 Back to artists leaving Spotify. Let's have a realistic conversation not a and so we can really get into the business model of it all as well Not a one-off if you Corey wanted to hop off of Spotify and then stole direct Decorate could probably do it successfully right Make it happen. Cool. You made more money or maybe you're making a livable wage. That's great But let's talk about the masses All right, we really saw impact like oh man most artists leave Spotify and All DSPs because let's stop like people have this Spotify conversation. You can't just leave Spotify You gotta leave DSP if you really want to fight that fight. Otherwise, it's nothing boy So you're leaving DSPs and you're going direct in that way Do you think that's possible or what do you think it looks like for the for the masses? Not not a one-off artists here or there because there are those that already exist. I Mean, I think it's I think anything is possible. I Imagine there are artists who don't have their music on The streaming platforms who are making a living and it just depends on who their fans are what their strategies are what their community looks like I think exclusivity and physical releases that kind of thing Work really well if you have the community built so when I go on tour with soul for example we're selling vinyl and clothing and that saves us on tour so Spotify our music song Spotify, but I you know I Don't even pay attention to the royalty statements beak from from the Labels or you know, whoever is is giving us those recordings sound recording royalties it's so inconsequential and On the other hand, there are artists whose consumers are almost entirely on the streaming platforms And so it's incredibly important for you to nurture those connections. I Think if you're in a position to do all of the above and benefit from it Great, that's amazing because now you have so many Different royalty streams working for you and that's an amazing thing because then you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, but if more traditional methods of releasing music and Selling your your assets such as vinyl and CDs and tapes and whatever if that's What has worked for you and you just are deciding that you don't want to invest that kind of energy in Spotify than cool or if you want to leave One or more streaming platforms because of moral reasons or because of political reasons. I respect it all I think It's just a matter of figuring stuff out. I think we get wrapped up in the platforms and the methods of sales rather than The viability of sales themselves If we're having a conversation about whether or not you should get off Spotify Let me ask you how many fans you have that are listening to you on Spotify to begin with and what is your fan? Outreach strategy and what does your community look like and most artists You know Unfortunately are putting the cart before the horse in these conversations because they don't even have an album of Spotify yet And they're just psyching themselves out. I find a lot of creatives are like that We put the problems before the actions. It's like you don't even know if these problems exist You're gonna you're gonna life the second you decide to wake up in the morning You're gonna be faced with challenges But in the music community We're dreaming about our problems before we even open our eyes, you know what I mean? So it's just it's silly to me because you'll have a whole hour-long debate with someone about the merits of Relief of taking your music off of the streaming platforms and then you realize They have one song out from five years ago with with three Listens and you're like, why are we having this conversation? This isn't relevant to you You have to figure out how to get your music to people first And whatever method you find works for you. Cool. I I would personally I'm not telling people what to do I would personally encourage you to explore more than one option Especially if one option is working, but even if it's not like my thing is where where there are people Who listen to music get your music there and then decide but give it a real effort Some people be like, you know, I put my beats on beat stars. I put 10 beats on beat stars in a year later I wasn't rich so I got off I Put an album on Spotify and nothing happened. It's like that's not okay You're hopeless, but for the people who really are putting forth an effort. They're gonna have more experiential anecdotal and quantitative data So they can make better decisions But you got to do it and you have to do it at a high level for a long time in order to even have The insight to figure out what's working. What's not what needs to be changed how it needs to be changed, etc Yeah, I think you touch on the important part of it is I don't think artists are looking at these platforms as just a marketing a marketing tool Because the money is typically where it starts first Right, so in your example if I'm the artist looking at like man, I could Hypothetically go build a million fans on Spotify But then if I do I'm not I might not be getting paid fairly because of what I've been saying But we're looking from the side like yeah, but it still helped you get a million people in saying that if you're moving Smartly, you should be able to do other things with those people. You know saying assuming um, you know You just become better educated about a point or the right people get around you But I really think that's what most of the issues stem is like hey You're thinking about the money from the platform before about the reset of the platform gonna for you Yeah, because it doesn't matter what you do if you're not taking full advantage of these moments Then you're just wasting your time if you play a show for a thousand people and you get off stage and leave the venue Without taking photos with people without sitting at a merch table and trying to sell physical product without having an email list That people can sign up for what did you just do? You just wasted all of those precious Potential fans that that was an amazing opportunity same with Spotify if you have You know if you if you suddenly get a thousand monthly listeners What can you do and I don't have a quick answer because it's it's different for everybody but what can you do to Convert those listeners into actual community members. How can you reach out? How can you figure out who they are where they are how to talk to them more directly and I think that's another problem, but like I Don't want to overwhelm people who are watching this and think wow I got to just be this data analyst who's constantly doing 12 things at once You just have to plan and when you mess up, which you will you just have to have the the self-awareness to Recognize that you messed up and then the the drive To correct that so the next time you don't You know a big thing that I don't think people focus on enough is I've never seen an artist not be able to sell fan direct Because they're on Spotify Like yeah, Spotify doesn't mean you're gonna make less or more and taking your music off of Spotify Doesn't mean you're gonna make less or more It's a completely different experience than direct and to have like all of your music as leverage I just haven't seen it play out as well as people kind of imagine Maybe it's like a short-term market marketing tactic for us a second But long-term it never really plays out that well like for instance always say As an example, I remember what Prince was going so hard keeping his intellectual property off line And I was having conversations with my dad and I was trying to like get more references Prince And I'm like man if this stays on for too long You just gonna miss the boat in terms of the future generations You'll have this great artist that you know, there'll be a chasm Maybe somebody eventually finds it and brings it back But there's just a generation that can't acknowledge it because they can't consume it. It just is what it is, right? Obviously, you know That that moment passed he allowed things to be out there But that's three a small artists can't afford that right? It's like you're trying to build in a silo and that just doesn't really make much sense to me Yeah, I was gonna say Prince can kind of do whatever he wants It's not gonna affect his his life or his legacy in any real way, but Again, you know, if it's a symbolic gesture, I respect that too. I'm not here to tell people what to do with their music I think If you want to stand on your Protest of Spotify stand on it great because you know, they pissed me off, too That's cool. Like if we want to get into the like symbolism and things like that But I think a lot but when we talk about like straight business, right a lot which most artists are really speaking from now A lot of the symbolism if they were making a certain amount of money that symbolism argument wouldn't be there All right, I don't I hadn't heard any artists who's making 5k a month make that that argument or 75k a month I haven't seen those people were making which is kind of sad from from an ethics standpoint, right? but again Businesses is something that we often associate with the erosion of Morals it's a new year and I know you want to go to a new level in your music career and luckily for you That's what we do here help artists grow get more streams grow their fan base do shows get connected with people who can Help them and have direct conversations to help you build out your strategy These are the type of opportunities that we provide for free and no labels necessary Com but the thing is it's not always open to new people, but the beginning of every year We get a little loose. We say alright Let's go ahead and let a flood of new people in and once we hit our new registration cap It gets a lot harder because we got to slow down on letting people in off of the wait list So apply now and no labels necessary calm because the faster you apply the faster you get in Absolutely free back to the video. We have one post that we put on our IG page Where it was addressing this subject. You wouldn't believe how many artists would be like, oh, man That's perfect. Like get rid of them there less competition or like this is Like any we're talking about artists that don't even have a lot of streams themselves, right? So I think there is a worked Idea of how things are supposed to go one way or another and I think artists don't even realize That they're not all on one accord and the reality to me is again just going back to the share business One this is a marketing platform We've always promoted as something where this is not where you should be looking for the majority of your revenue I always said Spotify is losing money and to be looking to Like looking for the best out of a company that's losing money Why they're losing money how it's ran is a whole another thing, but they're losing money They're looking at it's podcasting right to try to make money. That's not really going how they want to want it to go so if you're like trying to optimize and The margin on a sinking ship it doesn't really like work that well because beyond Spotify Let's look at streaming models everybody who's doing the streaming model is like this sucks Like all companies and then you're within that funnel also complaining There's like nobody's like killing it in streaming the way they want to you could say yes These people are billionaires and these people are but even from their perspective They're like, oh man, we have to figure this shit out Well, the three majors are killing it. I'd say if they're making these aren't our different billions of dollars a day What but I'm saying it's it's it's helpful to keep that in perspective because otherwise There would be absolutely no reason for these Spotify These streaming platforms to exist right because if they're not making money and the artists are all disgruntled Why does it exist? Well the consumers like it, but Yeah, the the businesses are there to make money off of the consumers They're not there to provide enjoyment for free to the consumers while they hemorrhage for sure collateral but so it's someone's making money and that's the reason we have it so I Don't know if it's gonna go anywhere anytime soon Just because it's it's centralized. That's that's how the the music business works the majors centralized Assets and they do so on behalf of all of us even if we have nothing to do with the conversation or We have no Connection directly to those labels so that that's that's problematic, but I think They're you know either we just Are angry about it and do nothing or we're angry about it and we figure a way to to still survive and thrive Well, what's the other way right because you have for instance like with SoundCloud was You know falling down. I don't know was maybe four years ago now and they were going through it Of course, you look at it There's no way they're gonna get rid of SoundCloud somebody's gonna have to buy it because it's too big of a centralized All right resource you have all this data and The reason things I feel like go back to centralization Especially when you talk about music is it's so hard to adjust consumer behavior. So once you have something There at that threshold Well, all right, we got to figure out how to make this work and lean into it as much as possible Until something else happens to happen But you know, it's so hard to force a new thing to happen when it comes to you know, that level of consumption So you can't yeah exactly that's what they tried to do with NFTs and it didn't work Exactly, and it's a lot a lot of money that went that went into that And you know all you got was more education about it and a lot of people who still don't know what the hell NFTs are People don't even realize like I told people like I don't know how long I've been in music whatever now But like it was maybe two years ago now And I remember talking to my dad about something going on Spotify. He was like, what's Spotify? I'm like, oh shit At the restart the whole conversation, you know and that goes back to speak like certain audience is Maybe your monetization is not there if you're trying to make money off of him There's a lot more money like I think you know, he knows he knows YouTube music and all that stuff well not YouTube music but listen to music on YouTube and a lot of these other platforms So there you might be cutting out a way to reach your audience is better for sure But it doesn't come from like I don't you're not gonna make money because you cut Spotify out outside of me The the focus that you might have on something better, but not like from the fans, they don't look at it that way that way They don't care Yeah, I mean it's easy to just upload a song to Spotify and call it a day. It's it's a lot harder and More expensive to create physical merchandise and a campaign around that So I think a lot of people I think this is what's funny to me about the conversation A lot of people will say a lot of artists will say well Just just do physical merch just do these kinds of drops just do limited. It's like that. What do you mean jest? It's all hard. Let's let's not act like Dropping out of Spotify is just this pill that you swallow on the next day. You wake up successful The amount of marketing man that goes into that In addition to the logistics in film you still basically have to do the same Overwhelming low that you already complain about And then you have to add more logistics That same it's it's all my point is it's all hard So if you have people saying well, just simply get off of Spotify or simply just just upload your music to Spotify It's like neither of those options Whether you eliminate one over here add one over here take away The immense amount of work that you're gonna need to build community in Order to create sustainability in your music career