 In this Saturday video, I'm going to challenge a major idea that's common in the indie and DIY community. But I promise if you watch all the way to the end, you won't fall into this trap that all the conspiracy theorists commonly fall into when they hear the idea that I'm about to present at first. Because the conspiracies are all good, but that mental masturbation is never good for the actual realization of freedom that you want at the end of the day as an artist, try to manage your running your own business along with your artist and the talent that you're looking to push. So here's the idea, but I need you to listen to why the idea is so important for your understanding and winning in the future of the music industry. The idea is artists need a label, right? Controversial to some, but some of y'all might get it right off the bat. Here's something though that you need to understand, like what that really looks like and why that is, right? We say artist, we don't need this. We don't need labels, right? Labels, that's the big bad machine. But understand the reality about the actual economy is working with them music and what's really at bay because a lot of people get you to focus on, oh, the anti-label and we're raging against the labels. And the problem is labels aren't really anything that you can put your hands on like that. Labels really represent an idea and a set of functions, right? They represent marketing, right? Distribution, my tech and my writing might be a little bit weird. And then development, right? That's artist development. Those are like the key things. Some people might argue more things, but when we're talking about labels, usually artists are looking at these three things for a benefit. Now, let's say labels died. Do you still need marketing distribution development? Of course you do, right? But we're in an age where distribution is more accessible. We don't have to wait on a traditional label. Marketing, if you're really willing to put in on social media and use all these available tools, we can take control of our own marketing on the indie side. The big problem that people are experiencing though is a lot of people want more development, right? But you don't have the patience or you're afraid of doing it in front of people, right? On social media or you don't wanna wait, right? That goes back to the patience and just build yourself in the dark and then finally get on social media. And all in all, the reality is a lot of this is expensive, right? True development, truly getting in front of people and having those performances that make you an actual better talent. All these things are still needed, right? So here's where things get interesting though and this is why I talk about the future of the industry when I talk about this, right? So all these things are the label. Put that out there. The artist still needs this. If we look at the future of the industry, the artist is just going to have that in their own circle. The artist is going to have their own label. Every artist still needs a label. The question is, what does your personal label look like? Because the label is really just a combination of these functions at the end of the day, right? So does that mean I'm a true DIY DIY to a fault artist where I'm by myself? So I'm working with a distributor, whoever your distributor is, right? As a label, you know that two losses one of the distributors that we mentioned on this channel what about development, right? Development, well, I'm just developing myself, okay? And then of course marketing, I might do all of that myself. I'm truly DIY and I just work in a silo. But other people are going to hire teams whether it's an agency they usually use or a homie that they train up and becomes really good at marketing. You have all these things. You have a manager. You have all of this in house, right? Or you can export some of this stuff to these individual entities that now exist in an indie way because it's more accessible but you might not wanna specialize it to the level that some people can do, right? And what I mean by that is labels, the benefit of an infrastructure is when you're putting a certain amount of money your resources and specialization, you're able to be very, very good in areas that's hard to do as an individual. But now we're in a space where you might have a marketing agency that's really good or a PR agency that's really good, a distributor who comes along with a couple of other services. And this is rare, this is hard to find but I know of some people who are even putting work into developing artists on a more systematic or consultative basis. So you can still find these specializations. This is why I think the idea of raging it against labels is so important to think through because labels are important. And what I mean by that, this is playing with words now, the label when you think about a word you need to be thinking about it properly. Most people are raging against the labels because those are the set of things that you still want at the end of the day. They're raging against this outer circle and this blue circle. That's the institution, right? So if we're getting rid of the institution, right? What does that look like? Because, well, we really don't like the institution in most of these cases, not the label because we still want these things. But if the institution starts to get rid of the actual label aspect of what it does, it doesn't have control of that. What happens there, all right? Well, the thing that you're raging against the reality is well, we're gonna have these individual marketing companies and distribution companies, maybe even some development companies. There are some that, well, actually, yeah, there already exists where labels are investing in them, right? Y'all probably know things like what Sony owned AWOL or something like that, right? And there's other distributors that labels have invested in. That's part of it. So it's like, well, the institution has just exported its own services and now it's just dealing with artists in a lower risk away when you deal with them through a distribution model, right? That's one thing. And then another thing is, well, sometimes it's not the institution in terms of the name, Warner Music, UMG, Sony, right? The common names y'all think of when you think about the institution of a label. There's companies, right, that are investing in the companies, right? So there's other companies up here that you don't see and you don't think about the name as a whole that are investing in the labels. And then there's some that are coming around and investing, not divesting, investing in these categories that artists are still ultimately using, right? And then in general, there's a bubble over here that could keep this in mind, but I'm just gonna call it its own bubble, tech, right? That's, I probably wrote that way too small. Tech, T-E-C, there's these tech companies that also in some ways can become a label themselves, right? Or have a label-like level of control, right? We think about the issues that some people have with TikTok. We think about the issues that we have with even like a social media engine, right? Not giving us the full amount of views that we've invested in so heavily, right? We put in all this work. How much are we getting from every time our song is played on the platform? All these things are in consideration. And at the end of the day, like it's technically compensating artists and giving artists a proper level of control. Yes, they are a huge part of discovery, but we're trying to figure out how everybody's truly gonna sit into this ecosystem. Same way we'll have these other companies start, let's say the DSPs, a Spotify, a Rezo, a Deezer, right? You'll have other companies, right? These same companies that you think that you're avoiding these institutions, they find their way. They're gonna find their way and they're gonna be fine. So this idea of raging against them, you're losing focus on what's important. What's important is your own empowerment and not getting caught up in this idea of anti-label, anti-X, Y, and Z because you want what a label is, all right? You just need to understand where the blocks lay and why you're empowered. They're gonna have to change, not because artists are making different decisions. They're not gonna have to change because they lost their leverage period, right? These institutions, tech is killing them more than artists are, right? And I'm not saying that as a slight, I'm not saying that to disempower anybody. I'm saying the best way you can empower yourself is just focus on empowering yourself versus being anti and getting caught up in those conversations and the idea of, oh, well, this person is benefiting from streaming or this person is benefiting from this model. Everybody is trying to figure out what the next thing is, where the world's going because the ball is already rolling, right? No one's trying to maintain things where they are, right? People think that, but no one is because no one's making the maximum amount of money in terms of music industry, what it could be, right? They're still trying to get back to what it used to be in terms of money and, of course, continue to grow the investment and they wanna get ahead of things so by the time we get there, we can make the money. And you'll see some of this tech acting like a label. I'm gonna go way deeper into this summer in like a month, right? Cause I'm just so busy. I mentioned that last Friday, last Saturday video, but I wanna break these things down. So like in a literal way where you can see how all of this stuff is connected. Give me one second, baby, okay? All right, sorry, my kid came and interrupted me, but all these things are truly connected and here's the issue though. A big issue that I'm gonna break down when I get into the true breakdown of this in about four weeks, maybe five. My problem is when things are music focused, improvement is not enough. You'll see a lot of new models that are improving on the bad model, but they're still violating compared to how other industries act when they offer the same services, right? Like this is what a lot of artists are missing. So you'll go from a label to a distributor, but the distributor is really just basing everything they do on we're better than how the label is or we're going to a tech company and we're saying that we're a direct to consumer and helping you monetize company, but the way they're doing it is in a way that's better than how labels treat artists, but it's not better than how other direct to consumer companies treat their clients in other industries. You hear what I'm saying? And trust me, I'm gonna break this down really deeply specifically in about five weeks when I have a time to really like graphic it up and everything for y'all. If y'all wanna have these conversations in meantime, by the way, of course y'all know we have our free community with Hella Courses and we got case studies just showing you how we've blown some artists up and like interviews with those artists so you can kind of watch and hear their experience all that's free and www.knowlabelisnecessary.com check it out. But the thing I say is important for all of this is once you understand what a label really is which is just a set of functionalities, right? It's not really the institution itself. It's a set of functionalities that you need regardless, right? It's a coin that's been termed to encompass all these things. You know that it's still useful. You know that you want it in some way. It's just who's in charge? Are you completely in charge of your label and who's executing it? Is it you? Is it somebody on your team? Is it somebody that you outsource? And you could take on all these or some of these. But at the end of the day, this is where the future of the music industry is going and you'll see artists become smarter and smarter over time. Well, they'll realize there was this period where we would be in completely done wrong on the label side, but then there was a lot of indie and direct to consumer talk, but we got duped in some ways in the way that got presented, right? And then there'll be artists that are just really, really intelligent and they see the entire game, right? And it reminds me of a conversation that I had with a really smart artist, already successful artist who's working with a super successful artist, their partner. You'll know them. We'll drop in an interview with them pretty soon. He said it's all about a good deal. A good deal is a good deal, right? He's looking for the best opportunity, the best deal. It doesn't matter if it came from this building. It doesn't matter if it came from having his own team, right? It doesn't matter if it came from my neighbor, right? It's about the right deal. And as you start to move in this industry more, but have more success as a manager, artist, whatever you're doing, you'll realize all the people that are winning have completely different setups and it's gonna be even greater of a divide as you see or greater of a variety as the industry continues to evolve where you'll be like, oh man, this person is going crazy with just content and social media. This person is doing their sync thing. This person is doing a combination. This person barely has any followers at all and they're winning. And this person has a 80, 20 split with their label. This person has like no label, but they have their own internal label. Like they'll see all of these things. They care more about publishing. You'll see every single one of these varieties. And when you realize and open up the world to yourself to understand there's no rules to this thing, you can win how you wanna win. And it's just about making the right deals and best deals for you. And if you ignore the idea of something, right, without looking at the actual offer that you're being, that's on paper or the actual opportunity that's before you, then you start to sell yourself short because you're selling an idea that was sold to you by people that were there before you even got there. Right, there's a lot, there's a lot of, that's a whole another video. I'll leave it at that. This is yet another Saturday video. If you like these Saturday videos, subscribe to the vibe and we got a whole playlist of that now. So y'all can check out the Saturday videos playlist. It's on the main channel. Just go to, you know, click that button. You know how to get to the main channel homepage. And other than that, have a great one. Peace.