 People say, oh, he's an industry plant, as if it's a bad thing, but I don't see a bad thing. I see perfectly executed, cheap, and clever marketing. That worked. So I'm gonna show you how we took the industry plant marketing playbook and helped an artist go from less than 30 monthly listeners to near 300,000 monthly listeners in two and a half months. Check it out. What's up, my name is Brain Man Sean and my agency has helped over 100 artists grow their fan base and get millions of streams. That's not to sell you anything, just to let you know who this information is coming from. Let's get it. Industry plant style marketing is one of the most powerful styles that you can use to market an artist because it builds a strong fan base. It's proven to do it over and over again and the beauty is you don't even have to use TikTok to do it today. We just did it in the past couple of months as much as we use TikTok and didn't use TikTok at all for this. But most artists don't take advantage of this style of marketing, not because they don't have the resources, they don't just understand the elements at play and how to use social media for it. So I'm gonna go over every single step in this video and explain the background so you can make sure you use it for yourself and get the results. So starting here, one of the most important parts about most industry plant style marketing is actually mystique. I wanna repeat that mystique, not mystery, mystique, not mystery, mystique. Why am I repeating this over and over again? Cause most artists actually do not understand the difference and they think they want mystery but they actually want mystique. I'm not gonna go deep into this video cause I have others explaining it but I am going to read you the definition and I'll let you choose for yourself. Let's get to Google. Google says the definition of mystery is something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain. That's what you're going for, right? Are you sure? Is that something that you want to be the goal for your brand? Let's just read mystique. The definition of mystique says a fascinating aura of mystery all and power surrounding someone or something. Now that's sexy. Building an aura that leads people in all of the energy around you is what you're going for. Mystery is a tool to get there, not the end game itself. Take Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle for example. Neither of them are artists obviously but they're both wildly successful public figures who happen to be comedians. And if you look at both of their brands, there's a stark difference between Kevin Hart's and Dave Chappelle who's completely separate from the field, not just for his comedy but how he moves. He has a mystique about him. And one thing that's very clear that you see in his activity is the same thing that's clear in artists whether it's rap, R&B, pop or any type of public figure who has mystique within their brand. And that is the amount that he posts on social media. If you look at his Instagram, Dave Chappelle has posted like 30 times in the last two years while Kevin Hart has posted about 30 times in the last two weeks. And this is where it gets really dangerous when you're trying to follow the industry plant marketing playbook. So to make sure there's no confusion, let me give you this example. You got Kevin Hart and you got Dave Chappelle. Both of them have their own meter of marketing activity and awareness that occurs. And both of those meters have to be completely full. But the difference between Kevin and Dave's meters are Kevin Hart has 80% of the activity coming from self-promotion, things with him in it, him talking about himself, him talking about his projects, him showing up everywhere again and again and then the remaining 20% is activity of people talking about him, other things occurring where he comes up in people's conversations. But the flip side is Dave Chappelle has 80% of the conversations occurring without him, not necessarily even seeing him at all. You're just hearing that he did this, hearing that he was at this place or having people show small pieces of snippets of things that he's doing, but they're showing up on other people's platforms while Dave on his own platform is the other 20% that rarely posts. Like he did when he dropped his 846 special, which I believe was his very first post on Instagram, period. So you know that a lot of people are watching. And if you wanna translate that into an artist category, you can look no further than Yeet. Underground rapper who had a momentum then completely took off in 2022. His Instagram page has literally one post in the last eight weeks. But if you go to the underground sound Instagram page, which is one of the dopest Instagram pages that covers underground rappers in that particular niche, you'll see they posted about him 14 times in the last eight weeks. Yeet posted once, but this other outlet posted him 14 times. And that's just one particular page. Imagine all the other pages that have posted about Yeet as well. So understand not posting too much matters in this style of marketing. However, the more important part is actually having other channels talk about you. So the activity is still 100, right? You need somebody to fulfill that 80, 20. It might be 90, 10, but you pretty much don't wanna go over that 20% of activity coming from you. But where do you find these channels and how do they differ from all the other pages on social media in general? Well, these particular channels are conversation channels. Now, what do I mean by conversation channel? Well, there's a lot of ways that you can get awareness on Instagram. There's a lot of pages and blogs and all of those types of things on Instagram and other types of social media because it's not just IG. We'll get into that in a second. I'll tell you the outlets. The difference is these channels generate, guess what? Conversation, right? It's not just posting and awareness. You can literally have an influencer post and then they get a lot of views and they even listen to the song directly. I'm not even talking about some background where you don't get streams. That's great, but that's not more for building image, right? That's more about building the song's awareness and maybe even getting streams for the songs. But a conversation channel specifically is a place that you can post that's almost forum-like in the way that people interact with the post on that page. They discuss whether they like the artist or not. They discuss if the music's good or not, if it's trash, if there's somebody better, if there's somebody up next. They have a strong opinion and they're constantly invested in music more heavily than the later adopters in music. The people who don't spend as much time and aren't as invested in the movement of music in that particular niche, right? Underground Sounds is an excellent page for this and a great example of what it looks like on Instagram, but they don't all look graphically exactly like that. Another channel beyond Instagram is Twitter. Twitter is conversations as a whole. So who can you get to post there? What publications or people actually have people that pay attention to the music that they're posting? Discord is so underrated, it's ridiculous. The entire space is conversations, right? People are going there. There's so many servers that are doing nothing but discussing music on music and making recommendations on who they like and all invested in listening to the new music for that particular artist. Discord is highly underrated and trust me, people are gonna start figuring that out over the next couple of years, but it's underrated right now. Another channel you have is Reddit. Notice that I haven't even said TikTok yet. TikTok isn't all that great for this particular effort except for TikTok creators specifically. So when you're looking for spaces and places to post about you, pursue these conversation channels and you're going to get the most invested fans and activities and ongoing image building that you won't get just from getting your music heard. But none of that matters. You can have the best conversation channels ever if you don't know how to create conversation. You can't just post there expecting it to happen naturally. You need to do it in a way that's going to have a direct impact on your brand and what you want people to remember about you. And that's when we get to narratives. See narratives are all about telling a story. You can be the story or simply be in the story but it's all about the story itself. And when it comes to this style, typically you are in the story, not necessarily always the story. And there's also another option where you really start to make an impact which is called making an impression. All right, making an impression. We're going to go through what all of these mean and what they look like separately. I'm going to break down, showing you actual posts and examples. But before I get there, this is the most important thing that you got to understand when it comes to a narrative. Part of my interruption is Brandon Shawn here and I got to take a quick second and say if you appreciate this information, if you want to see more of how to build, market and brand yourself from people who are really doing it and have some of our peoples who also are doing things in the industry, come around and drop gems or y'all, hit that subscribe button, hit that subscribe button, hit it, hit it, hit it. That's it. Back to your regular schedule program. This is the most important thing that you got to understand when it comes to a narrative. Narratives are literally a thought, a fact that you want somebody to remember. That's it, right? You can have a full-blown narrative that's complicated but when it comes to actual marketing, especially as an artist, you're just trying to get that one specific message, that one specific thought, that one specific fact to be stuck in people's mind. And by the way, the fact doesn't have to be real. That's where we get tricky, like the politics and really manipulating the media. But what do I mean by this? Well, look at the baby. As he rolls to fame, there are a lot of random things that were associated with them. Number one, there was a moment in time where he wore a diaper at South by Southwest. He was wearing nothing but that. And man, was that something wild but boy, could you never forget that you saw this man in a diaper. You might not have known that his name was the baby. It's probably kind of easy to remember. We're like, oh man, this guy was wearing a diaper and his name is the baby. But with those two things, you still might not know his music. You might not like his music. Next thing you know, you hear about this guy getting in a shootout with another guy in Walmart and killing a guy in Walmart, right? Then you find out, whoa, that's the same guy. These are two separate narratives, right? That can stick to your mind and now you're putting two and two together. The guy that was wearing a diaper is also the guy that shot somebody in Walmart. Oh wait, now you hear this song. This song is the same guy as the guy from Walmart and also the same guy who wore the diaper. Now you know three narratives. So the whole point of a narrative is just to get that one thing in people's mind as opposed to telling them your entire story because nobody can remember all that shit at once anyway. You have to get one thing in their mind and then over time, they get another fact. Over time, they get another fact. When people start to know four, five facts about you, then they start to feel like they know you and start to check for you in the future by themselves, right? So when you pop up, they're interested to at least see what's going on with you as an update. The same goes for your music, right? So when you get one song to be loved by somebody, that's great. But when you get two, three, four songs loved by somebody, now they actually know who you are. They can't not at least know who you are as an artist and now they'll be curious to at least give you another chance and learn more about you, right? So a narrative is literally that concept. You want something simple, strong, 50 cent, got shot nine times, can't forget it. Very simple, right? You could tell the whole story of what happened, da, da, da, da. Nah, people don't need to know that. It's a rapper who got shot about nine times and then you give another fact, another fact and another fact. So anybody that you know a lot about, you effectively just have collected many narratives about them. That's how you wanna think about it because if you complicated narrative, you take away its potency and it's hard to make people stick when narratives are meant to cut through the noise. And now that you understand narratives, I'm about to show you some examples of narratives that were done well by artists and how it affected them, the conversations around them and that's going to wrap up the front end of all of this when it comes to the industry plant marketing. But understand that there's also a back end and if you get caught up just trying to do the things on the front end like so many artists do without understanding the back end then you'll be wondering why are these people getting progress and I'm not? So make sure you stay to get the back end as well. So make sure you don't just watch the front end but you also watch all the way through to understand how the back end works so you can apply it in tandem whenever you're ready to use this strategy because then you'll see why it's one of the cheapest and most effective styles of marketing for an artist on the come up. All right, so here's a quick breakdown of a few narrative driven style posts so you can understand how to apply them, what they might look like and the different scenarios that they can be used for. Baby Tron has wrapped on everything imaginable. Now he's wrapped on the NFL, things on Star Wars, Jurassic Park, some SpongeBob stuff, right? And there's literally a post of a guy talking about just that, right? This is what they're sharing and they're about to play all those beats but the focus is this is about Baby Tron, right? I'll come back to this post for the second style of narrative that it relates to as well but just know this is where he is the story, right? Here, Pink Hearts is finally dropping along with four new songs out, right? He is the story. So Fago is the story right here. This is a story about his project. Now, this is a very, very, very, very weak narrative if you are not his fan base. This is why we have narratives that might create growth and then you have narratives that are focused more so for the people who already know and care about you. This one right here has the ability to grow. The fan base, because you're just curious as well, he's wrapped on everything. That's an interesting narrative, right? You don't even care who Baby Tron is. It can be anybody. They've wrapped on everything imaginable. That's interesting that you scroll to the carousel and then see and they start to play him rapping on everything. That's something that can grow your fan base. It can be shared, right? This one right here, a very direct in 2022 Yee Outstream to Beatles. Now, it's about the artist directly. So it's him focused, he is the story, but it's more of a brand positioning post because it's showing an accomplishment, right? The Beatles already have so much clout that putting yourself in the same conversation with them in any form of fashion will elevate your brand to another level. And it's a fact. Notice all these things are just simple based facts, right? Something for you to remember. Now people know this about you. Now people know that Pink Hearts is finally dropping. Now people know that Baby Tron has wrapped on literally everything imaginable. So those are a couple of different examples of how you can be addressing the artist directly as a narrative about you, but the stories can be completely different and the impact can be completely different. Now, let's go to the next level. So this post right here of E.M. Trippling where you talk about performing at Rolling Loud with 13 people, gotta start somewhere. If you don't know the story, this post has gone super viral, right? Went super viral. A lot of people are like, hey man, you know, it's just a start. You know, being encouraging about his transparency and being thankful that he has to start somewhere. But then you look a little deeper. It seems that it's very clear that this was staged, right? Now, what's important about it being staged? Only the idea of the importance of events. This team understands the importance of events and how they can be used to market yourself through these narratives. So you can create a narrative. Sometimes you don't have a narrative, go fucking create one, period. All right, you create a narrative and now they had something that was shared on social media and went viral not just from this page but other pages, right? And they even did it again, right? They had this post right here, check it out. All right, so this narrative also got shared on social media, right? That Bro forgot his name and this is still the same artist E.M. Trippling. And then that went viral. That Bro forgot his name. It became a thing. You see it has 128,000 views on Twitter, by the way. Not to mention what it did on other pages but from his own page took off like this. Now, here's the thing. We talk about it being staged. This is the same show if you really pay attention. This is the same show that the other video was done at. And if you notice, it's definitely more than 13 people out here. I ain't saying that it's a Drake concert out here but it's more than 13 people. So there's even something to saying the number 13 there's a level of consciousness when it comes to understanding the detail and importance of saying 13 versus 10 or 20 or 21, right? That was thought about not to say that 20 wouldn't have got a result. I'm not gonna even go into that rabbit hole but there's a level of thought about the number that was said and all this stuff does matter. So the biggest thing to take from this is if you don't already have a narrative you can literally go create narratives. And once you do that, you unlock that aspect of artist marketing that yo, you can actually just create a narrative then things start to work for you on a whole another level, right? You can see through the matrix because so much of this stuff is intentional and I'll get deeper into that in a second but I wanna move on from how you can focus on narratives that are centered around you to how you can then also have narratives where you happen to be a part of it. So if you look at this trippy rare hops on K.O. Banks late, right? K.O. Banks happens to be a part of this story. I know that this is his song but the bigger story right now in this particular narrative is trippy red hopping on a song. K.O. Banks happens to be a part of it, right? If you wanna get the power of this then you can move on to this right here. Yeet song was used by French presidential candidate for a campaign. The story, right? Is that there was something happening and Yeet happened to be a part of the story, right? The presidential candidate was using Yeet. Like that's crazy that he happened to be a part of it. It wasn't something that Yeet did. It was something related to Yeet. Something happening in the world that still included him which shows him to be even bigger. But if you wanna stand even clearer there's two more examples I'm gonna show you of that in these narratives. Number one, we're gonna go back to Bro For God His Name, right? This whole story, if you see how it's pushed for the most part it was that this dude was at a concert, right? And the guy forgot his name. Somebody asked him on stage like, yo, what's your name? He took a minute to say it and oh snap, he forgot his name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Well, that's Ian Tripling, right? So Ian Tripling, so the story is a guy forgetting his name. Yet at the same time, you happen to see Ian Tripling again. You're getting this additional awareness of him just by way of that marketing story. And when this type of stuff starts to happen it makes you feel even bigger and bigger that people start to create a omnipresence which brings a level of power with your brand, right? It's like when you turn the channel to multiple radio stations and then they all have the song on or you go to multiple clubs and they all have the same song on or you keep changing the channel and you see that same person being interviewed on all these different channels. Like when Kanye was everywhere for a period of time whether it was because of the comment scene they made or companies dropping them, right? Now that relates to the very last narrative category that is what I just talked about. The more subliminal impression when you start to have these small narratives of just your face being seen again and again and again and again and again. This post is not necessarily about Yeet. What artist producer duo will make the best collab album? Yeet just happens to be the person that got chose for this. It could have been anybody else, right? It could have been anybody else. But I could pay for this. If I'm marketing an artist saying, hey, create this post that has nothing to do with my artist but use their face just so people see his face again and his brand pop up again. And it doesn't feel like he's being marketed but just the fact that I put his face there gives this level of importance to his brand who he is. Look at this post as well. Old school versus new school SoundCloud rapper, right? Yeet again was one of the faces that was chosen but it could have been somebody else. There are multiple SoundCloud rappers that could have been in his place. Of course, he's one of the more prominent ones so it makes a lot of sense to choose him but his face could have not been chosen. And somebody just seeing his face again without even mentioning his name, that brand impression right there establishes power and adds to the narrative. So now I wanna end the narrative section with this. Something that brought all those things together. I don't know if you saw when the Kanye, Madonna, Antonio Brown, that's the guy on the far left and Floyd Mayweather pick came out. It was this big thing, right? Do you think people like this aren't aware of the power of this picture? Especially Madonna and Kanye. They're extremely aware of the power this picture has, the ability for it to create so much conversation so they made sure the picture was taken, they made sure that it was circulated. There's interest here. So when we talk about manufacturing events, it doesn't mean that they all decided to meet up just to take this picture but when something like this happens, oh, let's make sure we make this a moment. Let's make sure those photos get taken. Let's make sure those photos get out because they also have the power to make sure those photos don't get out if they want to as well. And here's another example of that power brand association. If you look at the one that I have most enlarged in the top right corner, right? Well, if you know who Antonio Brown is, Floyd Mayweather is, Madonna and Kanye, then you go, well, who's this girl hugging up on Kanye, right? Or you might say, who's this other girl in the bottom sitting on the ground because everybody else has so much power in the room. If you're aware of that, right? Maybe you don't know one of these people like Antonio Brown or you don't recognize Floyd but just understanding the power of these people in the room, seeing these other people make you say, well, who are they? So imagine if you saw Ian Tripoli in this room, right? In this picture, you'd be like, dang, bro, he really has something going on on a whole another level. The power to his brand that would add would be ridiculous, right? You could eat in his room, you could put anybody who's not perceived to be on this particular level in this room and the value that it adds to their brand is ridiculous. So this is what I mean in terms of the supplemental marketing and narratives when you don't necessarily say, hey, you did this, you did that or something happened at Yeet's concert but Yeet happens to be in the picture and the story could be literally about Kanye or Madonna and then Yeet just happens to be there. You're like, well, dang, what is Yeet doing in that room? Especially if you recognize them, right? So that ability, the power of that is ridiculous and you also wanna make sure something like that gets shared. So when we look at these types of pages, right? You'll go on there, right? You will make sure something like that gets shared, not just, oh, my album job, not just I had this great accomplishment or something happened at my birthday party or my event, right? Those are great but people severely underestimate the power of circulating a story that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with them yet they happen to be around. Just letting people see that creates a lot of brand clout and perceived importance in the general public. So that's the end of the front end side of industry plant marketing for this video and hopefully you're starting to understand how these quote unquote industry plants are really just executing very good marketing and branding techniques. Because when you get that and truly understand more about the backend of how this industry work, this whole idea of an industry plant actually becomes less real to you because the circulation and belief in industry plants is really a luxury that only fans can afford and journalists and bloggers can benefit from. But an actual artist, professional or manager who's doing this thing, trying to build a real fan base, they don't have the luxury of believing in Santa Claus. They have to understand that this is actually just artist marketing and everybody's trying to do it. Some people are just spelling at it. So now we move on to the backend. That includes relationships and the height machine where everything is working for you and you begin to go viral, get covered everywhere, things start to move. That's what we're about to get you to. But you first need to understand the relationship foundation. The key to both of these is good music if not great music. I know, I know, I know. So many people don't think it's that important to have good music and oh, we just got relationships. You can make this happen. If you just got money, you can make this happen but that's not really how it works. I know you wanna think that but the truth is it works like this. Think about yourself. Think of you had a friend, a good friend. Y'all have a relationship and you have some level of clout, right? Now, if your good friend comes to you and they're like, hey, yo, support my music, man. You know it, buddies. I know you sent sway back wind and the music is trash. Are you going to be able to support that? Probably not. If the music's okay, you might feel a little bit better about it but you can't put that trash behind your name. You just can't, right? Because you have a brand to maintain and you're not gonna be able to push it with a good heart. Right? You shouldn't be telling your friend, hey, well, I've known you since way back when so you need to trust me when I say it's trash. But when it's good music, like just solid music, it becomes a little bit hard. So you might say, you know what? You know, I don't fully resonate with this music but I'm going to kind of push it a little bit. But what happens when that music is amazing to you? Right? It's so good. It's so good. Next thing you know, you're like, yeah. I mean, I'm happy because I get to do a favor for my friend and I actually love this music. So I'm going to push this hard, hard. I'm going to go hard for my friend and now that relationship unlocks. Things become so much easier. That's what it's really like to work and leverage relationships in the industry where you have a better product. And that usually not just entails the music itself but also the vision that you're painting as well. People will love to support you and the relationships just makes it easier but nothing makes it as easy as good product. As a matter of fact, a lot of managers, they build their relationships by finding artists who have good product and then selling the artists to other people and being connected to those people. Now building their own network because those people love that artist and they now want to be able to be close to that artist as that artist grows. That's the power of good vision, great music and a little bit of hustle. So that's how it really looks. Again, yes, relationships are meaningful but they can't be leveraged the same if you don't have a great product. So keep that part in mind. And that's when we get into the hype machine because the hype machine, man, when you can get that to work for you, game over. So your relationships are a part of that. What if you can get people to really wanna push for you? Everybody is saying, yo, I love this song, I love this song, all of your friends are going hard for you genuinely. Not just saying, oh, I like this and then they go home and they're never listening to your song again. No, they say, I like this and they listen to it all the way home, right? Once you have that type of energy or that type of product or visual, think about when you put it in these conversation channels. That effect was why we were able to help Raul go viral in such a short period of time without getting all these influencers to post and finding these massive platforms. See what happened is you leverage these conversation channels that people who love music are looking at. And a lot of people in the industry, right? Whether it's on the indie side or the major label side are looking at these types of channels because they know they're great at curing music and everybody's looking for the next thing. Everybody's looking for good music. Like there's people who just legitimately in the industry they just love the music, right? That's why we're in the music industry. So we just wanna come across something that's dope and refreshing. So people saw his stuff in these conversation channels, creating conversations. And you know what? Next thing you know, TikTok creators found it and they're like, yo, I gotta talk about this. Next thing you know, there's other people in similar spaces like, yo, I wanna be the one who talks about this because this is what the hype machine looks like, right? Number one, the biggest thing to understand is the psychology within music is I'm going to be first. I wanna be the first to discover this artist. I definitely wanna be the first to reach out to sign this artist if it's somebody who makes sense for my label because I wanna get in their ear and build a relationship before any other label has any chance to influence them away from me. So if I can find them early, I'm gonna hop on them, show them some kind of love and respect. Maybe I'm sharing their music, maybe I'm reaching out to them and especially those people who are curators and they get cloud for sharing good music and putting people onto music quickly, they're gonna wanna put that music out there as quickly as possible. So now you have the machine working for you because everybody's like, yo, this is good music and people are already kind of talking about it in these conversation channels. So I gotta hurry up and talk about it. And then the next person's like, yo, I gotta talk about it. I'm one to this, I'm one to this. And now you have the whole machine creating new awareness for you. That's literally what happened. Using this strategy, getting him in the right places just to create conversations and then all these people with big platforms were inspired by his music, by his product and then putting it out there into the atmosphere. That's what great music does, great products, a strong vision, just a really nice aesthetic. And look, when you have that all packaged together, people will work for you. I know it's hard to believe that this type of stuff still happens and there's just this legitimate organic nature and way of getting music out there. Of course, a lot of the things I talked about was intentional, right? Creating stories, creating narratives and getting it out there for conversation. But once it's out there legitimately, the things that will happen, the needles that will move, if your product is right and you add a narrative that gives it just enough attention, you will be surprised who will discover your music. And it's not the first time we've seen something like this. It's just the latest time and it's one of the most refreshing times in an era where we know TikTok is driving so much behavior, but this did not need TikTok because good music will find a way. Those are the main elements of the industry plan marketing strategy that you need to understand if you wanna do it for yourself. I'll maybe do a breakdown even deeper later, but for now, if you wanna take advantage of something like this, you definitely need to understand how to also build the right team around you who can make these things happen to bring it all together. So if you wanna understand the right team to have in 2022 and beyond, because people are still thinking about building their music industry team the old way, which is now the wrong way, you need to watch this video right here. Check it out and build a team that's gonna make your life so much easier and get you the success you deserve.