 Whether you want to sign to a label or stay independent, you're going to need some money at some point. Even the people who have a lot of money end up getting money from other people. So the question is not if you're going to need money as an artist. The question is how do you get money from other people? But make sure that you're not ruining your career. It's a good deal. You're not throwing away everything. So you need a tool to analyze a good deal for you. That is what I call the Moe strategy, M-O-E, Moe. These are the three things that you need to think about to consider whether the deal is good or not and fair or not. So what is Moe stand for? Moe stands for money. Of course it stands for money. O stands for ownership and E stands for effort. These are the three things you need to think about and look at. Where's the money coming from? Where's the ownership and where's the effort? Who's giving what efforts? And the effort is the part that many people don't really take into account and don't understand how it creates the domino effect for the O and the E. So let's talk through it. What do you think about it? Now if you have a team that helps, if you have a certain connections that helps, all these things takes effort off the table for the person that might be doing the investment. But the more effort that you need from this person who's providing an investment, the more ownership they're going to want. You see that domino effect? Because if I have to get myself off my behind to go to work for this thing day to day or use some of my resources to do that same thing then I want more ownership of this. That's why when you go to certain labels you'll see a lot more of this but then distributors who traditionally aren't going to do a lot of that stuff and that's not in their business model to do a lot of things like that then they're going to allow you to have more ownership. But you better believe if people don't ask for any ownership you better have the ability to put in the efforts to get the results. So there's investors that will literally give you money and say, go ahead just give me a return on my investment and then there's investors who have connections for you or have a marketing team for you or will help build your marketing team or they might join your team. All these different things the amount of ownership that they desire will be determined by the amount of effort that they feel like they're going to have to put in to get the desired return on the investment that they want which brings back the money. How much effort do I need to put in to get the amount of money that I want back? Well it depends on how much money I'm putting in. The more money I put in likely you're going to have to depend on some of my effort and resources if we're talking about a really really high output. So what's going to happen? I'm going to end up needing some ownership anyway because if I give you $10 million we're not talking about a regular indie artist the goal is to make you a household national name or you're already a national name artist and we're trying to just leverage those resources and blow you up to a whole other level get ROI through touring and all these other types of things that exist. We're trying to figure out how to get this money back period. I'm going to need more ownership period because the more ownership I have the bigger percentage I get for every dollar that comes in which means it's easier to get to that $10 million mark and then make money past that because I'm not investing to make my money back I'm investing to make money on the money that I put in. So again who is putting in what effort and there's so many parts and slices of efforts and you can find all different types of deals but it's really all dictated on what the effort is or the perceived effort. Perceived effort is a very real thing. Even if we're talking about an investor who knows they're not going to have to put in any work they want to look at the amount of work they believe that you need to do to give them the return because if I see an artist who has zero fans and I see an artist that has 15,000 fans I'm more likely to invest in that other one because he probably has to do less work to bring me the result that I want especially if I don't have the resources and effort to offer him to actually help him out. So effort, effort, effort is the biggest, most important factor in not only determining a lot of times what people are going to request but also how you want to analyze fairness because if someone's not doing a certain amount of work then you need to look at the amount of money and ownership that they're requesting. If they're requesting a whole bunch of ownership of your masters and all those things and you're like bro y'all aren't doing any work all y'all are doing is giving us a little bit of money I can probably find a better doing this. Alright guys let's take a quick break because I gotta 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 and two of the data dashboards chart registration and helpful guys 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 ditto m dot 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. And this is why you hear people say stuff like record labels aren't anything but a bank and it's not fair for them to have so much ownership when all they're doing is giving us money and they're not putting in effort. Those cases exist and no if you're just giving me money but you're not putting any effort towards this that should be a loan not ownership. This is why I keep saying everything is dictated by the E. The M and the O are dictated by the E. At least when we're talking about fairness so make sure you analyze each of those three areas and spend the most amount of time on the amount of effort that's being put in from who and let that determine how much you truly value the M and the O that they're going to put in. Alright now at the top or somewhere on the side I'm going to put two other videos that help you think through this scenario how you make deals and how you can actually strategize your entire career and get a lot of money hundreds of thousands even over a million millions of dollars worth of investment without having to give up ownership. The game is different today so check out these two videos below beside whatever they end up. Peace.