 What's up, what's up, what's up everybody is Sean Taylor once again and I do this because I believe artists should control their own destiny. So today we're going over tech nine and how to build a rap empire without a record deal. So I know a lot of you people might not know tech nine is going to the game for a minute, but let's go ahead and hop into it. Tech has figured out the secret of how to make your own money. You don't have to go through any industry begging and borrowing and asking people for an opportunity. You can create your own opportunities. And the best thing about about being independent is that when you sign yourself, you will never fire yourself. You will never have to worry about somebody giving you a pink slip and a notice saying, I'm sorry, man, but you're not hot anymore. So we're not going to invest in you anymore. We're going to go with a better option. So that's why I love independent, of course, but as Dr. Boyce Watkins, a pretty famous, I guess, thought leader, he said, you know, tech has figured out how to make money. Let's do one more clip. And it was just amazing to see how somebody who's not on a major makes way more money than a lot of these artists or major has a touring life. That's bigger than a lot of these artists out there. He was the number three touring artist at one point in the country. I was like Kanye, it was Jay-Z, and it was like me. So obviously this guy is big. He's doing this thing, but he's doing this in a lot of ways, pretty much underground, right? He's making a lot of money, more artists, more money than a lot of artists and touring more than a lot of artists. So who exactly is tech nine? Once again, he's a rapper who's been in the game since the nineties, late nineties particularly. He has a fast, upbeat style. That's kind of his signature. But we're about to figure out how tech nine is able to take his small, seemingly small, non-commercial audience, go independent and really grow and blow up. So first, it starts here. He said, okay, hold on, man. Let me move this dude again. Everything you said to me before, I got it. Fuck all of that. What do you want to do? And that's when he told me about, you know, his love for the doors and the idea of strange music. And if he had his own label, he would call it strange music and all these different things. And I said, listen, man, if you want to do this, I'll help you out. I'll help you put this together. So this is tech nine's business partner, Travis O. Gwynne. And if you listen to what he explained, he said, fuck all the other stuff you're talking about because he was talking about what all the label people at the time, tech was on a label. We're telling him early in his career. And he was like, no, what do you want to do? Have a vision. People aren't going to help you get to where you want to go unless you know what you want. You can't be telling people what other people want for you and expect them to invest in you. So you need to find a partner because you need to focus on your art. And if you want to really build an empire, you're going to need somebody to be focused more on the business, but you can't sell them on investing in you and partnering with you. If you don't have a vision to where you want to go and they're just there to help you get there as an artist. But, you know, we couldn't get distribution in the beginning because tech hadn't sold any records. So nobody was trying to hear us. So what we have to do, we have to do a deal with a middleman. Times in which we had a middleman, somebody in between us and our money are the times that weren't so pleasant. Those are the times where there's been mishaps, miscues, misdirections. So as Travis has stated, when you start off, you don't have a lot of leverage. So you're going to have to take somewhat bad deals, quote, unquote, but you want to be as strategic as possible in those deal that you're taking. So you might not be able to go direct to the source and you have to go through a middleman, which adds a little extra cost. But knowing where you want to go, try to build those relationships and even be strategic in the middlemen that you choose. Because ultimately, you need to think long term strategies about where you want your career to go long term. People get caught up in these short term tactics trying to talk to this person and look good next to this person. And they end up losing their way. These strategic, particularly when you want to build an empire. So next is really start owning what you need. You're starting to cut out the middleman as you build out from here. And this is all assuming that you have good music, right? I can't really tell that part for you. I can't tell you how to do that. But if you're looking at this factory, they, I mean, this warehouse, they own these boxes. They own these everything in these. They're getting this stuff made or they're ordering it themselves. They even went to the extreme at one point. They were actually pressing their own CDs, not making and burning their own CDs, but literally making the CD that they put the music on. But as you get to this level where this might look like starting offage, making your own merch, right? You can have someone make some bracelets or you can buy your own t-shirt machine. We'll start pressing your t-shirts. There are a lot of ways you can start doing this on a small level so you can increase your margins and then reinvesting yourself early on as you go. And then as you grow, cut out the middleman more and more on bigger levels and bigger scales. Maybe you're creating your own studio and investing in other things like that. But start this mentality early by owning what you need on a small scale. Explain it. It's been under the radar for a long time, man. But what a lot of artists don't realize is that if you want to be the hip hop president, you got to get out there and politic. And how do we politic through music to hip hop? We get out there and we tour. We get out there and we have merchandise. You know, people are walking billboards. So if I make a tech nine hat or a tech nine G string or whatever it is. So as tech says, I mean, hey, you got to work your ass off. Now, assuming once again, you have good music and you already are starting to build some sort of fan base. You got to market, market, market, put your name on everything, create merch, get in front of your fans as much as possible. That's touring. That's that's really that way that grind to get through particularly today. We're not talking about old school where you're just going to sell some CDs and do a few concerts. Really getting in front of your fans, touching them, getting up in front and close touring, keeping that web presence. All of that stuff, work your ass off and that's going to get you where you want to go when you're building this empire. And then you want to really start building a team somewhere along the way to start supporting this infrastructure. All these extra people, these extra tasks that start coming in like, hey, who's going to set up the tour dates? Because that one business person isn't going to be able to do it all. And your creative juices can't be used on all your music and all marketing campaigns. So you start to develop a team as you see fit and if you have a strong vision and you're a moving machine, you probably want to just pay a lot of money to build this team. People will want to get in, get the experience and you might even be able to get like some free interns or something like that. Since then we bought another spot. But yeah, you're on plant. Like, you know, you're doing everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, about the grace of God, man. You know what I mean? And it's because I feel like real ish always shines, you know what I mean? And if I just stick to what I've been doing and not conform for no amount of money, I'm good. And so important is last part, which is stay true. Stay true to yourself, your artistry and ultimately your vision because that's what strategy is all about strategy and building an empire. Empires need strategy because they're long term things. They can't be built in a day. You have to stay true to your ultimate goal. Yes, you can be flexible in how you get there, but don't veer off of your path. Stay true to what got you where you are and keep going because you start to sway away from that authenticity, that core. You're going to get knocked off the path and start getting messed up in these labels and these trends. Don't do it. Reconsider, stay true, find a partner, be strategic, work your ass off. And I put stay true on here twice. My bad. I'm going to say have a vision as number one, then find a partner. But do all these things. Of course, as I said, hopefully your music is good. Subscribe love to hear from you guys as far as what you think about this video. Any questions you have, I'll answer them. And if you have any recommendations for things you'd like to see in the future, let me know. You want to talk to me on Instagram, Twitter, ask me other questions about your stuff in particular. I'm free to answer it. Go ahead and hit me up. Have a good one. They showed basically how tech man is process of doing music. Yeah. And I was like, that's cool. I was like, but everything's always exaggerated when you look at like I got to be exaggerated. And then when the numbers came back for that sucker free episode, that was the biggest sucker free episode ever. Yeah, I heard ever, ever, ever, ever. And with any artist tech man had the largest sucker free audience. And I was like, wow. And then I just started doing my homework and seeing how big he was.