 Today you hear people say, don't sign a record deal. Don't sign a record deal. But where can you get money if you don't sign a record deal? An investor, where are the investors? I don't know, right? Because investors can be in real estate, they can be in tech, they can be any random person who happens to have money. Somebody who got a trust fund. But there are some people who are willing to give away money consistently, consistently to artists to invest in their career without all of the downsides of getting a record deal. Now, who are these people? They're called distributors people, right? Distribution deals are one of the most best funding routes for artists today. I know multiple artists who have millions of dollars worth of distribution deals, right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of distribution deals and you can get these deals without having to give away your masters. We always talk about own your masters, own your masters. You can do this without having to give away your masters but I'm gonna break down exactly what it looks like. Just the simple aspects of it because one thing that you should keep in mind, today in music, you can get whatever deal you want to. You can build your contract with your manager, with your distributor, with your label or whoever, however you want to. There are no rules to this. There are some industry standards that you tend to see but everybody's situation is different and what one person is happy with is completely different with another person it can be happy with. So it's all up to the two people in the room who are negotiating and if y'all walk out happy, who am I or anybody else to say that this is a good deal or a bad deal. Now, distribution deals. Now, what is your cut? Where does the money come from? What are they investing in if they're not taking your masters? Typically in distribution deals, they're getting a royalty split. So they're taking the royalties, the money that the music is making itself, right? When you think about streaming on Spotify, they're taking that money. Now, 50-50 is like a pretty steep cut that I've seen in distribution deals but I've seen people do 85-15. I've seen 80-20 and I say 85-15 like the artist keeping 85, right? Or the artist keeping 80, right? So you can get some very, very good deals and most deals that I see don't give up more than 50%. Now, with that being said, this is just the royalty split. This is what they're investing in. They're trying to get your streams up, your music to be heard. They're not getting any money from your touring or your merch or anything like that. Now, there could be a distributor out there because again, everybody can make any kind of deal they want to that is trying to do things like that and that could be fine. But that's typically what you wanna look at when it comes to the royalty split. Now, the benefits of distributors is they have some label-like services. A lot of distributors have play listing and relationships, right? So you can have more editorial opportunities than you would just being a regular artist submitting to Spotify, using their pitch tool, all right? That's a beautiful thing about using a distributor and that's what you're probably gonna look at. They do have some marketing teams, some of them. Hey, their marketing teams aren't necessarily all that savvy at a lot of them I've seen. And a lot of, to be honest, a big thing I've seen is, it seems like they have a marketing team just so they can pay their own marketing team to market your music versus having to pay somebody else. That's the honest truth that I've seen from a lot of these distributors because they don't truly invest in being cutting edge in understanding how to market their artists for real. It's more about an accounting situation, moving money from one side of the business to another side of the business. So I wouldn't rely too heavily on the marketing team aspect of a lot of these people. And a lot of them honestly even outsource to people like us, right? And they'll work with people like us and you get introduced through. But there are play listing situations. Some of them have sync relationships that you can get. Those are very legitimate in things that you probably aren't going to get by yourself. So those are huge benefits from when it comes to working with distributors. All right, guys, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you about Ditto Music Distribution Platform, which unlike many platforms, allows you to own 100% of your royalties and start releasing music without getting charged for every single song. With Ditto, you'll be able to reach your fans across the world with access to playlist promotion features, intuitive data dashboards, chart registration and helpful guides that will help you get your music heard. All of this without the hassle of a record company. Isn't that beautiful? So if you're ready to start monetizing your music, visit diddom.us slash brand man dash network. I know that was a lot, so we'll put that up on the screen. And not only will you be able to get a 30 day free trial, you can use the gold brand man 50 to get 50% off your first year. And it's barely anything in the first place so you're getting 50% off of cheap. You can't beat that deal. Go ahead, check it out. After you finish this video, of course. Now, another thing, actually let me make sure I don't forget anything. Um, ah, yes. As I said though, the big benefit is you own your masters. You own your masters. Nothing's better than that. So yeah, you're not getting a big multimillion dollar deal in a lot of situations. You're getting less money than you would from a label. However, you're getting to own your masters. So it makes sense as a distributor, if I'm not gonna take ownership of all of this, I'm not gonna pay you as much money, right? But you have this benefit and this long tail of your career that you can continue to make money from over time because you own your masters. And what a lot of artists don't know is royalties diminish over time, right? Royalties do not stay the exact same amount. I could do a whole another video on that, but they get smaller and smaller and smaller over time. But your masters, if you own your masters and there's a completely new situation 20, 30 years from now where someone has, is trying to use your music, you get full ownership of that versus the diminishing royalty rate. But that's another video. Now, another thing that you can do outside of distribution is singles deals. Singles deals is something that I know quite a few people do as well and you can do it at any level. It all depends on how big a song is, right? Typically a singles deal is gonna be something that you have an opportunity to do if the song is already taking off. It's already building momentum. So instead of investing in you, the company's willing to invest in the song. They might wanna lock you up, but there could be willing to just do the song, right? There's a couple of songs that we've gotten to millions of streams, building up a lot of the momentum and a label swooped in, said, hey, I wanna sign you. And then the artist was like, hey, well, I wanna do a singles deal because I don't wanna sign away my entire career. So you still own your masters for the rest of your music, but you don't own necessarily your masters in a singles deal for that one song. That's one thing that is, you have to call it or play that how you feel like best makes sense for you, but it could be great because you have this one song with a full label doing their push behind it while the rest of your music continues to rise as that song gets bigger, right? So that song's marketing for you and you get all of that money, 100% of that money from all the other music. So a singles deal can be very beneficial at the same time. And another thing to keep in mind when it comes to singles deals is you'll find a lot of these that are fruitful in comparison to being a distributor. Distributor, you're gonna more likely do a distribution deal, right? A singles deal is typically gonna be with a label, but you also are talking about the possibility of getting on radio, right? That's the type of thing you wanna be looking at if you wanna do a singles deal. They need to be talking about radio or just some of these really high level things that are gonna be difficult for you to get for yourself. But the beauty of both of these types of deals, a singles deal or a distribution deal is it's a great way to get funding for your career without selling your entire career away to somebody else. And the difference though, it is when it comes to time, is a singles deal, well, they get those masters for those singles and unless you buy the masters back at some point, they pretty much have that into perpetuity. But for a distribution deal, distribution deals, they typically last one year, six months, a lot of times. So I'm seeing plenty of people sign a distribution deal for six months and get a couple of hundred thousand dollars and still own all of their masters, all right? And all of the rest of their music and only doing the distribution deal for the music that applies under that window of time for that distribution deal. So imagine this, I have some music, I'm popping, all right? Someone says, yo, because of your attraction and where you are, I'm willing to do a deal with you and I'm gonna give you $150,000 for your next project, all right? Or for your next three songs or your EP, whatever that might look like. And we don't wanna own your masters, all we want is the royalty splits for the things released in this period of time and after eight months, you will have the option to continue to work with us or not. Or we will have the option, depending on how the deal is set up, right? To decide we wanted to get another project from you or not. That's a beautiful situation, all right? The music that you continue to release outside of that deal is yours. The music that you release before that deal is yours with zero split. The music that you release within that deal is still yours. However, you just have to split some of the profits. It's profit sharing while you have ownership and what you're getting from them for that profit sharing is marketing in spaces and places that you would not have access to otherwise while building a relationship with a future funder who could give you more money down the line. So don't just look at it as, oh, I'm gonna hit this link and I'm gonna do this distributor wrong because if you do that right, you can have a funder for your next project or your next project or walk away and say, hey, I'm gonna drop this project by myself and we'll do X, Y, and Z. But then you keep that relationship and then a year from then, you go ahead and get another $200, $300,000. That's a very possible thing today, right? You build your investors, you're looking for investors, distributors are the investors out there. These companies are the ones that you should be looking at. All you have to do is build yourself up to a point to be attractive for those distributors but that's another video. All right, that's it for this video. I'm gonna put up another video or two somewhere here in the end just so you can continue to get educated in this particular space of getting these deals because today is the better time than any ever when it comes to getting a deal in your favor and making money from your music. That's it.