 What's up everybody once again is Brandon man Sean and we got to talk about something quite interesting that's the topic of diversity and it's inspired by the last video that I did on diversity that was titled your diversity might be killing your career. Now if you're interested in diversity or you have questions about it or you work with artists that are thinking about diversity then I suggest you watch this entire video all the way through because we're going to be touching on it from multiple different levels and layers but then if you're not really you know worried about diversity too much then this video is probably not for you and this video is gonna be done pretty different by the way because I'm gonna be reading a lot of the questions or opinions off of that video and then just responding based on what I read. But first and foremost before happening that you have to ask yourself do you want to be perceived as a diverse artist or do you just want to be an artist that makes whatever type of music that you want to because being perceived as diverse and actually being diverse are not necessarily the same things and they require different actions in terms of how you go out into the marketplace. There's a lot of artists that people don't necessarily think of as diverse but if you look at their career they've been pretty diverse and there's some artists that probably aren't as diverse as people make them out to be but they branded around that in some ways or something happened throughout their career that kind of forced people to think that they were super diverse. Now for comment number one only Jay said do a video on what makes a successful and diverse artist for those who want to do that with their brand because it can be pulled off. Yes sir it can be pulled off and your wishes are answered because that's why we're doing this video right here. Sawyer Royals I think I said that right said when would you say diversity is good is it once you have built a core fan base because I would consider someone like Kendrick Lamar diverse comparing songs like love and DNA. I think you said it perfectly man once you establish a core fan base it allows you to go in multiple different directions and that was one of the biggest points that a lot of people missed who were kind of going against that last video. It was talking about working from ground zero when you are just starting off because if you think about Kendrick Lamar Sawyer Royals check out the fact that his mix tapes were all along what you would just consider one fan base right it was pretty clear he might have evolved and became a better artist but at the same time it was pretty consistent in a certain space. The same even goes for outcast if you think about them so one of those things about hitting a core fan base first it's really about hey I'm going to serve an audience and make them fall in love with me and then I can take them somewhere but you can't just come up to me in the street and tell me to go with you you have to build some trust with me. It's like going out on a couple of dates with somebody and just expecting them to love all of you after a couple of dates. No man I'm just now getting to know you. Wait till we have more of established relationship before you start showing me some other sides of you or at least expecting me to accept or love them. And a couple of people Lil AK-47 and Super E both alluded to having two-sided brands right if you could think about Beyonce and Sasha Fierce or TI versus TIP of there's some been some other people who have done it even more extreme and really played off of it but just the whole Jekyll and Hyde scenario that is something that you can definitely do and establish that there are two sides to view and if you do that you do that through a specific project or a concept where you can really introduce that to people that's one of the best ways to do the I'm two-sided because now you're preparing the audience to understand when you're doing certain types of music or you're working in certain types of spaces whether that's aesthetically or musically because you already painted the concept of it being there but at the end of the day a lot of these people who have these two-sided brands are still mostly looked at on one side people might acknowledge that there's this other side and accept some of that music but overall the brand has this one side that forms most of the opinion at least on a commercial level and also understand you don't have to start off right away trying to get people to know that there's both sides you can introduce the concept of having two sides of your brand after you establish an audience where I really really stress its patience because remember we're talking about working from ground zero especially I stress patience and realizing once you develop a chord fanbase you can take them multiple directions once you have that trust Kanye West because I saw people mention Kanye West as well Kanye did the whole college dropout series right college dropout to late graduation before he did 808 in heartbreaks so yes it's super diverse when you compare those two and compare his entire catalog but his first three albums or really evolutions of each other 808s was to the left in comparison to those with people he really had people's attention and he was a pop star in a sense at that point and even when you think about my beautiful dark twisted fantasy that was really a combination a culmination of all these sounds and things he introduced so he was prepping people for everything he brought together on that project because they have been listening through the years and then of course he did add some new things on top of that but that's patience we're talking about an entire career not just dropping a few songs think about it this way why does a nail have a pointed end right the end of a nail is pointed because the more concentrated something is the easier it is to penetrate if that wasn't a true principle then a nail would have a flat edge but it doesn't because it's easier to penetrate when you enter through a smaller concentrated point that's what this whole concept when it comes to branding and developing a core fan base you have to look at the marketplace as yes there's all these different types of fans and different types of music but at the same time where am i going to enter and that's the perfect segue for artists like triplex but someone asked me about triplex in one of the comments so i'm gonna wait till i get there next i'm gonna read this comment i could say bob is an example of this although he truly is an amazing musician far more versatile and talented than triplex in my opinion all right so i'm not sure exactly what you were trying to say there but i will say that bob is definitely far more diverse in general than a lot of artists who say they are diverse that is for sure and i'm just gonna give a little backstory so i grew up not too far from bob like a few streets over we rolled the same bus like when i was in what maybe like sixth grade the first song i ever heard from bob was when he got on the bus he was handing out cds and it was a cd with one song on it that song was cloud nine and i watched him go from this dude just mimicking and rapping his freestyles looking out the bus window to who we know bob is today and when we want to look at diversity on his level like super diversity as far as the type of songs you're putting out this is when we can truly understand why so many people are preaching against diversity then we can get to more so accepted diversity like i said the first song i heard from bob was cloud nine because he gave me the cd but it wasn't his first song he already had songs that i knew he was a rapper but i just hadn't heard of my death point just putting your music out on the internet and get everybody to hear it wasn't a thing thing yet at that time if you could believe it but i remember when he first started to get on local radio and all this stuff i remember when he dropped out of high school so he would stop riding the bus and the big thing is if you look at that era of his career just the beginning most of his music could be put in a category of similar to what you might see um an early Kendrick Lamar his first few mixtapes with a little bit more smoker music as well so it was like smoke music and some things a little bit lyrical but then overall a lot of music that also spoke to the hood it was a hood feel it was like a hood slash andrew d thousand slash smoker that was the vibe that was kind of a niche he was moving into and at the same time early on bob was performing in clubs with the guitar where crowds did not necessarily understand why is this dude like performing with a guitar in his club like it wasn't the environment where you would ever even see a guitar that was probably some people's first time ever seen an acoustic guitar in person that's the type of club that he was performing in so it wasn't perfectly accepted but just take this snapshot this is this era of his career when bob blows up what does he blow up with beautiful girls airplanes that entire project completely different than what he was doing before that it's not that he never had the ability or it's not that he wasn't even ever recording some of that stuff that part i don't know but as far as what he was putting out into the marketplace and the fan base was building around it was more so reflective of where he was indicated georgia and that's how his audience was being built but he blows up with airplanes beautiful girls all that stuff and the thing is this is when you start to see the impact of being very diverse because that music sounded nothing like the music he blew up with but that was a lot of people's first time hearing that so then after that project bob has these other songs coming out with completely different sounds and when i say completely different sounds i'm saying completely different sounds to the people who heard beautiful girls but these songs were kind of hood songs or more decayed georgia type songs again but those people who discovered him through beautiful girls airplanes i'll be in the sky and all that stuff they were like oh man bob's a sellout i hate he's just talking about the regular money cash and women that so many other people are talking about but in some ways he started in that space as well it's not even like he was selling out he was just doing something reflective of one side of him and a genuine side of him because it was where he came from a lot of the music like that exists where he came from but then on the other side the people who know him for the more smoker and conscious or maybe hood type music they looked at things like airplanes and beautiful girls as sellout music so he had this extremely diverse audience a for real for real diverse audience and this before singing and rapping at the same time became a super fluid thing that everybody was doing and as a matter of fact he wasn't really sing rapping he was really legitimately singing or legitimately rapping and this wasn't like i'm doing this trap soul r&b thing or i'm rapping but i'm singing my hook and when he was over here singing it was like legitimately some stuff that a lot of people over here wouldn't legitimately not like of course there's people who overlap and have wider diverse ears but generally speaking his fan base literally there was these two sides i remember going through his comments in real time because i was a huge fan and of course i just was super proud knowing where he came from and seeing him rise and going through these comments you literally saw people on both sides calling him a sellout people who knew him for the more lyrical hood or weed music and people who knew him from just the poppy stuff because each audience heard certain things first those are the type of problems that come when you do certain things really fast and when you just happen to have for real extreme diversity most artists are not as diverse as that not that they can't do it but i'm just talking about the type of music that they're putting out isn't necessarily that diverse there's a difference between a fan listening to music and saying that was kind of not for me and a fan being able to say yo this dude is selling out he's not even the same guy he was before not to mention b.o people put out the no genre mixtape and i love that mixtape when it came out and he was aggressively trying to like push the people that yo i can be as diverse as i want to i don't have a genre you can't put me in a box but oftentimes for whatever reason when you're trying to aggressively chase these opinions improve people wrong by just putting out more music for whatever reason it doesn't seem to work i haven't i've seen it quite a few times and it just seems for it to be hard to be successful that route i'm not making any deeper commentary on b.o b or anything like that at the time but it's just an outer observation maybe i'll do a deeper b.o b video later but the next question that i want to read that i'll think it'll take us to in a completely different direction is post malone came into the game diverse there was also somebody else that said prince was diverse in the very beginning and i also somebody talked about drake being diverse in the very beginning all right let's go ahead and kill some of that noise post malone he came in the game a lot he stayed in the game a lot he used hip-hop likeness right a hip-hop image but he never was completely a hip-hop artist and they quickly took him pop and i'm not saying this in a negative fashion i'm just saying this is what it was and he had a situation a very real situation this wasn't some indie artist on the rise remember i'm talking about people starting from ground zero and one of the primary things i continue to say you don't want to try to spread too thin when you have limited resources we'll get to that because someone has a question about that in the comments but let's talk about prince prince was not immediately diverse when he came into the game and i'm not talking about skill set once again it doesn't mean you can't create diverse songs it doesn't even mean that you aren't creating diverse songs it's about the music that you're putting out and how you're advertising it if you look at his very first album there was a very consistent sound and they just pushed that album they weren't pushing multiple sounds at once even if you drop music that has other sounds you're pushing one sound as far as your resources so any artist that continues to think that i'm saying do not be diverse or you cannot be successful as a diverse artist you're completely taking things off base because that's the opposite of what i'm saying oh and drake drake once again a completely different situation the guy has more resources than the general artist i'm talking about when he came into the game what was he signed to young money he was signed to little wang that's a completely different level of resources and even when you look at the projects he first dropped there was still a pretty consistent sound it wasn't until he was really on on that he really started dropping all these different sounds that were super diverse so don't compare yourself to pop stars and what people are doing while they're already up there we already discussed that after you have a core fan base it allows you to experiment and go further in different directions but drake drake dropped his first project so far gone in 2009 and he was also featured on jz's blueprint three in 2009 jz used his vocals he was in a completely different space than you likely are right now all right kyle brie said what's up sean in european how far can an artist go in terms of the different styles of music before they are using their resources wisely now once again i'm going to go back to the nail analogy why is the nail pointed at the end because when something is pointed right there's a smaller concentrated point of entry then it takes less effort right less resources whatever that energy looks like human capital money capital like whatever resources looks like it takes less of it for it to penetrate so if you think about your career that way once you penetrate it then you can think about okay what is what does it look like if i became more diverse where do i want to go from here now that i'm in the wall a little bit and not just kind of in the wall but i'm steady in there kyle brie's also mentioned kindrick lamar is to mipba butterfly but think about how far along kindrick lamar was before to mipba butterfly dropped remember all the mix tapes his first album he was solidified in there to a certain point and i would argue that to pippa butterfly was what actually fully positioned him and settled him in to a stronger fan base but that's an entirely different conversation still it goes right back to that same building your core fan base analogy before you actually start to take people in some wilder places all right triple x i couldn't find a comment that was asking more specifically about triple x but let's look at it like this because so many people keep citing him as somebody that came in the game diverse but let's look at the reality of it when we think about brand now one he blew up with look at me that was one specific sound one specific song now it's not that he didn't have other songs that were popular and poppin i get it i get it cool but when you think about that that was one of the things that mainly got him attention and then you add the whole gel scenario he had a just a unique circumstance that created other types of energy around him he had a very strong image right with a half and half hair situation and then on top of that with all of that being said his music was not his brand triple x's brand was so much greater than his music itself just like tupac's brand was so much greater than the music itself triple x stood for something triple x represented a certain fan base he spoke to people deeper than this is my music i have from dope songs he spoke to people about mental health and just depression and all of these other situations that he had going on with his brand and because of that that allowed him to penetrate and stand for certain things in a way that your music necessarily can't just like when you think about tupac right so i say all that about x because people don't realize that your brand doesn't have to be just your music right a lot of times people think when the music isn't a primary brand that it means that people don't like your music and they also think it doesn't mean you have a real fan base but people like x music people loved of tupac's music we know the impact of both of their brands though and neither one was completely dependent on the music they had brands that were far bigger and if you can use things like interviews and other things outside of the music you can build your brand in that way because x would not have had the brand he had just off of music he might have had music that people loved but if you don't start with the specific sound or field then you better be starting at a completely different level all right you better be signed or have a lot of connections and resources to be able to push multiple things on people at once let's even look at cardi b cardi b has a you know pretty diverse catalog of music and things like that so far after bodac yellow drop but think about her sound before bodac yellow first of all she was just trying to figure things out but where her audience was already established around her personality so that's still similar to x that's still similar to uh prince and tupac in terms of the personality and brand was so established that it allows you to go different places with the music as well you see that with a lot of pop stars the brand isn't completely just music and culture driven so i want to end this video with a couple of comments that i thought were pretty insightful or helpful for people for y'all to think about that we're still on that video that i you know made this for juice mob said i remember bob dillon talks about how he lost a lot of his core fan base when he tried to switch up his musical content because he felt he had grew they hated the new sound and refused to support it that's why david bui created ziggie stardust persona instead of just david bui with a new sound number one yes david bui had these different personas and he played with them over you know different generations even though they were iconic personas you would think that was like the entire career or a huge part there but they were really only like one project one era and even the bob dillon scenario whether you know his music or not that's something that's very very common that you would hear for from a lot of his early on fans they didn't like where he went with his music i remember steve job saying this i think it was in his autobiography when i read it but he basically talked about how he loved bob dillon but only the early stuff before he became trash and juice mob also said i once heard young scooters say every song going to sound like young scooter that spoke volumes i'll also recall before the breakfast club asked gucci main where his new album was going to sound like and he responded same shit as last album once again it's just going to sound just like gucci man young scooter is going to sound like young scooter and it's not even like gucci main has never had any sense of diversity so icy doesn't really sound like any of his other songs when you think about that's one of his biggest songs but all this leads back to something that i am messiah said in the comments of that video being versatile is true artistry but you need to stick to a message the message of what's true to you they are talking about a sound and message make music that you can simply relate to it's simple and when it comes to sound do what the fuck you want and i think i am messiah got it spot on that's what is really more about than anything it has to have a consistent message something that your audience relates to over time and time even as you evolve that's how you maintain your core fan base which leads me to lastly say is when it comes to diversity a lot of times the biggest trouble artists find is when they're trying to sound like one sound and then sound like another sound and i don't mean this and i keep doing this type of music that's how i feel and it's true to me i'm talking about when they're early on in their career and they don't really understand who they are as an artist yet so when they're doing this sound it just sounds like they're mimicking one artist and then it sounds like they're mimicking another artist even early on Kendrick Lamar had that same feedback he was building some fans with some you know young people who didn't really understand certain where some sounds and things were coming from but a lot of people were like ah he sound too much like Lil Wayne on this song he sounds too much like Jay-Z on this song who is this guy he was dope lyrically he can rap but who is he you don't really hear anybody talk about who Kendrick Lamar sounds like anymore you hear people sounding like Kendrick Lamar it's easy for him to float from different styles because he know who he is as an artist so doing that being diverse becomes a lot easy because you can still speak to the same people from different angles all right and that's probably one of my longest videos of me just sitting here and talking but i was answering questions i hope that was free flowing if you really needed to have some kind of understanding of the different angles of diversity you could probably take small snapshots of that video and figure out how that applies to you because at the end of the day if you're still here to listen to this that's what these videos are for oftentimes people will argue with something in one video thinking that oh i don't need your opinion on this or your opinion sounds cool but it's not true when i'm literally painting the principles of one situation and i literally have a video somewhere else that's painting how the principles work if you go for a completely different situation i have videos talking about why you should drop one single i have videos talking about why you should drop one project and the benefits of both of those being mysterious being high volume only dropping a few tracks i have videos that talk about how you can capitalize on each because every single artist out there has their own way to get in everybody can't do the same thing the idea is for you to be able to understand different angles and then take certain things that work for you so you can apply it to whatever your scenario is and create something unique for yourself and that's it as always if you like this video go hit the like button if you like you might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe