 Now, with that being said, just a little bit deeper, because we had a conversation yesterday with an individual in the industry that has a nice amount of clout in what he does, very, very reputable and respectable. And they were asking us about TikTok, some questions around TikTok, because we dropped this really dope report for y'all who don't know. We did a TikTok global report for 2022, had the industry talking about it, posted in many respectable publications. Y'all should check that out. Maybe we'll drop a link below here. We'll do that. So they were asking us some questions. Now, one thing that he said that a lot of managers were complaining him about was it being hard to make a hit on TikTok. There was this moment of time where they just felt like it was making some hits, but they feel like that moment has passed. I'll let you get started on that. I got hella thoughts on it. Obviously, we had the conversation already, but share some of those thoughts that you shared in the combo. Yeah, man. So I think the conversation started because we were talking about the artist generated content. And so for those who haven't seen the report yet, we have this term that we use called AGC, which AGC stands for artist-generated content. It's our term. You see that anywhere? That's our term, people. Just let it be known. So AGC is basically content that the artist makes and put out on their own platform, similar to UGC, which is user-generated content, which is content that people outside of the artist make, put on their platform. So the conversation was sending around how our report found that most of the most recent TikTok hits, their spark was driven by AGC, the artist-generated content, rather than what was more traditional, was influencer campaigns. And so I think that we're in a really unique position where we might be one of a handful of people in the music industry who have been working TikTok in every version of it, you know what I'm saying? Other than when it was musically. But we came pretty close after they switched to TikTok. That's ads, influencers, content advising, manipulation, and media. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Every single aspect. So it's like when we were listening to the guy speak, I'm thinking, okay, this must be coming from managers who maybe are familiar with 2019, 2020 TikTok. Because I don't know if you remember that TikTok, but that TikTok was pretty easy to get viral. We was getting a viral campaign every other week, you know what I'm saying? That was all off of influencers at first too. Yeah, exactly. Just money being spent, taking advantage of the platform, how cheap the attention was, and then just blasting it out a lot. The platform was much more simpler back then. You could get a fucking 10 million string song off a good dance trend, right? You fast forward to 2022. The platform is more mature, you know what I'm saying? Like the creators are talking about a more diverse group of things. The community as a whole is pretty sick of dancing. Every time we hear the influencer about a dance trend, they're like, bro, please, please leave me alone about it. So I think it's a lot of these managers and people in the industry who are coming into 2022 TikTok with 2019 aspirations, you know what I'm saying? Oh, I'm just going to be able to pay 50 influencers and it's going to spark everything off. Or I'm just going to be able to get my artist to do a cool little dance trend or something. It's going to spark stuff off. And it's like, no, the platform is much smarter now. I think fans are able to pick up pretty quickly on when they're being marketed to. You can kind of feel the signs out, you know what I'm saying? Like we did with the E-Triple Impulse, bro. It's like, you know enough, you can start, but this feels like some other shit that was being marketed to me, you know what I'm saying? That one time. So it's like the fans are smarter, the platform is matured, and the strategies that work then don't work now. Right. Right. Like 90s and 90s are not going to work. And so I can understand why they would say it is much harder to break an artist on TikTok in that regard, you know what I'm saying? But that's what comes with every platform. There's no platform that gets easier as it builds, you know what I'm saying? Like, bro, one of my biggest regrets is not doing YouTube in 2004, bro. I wish I had, bro, what? You know what I'm saying? Being early to YouTube and just staying with it. We're crazy. Man. I know there's people that got big. I saw them be big, but they kind of like felt like it was the ceiling at the time. They didn't realize that it was still place to grow and go. So yeah, another platform thing is definitely huge. One thing I feel like, all right, managers got to realize, and not just managers, but they mentioned managers have been asking me this, like people got to realize when you get something popping on TikTok, it's still no other place that you can get something popping from zero to millions of streams so quickly, so cheaply on a consistent basis. Right? We've seen this happen time and time again. We've done it as an agency time and time again. The difference is, right? When TikTok was super new, super novel, you might have seen some stuff pop and go like to hundreds of millions and billions of streams more often. Maybe that was happening more often. I'm not even fully of that idea. What I think is there's also way more artists in the game. So it's just a more legitimate percentage that's reflected. But if you get to millions of streams for basically nothing because the price of TikTok is not the price of these other platforms in most cases, it's just up to you to keep the thing popping. Like, all right, your shit got to 10 million streams. Nobody's going to like feel sorry for you because you got 10 million streams and it stopped there. Now you got enough attention to flip to Instagram. Right? Now you got enough attention to flip to radio. If you have, you know, those relationships begin breaking the artists. We had the convo about Ice Spice. Right? Remember breaking marketing a song is not breaking a song. Breaking a song is not breaking an artist. Right? So there's more leg to that race. I always say if Lil Nas X never made the connection with the labels, right, to do the rest of, you know, the marketing and provide the rest of the resources to continue Old Town Road and take it to his max, he could have just been another internet hit artist. Right? Had a nice little viral moment kept pushing. He was getting close. Right? Those windows are small. And, you know, I don't know the back end details of it, like whether it's him smartly understanding the importance of his relevance of it to his team, however, all right, because that's, you know, that was ran so beautifully. But it literally was the difference between being, I think at that time it was like the most streamed song of all time. It broke some kind of record. It broke a lot of records, literally of all time record breaking type stuff to literally just another hit on a rate on the radio on TikTok and in the rest of internet. That was the difference, right? So you have to realize you have that window when your stuff pops off and you need to move quick and always especially new artists, right? New artists fail to value the moment, right? Because they don't know that this moment is fleeting. You worked your ass off and finally after two years of like grinding it out, I got a song that's just taken it off. I'm not even doing anything. I go to sleep. I wake up my phones moving faster. I eat some lunch. I wake up. I got some more followers. I got some more streams. I got some more views. And then they finally take a take a step back. Like, man, some of them, honestly, right, which is something y'all got to work on like that mental work. I know I've talked to many artists, they'll be like, man, I'm almost scared of it. Like so much activity. I just get off of TikTok. I just get off of Instagram. I don't do anything because like you get paralyzed. So that's a whole nother conversation that needs to be had, but this moment will not last. You got to capitalize. You can't have no paralysis analysis. You can't just not do anything. Get afraid of negative comments. You can't just, you know, rest on your laurels thinking it's going to apply to the next song, but that's what everybody does. And it sounds like some managers, they don't quite understand like TikTok is what it is. It's up to you to take it to that next level. Like you never stop working a hit to that moment. It's gone gone. All right. It's gone gone. So, so I don't know, man. It's so many things about it. Like with, with, it bothers me every time somebody attacks a platform, I guess, right? It's just like, come on, bro. Like the platform, it's, you know, it's, it's a gun, right? Depends on who has the gun in their hand. You know what I mean? Gun ain't good, gun ain't evil. You know what I mean? And shoot, I could, I could shoot you. Some person don't think I'm good. Some person don't think I'm evil. You know what I mean? So it's like, all of that is relative. It's just like, go and get whatever you want to. So, like, I think it was some, another interesting thing buddy brought up in that conversation was TikTok over time, right? He was asking if, if we thought artist-generated content has become more effective over time has influencers become campaigns become less effective because we had a stat that basically like two-thirds of content like hits that got sparked off or from organic content, artist-generated content, right? And you know, my whole analysis was, look, influencer campaigns are great. If you look, if you look at the, the data, right? It was artist-generated content. We had user-generated content second and influencer campaigns and ads were last. And when you just think about it, all three, those top artists influencer and user are all content, period. And it makes sense. It makes sense. Content works. The only difference between your shit, your artist-generated content and influencer content is you get unlimited at bats because you got control of this, right? You can keep posting and posting and posting. Influencers, you run out of budget, you have no more influencer campaigns. So it makes sense when you got more chances and you're not spending money for most of the things to pop off, be that, right? Because then you have managers and astute marketers like us that are like, yo, let's try to actually make it pop off of artist-generated content first and before we pay for it influencers. And then, you know, the user-generated content ain't bread just is what it is. You know what I mean? Like whatever guy does, guy does, you know, that's the luck. I don't even want to say look at a draw. That's just, you know, look, if it happens, it happens. So like the stats make a lot of sense and influencer and user-generated content have not become less impactful. It's just people becoming a lot smarter and understanding the impact of artist-generated content. So if you ain't creating TikTok content, I know you heard this before, but yo, it's a L. Yeah, I like it, bro. And I think, too, like people understand how to more effectively market that music on TikTok. Because if you, I mean, I think even like, you know, us in 2019, someone's been like, yo, how do I promote this song? And we're probably like, you know, we don't completely understand it yet. But now there are so many examples of artists who've used the platform correctly, both in the past and even currently, that I don't know, it just, it makes sense. Like even looking at the line where like artist-generated content is the first thing makes sense. People like to see and hear things from the artist first, right? We like to feel like we're getting that personal connection with them. User-generated content, these are the fans of the artists that he got from making the posts, right? Influencers is like, okay, now he got some budget. He found the bag somewhere. As, it's like, you don't feel like doing nothing at work anymore. You just want a little traffic push in the background while you go do some other shit. Right. And so I don't know. It's like, I guess it makes sense to me because we see that line happen so many times. Like we see it go from artists to fan, to then we gots with influencers and it gots with ads and then just rinse repeat the whole process that it felt like a little bit of like a dub moment. I mean, even though I think the point I made to him was that they're not less effective, it just makes sense to do them at a different point in the artist campaign. Exactly. Where like 2019, 2020, we were going influencers first, right? So, oh, shit, you got the bag. Let's just pay as many influencers as possible. Let's gas it. Let's find a trend. Yep. Probably was around late 2020 when we started noticing like, man, this trend shit is kind of dying off. We ain't had a viral trend in months, you know what I'm saying? Also, I remember it was just way more expensive to Yeah, yeah, yeah, more more influencers started learning their worth. Becoming more high vibrational creatures, you know what I'm saying? Picking up the information prior from people like I think about it all the time for like, damn, we probably shot ourselves in the foot, but you know, but they got the information for wherever they got it from. Know your value. Know your value. I mean, and it was actually, I think when we started to see it was Well, I don't know. Maybe when you saw it, but I know when it clicked for me was the the Nick D campaign was when it first kind of hit for me. Which part? The ours generated content stuff because we had like 24k golden. He was No, bro. How did it not click to Nick D, bro? Because Nick D's find out what was the first one where I could see it from ground zero because when he came to us, it wasn't going. It wasn't like going crazy. Was it? But fast was a year before that. Oh, you're right. That's true. I forgot about fast. My bad fast. A year before that, right? And he had zero. He only had content. So I to me it was cleared in. It was just I think it was TikTok was still so early and influencers and trends were still working. Well, actually, that's why people still want it. So it was no point of really trying to push them to that. That's kind of where my energy was. Yeah. That's what I said. I'll take it back. I do know why Nick D was the first one. So because it was the first campaign we had where we try all of them at the same time and we could really clearly see like what was driving, what was driving, what, right? Got you. Like we saw the portion that was influenced the focus. I think we had just got access to ads at the time. Like he might have been the first. No, Taj was the first ad client. He had to be like the second ad client we ever had for TikTok. Right. So we're learning there and then his shit is the one going inside. Damn. His shit is going crazy by itself. But when we add these other elements to it, spark and really went crazy. So it's like we could keep trying to flip the chart and go influencers as and then convince the artist to make content. But it's like when that shit is inverted and they can figure the contents of our first, like the rest of that shit is easy. You know what I'm saying? Well, I won't say easy, but it's much easier than when nothing is happening. So that's why I said that was when it clicked for me because I could I could look at all three parts of it working together and be like, oh no, this is clearly the thing that's driving the majority of the people with the content. And so like, but I know that was the point when I mean, I always tell like other people about this, but you know, we had that point that same year where we just like looked at all of our most successful campaigns. It was like, damn, like what's the same thing we got? We got these 10 hours this year that popped off to varying degrees. What, what do they all have in common? And the one thing that they all had in common was they all were pretty good to really good content creators. Yep. Some of them were decent, which we argue like we don't need you to be amazing. We just need you to at least be decent, at least be okay, bro. Like, but most of the really good ones were like really good to amazing content creators to the point to where when they had that shit, it almost felt like it was too easy. You know, it's like, damn, we just got sales man hasn't his own info. He did most of the work, bro. He made this shit entertaining him and all that stuff. So I don't know, man. I feel like the point we keep making the artist is a bro, if you got the money, do all of it. Right. Like still do all of it. If you don't have the money, you definitely should be going to come. This is why that's important though, because it goes back to newer artists, not quite understanding the how high something can go. Right. You have that moment again. Oh, I've never had three million streams in 30 days or 60 days before. So I'm like, yo, I don't need anything else. Right. Because I popped all off of organic or maybe it popped off of influencers, not respecting and understanding where the other aspects lie. Right. So it's like, yeah, ads might not be as impactful for creating the spark like artists just generated content, but it doesn't mean ads can't add value to this campaign. Yeah, it doesn't mean IGPR can't add value to this. It doesn't mean that influencers can't add value to it. It's just used strategically in a different way. Yeah. But so many artists is funny because, you know, we've had so many different clients that will move in different ways and they found success in different ways and they'll only swear by that way. Yeah. Next thing you know, nothing else works. Oh man, you know, all I need to do is post content ads don't work. Do you have the artist that popped off with ads and that's all he sees. Right. And then you got the artist that had an influencer campaign or artists that never spend money at all a day in their life because they're meant, but you got a manager that's a hustler and they flip some things they're creative and everybody just falls into their dogmatic mentality and tries to preach and nothing else works while we're kind of in the center and like seeing, you know, all these things work. Yeah. It's just when you do them, who you do them for, what song, like it's it's an entire machine. So, like to Jacory's point, man, like if something gets popping, like one, it doesn't mean anything else doesn't work, but two, like your song can go farther if you do more. It's the same reason why people will work a song. They'll say radio isn't really responsible for creating hits these days. Yeah. Yet when songs get really popping on the internet, what do they do? They take it to the radio. Yeah. Right. Because radio still does have value. You just need to know when to apply the value. Yeah. Like that's that's my point with that. Yeah. All of it really. Yeah. We talk about the whole marketing mix mix. Yeah. Ecosystem. This doesn't make sense to do now. This makes sense to do at these points. And it's like the idea in the ideal world, everybody would do all of it. You know, I think in the more realistic world, you kind of find the combination of things that work for you. And then you get that so tight knit that you feel comfortable enough to experiment. Right. Like, okay, even this fucks up. I at least got this thing, this system over here working for me. Right. I just feel like, yeah, like too many people write it off as just like, I don't know. I guess writing off is like, I think it's the word aspect of it. I always go about that, bro. It's like, if I tell you to go make a post, that's just you got to do. If you tell me you want to run some ass, that's it. We got to do it. And I really do feel like that's what it boils on. Because there's no way everybody's seeing the same people on TikTok pop off, seeing it the same way. Now we got the report out so we can definitely blame the way you ain't you ain't know this shit now. But there's no way that we all for the last like year and a half, two years of the industry have been looking at this shit happen. And nobody else is coming to the same conclusion that we're coming to. I refuse to believe that we might be the first ones to put it put numbers on it. Right. But there's no way we were the first ones to start thinking about it. So I have to boil it down to everybody's like, damn, that's how this shit works. I don't really want to do that shit. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm gonna go do this other thing. I hope that works out. And it's like that is at best stupid at worst, really fucking stupid. Hey, bro, that's a fact. You already know I'm on your side with that one.