 Artists, if you are serious about your art, if you want to be able to build a career, right, where you are able to fund your lifestyle, your family's lifestyle if you have one, your employee's lifestyle, or at least put yourself in a position where you can even have employees in the first place, then it comes from doing one thing, rethinking, right, how you see this game. I'm small things, I'm serious, and I have multiple clients to show for it, and I want to explain what that is and how they're approaching things, but it's really, really small, and I'm not gonna have time to do a full video, I'm gonna do like a deeper videos on this in the summer, when I have time to like make it really tactical, so you can just follow it straight off a YouTube video, but I do want to like touch on this. So, I'll say it like this, if you want to be free, and when I say serious about your art, I started the video saying serious about your art, because this is what I mean. The artists who have followed this process, all right, and find themselves in this place in their career, it's been night and day, like a glow, like a glow. I'm thinking about one person in particular, but just talking to these clients where you go from struggling and heads down and complaining or then feeling entitled and then feeling like, well, am I lazy, or do I want to do all this stuff to be successful in this industry and get these streams, not even label, not even label stuff, already decided I can move without a label if I need to, but still playing the game. You're playing the label's game without a label, which is a wild thing to do. That's what most artists are doing. But when you rethink it and finally crack that code, man, so all the artists have basically said it to me like this. In our conversations, one, they feel like they say they beat the game in some form or fashion. Two, they realized that, yo, I don't have to create a bunch of content. I don't have to drop a song a week to win. I don't have to drop content every day to win. And they feel like they can make music for the original reason that they started making music, which was a love of it, because now they're not creating from this pressure of, I gotta drop content or drop music just for it to possibly go and feed an algorithm. I'm making it when I feel led to do it, more off the inspirational side. And there's no pressure on how much money the music makes. It's just because I've already built a world of my music where I know there's gonna be people who super appreciate it. And I know that there's gonna be people who are willing to pay me for that experience, whether they're paying because I sold a specific project. That's only one route, right? Oh, I'm gonna sell you a song or whatever, or sell you a vinyl, or they might pay for experiences like my shows or other experiences, extraordinary experiences. I'll call them because there is no exact same experience for every single artist. It depends on your fan base, which I'll get to. So this is what it looks like. It comes down to understanding your audience. Understanding your audience. Understanding your audience, I gotta say one more time, understanding your audience. And this is why. Most of the artists that I talked to, they make this grave mistake. And I saw an episode on Shark Tank one time, and they basically depicted it perfectly. There was somebody who was doing something really successful online. I can't remember what the product was, but it was like killing it. And they were selling online direct to consumer. Most brands of their product style would be in stores. And they were like, what's your plan? What are you gonna do with this money? And they said, oh, well, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna get in retail stores and expand. And they were like, why? Why do you wanna get in stores? You already beat the game. Your margins are extremely high. When you go in retail stores, they're not gonna give you the information on your customers. That's the most valuable part of the game. You're going direct to your audience, direct to your customer. You have all of the information the way you're doing this online. Why would you go backwards? That was how they saw it. And you can tell the people weren't ready for that. Cause they were just like, I want this money. It reminded me of artists just being like, well, I just want this record deal. I don't know, cause I imagined that that's what success was like. Getting an investment from some VCs on Shark Tank or something. That was kind of where their mindset was. That's how they imagined success. So they were kind of doing it out of the going through the motions versus reevaluating where they actually were in reality. And not realizing not only were they successful, they were more successful than the version of success that they imagined for themselves. But because they couldn't see it, they were going to work backwards. Crazy, right? That's why I see a lot of artists doing because we think about this whole direct to fan thing. And a lot of these people have been preaching this for years. It's not just me. So many people like that. You can't even name it. It's just been a common thing. And everybody says they want to do it. But you know what the problem is? People don't actually take the time to use the information, all right? A lot of people don't go to the, a lot of people don't take that first step to like go direct. A lot, and then most, I'm almost stuttering. Then after that, a lot of people don't collect the information and then even more people, even more people don't actually use the information to study their audience, understand their audience so they can use that information to make more money from their audience, to deliver better experiences to their audience. It just comes from a backwards mindset in how artists are trained to think versus any other business infrastructure. And unfortunately for some of y'all who don't want to think from a business standpoint, building a career around yourself, supporting yourself financially requires the business side of things too. What do I mean by this? Well, artists get told it's all about you, right? It comes from you. It's not even real or authentic if it's not just whatever you thought. Music you made only for yourself. Every single piece of art and pixel on your website was only for yourself. Who cares, whatever anybody else thinks. That's how artists are told to think. And then the strict, complete, non-creative technical side of business is like, well, what do people want? Understand what people want and then understand why they want it and then deliver that to them, right? It's that simple. Well, how do you flip that? You have to understand that doing this process, by the way, I know the phone's wobbling and everything. I'm holding it, doing this video for my phone because I had an audio issue, but I said I'm gonna drop a video every Saturday, right? I think for the artists who struggle with this idea, where you should be able to reconcile with this is if you first create from within and express outwardly, you're gonna attract people who are attracted to what you created, right? So you're still creating a world of people based on what you have inside of you. However, when you want to monetize that world of people based on what you have inside of you, you need to be able to think more from their perspective, right? Understand what they like about what came from inside of you. Understand what other commonalities you guys have, right? Understand what experiences do they dislike, what experiences do they love, what elevates an experience. And here is a perfect example that I like to share. I've always been doing this for years and that's why some of these artists have used this process. Say if you have a show, for instance, what artists do wrong is they start inward and think outward a lot of times, right? And what that looks like, again, is I want people to come see me and I wanna feel amazing. I want to live the vision of what I saw as an artist when I was a kid. Being on stage and people loving me, singing my words, right, that's it. It's not even about their own artistic expression and what they personally would love a lot of times when they're thinking about shows. They don't elevate it to that level. So just to get you out of your own head or out of your own way, how do I create an experience that's amazing for everybody coming to my show if I never performed? How could I make that show amazing, right? What if there are no performances on stage even? These are just thought experiments to force you creatively to think of new ways to stimulate your fan base, right? Please your fan base, all right? Once you start to think about that, then say, how can I insert myself into that experience and not just slide myself in, but how can I use me to elevate that experience to a whole another level? Would they really love this? I'm not just the cherry on top, right? I'm the icing too. How do you do that, right? Just a thought experience, right? Experience for some people that might look like throwing a ball, you know what I mean, across stage. For some people that might look like having a comedian up there or something like that or it might have certain lighting. There's all these little things, right? And maybe it's an outside show versus an inside show. You're doing a show in the mountains in the middle of a hike. I don't know, it depends on your audience. All this depends on your audience. But just like that type of thinking, I promise you when the thing happens and you do it in that way, what we're seeing is people are getting new fans without trying. And this is what I've, I got a video on this channel a couple of years old, at least that somewhere in the middle, I talk about passive fan creation, right? It's really at the end of the day just word of mouth, but like creating a machine for that. And what we're seeing now at artists earlier this week was like, yo man, like people were coming. And I was like, how did you find out about this? Like, why are you even here? Cause you never even heard my music yet, but you're here. And there are like, well, my friend told me that I need to be here. That's it. And there was enough about how things were packaged to make them feel like they should go ahead and come. Sounds were about right. And then when they had the experience there, got the music, they're a fan. How do you do that? Right? And you can do that digitally, you can do that physically. We're seeing this over and over again and the artists who are experiencing this level of freedom and how they present and being able to like, drop music and not have to worry about the algorithm and not have to worry about putting out a certain amount of songs a year, that's the commonality. They're understanding their fans to be able to create experiences or create a packaging and a communication line. So great that the fans start building the world for them. They start bringing new fans to end. It's that simple, right? Now, the nuance of course is you, right? What does that look like for you? And like I said, I'm gonna do a video, it's gonna be a detail, probably like a 30 minute breakdown. I might even do a PowerPoint or something. At some point this summer, I've been wanting to get this out from the beginning of the year, but it's just been a busy year. But I can say this already. I've seen the small change have big results for people already who joined the 30 day challenge. And for those of y'all who've been asking, yes, we're gonna go ahead and do it again. We'll have a link in the description below. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll talk about it at the end. But the 30 day challenge is like this small tweak and we've had people who only had like 1900, well, I'm thinking about one by a person in particular. Somebody who had like 1900 followers on Instagram didn't realize they have like 500, like legit, legit fans out of that 1900. Legit. I'm talking about we'll do stuff for you, we'll migrate, we'll buy. That's what they're finding out already. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. Because how many followers on IG do you think you need to have to have a thousand true fans? How many streams do you think you need to have to have a thousand true fans? If he can have 1900 followers on IG and have 500, the number doesn't have to be that big. Now the question goes, how did you build your followers? That's the real question that some of y'all are fooling yourselves with, right? So that's a whole another story. And one of the artists that has actually expressed this freedom to me has said, yo, like what made it finally click and me start to do it and follow the process. And they are there more than there. I'll just say multiple hundreds of thousands now that they're making. I was like, well, a couple of years ago, we were having this conversation and you were talking about certain people and you were working with what they were doing. And I'm looking at them like, yo, they barely have any IG followers. They barely have any monthly listeners compared to them, right? Cause I think the group they were referring to only had like 10K monthly listeners. This person had like 200K monthly listeners. And these other people were touring, making money, funding their career, right? Legit indie, it's very possible, right? So just know that changing how you look at your audience and think about your audience, truly understanding them, not just, oh, I'm gonna try to go sell something. Man, I wish I talked about trying to sell something earlier. I don't wanna make this video much longer, but I would say this, people make these drastic jumps from, this is more of a rant video. Hope you all like it. People make these drastic jumps for, I'm gonna go and play the industry's gaming and sign to a label. Wait, nevermind, everybody says it's cool not to be at all labeled. So I'm not gonna sign to a label. I'm gonna be independent, but I'm still gonna play the exact same game with the exact same goals and milestones that I'm trying to hit as if I was at a label. And then they realize, okay, that'll make exactly that much sense. Most people don't even realize that, but the ones who finally do, they realize it doesn't. But then they go the other extreme and they're like, oh, I need to sell something to my fans ASAP. I need to sell something to people ASAP. Matter of fact, I don't even have any fans, but I'm already thinking about how am I gonna sell to my fans and how am I gonna build this group and like get them to pay me like $1,000 for a track when you haven't even thought about really still building a fan base. That part does not change in the game. I don't care which one of these you're doing, right? As a matter of fact, there's a little room for smoking mirrors when you're on the label play game, but there is zero room for that when you're doing the indie and I'm trying to monetize myself game. You cannot ignore the first step, which is build fans and then understand those fans and then monetize, right? In different ways or build relationship in different ways. Okay? And before I forget that 30 day challenge, again, I said it at the bottom of the description. It's $1 straight forward. It's a way to build fans, focus on your fans, how exactly we're doing it, the software that we're using, et cetera. I'm sure that there's more information on the page in the description or something, but I wanna not lose my thought, but I did have to mention that cause I said I would mention it earlier. The problem is you end up never actually building a fan base when the first thing you do is I wanna go direct the fan and then the first thing you're doing is trying to sell something. You weren't making like $100 a year off of Spotify, yet somehow tomorrow, next week, you think just because you run some campaign, you're gonna sell directly to fans? Here's the trick. Cause some of y'all might be like, well, yeah, I did make some sales. Some people did buy my project. You can sell if you promote something correctly and package it correctly, you can sell something to a non-fan, to a non-casual listener. People do it with products all the time. You didn't even know a product existed and they sold it to you. You just saw it the first time you were in the store. But this isn't the point of this as an artist. You can go sell anything, right? If you went for a higher margins, if you just wanna be a digital marketer, you're not here to be a digital marketer. You're here to be an artist that actually ends up with a fan base. So you can't forget that process first because if you're just trying to sell to people, I use an example all the time and I'll probably use it 50 more times this year in videos. There's artists who are selling music on the street still to this day, selling CDs. People can't even go listen to them but they're selling those CDs. Did they make more money off of their music than you? Technically, cause their music's on the CD and they're saying, hey, check out this song. Go, go ahead and get that CD and then people are paying out of support. But what's really happening there? I had one guy who came to me as a client. He had made $50,000 selling CDs. But he didn't have a fan base, right? Why? Because people weren't playing the CDs. They were buying it off of his salesmanship. The way he packaged things, the little bit of pressure that he was willing to put on people at times, right? So the point is anybody can sell something. I know it might not sound easy if you haven't done it but building a fan base is way harder than selling something. And if you actually want a fan base and don't wanna have to work to sell your way up hill every single time starting over and you wanna get to a point where you can just drop your music or drop an announcement that you'll be someplace in a show or drop that you're gonna have a pop up and then people just sell it out. If you wanna get to that point, that starts by the fan base first mentality. Before you try to start all these groups, before you try to monetize and sell an album or sell some merch, all right? People are getting it backwards. I get the label like not being the ideal way extreme but don't go to the other and forget that we're trying to create art and fan base is off of art. Y'all are acting like labels. Just trying to monetize people at the end of the day. Like y'all are going straight to the same mentality except y'all are keeping more money and that's the problem that I'm having when I'm seeing. So if you wanna build yourself out to be free, understand your fan base. Once you understand your fan base, provide for them. And of course you wanna start from somewhere internal but you gotta be able to build your experience and understand them at the end of the day. I don't know if I actually said the site. See this is why I wanted to mention it. Earlier before I forgot, but I think I still forgot to mention the actual URL. www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash dirty days. Information on for that thing I mentioned earlier should be there. But other than that, it's Saturday. I'm recording this thing on my phone and I'm trying not to drop and wobble my phone too much but hopefully y'all got value after this video and I will be doing like more formal breakdowns of like exactly the steps that we have clients and people executing. We're not getting a chance. Like it's gonna take time because when I do it, I for real want to do this, right? But hopefully y'all understood enough nuggets to be able to take it and run with it for those y'all who are in the right place to do so. Peace.