Yeah, blow his comments up, all that good stuff. But he does not like love TikTok. He's not a, that's not what he's saying or defending a TikTok or anything like that. But I think it is a big idea. And it's something I've actually responded to here. I said, you know, good stuff, like legit to me, because this is a constant thing that I've always did not like that I saw in the art scene. Like as a child, you know, I always had my like entire way of seeing things, right? My own viewpoint. You see the establishment, then you observe a little bit more and get pushed a little bit towards anti-establishment. But then I observe anti-establishment, then I have an anti-anti-establishment. I'm somewhere in between. OK, all right. That's kind of how I saw myself develop. So it's a lot of times it's hard for people to see where I don't understand where I'm at because I see fuckery on all sides. Right. So it's like, I can't rock with anybody all the way. So this is the context to what I wrote. If people study enough history, they realize that many times artists, ironically, end up being the ones who resist art moving forward. When artists become a purist or believes that their personal distaste equates to a lack of artistic credibility, they're projecting what they supposedly hate straight up. You can't you can't institutionalize this shit. Yeah. Like art is art. It cannot be defined. It cannot be put in a box, right? And the thing that you hate, somebody else will love. The thing that you love, somebody thinks it's pure garbage, like not even close to art. And I think people lose respect, perspective on that as a whole. And I never try to get beyond that from an ego standpoint, but that's a lot of the grounding for this conversation and how James Blake presented it. I would love to know how y'all think about it in general and how Sam most importantly presented that because I think I love when people write little mini thought pieces because Sam cares about this shit. Sam cares about this shit. Y'all don't know, man. Sam actually cares about this. I could go real deep into this. Let me read a little bit more on what he said. Let me see. Just so y'all can have a context of who he is for those who are going to are going to be too lazy to go to his page. Myself and the people I admire most are driven by an urgent sense of competitive purpose. We want to be the best in the world and want to facilitate greatness for those we work with. I am driven by the belief that art and the expression are the most important things in the small microcosm of the universe occupied by human consciousness. And it is my goal to participate in and help build up great art. All right. That's that Sam in a nutshell. All right. So know that it's not coming from all like who cares about art. I think we we we don't have real discussions around this music stuff and approach to it and we get caught in these silos and purists thought processes because people always like to just say, oh, you either hate art or love art. Right. You're either the man institution or you're somebody who's about free. And it's like, no, you can still like both love art, both be super indie minded and still not think about going about this the same way. Right. Or disagree upon some ideas. And I think as this evolves, we'll probably see more nuance because I don't think people see or the space for this nuance. Right. Because right now it just feels like, oh, it's institution versus indie. So if you say anything that critiques the proper way of doing indie or how you should go about it, it feels like you're just institution because indie hasn't been invested in enough and it's not as many people involved in it just yet or it's not the still not the number one thing where then people could say, OK, yeah, you're splitting the hairs of indie versus, you know, going to direct other direction completely. I think that's probably part of what we're going to do right now. Yeah. I mean, the thing about it, too, is I don't think I don't think these artists realize they're building the same elitist system that they claim to be against. Right. Because it's a couple of things I was thinking about. Just listen to that. Right. One, you said something really early on that stuck with me and is the indie music space is the fastest growing section of the music space, right? Right. It's projected to make a lot of money over the next couple of years or just in perpetuity, I guess, if it keeps growing. Now, what people are assuming is that that means that it's going to make more money because the artists within the space are going to spend more money, which I do think we are slowly starting to see become true. But I don't think people think about is that the space is one of the fastest growing spaces is because a lot of people have realized that, oh, this group is finally ready to start spending money. So we see no more services. We see more products and things popping up. We've been in any space for a long time. I can't even think of a time where a year where I would see even like I would see a new platform come out and see even more than three of that same one kind of come up in that same year. You will find like a music platform and it'd be like maybe one other competitor at the time. Now, bro, you get one platform out. It seems like a semi-good idea. It's like 10 more about it. You send a platform like these tech platforms. Yeah, a lot of tech platforms. And to that same point, and this isn't like an ad or anything for these companies, but Bandcamp has existed for a long time. Bandzooogle has existed. You're talking about like 20 years in the game. Yeah, Patreon and all that. Yeah, like you and Patreon is like 10 years deep now, right? So it's not like people haven't had these tools, right? Like it's not like, and if people haven't been using these types of tools already and then to start selling the idea of it, then it makes me question a little bit. Like, well, it's like, bro, you weren't like, you were already killing the game. Are you selling this now because you're like benefiting or were you actually using the Bandcamp and these other things going direct and playing on this idea? And now you're trying to just go about it a better way with your experience as maybe an artist specifically to build it better for an artist specifically. You know what I mean? That, okay, that's a lot more genuine, but then like, I don't know, like the James Blake rollout was a little interesting. And this isn't even to call out any particular names or anything like that, but I just go off of feedback and things when I talk to artists like that and they're confused, right? Like, yo, bro, I'm about to drop my first song and which distributor should I use and then which one of these like monetization routes should I use? It's like, bro, you haven't dropped your first song. Like, stop thinking about that. It's a lot. You know what I mean, right? So it's like, that's more of why I say this than anything is like just people are getting confused a little bit in terms of like even the process of going about it. And if you do end up using one of these routes, like look at the, look at the path that still works, right? Path number one, get some fans, right? Like, period. We're all starts. Like this is where it all starts. So like at the end of the day, man, like again, I think this is gonna be a good thing. It's interesting that they're having so many people that are large become quote unquote independent, right? And I only wanna put the quotes on it, but like yes, because some of these have these massive big joint ventures and it's just skews the idea of what we see as independent. And, but on the other side, the thing that people should realize is, I don't know how to say this. Independent on paper is not what people perceive it to be. So when you see independent growing, that doesn't just include Johnny who's sitting in his bedroom. That includes independent labels, right? And that also includes the massive artists. Kanye is gonna be a part of that market share now. When they say independent is growing X, Y, and Z. So now the game is all muddied up. And you don't even know what's for you anymore as a indie, indie. I even think about that's a good point. Like when the indie stats come out, I'm just gonna be crazy padded. The stats are padded, bro. The stats are padded. Like it's a completely different game now. So it's gonna be hard for y'all who are like, really indie and still on the come up to know what's for you exactly. How are y'all doing as a bunch? Exactly, cause not too many people are going to like really show you the detailed breakdown of that cause it doesn't really benefit, you know, certain people. You know what I mean? It just is what it is. Yeah, but that's why I mean, we've never gotten any like hard stats on this, but I've estimated for years that any artist with a fan base, at least 30% of your fan base is other music artists. And I think that as artists who are fans of other music artists, which is probably majority of you, you have to get really good at discerning between when this artist is selling to you as a music fan and when they are selling to you as a fellow music artist, you know what I'm saying? Whether they respect you in the same light as wherever they are necessarily, there are two different business models, so I can sell to you as a fan by my t-shirt, you know what I'm saying? By my vinyl, I sell to you as a music artist. Hey bro, I ain't getting paid like you ain't getting paid. Come on over here and buy this shit. And you get it, cause you there, you know what I'm saying? And your hair, you like, damn bro, it's crazy to, you know, X, Y, Z ain't making bread. Like I ain't making bread. We need to stick together. And that's not how they're looking at it. That's not how they're looking at it. Another guy, some funnel guy behind me, like, hey bro, you know what I'm making? This, this, this, you know, cost-back position go crazy, bro. Sprinkle a little bit of that. Sprinkle a little bit of narrative on it, bro. Get the people out of it. Yeah, there's, there's the marketers behind them, right? And, or they are the marketers themselves. There are artists who are, who are that? Like, bro, like there's gonna be so many artists that are coming from like just professional backgrounds outside of the industry. That's the new thing, right? We have so many artists who have legitimate professional careers that move into music. They know how this stuff works. They understand the strategies. So they are the corporate. Yeah. It's just, it's just individual or a small team instead of a big building over-invested in overextending themselves. So, like, just know that this is the new industry, all right? And it's only gonna continue in this direction. There's a lot of great stuff coming, but, you know, keep your head on the swivel. Yeah, man. You know, like Sean said, man, we didn't do this to be negative. Like, overall the discourse about it, regardless of who it's coming from, is a good thing because it moves it forward. It's making people who wouldn't otherwise have had attention be a little bit more aware of it. Right? It's starting some conversations. We just want you guys to, you know, remember to, that, you know, sometimes you gotta go check the wisdom of ours and look behind the curtain, though, like. See you, what's up? See you, what's up? And with that said, this is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary. I'm Brandon Manchin. And I'm Cory. And we out. Peace.