 These are, has this program where they're going to start tagging artists. One is going to be called professional artists, and the other one's going to be called hobby artists, I believe. Are you serious about your music or are you just a hobbyist? One DSP is saying that they're not going to pay you if you aren't doing serious artist numbers. Now, what are those numbers? Check out this clip right here. Professional artists, you have to get a thousand streams a month and something else, and you'll get paid almost double what a hobby artist will be. Alright, first of all, how many artists do you think considered themselves to be professional artists, taking it seriously, that got less than a thousand streams a month? All of them, probably. Yeah, all of them, probably. It's definitely some people who just considered themselves. 99.2%. I feel like that right there is going to be offensive to many artists. Yeah, good. Because, if you didn't know, 90% of songs on Spotify last year got less than a thousand streams. I'm not saying it's the fairest because major labels will always have a leg up with algorithmic playlists and editorial playlists. Alright, so you're talking about people who have over a thousand streams a month getting paid double the amount as artists who have small... 999? 999. You got less than a thousand streams, you're going to get paid half the amount of money who artists who have a thousand streams a month. Now, he said that's not necessarily fair because major labels are always going to have a leg up. A thousand streams a month isn't that much. It's not crazy. I thought the bar would be higher, and they probably made it as low as it is because of the argument he's trying to make. Let's see it. We're going to let this finish off and we're going to really get into these details though. And editorial playlists, they will automatically always have double the price, but it does kind of suck for indie artists who are just getting in and is like, damn, give me a chance. We're all sharing payments and stuff like that as far as what we get from the royalties from streaming based on an ad pool. So, say for instance, there's a billion dollars. That's all they got. So all the little streams that we got have to be divvied up amongst us if we cut off the entire bottom and say, y'all can't even monetize until you hit this tier and all that money gets pushed up. It's the YouTube model. That is the YouTube model. Alright, I like that last point that he mentioned. It's not like we're not used to this. I mean, a similar model in terms of you're not getting enough views, streams, you don't have enough subscribers. Once you hit a certain threshold, you get access to money features and things like that. So I think that part is solid. The only thing is it's hard to take something away from people that they already have. Yeah, I mean, and even outside of music, I mean, it's basically the sports model. You know what I'm saying? It's like the high school student that goes on to play college ball and then goes on to the NFL, the NBA, you know what I'm saying? So that's traditional sports because you got the NIL, but the NIL deals have made even the young boys able to get money. Alright, that's true. So that's like now we're going backwards. So someone might call it prehistoric. I say this, we got to adjust the first point that a lot of people are talking about. Like one guy said, this is going to kill it for any artist. I don't know about kill it. It's going to ruin any artist's careers. The struggle is already hard enough to that. I got one question. I got one question. Not paying artists out for a thousand streams a month. That's not a lot of money. All right. So these are paying 0.0064 cents per stream. So you're telling me missing out on $6.40 is going to kill your career? I mean, we talk about a month, you know what I'm saying? With 6 times 12 is 72. The average cheap distributor for the indie artists at that level is between $20 and $80 for the, is it a year or a month? What's the digital key? Like $20 a month or $20 a year? I don't even remember. You know what I'm saying? Maybe, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. There's no way, bro. If $6 a month is going to be the end of your music career, then look, man, there's a lot of tougher things in this business. You probably aren't going to have a music career in your first place. Yeah. And they don't really believe it. They really believe that. They would have mobilized when that stack came out last year about all the songs that had less than a thousand streams. It would have been pools of playlists. That's when you react without doing the math, right? That's when you react without doing the math. Now, of course, what benefit does that bring? That's probably a lot of money on a long tail that they've given away to artists who, some of them might not be serious or whatever, the artists who aren't going to get paid double. Once you do hit that threshold, as an indie, those numbers might look sweeter for you, right? Now, again, it's not like I necessarily agree that this should happen, but I think we got to make arguments on both sides. And there's a couple of really dope arguments that we should address, all right? So, Austin Holt says, I see both sides could be nice to give people some actual incentive to promote their stuff and get to the paid tier. That's what I hear. I'm like, oh, for me, outside of even hearing the term, I'm hearing the idea of I get paid once I hit this level. Just feeling like, oh, I get considered professional at this level, having some level of measurement, but I can be more goal-oriented sometimes, right? Just like everybody else does with TikTok and YouTube. It's like, oh, yeah, I want to hit that. So I can, now, what was the thing on IG when you hit 10,000 followers back in the day? What was that that you had access to? Was that like, you can go live maybe? Well, that was TikTok with the thousand followers go live. I don't remember what Instagram was. They were the first ones to do that, though. Man, it was big, too. It might have been the verification stuff. No, it wasn't verification. Well, not getting. It was something Normie used to worry about. I was a normal civilian, you know what I'm saying? Worry about this shit. What was it? I remember TikToks, but I don't remember it. Y'all let us know. Back in the day when you got to 10,000 followers, what was the benefit that you got on Instagram? I wish I could remember what it was. It might have been go live. No, you got to go back to that first. Because that first comment made a good second point, too. What was the second point? But it also could also discourage people just starting and add a whole new sense of jadeiness before they even get their music off the ground. Though this might cut out some of the over-saturation. I completely agree with that. The over-saturation? Yeah, well, both sides of it is going to make those. But those types of artists, man, the artist that is getting 12 streams a month that feels like he's being cheated, that's the type of artist that will already be jaded anyway. You know what I'm saying? This is really just building on top of his or her frustrations. But the cutting out the over-saturation, right? Because that same comment goes, well, talk about making people work for it. We know that one of the bigger complaints of that demographic of artists is having to work hard. They like to feel like I should be able to just put the music out and streams will magically flow from this oasis of magic listeners that find me amongst the 10,000 other things they have to do. That's who's going to be cut out. Yes. Because to the point you made at the top of the pod, a thousand streams a month isn't difficult to get to. You know, you talk about pushing one song to the point that it's doing, I don't even say it really well, it's just moderately well. Yep. You're talking about having the catalog of multiple songs that do decently well. You know what I'm saying? It's not the most complicated number. I could see if this was like, oh, you got to have a million streams in my DNA BOD. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Exactly. But a thousand streams a month, bro? It's like, I've seen some people get that on accident. Yep. Not even monthly listeners. Yeah, exactly. Not even monthly listeners, a thousand streams a month. So it's like, if there's an artist out there, and I know there will be, who feels like, oh, this is made to keep me out of the game. You know what I'm saying? This is made to step on the little guy and stop me from succeeding. Then you are already lost. You know what I'm saying? You already put yourself out of the game, man. So this ain't, this ain't, it's for you, but it ain't for you. Right. And shout out to the Help Me Divine podcast. This is where this clip is from. Check out the YouTube page and all that. And in the comments, there's another one. W. Thompson Music says, I'm not sure I'm a fan of this idea. I think the difference between this system and YouTube is that we, the artists, have to pay for distribution to the various DSPs. There is no cost to upload to YouTube. If Spotify is going to raise the threshold for monetization, they need to make it so the artists can upload their music for free without requiring us the use of, the use of a label or distribution service. All right. Here's a couple things to that. They need to. You know, you can't say that at all, right? This is their business because it's not like they were benefitting or monetizing the distributors in that way anyway, right? They're not making that money. So it's not like we're missing it. We're missing it or wanting it. So allowing you to upload for free, I think that ship already passed. They had the DistroKid partnership. It didn't happen like they wanted to. They actually did try that. All right. Two, yeah, that's your service to distribute. Maybe their sense of quality control. Really it's the complexity, I feel like, in terms of music and the metadata and things like that, that makes it a little bit harder too. Yeah, exactly. And some licensing around it. So it's not even by choice. I think they would make it that way if things weren't set up the way they are. Every artist would be uploading a song with a fake Drake verse on it. And the issues that could come from that are much harder to deal with than the issue of getting the artist to pay $9.99 for the distribution. Yeah, exactly. Because it is our distributors who usually handle all that stuff. Oh yeah, we can't take this. Artists who work with us. Make sure everybody's credited and getting their splits and all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. They're not dealing with that. And one distribution has never been a free thing. Distribution of music has never been a free thing. They even alluded to it, bruh. Labels had to pay for it at some point. Now we have the digital companies. And two, the only reason that, at least as I feel, the only reason YouTube has never made us do it is because, well, I think to your point earlier, they just kind of started that way and kind of got locked in. But then as they built, when they were just super fast-growing platforms, they got monetizable pretty quickly. You know what I'm saying? You talk about just the history of social platforms. YouTube was probably monetizable in its first two or three years or something crazy like that. Now, if I remember correctly. And then they get backed by Google and they make hella ad revenue. They have so much money coming in from other places they don't need to take your $2 of low versus. People love to forget that Spotify is not profitable. And that is what is driving. This isn't a Spotify thing, which is, you know, it could be different with Deezer. Which is actually, I just thought about it too, that's crazy. This ain't even about Spotify. Spotify called it straight. I know, bruh. I know. He's like, exactly. I'm glad you brought it up because I was going to say that. But this goes back to that same point because there is a Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music title. There's all these platforms, things that are so fragmented. That's another reason that the distribution services are there. They're also making your life easier. Yeah. There isn't, oh, I'm going to upload to YouTube and then I'm going to upload to the YouTube part two and rumble and all that stuff. You can, but it's not really fragmented in that way where you're going to do it as a norm. Exactly, bruh. If every platform allows you to upload directly, then the argument would be, oh, I wish there was some type of service or platform that would allow me to upload to multiple places at once. We'd just be talking in circles, man. But let's further this point though. He said, while raising that floor, let me see. While raising the floor for monetization is great for established artists, label artists or viral artists. How are you going to throw viral artists? That's not even a real thing, bruh. You can't even say that. It's also very discouraging and costly for a new up-and-coming artist. Again, we're talking about $6.4 a month. It's like you're not making $6.41. And I know it's hard to come by money. You know what I mean? Like starting up, I get it. I remember being in college in a $5 party. It's like, I don't know about that. Artists below that threshold are already potentially spending thousands of dollars to get their music produced, mixed, mastered and marketed. You might have to change that mix to not just be so heavy on the mixing and production. I don't know. Because again, if you're marketing and you're spending thousands of dollars and you can't hit, you know, a thousand streams a month, that's what we're here for. Just listen to these videos. Hopefully, at some point, you can get beyond that. This system will require them to spend even more from marketing and promotion before they are seeing fruits of their labor. He's crazy, bruh. He's not doing the math. That's all it is. He's not doing the math. He's talking like an artist that, once again, forgets content exists. You know what I'm saying? What do you mean by that? I mean, he's talking about spending more, bruh. Most of them don't have to spend that much money to begin with. Well, there's a lot of artists that don't want to do content. That's what I'm saying. This all comes back to work ethic, bruh. You know what I'm saying? It's a very specific demographic of artists that I think will be triggered by this feature. And it's the demographic of artists that are small and don't want to do the work not to be small. The entitled small artists. I hear that. I definitely hear that. See where you're going. I mean, look, any kind of floor, any extra level of difficulty it sucks to hear in the music business. We know that music business isn't the easiest business. It's hard for artists to monetize and things like that. I get that. At the same time, when artists get into the bag of well, they're making this so hard for me and the music shouldn't be so business heavy, it's like you know you have that option to not be a part of the business and just be happy creating your art. It truly is just for that purpose. Once you want to impact people, there's going to be barriers. Other people, other agendas, other business that has to be had. So that's just a part of the game. Yeah, I get it though. A lot of it sucks in the music industry but in general still is effed up. So I agree with that but this isn't one of those things that I think that merits that reaction. It's a little bit hard. Let's talk about the fact that most artists fail to understand that it doesn't take forever to monetize your audience. We had an artist literally begin to take off and make $20,000 from his brand new audience in the same month. But how is that possible? It's because we're in a new era, baby. Yes, you want to continue your relationship over time but the first time you make money from your audience can happen today if you understand the new age music marketing funnel for artists. So if you want to hear about this approach and how you can apply it to yourself, I made a completely free video to watch at www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash monetize. You got to make sure you put the www or if you're on YouTube you can find the link in the description and check out how we help monetize artists for completely free. I promise it'll completely change how you see things. Now this person said, Roosh did it. I think the separation between the pro and hobbyist is actually helpful but I don't know about the stream count being the line in the sand. I know there's a lot of small artists right now that are serious and don't want to be considered hobbyist and that's fair but consider that there are also thousands of people who just want to make music for fun which isn't a crime or anything obviously but then you also consider that those people in their songs are taking up the same airspace as part of their overall money pod so do we really want everyone perceived on the same tier? Alright, I think I know what he's saying. He's saying there's artists who have over a thousand streams per month that aren't necessarily serious. Think about a speed, right? Like oh, I got a big audience or a Kai Senet, right? I'm a streamer really I'm gonna drop some music for fun and because of our audience I'm gonna get over a thousand monthly listeners so it doesn't necessarily weed out professional and that I like. Like this is a really solid point. Now what else did he say? Bruh just said 90% of the uploads had damn near no streams so couldn't it be beneficial for those folks to have their own classification versus folks like that? Folks like us that do take it seriously no matter how small maybe using some other metric like how active are you in the industry versus simply how streams how many streams you get though otherwise it's hard to separate someone serious who just doesn't have reach versus someone's cousin who just fucking off. Alright so again he made some solid points in terms of how you truly can consider somebody serious or not but again the companies have to focus on what they measure like I don't know if you just had a meeting with your Corey you know what I mean? Like are you going to a couple of networking events? I can't judge your seriousness if I'm Deezer in your music career beyond your streams so I think they have to do something that's aligned with what they can measure themselves and of course it's still going to be imperfect maybe there's a tier but y'all wouldn't like that right? Now I got to pay for like paying for verification on um on Twitter yeah it'll be similar to that so would y'all want to pay an extra $7 to say hey I'm a professional artist and because of this I'm going to get paid I kind of like that actually from the company standpoint I like the revenue like from the artist standpoint $7 isn't a lot of money it's not right and then I get to get separated and get paid way more while we can take away the money from anybody who doesn't want to get paid at all because they're like I'm just throwing my music up here so now we don't even have to pay them out at all possibly I don't know what legally you can work out there but I would like the idea of maybe just doing some kind of paid program and then having an extra set of services that you might take on as a part of that. Yeah I think so I mean or they just add more tiers you know I think they could stretch it out the paying the money I think would be to your point it will be hated by the artist community at first of all I think overtime they will come to accept it you know what I'm saying like you got to pay some more money it's another charge which I get when we're talking about specifically a quality tool for figuring out some level of seriousness. Yeah especially if it came with features like you know the Instagram verification thing it was all this hoopla about it until people realize that oh I get like hack support through this and like if my account gets hacked then you know there's some extra things that come with this if I hit the worst cash scenario now to the point you know to your point right like how how do you tell who is a serious artist versus a non-serious artist right he made I think his comment another comment made the point of putting the resources into it and that should separate them I think that's a big um differentiator for I guess those of us that like the grassroots level of it right like like someone like us where like I can tell the difference between someone that takes it seriously versus someone that doesn't buy how well that cover art looks right or like how yeah um how well the quality of the song is but now you take this away from music and that argument doesn't necessarily fly in any other job or industry right like I could go I could go to Nike right now by NFL level cleats you know what I'm saying I could hire a personal trainer to run me through the same workouts that some of the best wide receivers run through you know what I'm saying I could go on Google and get the same meal plans at the end of the day that does not make me serious or on the same level as all of the athletes that have reached that level you know what I'm saying that is a fact because there's a lot of people who do have resources and still don't hit it and still don't hit it and on top of that like the resources aren't as meaningful because maybe I'm just rich or whatever you know what I mean yeah I was like yeah this doesn't mean as much that's why again I think if we want to classify this the answer is right now paying some type of money because you have to manually and actively make that choice now of course that might be somebody who I don't know how you define serious beyond that point like who we don't think it's serious but to me yeah that's as good as it gets man that's as good as it gets yeah because even in that man like there are um I don't know where I'm looking for high level hobbyists professional hobbyists but there are there are people that hit all of those markers that still will fall in the hobbyist category you know what I'm saying not even just across anything like that just good like that yeah it's like no there was a point where my me and my friend group had a tennis phase you know what I'm saying we all bought rackets you know what I'm saying we all used to used to go to the tennis court said you know what I'm saying like the we hours of the morning and you were on that level yeah yeah I was out there swinging that joint bro you know what I'm saying swinging and hitting too yeah hell yeah whatever I was literally that joint but no one in the back of my brain that I think I was gonna become a professional tennis player I knew that hey like I was just willing to have the most amount of fun with this I could possibly have and I understood more for me to do that I had to invest in certain things to do it you know what I'm saying and so that's what I said like if someone had walked by the park one day and they got the cleats on he got the racket you know what I'm saying they got the full canister of balls yeah you must be trying to go pro right I might not like oh but you look like you are and it's like no but I'm not you know what I'm saying it's the same thing here you know what I'm saying it's the same thing here I would like to know what y'all think artists I came from an analogy I kind of like the analogy I want to see what the artist think I do love the idea of verification for a single platform the problem is I wouldn't want artists to have to pay $7 on Apple Spotify you know what I mean like now that's gonna add up and that becomes an expensive cost it should be a distribution thing it should definitely be a distribution thing yeah I like that maybe you're an distributor somehow decide if you're verified or not I like that yeah I like that but yeah what do y'all think this is yet another clip check out the next video because it's gonna be just as fun to watch peace