 Oh, what's up everybody once again is brand man Sean and today once again I have a very special guest for you guys it is Aaron Wolf, yo, what's up man as a matter of fact I was going to big you up but I'm going to let you big yourself up tell them a little bit about what what you do your your artistry and then I'm going to jump in and talk about the stuff that you didn't mention that I wouldn't know cool man yeah so I'm I'm an artist and entrepreneur I live in San Diego California really fascinated by just like well obviously music but I'm fascinated by the digital aspect of everything and how the internet is just the shift in the internet across all industries mainly but within music specifically so I just released my first EP greater than self this past year and I just I pretty much just wanted to I want to use my art to help people which I know it sounds like cliche and you hear that all the time but it's what makes me the happiest and I know that there's other people out there that are dealing with certain things that I maybe had encountered before and so I'm just a big believer of like being a bridge of getting people like certain outcomes and so that's that's kind of like what my whole philosophy is I just want to help people get outcomes that will change their life and help them progress toward what they want so a lot of my art is focused on that so yeah oftentimes if you ask me about me it's usually like I try and put that focus out on like helping other people just because that's where I find the most happiness you know man that's exactly what I want to hear and want people to get a gist of we have matter of fact first I want to start here because what Eric didn't mention is he's one of the founders of the Music Mastery Summit I said that right right and musician Mastery Summit but musician Mastery Summit and he first reached out to me to speak at that summit maybe about eight months ago or whatever and if what's really interesting about it is it's a digital online summit I've never seen anybody do that in the music space however I used to do some things in the sales space of sales I think the sales hacker that conference did that and also Damien Ritter him and funk volume he said they used to do some online summits here and there something probably not as well done as yours because technology just wasn't that great back then but it's a super interesting concept and just to know for a fact that an artist is one of the founders of something like that that right on the back in treatment right because we always talk about differentiating your own path finding what works for you as opposed to following other paths we even talk about how you introduce yourself he says you're an artist and entrepreneur where people might say they're artists and they do entrepreneurial things they're trying to figure it out but you introduce yourself as an artist and entrepreneur so tell everybody a little bit more about your mindset or she'll tell me a little bit more about your mindset what got you into saying I'm going to build a conference out before even necessarily blowing up and having a big name by myself sure yeah man it was it was really a means to in the end for me it was it was to get my music to progress to progress on my own stuff so I just like I said if I can if I can solve a problem for other people it usually means that I can solve a problem for myself so in the music industry in general like it's I've noticed a lack of transparency it's kind of one of those things that and it's not necessarily always the case but if you don't know it's it's on you to learn basically and if you don't learn those things then you'll kind of lose out and people generally speaking will not necessarily let you know certain things that you might want to know and be aware of so initially I just I had seen these types of conferences in other industries and I went to you know I wanted to basically shine a light and give access to people so I went and I went and looked for these I went and looked to find some of these I couldn't find them as far as the music space like any summit like this it was going on so I just thought I'll just create one and then it's really cool too because it allows me to one of the benefits I got out of it was to be able to reach out to people that necessarily wouldn't have like if I was just pushing me to them it's like brand man Sean doesn't have the time today to talk to every single artist who wants to be like hey check out my music so it was more of like I think I think you actually said like a backdoor way to go about of it to go about it and it was more or less just seeing how I can add value because there's a lot of like consumption as an artist like everyone's consuming it's like they're paying for this you got to pay for this you got to pay for this so it less like you're like an engineer or one of these people that are like charging all these artists for these things as an artist you can feel like kind of hung out to dry almost and so I just you know I want to help other people with stuff that I had I had kind of struggled with and then I really wanted to use this as a way to help me also so it was pretty much just inspired by seeing it within other industries and I just noticed that there wasn't one for music yeah I thought it was a good starting point for me yeah man I have to say when I decided to at least look into the music industry information wise more just just seriously the first thing I noticed was in relation to the industries that I'm used to which is like technology and just sales as a craft and things like that information is completely different in terms of how you come about it it's two primary things one a lot in sales and technology people think the product in the in the in the talent the skill is the advantage in music or entertainment in general seems like but especially in music it seems like the information is their only advantage versus skill and I think that might be because artists so subjective anyway they look at the information and in relationships as like the two advantages which is probably what results into a lot of the BS politics and a lot of other dark things that go on but did you pretty much notice a similar thing yeah and like a lot of people not really like like so in business like if you have and I think that at the higher levels when you have a lot of ad revenue and stuff or a lot of ad spend to be able to use I do believe that it can get set up to where I mean it's happening these these bigger labels and stuff like you'll see a big artist bring in another artist and help blow them up yeah I don't know what's happening as often but it's because there's incentive for that other artist to help this upcoming artist so I think exactly what you said and like what's the incentive to give away this information you know so with me it's like in sales just to like rewind back to a previous life basically as I was training people is because I was gonna benefit so there was like a win-win in it there and so that's really what I tried to do with the summit is find a win-win like what's gonna be beneficial to the speakers what's gonna be beneficial to the audience who are feeling frustrated and like I think there's a sense of overwhelm with the information on the internet too it's like there's so many different ways and like if you take the shot I'm gonna approach you just doing all of them at once you can kind of like just run in place and then also you know by like kind of like it just so happened to benefit me as well but yeah I definitely think that information is the only advantage that you can have and I think now it's shifting to where being transparent and being the person who's giving that information is now going to be the advantage so yeah I definitely see that though like the industry the music industry is late on that as far as compared even since I've done the summit I'm starting to see people offering online courses and I'm starting to see I think there was even another summit that happened like right when mine happened there's some dudes who do like a club where they do it so I think that's all shifting and so my goal with my music is if I can make my music successful it's just a matter of time basically with weight marketing and stuff works then I can kind of like reach back I can help other people become successful and it doesn't necessarily have to be within the confines of like a corporation or like a label set or something it's like the more people I help the more it basically lifts me up you know branding at that point right yeah exactly but your brand is that you actually help people without extreme circumstances like I don't need your your life on a contract you know which is why people like Gary Vee are winning so much right yes and that's almost it's a whole shift in how everything is and how everything operates and it's just like it's really an abundance thing you know it's like some of my favorite people that I watch it's like they literally are doing so well that they don't they don't care if you know what they they understand it's not gonna affect them negatively so I think that's gonna be the big advantage is just being open and honest and so that's I love what you like how you'll go through and break down people you know their whole their whole process from how they went from here to here because if you're on the outside looking in it's like how did they do that you know and everyone wants to act like it's so cool in this industry like and they're just like that person so that's why they're blown up when really it's because they have a dope ad strategy just behind them in a big budget or whatever it is you know obviously the music's got to be good but like you said that's objective you know what's that you got that feedback going on you have something else playing over there no let me throw these in here like a phone or something that better keep going talk say something that better yeah all right cool um what was I thinking oh yeah I'm you talking about the fact that I'm artists when I'm also appear cool and just as these things just happen they're like in front of the curtains that's probably another reason I always think back to why a lot of information isn't revealed either because when you can see behind the scenes all right then it's not as pretty when you open up the watch and see the gears that are together everybody can appreciate that art like somebody like me I'm like ooh that's beautiful I love how these things connected but from a general fan standpoint is more like oh man okay that's not just he's not just cool it's because this this happened which is it's an interesting way to look at it right depends on your perspective as an individual yeah and one is as people perceive that it's like it's way it looks way more powerful if all of a sudden like you just throw this thing together everyone's like whoa how'd that happen you know and so I've learned a lot of a lot of artists will like delay their timeline so when they're doing this over here they've actually and they're posting this it was actually from like a month ago and so there is a yeah like there is a lot of it's just the smoke and mirrors of it which like you can look at it negatively or you can realize that it's just like a tool that's being utilized and you know it's just the rules of the game so it's like you got to play within that but I I want to go against that grain I want to show people like dude these people aren't that cool like they they've just figured something out that you can also figure out and nowadays it's like you can literally go and find your fans and like the same people that listen to I don't know some huge trap artists in Atlanta aren't necessarily gonna love my my music or some bluegrass artist music but there are people out there that will love there is someone that relates to everyone you know actually so I want to be transparent and show people like hey it's okay like you don't be frustrated you can do this too I think cool a couple more questions about your conference and then before I move on just while so my mind one was it successful in terms of whatever your aim was yeah man so that's what's cool whenever you're doing an online launch with ads and stuff it's you got to just basically find like the winning ad sets the winning advertisements and targeted audience that you're gonna use but as far as the outcome I learned a ton I was able to apply a lot of it to my release I got tons of people that reached out to me which was my initial goal is just to help other people in a very like money driven society it's very easy to slip into like focusing on you first so this was like the real first project in my life that I've ever done that was just like completely about other people and so and hence like I named my EP greater than self after and so I got a lot of people responding back I've continued to have we've continued to like sell the recordings for anyone who missed it and I've had a lot of people continue to buy it and like even last week I'm having someone reach out like hey man what you talked about with playlisting that stuff blew my mind so it helped people it helped us it was profitable to where we can do it again and now we have all the data to where we can basically just optimize it's like okay so these 80% of our ad sets only brought in this much of their revenue for it let's only put the money in double down into the 20% that worked so it's gonna be processed but what's cool now is as I go into the next time now I have a whole new layer of questions because I just used all the stuff it's like everyone's gonna get to learn kind of like with me and I've only heard parts of it but like Gary V's book rushing it talks about that a little bit I've listened to on audiobook and it's just about like inviting people into your experience because now it's like your music is not like your song is not really a product it's like you're a brand and your music is almost like you're like a business card or something you know to like invite that's what I always say it is yeah yeah to experience the rest of what's going on yeah so yeah I love the fact that you are learning and you you created a vehicle for yourself to learn at scale but it's a win-win situation for you to have conversations with these people and then you're inviting more people and increasing your brand by just allowing them to learn with you like it's yeah well dude and I got I got I didn't even intend on it but I got like fans out of it like genuine people that I've never met in my whole life and once I released my music they were like interested because like it's the whole people don't care about what you know until they know how much you care and like people knew that I cared about them that watch that because I did because I've been in their situation and it's painful to not know a direction no matter what industry you're in and so I got I got fans out of that and they're sharing my music in like states I've never been to and so that was kind of like a little byproduct that I wasn't expecting but that just goes to show like when you do something for the for the good of things then blessings come you know yeah man that's what's up man the last thing on conferences because I have been to a few conferences right and so many of them sell themselves as bringing value through the speakers right I know just how we talked about information is being withheld in the music industry at these conferences a lot of these people are not saying the real stuff that they do right yeah that's that's the part that aches me I was literally at one conference not gonna even mention the conference and one guy was speaking from a major make it a record label but I was on a bus with him was it a bus yeah I was on a bus with a we were headed out to a to a yacht and he was talking about some strategies blah blah blah revealing a little bit more than he was gonna reveal on stage or whatever to everybody else and he even said he's not gonna say like that the stuff that he was telling us on stage or whatever and he would only say that to the little bit he was telling me to me and he was like even if he did the little bit he was gonna say on stage he was like his record label is probably go crazy just a little bit he's gonna say right yeah it kind of makes me weary two conferences in general particularly when you when it's people from those big names right the big name record labels are big name places or people that you see that actually draw people in those are the places that you're probably gonna get the least information in my experience right just because they can't give in they don't they're not incentivized now when it comes to our conference from everybody you got to talk to do you feel like they give a look they've given a lot more than most conferences yeah I mean you know I can't really speak as far as like in the past I haven't been in the music industry forever but I do know that just the difference in the school of thought like like one of our speakers well I mean even your channel dude like on your channel all you're doing is trying to add value so like you were one of our speakers and you know you understand this so I tried to reach out to people that one of the big things for me was having people that had a list because then it would get more exposure and more reach so I think because I reached out to a lot of people like you like Wendy Day who is awesome all these different people that like understand like if you give value like it's plain and simple if you're a business whatever it is and you can get someone from here to here then they're gonna want to know how to get from here to here and eventually you can monetize that as long as they're earning more or getting more value out of it then you know you're earning off of them learning that from you so obviously and the if for me it was different because it was just for my music exposure and for me to solve a personal problem but I do think that a lot of these speakers like all of my speakers were down to do it for free because they were down for the actual mission and I think that when our vision was based off of like helping people only the people that could relate to wanting to solve that mission with me are the ones who said yeah but I can I can see that where people don't you know they'll withhold stuff and tell you that it's one thing when that's just like the very surface of it but I think that's dying dude I really do because there's the internet's crazy like you like we don't have to play by any rules it's completely open and whatever we want to do we can do so I do think that that's kind of like the old it's dying out probably in 10 or 15 years it won't even be you know everyone will that would be the bigger disadvantage if you do that you know I'm saying yeah for sure there enough man and you dropped your album or EP house loan after the conference man it was I can't believe I don't know it's out my head it was like a month or two after I think okay so yeah and it was pretty cool I the thing with all these systems that like getting on playlist and all that stuff is you kind of have to stay on top of them so initially we got on a bunch of big play I got a bunch of big playlists and it kind of spiked my my Spotify numbers and all that stuff but it was just a couple months after and it was really cool like I said cuz I had people from the conference that I didn't even know that we're genuinely interested like I wouldn't have known you were like watching what I was doing you know I'm saying it was it caught me off guard like when you said that you're like hey dude be on here it's like oh sweet yeah yeah I mean yeah just to let you guys know I yeah I definitely reached out to him he reached out to me for this interview I don't I really don't take requests for interviews so don't hit me out just as a reminder yeah exactly but um you mentioned the fact that you got on Spotify and you got on a playlist what did you do to get on those playlists man so that was one thing that I learned from the conference actually Cody Patrick was talking about Spotify playlist pitching and as someone from background that I have with sales like pitching things just selling it basically so I was like man how are they doing these pitches and stuff and I just kind of came up with a plan to find all the different Spotify playlists so I guess there's two ways to go about you can either invest a bunch of money into like paying for exposure and with where I was at I didn't want to do that so the other thing that I learned when talking to Cody watching the sessions for the from the summit was that you can actually just get on a playlist if you get on a playlist that might have X amount of people listening to it per day so it's like way easier to get on one of those than to expose yourself to a bunch of individuals and so I just came up with a strategy to reach out I wrote down a big list of people again big big old list of people that I knew had Spotify playlist just from going online and creeping and I just reached out to them that the main thing that made a difference though is again I didn't reach out with them like hey put my song on your list I said hey I love your playlist because I genuinely did I found ones that I liked so I complimented what they're doing I told them why I'm reaching out to them is because they're awesome and then I said in exchange for you putting this on your playlist I think it would fit well I would I'll share your playlist with my following and so when there's that win win again just like in sales or in any type of healthy transaction or relationship both parties are benefiting then it makes it you know there's more incentive for them so I just literally just numbers game and it might take one out of every 12 emails that I send but if I but if I know that after doing 60 calls if I have five people that said you know put my song on there then I know like okay if I want 15 things or 15 playlist placements and took me 60 emails to get five then what do I got to do I just got to do three times that right so for me it's all I'm trying to just develop systems that I can that I can work on and then eventually like like you'll notice now I don't even know I think my Spotify playlist are too high right now but it's because I've taken energy away from that to work on other stuff ideally down the road I'd like to just bring on someone and be like hey dude here's my system to get Spotify playlist and so for me it's like you have like the one guy here's like the perfect thing that I I thought about this quite a bit I think it might be from like think and grow rich or something but you have the two schools of thought like back in the day they're these two shit captains and one of them teaches everybody on the ship to learn just one job and pays them well enough to where they're satisfied but they only know that one job then the other dude the other ship captain teaches every single person on the ship how to run every single part of the ship and then he goes and gets another ship and so now he has two ships under him so going back to not being scarce with things I would like to build these systems where I just reach out and I think with the Spotify thing it was it works because I'm exchange I'm in exchange I'm saying hey I'll share you I'll share your playlist with my following now coolest part about that is when my following keeps growing then my ratio of people saying yes is gonna be more because if someone's like hey put me on your playlist I'll share it with my hundred thousand people or whatever then you know you don't have to make as many calls but I'd like to kind of develop it as a system do you know I mean yeah I mean are you maintaining your relationships with those people that you reach out to right yes yeah that's the other thing too is if like like I've even reached out to someone they're like hey man I like your music but it's not quite this genre I'm like sweet if I think if I come across anyone else I'll refer him to you know cool cool man so you're really taking the sales approach into my said I hear all throughout everything you're saying but create no systems and that's what it's all about I always talk about system so I'm glad that you spoke about like you just mapped out some system that you developed for yourselves made it pretty clear because I think when people hear a system it's still like this abstract thing but it's how you achieve results and it's not necessarily a way to get a hundred percent it's just he said I mean I get my number by going high in volume over time it might take less volume after I have more pool and credibility and that's that just is what it is nobody wants to do the groundwork it first but that's that's dope and I want to make be clear on the type of artist you are because I know typically I might have like hip-hop or rappers on my channel or things like that but you aren't not a rapper man so I actually I did a whole project that was like like rap music and stuff a while back but I kind of it's not anything anyone over here but I've really been developing my sound for like years basically like for a specific genre it's hard to put put myself into that and I think now with the way that genres are like all crossing it's it's kind of like one of these things where I want to leave it open to interpretation what I will say though if people have just met me is all I could describe different influences so I'm really weird I go through these phases like where if I love a song I literally listen to that thing like on repeat for like 50 times in a row maybe a hundred times in a row and so depending on whatever I'm into at that time that's like what I end up writing ends up it kind of bleeds through but I'm my music is like a Southern Cal so I live here in San Diego I listen a lot of reggae it's like a like a SoCal Beach vibe then I spent a lot of time in Atlanta a couple my mentors are out there and so there's like trap influence within like the actual production everything that I write is based around my acoustic guitar so it's really it's completely a sound on my own I feel like it's just taking me a long time of like kind of emulating different artists that's like when I was in like my little like hip-hop phase it was like you know at that time I was I wasn't necessarily being unique and so now I just I'm basically just me and often times I find that my style will change ongoing hip-hop man it was back when I was like super into like man I was like you know like G easy and I was like like just pretty much all like the popular stuff like four four three four years ago and I did I did a whole project with that but it's actually something that I didn't really believe in the content that I was seeing it about like it was all really materialistic and so it's been a long road but now that I've really dialed in like what my message is and everything and it's in line with my brand more okay but it's it's like a reggae hip-hop trap music kind of production and then like a Southern California Beach vibe but some of the artists are like Jack Johnson slightly stupid but I'm influenced from everything from like Incubus to Sublime to like Tupac and like it's really it's hard to say man I just sound like me though so I'm confident in it you know but alright you know where you are now artistically how would you say you would feel if that first project back when you were emulating G easy and whoever else how would you drop that and that music blew up now that you are where you are now I'd be cool with it and I probably and I may end up I don't know who knows down the road I might end up putting showing some people but the thing about it is like I wasn't it just didn't reflect me anymore you know like that's things if you if you start making music and stuff like regardless of what it stands for like that was me at that moment in time so I'm not necessarily ashamed of it it was just not it was just not what I wanted to put out initially because I want I'm really big into psychology and like the things that we listen to throughout the day and like our own self-talk and shit and so I just didn't want to be out there talking about like so what I want yeah so what I want the same things nice house go check like I wasn't as well that's actually the reason I don't talk about certain stuff on a channel like I don't really get deep into the gossip I've had some videos that I've taken down or like yeah well it's going viral but it's not people are interpreting it not how I wanted to be in a little bit I don't I just don't like putting that energy out there so I completely get it but to be clear though I wasn't saying you dropped that album today like if you even if you dropped it back then and it blew up before even found this new sound do you think you would have chased that path of success and kind of had a you know a heart crash before you switched directions that's the thing man I was ready I was ready to go I was like man I'm making money I'm like and then I just had some life things change and it's like like we have those divine storms where everything kind of like falls apart and it was it was so that I could go back to a foundation of like honestly it sounds cheesy like being healthy like mentally and being healthy like physically and having a healthy lifestyle with balance and all of stuff and I just think that there's a lot of toxic beliefs in the in the entertainment industry as far as like what's cool you know it's like when I was like 20 early 20s and stuff like yeah that shit was cool to me but as I've kind of grown up and stuff like like certain things are like you know consistent and they're usually like positive things and so I just want to reflect like my growth as a person within my music but yeah I mean if anybody likes my music that like you know you make it so that you can impact other people and it's also a therapy to ourselves as artists but that at least that's my motivation I want to I want to like give people the feeling that I got listening to certain artists you know so so how do you plan to move forward when's the next time you're dropping music so I'm currently writing I've got what's what was really cool about the summit and just releasing an EP and I wish people would have like just spelled this out to me before is like once you release something and yeah sure if you invest a couple grand or whatever ends up being once you put that out there then all of a sudden people are gonna start wanting to work with you if it's dope and so my one of the big challenges that I had early on was that everything costed money and if I knew what quality I wanted and I knew the kind of people want to work with and it was you know expensive to make one song yep and then you look and then you look at the actual like monetary return on it and it's like it's an expensive ass hobby you know yeah so so what's been cool about this now is I have producers that are reaching out to me like hey dude I love your music I want to work with you and so now I'm negotiating on like if I work with people it's gonna be like hey dude I'll give you a portion of what we create together as far as like the publishing and all that stuff versus hey give me a bunch of money up front and then also I get a piece of like those were just the things that weren't spelled out to me yeah man it's important by what you're saying right there we always talk about music being marketing well the people who are understanding today we understand that hey music is marketing but we're still usually messaging it messaging it for the fact that it's marketing to the consumers but it's also marketing to the other professionals out there that's what you're touching on and I never yeah that way but I know it's that way for me as well I will reach out to people if I say oh man that's that's dope man how'd you do this or do you know that that could help you out because I might know somebody I get it yeah yeah so now that I've shown momentum and it's like the whole thing like people help those or God helps those but people want to help people who are helping themselves and so when I put that out now all of a sudden it's accelerated when I you know like my musical situation now I don't have to go out and raise five or whatever thousand dollars to make this next project gone because I'm gonna try and work with people who will work with me and then just do it because they believe what I'm doing so as far as my next project release I'm not sure the date but I'm writing everything right now I'm I feel confident kind of going at my own pace just with the way that the internet and digital marketing works I don't see any rush I'm gonna do the summit again early early this next year and so probably some time after that I don't know maybe do like maybe do a Kickstarter or something like that but nice you're gonna do a package deal man you package your project with it some ticket I know right yeah I mean it's all up in the air right now but I just it was a long time coming to release that first one yeah and getting that out there just getting the feedback and stuff I'm just more energized artistically than I've ever been really yeah it'll be soon but you know I'm just always writing always writing music and and working on that stuff so it's just day by day okay so your patience tells me that you aren't doing music full-time yet no I am it's just so I I am but I do have other things that I'm that I'm working with to sustain because it's like I didn't I had a certain type of income before and so I want to be able to keep that income up to where I continue investing in my music so I'd rather release a project every year than release like two smaller ones if I can have more resources behind that one so I just want to be able to make this next one a little bit further reach gotcha yeah so cool so I don't know how much you want to talk about your personal life but I would love to hear you talk about at least your transition from hey I'm working describe the type of job you were doing before and I'm gonna make this jump what's my mindset to make this jump and why'd you decide it when you decided and then you know I want to get into that side of things because a lot of people are in that space yeah totally and I think that's the biggest challenge and I'll I'll be the first to admit I don't have it completely mastered of course for me the big thing is having something that doesn't drain my energy that can still bring in enough money to supplement the progress that I need with my music so like you have a set amount of overhead cost for a certain project or whatever whether it's marketing or recording the music or whatever it ends up being and it's really it's like it's this awkward space to be in unless you have some balance so I was doing I did door-to-door sales for ten years different industries and stuff and then finally yeah yeah man I ran yeah I ran sales team so I would recruit dudes and then we'd go travel the country basically and we do summer summer sales programs so I've literally knocked on like hundreds probably hundreds of thousands of doors over the last like ten years and so I went after the EP release I was like I cool I'm just gonna do music full-time here I did the summit so the summit's bringing in passive stuff right now because a lot of people just come across to organically and then I have I took a break completely from work like I just did music and I just did the same thing as far as booking shows I just come up with a system I found where other people were playing shows out here and I just started reaching out so currently my income is split between making money off of playing shows locally here and my goal for that is to build up an audience probably just so that I can obviously build up my presence but you know people for if I do a kickstarter down the road or something like that and then I do I still actually do some sales stuff on the side because it just I wasn't in a position like where I was stoked on how fast I can make things happen so I quit that I went about three months and then I just realized that I'm gonna get where I want to go faster if I do have some supplemental income the goal I guess would be just to eventually get to where the summit and these different things are outweighing that but the most important thing for me is that I don't have a job that dominates my life and for a while there I was like that like you can't you can't create if you've been at some job that's so sucking all day at least I can 100% I love that because I think we have this narrative that we push in America in general but especially within the music industry and I know especially especially within like just a black culture that you have to really always burn all ships and that's the way but I think that's great in terms of a mentality and moving forward but at the same time it encourages when you couple that with a mentality of microwave and I want things fast it got really skews anything you think hey I'm gonna stop burn all my bridges and in three to six months I'm gonna be in a place that is desirable and yeah not that's not it because it takes a little bit away from the amount of time to build there is a time where you should commit but with that 100% you have to have some foundation set so I love the mindset of hey I'm going to do something that allows me to live and maybe even give me some additional marketing dollars for my stuff because it needs to be marketed you have to be your own investor at the beginning yes it doesn't take the energy away right yeah well that's that's totally the thing is is just your energy man and like it's that's one of my big like dilemmas just with the world and life is how many people are doing stuff that they hate doing yep and so like I'm no different anybody else like I got I builds every single month I gotta pay and everything like that but it's like it's cool to make that jump be like all right I'm done with all this I'm just doing music full-time and then to realize like okay maybe there's a more I always try to be like fluid you know I want to be able to be flexible and bend with things and so I just had another opportunity come up there was like hey you can make some money the thing is I'm not just making that money so I can come home and sit and watch Netflix at night yeah I am happy to do a job that's not necessarily my music if I know hey dude I just went and did that now guess what that means to my music career and so my music is just my why like when you're out there knocking doors dude like you go hours without doing like literally people just like shitting on you every single door and it teaches you that like you go through the nose to get the yes and then that one yes like even this you know being on your channel is awesome for me and it's like how many people you know will reach out to get on stuff like this and never get out so it keeps it keeps that muscle strong also and it's gonna accelerate it to where it's just like there's a book called the dip by Seth Godin and it talks about how there's like these natural it's like natural barriers I guess that life has and that keeps certain people from getting through to the other side and with like economics and stuff like if there's scarcity then there's value so in in certain industries or really in any undertaking we have it's like this and then the harder it is to get the more steep that that curve is the less people are willing to do what it takes to get to the end of that shit so I just see that having other income coming in is a way for me to get through the dip faster because to get through the dip of things you have to get you have to have resources which is like time money knowledge information all that stuff so yeah I mean I'm not full-time full-time yet but as I'm going through this now I have a I've uncovered where down the road I can start making more money and how it all works it's like it's like a map that's all covered up with dirt and you uncover some over here and you're like okay cool that's that and then you come over here and uncover some over here and then eventually over time it's kind of like you can see the whole picture I love that man I think that's super important particularly when it comes to music because so many of these industries let's just say you have a specific job maybe it's a sales job or I mean oh sales driven company that you're building all right you say stop doing everything else and focus on this whatever you're starting to focus on is likely attached directly to revenue yes music industry right you need a lot of time to learn and even even to revenue so yes doesn't make sense to put yourself in a position when you have your own income I don't know how you get that income you know whether you're in turn for somebody or working with something like you might say how I'm at least work for somebody within music whatever it is but you have to give yourself on time to uncover those things on a map until you can figure out and then okay let me focus on following this path but there's going to be so many things you bump your head on that you just had no idea like save yourself the struggle and yes somebody else's dime that's what I always say that's beautiful man that's a lot of that's a lot of it I know that there's like that I feel good right now because I'm in that place where you don't want to have too much money from working too often that you're so drained that you can't create but then you also don't want to have so much free time and be broke because then you can't create you know I mean so it's this like catch 22 and so I was stoked when the summit went how it did because it like it opens up a lane within the industry I want to be in where I'm adding value and it's free and so if people find value in it and they like it and they want to buy the things after then they could but it it's definitely like you know people have to get creative it's it's not like how it used to be within the industry and I just think a lot of people are not facing that so yeah it's it's great to burn your ships and I love that whole mindset of things and I still try and do that with everything I practice but you just got to weigh out what the cost of that is and what the benefit for the next five years looks like versus maybe it'll take longer if you do it without having some income you know exactly there's still a way to go about it let's just say it that way and it's all and it's all marketing dude like literally if you want to blow up like that's how all these people that people you know like artists will see people like how did that guy get well he had a lot of money to spend on ads and you made some content that it built a lot of people you know pretty much that's the simple version right right right of course though right it's true all of them all these activities on the back and they still result in basically those two things yes yes yes and that's not the only thing obviously like you can do it in a more responsible manner but those are constant you know it's like you're gonna need some money for marketing because otherwise no one's gonna hear and what's cool is you start getting on playlist you start running ads to your shit and over time like on these playlists I've been on I'm having people add my song still like every week I have new people discover it and add it so it's like you do a release that's like a heavy thing and then it kind of like trickles and they do another one and it trickles so that's kind of like the way that I'm going about over time so I you just said something you said you do ads you do ads for your music so initially I did yeah whenever we did our release we wanted to be like everywhere at once and it's kind of funny because like people that I grew up with were like commenting on things on like my ads on Facebook like dude you're everywhere bro you're blowing up and so with the internet that whole being able to be everywhere at once it's like you know they go to YouTube they see my ad then they'll go over here and I'll see my ad so I have a partner that I work with that's really solid with marketing and so I really understand that like the concepts and all of that just by being around her for so long she does more of the actual going in and setting up everything and whenever we're doing it like we ran ads for that and it just it just makes it's a lot of it's the perception but yeah you can run ads for anything like a new single or you can run ads we built a mailing list an email list for the musician mastery son of like 700 people in like those two and a half weeks we were running ads we made a Facebook group with like five or six hundred people from it so yeah advertisement is for anyone who I mean everyone probably knows but it's like the sponsored posts that you see on Facebook and Instagram those are all paid for you know so if you do that enough and get in front enough people then they're gonna like it then they'll hopefully share it and Wendy they put it really good she just said the purpose of advertisement is to start word of mouth yeah I like that so what did you what was your budget for your ad campaign and did you did you do multiple assets in terms of hey I'm gonna do a video on YouTube and I'm gonna do like picture on Instagram like what was that look like good question so we did I think there was a total of like 10 different images and then we split we tested like probably 20 different varieties of ad sets kind of saying the same stuff so what that looks like is we come up with a bunch of different ad copy which is just the sales stuff that you read and for the summit it was like hey tired of feeling the problem was that everyone feels confused about the music industry and it was like tired of trying to figure it out on your own basically we brought together the best experts click below to get your free ticket type of thing and then I think that we were getting people I don't know the exact number but it's under like three dollars we're getting signups for or maybe two dollars and again with all this stuff you can just take that data and you can just like literally see what it would be okay we spent I think we spent like not very much things like under two grand on ad spend total but now we can look at those exact numbers and we can take the ad sets that worked because like I said most of them didn't produce like probably want it 20 percent of your ads that you try are the ones that bring in 80 percent of your revenue usually so yeah now we can go we can just take that exact data and we can just scale it up yeah we were effective so yep I appreciate that information I think that's gonna be super helpful for everybody but I was actually asking not for the conference but if you ran ads for yourself as an artist because you said people you grew up with said you were blowing up so yeah yeah yeah yeah so we were doing we were doing Instagram and Facebook ads we also did some YouTube some stuff for YouTube for my first video that I did but we just did that in the week leading up to the release and I think we only spent like four or five hundred bucks on that but it was cool because like I had people that I didn't know well one I used the retargeting to everyone who's visited my Instagram so I created a custom audience on in the ads manager for Facebook is Facebook and Instagram are both up to run through that you can do more detailed targeting than a boost post and yeah we just I had a I had a retargeting audience from my Instagram so I just took everyone who visited my Instagram my website all that stuff so then I was just advertising my upcoming release to my warmest audience and then from there I believe that we did some stuff where it was like geographically located but if I had like a huge if I you know if I have 10 grand and ad spend eventually for like another release then we'll just do that on a much larger scale I think that probably we tried certain cities and then kind of see which ones pick up the most and then just doubling down there but with with all the ad stuff online it's really just like you find what works and then you just double down on that and eliminate the things that weren't working alright so from the little bit you did with yours you feel like it's worth just increasing that again to just do straight-up advertisements yeah yeah I mean that's it's just another way to to approach it and it's like it's that whole thing again like it takes people six or seven times to buy something so if they see you here and then all of a sudden they click over to Bram and Sean they see you're there and then they go to YouTube and they see this like like I can target people who like you I can specifically target people after this who like you and I can be like hey check out my interview with Bram and Sean and then I'm just showing an ad to people who like you on Facebook or whatever it is about talking to you so it's like there's certain ways to target and certain things to do another one that's cool is you can find artists that are like you let's say you're an artist and you think that I don't know you know post Malone is the same type of person you know you can you can target people then who like him and who likes Spotify or something you know so then you're only showing the ad to the people who have Spotify for sure so yeah there's just so many different ways and that's all like digital marketing stuff is just a whole another animal but I don't I think it's gonna be more than half of what the music industry is moving forward like it's all of it basically because that's all the I see ads that look the same from independent artists who are doing it good as the people who are signed by these huge labels because it's the exact same platform like the labels don't have a different platform than me and you know there's no TV or anything like that to differentiate the actual credibility like I remember her when I first discovered her either I popped up on her and then I started seeing retargeting ads or either I saw some ads first well it seemed to all happen at the same time but that's because those ads right you know but I was probably like one of the first let's just say 30,000 people to like to discover her that's still pretty low just to consider where she is but right like that she had a label behind her right but it's the exact experience but if people say ads don't work I think what people have to do is more people have to get more comfortable with spending that money and understanding it's an investment over the long term if you're expecting it to be hey I spend $3,000 and now I have a legitimate career from that $3,000 it might be a little bit harder with that mentality because you're expecting you all you have to spend first $3,000 maybe just to learn what the right target is for yourself right it's yes it's pretty interesting one quick question I want to see if you know this because I thought about this a while ago probably over a year ago but I just haven't had the opportunity to do it because I stopped doing a lot of individual work with artists now you know if I could target let's just say who's a big person on Instagram let's say Shiggy right you know Shiggy's on Instagram he blew up because of the whole Drake thing Shiggy challenge could I tell you his following it depending on how big it is like and I don't know him specifically but some people like if it's a big person yeah you really can like you could go and so like I could go and target like Incubus or Sublime or one of these bands and you can just set it up to where you're literally showing ads only to them and I've even gotten certain ads that are really super effective by artists that have been like hey do you like this artist well if you like him then you'll probably like this sound click here to hear the new single on and it's just like there's gonna be a dude sitting there bored or something at work and he's like yeah I do like them let me check it out and I don't and a lot of times we think of the ads like oh shit another ad and just because we don't like it like it doesn't mean that someone's yeah it's like whenever I started knocking door-to-door like way back in the day I was like dude no one I never would buy anything from someone door-to-door ever like dude comes my door I'm like hiding there shut the blinds but then you go out and like you find people are like come on in you know they're like let's do it so I just yeah so it's like I think you said it but and this is like my whole thing whenever you start putting it out there with ads then you get your true response then you get what people actually like like some of the shit we talked about in summit I really thought was like the best everyone's gonna love and no one ever asked or said that they loved it and then other stuff that I thought everyone already knew people were like yo I love this I never thought of it that way I'm just like who would have known so you really get an idea when you start putting it out there and people probably a lot of listeners have probably boosted posts before boosted posts are great but it's just kind of like a random throwing it out there don't boost those they're not not narrow right so if you can really like now people are boosting like I get sort of boosted posts from people like right now that like they're just like boosting some random pictures they took in their backyard with their old school like but you know I mean but if you can use the in the ads manager you can set up custom audiences so you're only targeting specific people and there's like a list of parameters that you can target by but that's the that's the beautiful part about this is that like you can go at your own pace you can target the exact kind of people you want you can avoid targeting certain people that you know won't like it it's really amazing it's amazing potential of what we can do now you know yeah man I was hoping that there was a way and you might have known it because I I hate that when I first thought about it you you could only target people of a certain side and it sounds like that's still true I mean I try on everything but I like a target people that like aren't necessarily huge but they might have a huge following on Instagram or a huge 500,000 people like imagine like I would always say if you do a collaboration with an Instagramer right you can do this with me on YouTube but so you but like if I could just do a collab on the Instagram and all these people love this Instagramer and they're doing they're dancing to my song and I could just take that clip and then target all their followers right yeah yes yeah man you can do that so like you can do that I don't know specifically each person differs because they have to be a certain size one thing that's cool yeah one thing cool though is if you can find someone who's sorry to cut you off I got a little delayed right if you can find someone that's bigger like that once you type that in the it'll actually start suggesting other people that are like that yeah I mean but yeah you can I don't exactly know on that on his specific thing but if you open up that's mandatory you can type in there and and it will usually show you yeah I think I think the way to go about it for that strategy is just finding somebody that you can't do it with for now it is always changing though too like yeah they're always taking stuff away and it's always changing but yeah it's definitely something to look into if you're an independent artist you know even just if you can do like I can run like basic stuff but you don't need nothing anything crazy it's just like you you have to show your music to people and it's a direct line to the person you're trying to show it to but what you talked about as far as the return on it find out find a way to monetize yourself you know find something to monetize because I can actually look at hard data on the summit numbers and say this much is what it costed to get someone on the list as many people watched out of this many people that watched as many people came and got recordings and then I can compare those numbers I think it's just an I think it's a down-the-road thing but I would assume with music I'm not there yet but I would assume the the more clout you get the more you can start charging for shows and different things like that so I think that it's more like it's a long game with music and that's I think why a lot of people are in it and it's a lot of convolution but then like certain people will become outliers and it's because they make it through that dip I was talking about you know 100% 100% it's funny because when you talk about that whole dip scenario I think because of the internet and where it is now it used to be like this but then because of where it is now it's more like a little bit further down and then the dip happens so it's like further but the dip is still there yeah it's it's literally with anything to working out it's what like like everything that applies to and so in his book he talks about the Sundance kid in like that old Western movie is running away from his and this way whenever I'm going through some like challenge I think of this and with my music especially like I don't care if it takes me to I'm like 45 to build a big enough audience to be able to do this in that in that movie they're running away from people that are chasing them and they literally head for the hills and they start going up higher and higher and more not the crazier terrain crazier terrain until they almost are dying because they're like on these cliffs and shit but it took to get to that extreme point to kind of like burn off the dross and like have all the all the bad things in your life fall away from you so the further I go doing something that isn't like realistic and it's like a pipe dream all these different things that that whenever you go the path that's least taken you know like the further you go the more reward there is because there's scarcity there and so that's where the values at you know true I love that man I think that's a great spot to end on is there anything else other than the wisdom you just dropped that you would like to leave people with man no just just go and follow me on on YouTube or on Instagram at Aaron Wolf music stay tuned I'm gonna be doing another summit we do the summit they're free so stay tuned for that yeah the summit's free so anyone who watches it the first time so as it happens live it's free you can watch it and then we do we resell the recordings for anyone you can even go to musician mastery summit calm right now if anyone wants to get the recordings from last one but I'm again man I'm just thankful for the opportunity I love your platform having someone kind of do what you're doing it just shows other people that they can do it so I like what you're doing a lot and I feel blessed to be a part of it though dope man I appreciate that man and I really respect what you're doing obviously that's why I reached out so everybody once again as you always know if you liked this video go ahead hit the like button if you like it might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe button