 What's up, what's up, what's up? We are back with episode four of No Labels Necessary because I signed myself. Now I'm so excited for you to get into today's episode. We got some great topics today, but before we get into it, two quick things. Number one, we are moving to Tuesdays and Thursdays very, very soon. So start to look out for it. If it's not this week, it will be next week for sure where we're dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. So you don't have to wonder when the full episode is gonna drop and it just appears like randomly, right? It'll be on YouTube and then it's very soon all platforms. Now, on top of that, this episode in particular though, as y'all know, we've been duggin' it out, workin' through the audio. The first episodes ain't great, but they one fan, I appreciate y'all day one fan from rockin' with us. But this episode in particular, we made some improvements. We got rid of a lot of that hiss. However, there's some distortion on my mic. I just wanna give you a quick little warning. Quick little warning that parts of me talking might be a little bit louder randomly or like if I laugh, it's gonna get a little louder. But we did our best to handle that and manage it so it's not just killing your ears. Our best, we did our best, ain't perfect. And it starts like that a little bit more at the beginning, but for the most part, it evens out a little bit more. So we are aware and we appreciate all y'all feedback and we appreciate y'all thuggin' out with us. Day one fan, we appreciate y'all, we appreciate y'all, we appreciate y'all. Now let's get into today's episode. Let's get it, we wanna get into topic number one and if y'all haven't, you know, even look at the date, we fresh off of Halloween. There's a couple of things that we gotta talk about, right? As you know, or if y'all have been watching, right? The Halloween theory, right? If your brand is strong enough, you are able to have people dressed up as you on Halloween. So we wanna go over a couple of cases, but you'll be surprised at what you see, especially when we get to the second one. It'll be surprises for different reasons on each. So I would just pull up this first one. I'm like, Cory, you know, and kick it off. You wanna talk about this? Yeah, man, he's a part of the ice spice agenda, bro. We back on ice spice. The ice spice agenda? The ice spice agenda, bro. We're on the ice spice agenda. We're pushing ice spice all fall 22? And for all of the last three weeks, a month and a half? What did we say last time? She been around like two months? About two months, we on two and a half months, and now you got Lil Nas X already dressing up as ice spice on Halloween now. And what does that mean? Does that mean ice spice is super, super connected and she got Andrew, she clout or does that just mean her movement is moving so well online that you got people like this picking it up? Yeah, well, I think we got to show the second one first and then I got my thoughts. All right, all right. Let me see when we gonna bring up this second one we got Lil Nas X. Oh, by the way, you know, you wanna see the... You wanna see the comparison, then you go right there. And then, yeah, let me pull up the second one right here. So 24k go to himself, right? Lil Nas X. These are two biggest artists that we've seen doing it. Cause I was getting questions asked too about like, yo, do you think this is an influence to campaign? I'm like, I don't see too many big influence to do it. So I don't think it's that. I think it's more so a testament to how much attention to TikTok that 24k golden and Lil Nas X pays attention to because they are two pretty big TikTok advocated. You know, 24k golden was the golden boy at some point, no pun intended. And Lil Nas X has been like the new golden boy at TikTok prices like last year or whenever he got super active on it. So I think this is them as regular people. You know, Lil Nas X started there too. Like he was one of the first two top hits. Yeah, yeah. Both of them are very, very digitally savvy. Like they do pay attention to the internet and they love the internet. So I can see it actually being some organic shit. Yeah, same, bro. And especially like the last episode when we talked about how hard she's been pushing the meme culture and 24k golden does a lot in the meme culture. So it's very, you know what I'm saying? He's like, what, like 20, 21? So anybody in that age range pretty much paying attention to meme culture. I think Lil Nas X is maybe like 22, 23. Something like that. Yeah, so they're in their age range was like, oh, bro, they were probably scrolling these meme pages like the rest of us and like, oh, I know exactly who I'm about to be this year. Fucking ice pipe. And that's an easy costume, bro. What color is that? Orange, wig, a green tank top and some jeans, bro. Like, but that's like a $20 costume right there. Let's see what other pictures. Munch, munch. I mean, I think this is, this is legit. Legit, yeah, I think for real, a testament just because both of them are so, just knowing both of them, everything I've seen from them, they are like watching the internet for real, for real. And they are playful like that personality wise. Anybody else, I would have definitely thought it was an influencer campaign, but this is the value of it because you legitimately not only show that your brand is that strong, but you basically do have an influencer campaign being ran for you when people dress up for you for Halloween. Like, if they don't know who you are already, then they get the, who are you? Bam, education. If they do know who you are already, it just makes you feel omnipresence. You're everywhere, you're a party, experience a Halloween. So like, there's nothing like, man, having your brand so strong, but it doesn't take a lot because look, Icepice is a relatively new artist, right? Like just being real. So her image though was so strong. People were like, let me cop that. Yeah. That's all it is. It's not even like, she's created the biggest moment of all time or anything you would really necessarily think it would be worthy of like, you know, she's Halloween costume worthy. It's just the image has already hit culture that they know you can identify that. That's why I always remember when we first started talking about her, I was talking about that hair. Yeah, the curly hair, yeah. That hair make a difference, man. Well, which is crazy too because like her brand look, at least as of now, it's not anything like super complicated, because I think about like, like if you wanted to dress up as like Michael Jackson, you're probably gonna do the big hat, the glove, you know what I'm saying? Maybe the nice white. Like you gotta go over the top with it, bruh. They have on a $6 tank top and $8 pair of jeans and a burgundy or orange curly wig and we have merely know who it is, even though it's such a simple dress. You know what I'm saying? I think we tend to think of the costume thing as like very complex dressing. You know, I think of like, when we had to talk about Yachty and Yachty had like the red hair right, he's very kind of like out there looks. I'm like, no, bruh. Something about her image is just apparently so transcendent that you immediately know who it is. Like, man, I can't even look at curly hair and I think of Ice Spice. And I don't know who was the last curly hair representative that was going that hard. But you know what I'm saying? They've been completely erased from my mind at least because of Ice Spice. I don't know. Yeah. Because you know that they've been around. Yeah, exactly. They know that they've been around. People have been wearing curly hair. That reminds me of, you know, when Drake popularized YOLO, right? And, you know, it felt like a new trending thing. I was watching, there's this show called King of Queens or whatever. Not of the culture in that way at all. And that show probably stopped new episodes in like 2005 or something. That was a good show. That was a good show. And they said YOLO. And I was like, what? They was like, yo, it's crazy. I know it wasn't like them taking it and putting it. Because the show is already over. So like a lot of times just taking moments that already existed and being that new person to introduce it is so strong. A lot of, you know, that's Kanye's great at that. But most times artists think they have to create something so new, right? So look, she's a testament to that. Before we even leave this conversation about the Halloween costume though, I want you all to see it. I'm gonna go back a little bit, actually. Hello, and welcome to episode four of our series, Kenneth Kirkland, where we try to determine the difference between name brand alcohol and Kirkland. All right, they have this entire series. This band, they're called Never Ending Fall. Shout out to y'all. Kind of a country-ish vibe. Excuse me, like there's more than that, but that's, you know, I'm still pretty service-level with them so far. But they already... Someone who did them as a Halloween costume, right? That series became popular that I just showed, like them playing with Kirkland. I know they got some probably brand sponsorships from Kirkland right now. At this point, I hope so. I hope so, right? And now, fighting off, y'all can't read this text. Fighting off all the men on Halloween with my sexy, Kenneth Kirkland costume, right? So they've made an impact. Meme culture, again, because this is meme culture. That's all it is. That's all it is. And let me see. I don't know how frequently they do it. They do it pretty frequently, but they only have 345,000 followers. Yeah, I already got somebody dressing up. Already got somebody now, you know. Again, like I said, I might be a little ignorant. So let me see what their Spotify listenership, just to give y'all context on real time because I don't even know what it is, honestly. Ending. Come on, there we go. 33,000 monthly listeners. That's crazy. 300,000 TikTok followers. And you got people dressing up as you on Halloween, not just because you have so many fans and everybody knows you, but they have that distinct series that stood out. That's all you have to do. Do something distinct and you just have to make that thing click and bam, there it is. Yeah, and I think it's cool too because when we think of the whole Halloween costume thing, you automatically go to like bigger artists. But I mean, they're probably the smallest artists that I've seen that's having fans do that, but I saw some of my underground rappers like Ken Carson, that's his dude name, like destroy lonely, like Yeet has some fans, you know what I'm saying? Like dressing up as him for Halloween. So it's really one of those things where like, hey, like if you, of course, have an image that's big enough that it appeals to pop culture, yeah, of course, that's what you're gonna get the biggest pop. But even in these micro communities, because I guarantee you she walked down the street and 90% of people probably know who she was. But the 10% that did know, probably lost it. But like, oh, shit, you, you the people, Ken and Kirkman, right? Yeah, exactly. It becomes like this inside joke. It's almost like an inside flex too, inside of the community, you know what I'm saying? It's like, I like them, why aren't you dressed up? Because like they wouldn't, they're surprised that you even thought about it almost. Like that's so creative because I'm thinking about all these basic costumes and basic people. Now you're this option. So yeah, I get that point. I get that point. Again, that's inspiration. If you do something creative and you make a mark, you don't even have to have a big fan base. Like I honestly did not know they only had 33,000. Yeah, I don't think that's serious. I'm popping for too long. Maybe like a two, three months or so. I remember Liam first of all, I mean, maybe like two months ago. Shout out to Liam for throwing this on the pod, man. All right, so transition. I gotta play this clip, bro. You send it, send it over. Before we get into rollouts, I should have said, we're going to get pretty heavy in the rollouts today. A couple of interesting things going on in the marketplace. But there's this clip that I'll just play it. I'll just play it. Trinidad James on Drink Chimps. Oh no, I got him TikTok muted. Hold up, let me run it back. Let me run it back. Down here. You know, I got charged 40,000 in wardrobe for their wardrobe, referring to GZ, TIP, and 2 Chainz. And if you go back to 2013, you go look at Doggo everything remixed, look and see what T.I. wore. Look and see what GZ wore. GZ had a Dickey suit and T.I. had on Hustle Game. His old brand, finessed me out of my old 40 bands. You know what I'm saying? I'm my label budget. I did this a few years ago. You know what I'm saying? Like I paid 40, I had to pay 40 bands for that. I'm a stylist dog before I'm a dog. That burnt my soul, that burnt my soul. Like I had to perform that. But you didn't pay, you didn't pay for the verses? No. Oh, okay. But they already jumped on you. Yo, he said that burn, he sold, bruh. That's just buddy. That's just funny. My little Trinidad James, bruh. Such a funny guy. Such a funny guy. That, yo. That's the game. That's the game. That's the game. And that was a growing pain he had to go through as a new one. Cause I'll go, everything was, yeah, his first, that was his breakout song, right? Yeah, he didn't know where he was going to go. I was out of it. But I know that especially hurt. Like you said, he's a stylist. I used to go to a shop at a store he used to work at. Oh, okay. Or whatever. And I didn't know he was a stylist, but you know, he was always dressed like, you know, like that, like that, basically. I'm gonna click. He was less money, you know what I mean? He was always dressed like that. So I know he's really looking at it like, bro, I did shit though. I know how much that shit cost. But we sell your clothing brand. I know exactly how much it cost. Not much of a whole outfit is. Right, so yeah, I know that had to hurt, but you know, that's the breakdown for those who don't get it, right? You know, charging the label. Yeah, especially too, when you look at like, man, you ain't paying for it. So of course I'm not gonna hit your label for it. I actually have a story that goes with it. Like I was, this was back when I was like interning for this publicist. And I remember at the time we had this client there just got a Juicy J feature. And so I just remember the guy was like, yeah, I wanted for the video. And I'm talking to my mentor, he's like, I don't know shit. So I'm like, bro, how much do you know Juicy J charge for like this feature? He's like, well, it's only 15K for the feature. I'm like, damn, that's not bad. You know what I'm saying? That's, to me, I felt like it was kind of like low for a Juicy J. And then he was like, however, we wanted for the video. So it's like another like 10 to 15K for his video appearance, which I'm like, okay, fair. It's like an appearance for you. And he requires at least a $10,000 wardrobe budget. And that's when I first, cause I never heard that before. I was like, man, so artists can make other artists pay for the clothes they wear in the video. And then my mentor was like, yeah, they got enough leverage and they're big enough. He's like, because it's like, one, I have an image I have to maintain. So I'm not about to, you know, have my image be turns because you ain't got the budget to make sure I look nice and I look a certain way. And then two, which kind of broke their four four off me with artist. Do you think like rappers, especially like, man, doesn't he already have like nice ass clothes? And you know, probably like chains and all this shit that he could just pull up in. And then I'm thinking like, man, they probably don't want to fuck up their clothes. They probably looking like, I'm not about to be all this video shoot with you in the desert or some shit. And my, you know, my $2,000 shirt that I paid for, you gon' pay for this shirt that's gonna get messed up in the video shoot. Make this a part of your production budget. And leave it like that. And I've seen different iterations of that. I have artists that, well, I know artists now that do it even at smaller levels. Like I get it a hundred percent. Who is the artist? I don't remember his name. He's like this, he was like a country artist. Like if you found a country artist with it, yes. Bra. Yes. I think I might have mentioned this to me before. Yes. That guy. I remember when I lived over like in the Viney's area, I saw a billboard and it was Juicy J and a country artist. You know, like a black, well, the country artist, black supreme leather jacket that was hot at the time. Yeah, that guy, that guy in that video. That was, I was just like, I ain't seen Juicy in a minute, didn't see him with a country artist. The whole thing looked off, but so I know exactly what you're talking about. It's funny, so there's two things, right? Like you said, one, you got the labels. I mean, like a lot of artists are kind of looking at like, yo, well, I'm charging a label. I'm not really charging you, even though they know it is charging you at the end of the day. But many of them justify it as if that's what they're doing. Cause I mean, I've seen artists almost like knowingly do that to each other where they're kind of like, cool about it. I even think I remember Future had a situation like this. I don't know, it was something like somebody didn't charge somebody. Matt Stein was talking about how she got Future on her, what got Future for her album. And I remember DJ Akademis made the point that like, it's Megan Future. She probably was like, you know, we just gonna tax the label cause it's Carl Sherry money, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, that one was different though. Cause it really does like, I don't know my label anyway. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Which, but yeah, artists don't mess with their label. They look at it that way. On the other end, like you said, maintain an image. I don't know if you remember or thought about this. Remember we had a situation, a song that we blew up. Music video is about to go crazy. We're about to drop the music video and then that music video is gonna take everything to a whole another level. However, first of all, it took a while for the music video to get recorded. When the music video was recorded, it was time to come out. The artist says, I don't like how it's dressed. I don't like the way I look. We need to reshoot this thing because the politics of it. And see, this is what I try to explain to people. Everybody just think, oh man, these people had a lot of money. It was so, it's so easy to blow a song up. When you experience all the back end nuances that slow some shit down, it's like, it's so much like, all right, songs already popping. So it's not even keeping it from popping on level one. That one had about four more notches to go. Yeah, at least. Right, for real. Yeah, at least. But music video doesn't come out. All right, now they wanna reshoot because she ain't, well, the person didn't like how they were dressed. Right? And so then basically music video never comes out. Like managers kind of go head to head. Well, actually the manager and the record label of one of the artists, go head to head and things just kind of sour. So it's kind of like, well, we just gotta let it rock as it is. The music video and the rest of the artist support never comes. And that was kind of, well. We are two years later wondering what could have been. What could have been, what could have been? We were gonna have two that year on that level. Yeah. Oh man. That was the first one too. Ground up. Yeah, that would have been crazy. Yeah, exactly. Ground up, zero too. Yeah, that was like five months in business at that point. That would have been crazy, entry points to the game. I mean, it was, but it would have been such a crazy entry point to the game. Facts, facts. Cause that was, you know, it should be real with y'all, right? There's a lot of different campaigns and sometimes you work more, sometimes you work less, right? You got one aspect of it and then sometimes you're working a whole campaign. We were the only ones touching that thing. Yeah. Period. Yeah. Going crazy. Nobody could have taken credit. Nobody ate. Cause bro, a lot of y'all be taking credit. Especially when they did label labels Oh man, that's music marketers out there. Man, when you dealing with some people at labels, just know that they're going to take some credit for some of the things that's going on. Yeah. Cause their job depends on, they're trying to get the promotion. I get it. I can't even be mad at it. Yeah. But that's why you got to record the calls and get a government name. So if it ever got to come up, you can prove it. They get them invoices. Are you telling me I didn't work with Curtis? People don't even know his name is Curtis. How do I know that? How do I know, bro? Why do I have his high school email on the invoice? I got his EIN and his social book. Duh. Duh. So you know, just protect yourself. Protect yourself out here. Just know that you put in the work you put in. But you know, that's part of the game on a label side. They got to get the promotion and they got to, whenever hit rock happens, not only is money being made for that artist, it's a lot of promotions and shifting that's going on in the industry on the back of that artist, just to be real with y'all, music marketers and people who are professionals who ain't got to that side of things. And artists, the beauty on your side is when things open up, that window, everybody is rallying around you because they trying to, they trying to cat, yeah cat as much as they can. I'll leave it at that. And everybody will pay for what you need. Cause the last point with this, the last point I got with this is that it also explains how artists burn through that budget. You know, you'll kind of break down musical things. You're like, man, there's no way studio time costs that much. There's no way, whatever, whatever costs that much. And it's like, man, he could have got charged 40,000 dollars for, wardrobe, for a video fan. That's what the budget went. That was crazy, it was, it was crazy. Yeah, I wonder, he said it like, he didn't know in real time either. It's like you found out after the video. Yeah. Yeah, so. Probably want to label him with the bill. Like, oh, you always, 200 cash is my life, 200 cash, 40K for the wardrobe. Hey, that's that. Oh yeah, we handle it. No, what does y'all handle, bro? They're like tips, say he good, GZ said they good, but why are they good? Does y'all pay for anything I need to? Let me see the itemizations before they travel. We raised their good time, cause we might not be able to do this for real. And I also feel him too. He said I gave him free verses. Like at that time, Tia and GZ verses probably way more than 40K, or at least around that, you know what I'm saying? Facts. Yeah. Facts. And I can respect the freemium model. Yeah. You get the verse for free, and then we charge you in other ways, bro. Just like these apps out here. Hey, man, I love it. I love it. Get it how you live. Get it how you live, artist. Just know that, you know, money's coming out of different ways. Let's get into these rollouts though. Yeah. So many of them. So many of them happening lately. There's two main ones we want to get into. Well, other things as well. But this COB, not COB, good lord. Her loss. Yeah, her loss. Rollout. You had some things in particular, because you've been watching that one more closely. I didn't realize how much has happened. So kind of break down some of the things you're seeing with that one. Yeah, man. So her loss is the Drake and 21 Savage collab album. I mean, the rollout for it really started probably, as I'm making this, maybe like two, three weeks ago, there was like a tweet that went out. There was like some, I can't remember if it was DJ Akademi, some other publication was like, hey, there's a rumor that Drake and 21 Savage are putting the project out. I think Drake or 21 one of them put like the cap emoji. Best of life. Nah, he lying, right? So you think the rumor was paid for? Yeah, a hundred percent. You think the rumor was paid for? Yes, bro. It was a rumor, it was a leak. They said it's cap. Nah, I don't believe that. We have to think about one, how much artists like 21 Savage and Drake don't leave the house or don't even talk as much. You know what I'm saying? So like, I don't just see them being the type of people moving around just telling everybody that's happening. Their team at this point are very high level teams. So they're probably not doing it. You know what I'm saying? Drake, Drake, 21, 21. There's no way like, I'm not gonna say there's a way, but I don't think any engineer would risk that. So the only thing I could tell is it was like, oh, this is promotion. You know what I'm saying? And it was such a random, such a random piece of information that didn't seem too far out there. You know what I'm saying? So I was like, I can see that. I can see Drake on 21 Savage doing a project together. So now I believe it. Like it's definitely coming. They've been like besties for the last like two years. You know what I'm saying? Hanging out, showing up together. So like when I saw it, I was like, okay, at the time I didn't think it was a part of the world. I just was like, okay, you know, 21 Savage, Cap, maybe it's Cap. You know what I'm saying? At that point you just gotta go by what the artist say. I think a few days later there was an official announcement of it. And they dropped like a promo video for it or something like that. And I was like, oh shit. There it is. There it is, bro. He wasn't lying. Now I'm thinking this is definitely the start of the rollout. So it was a religion puzzle come out, I think last Friday. But last Friday had a lot of releases. They were like Rihanna, you know, dropped like her first song in like forever. It was like a Chloe Bailey project that came out. There was a bunch of stuff that came out around that time. And so they got pushed back. They delayed it. They said it had something to do with, I think like 40 getting sick and you know, stuff not getting mixed. So I'm like, I don't believe that, man. I don't believe that one. Yeah, bro, y'all saw that Rihanna sing about the drop. But still, or you know, maybe they planned for something like that and that was just another part of the rollout. They wanted to push it out and keep it going up. So then we get into this week, which is when all of the fast stuff really started. For every one. So I think, I don't remember which one came first, but the two biggest things from the rollout was one edit of a fake Howard Stern interview that's funny as hell, like you haven't seen it yet. I love when 21 Savage does like personality stuff. Cause you don't, you know, he's great at being showing his personality in a genre. Well, a lot of those artists don't typically show that personality. And so they're very like one dimensional in their personality. Right. So they do the fake Howard Stern interview. And then they do like a fake Tiny Desk concert. I ain't seen that one. Yeah, bro. So they do like a fake Tiny Desk concert. Which me personally, man, if you pull the video up you'll see brother set looks like the real set. I personally, if I was Tiny Desk, I'm like, man, y'all could just do a real Tiny Desk concert. We could have let you make it commuted. And we could have made this work. Why y'all had to go, you know what I'm saying? Fake, fake it to that degree. Well, you see where is it? I don't got it. Is it this? Yeah, right there. Oh, yeah. Look at it, bro. It looks just like it. Yeah, they were wrong for that. Like just like it, brother. How come they can't use the real set up? So they do the fake Tiny Desk concert. They got a bunch of content flowing out. They tease the track artist or the track, the cover art for it. And the cover art is this popular model named Suki. So at first I thought she was a big TikToker, but she's like a pretty well-known model. So, you know, a little bit of influence of marketing, right? Olive is really influence of marketing to a degree. A little bit of that. Going back to like some super local-ish stuff. I remember, I think they maybe had a billboard out here or something. I know 21 Savage had like his birthday party like a week or two ago. Pretty sure there was some promotion around that. Right, so they had the machine kind of building up to it to the whole point. Oh yeah, that's her right there, Suki. And so the, however you choose to look at it, wherever your moral compass points, but the piece that let resistance for it was the controversy that's built around because of the line that Drake has towards Megastarion. And so I hate you about it. And I was looking at it and I was like, man, that made me think, bro, there's three Cs to a good rollout. Talk about it. Three Cs, bro. Creativity, consistency, then controversy. Got him. If you were able to hit all three of those points in a really like good way, way that makes sense to your culture and what their paying attention to, you probably will have a successful rollout. I think the controversy part is maybe like a double actually, like you don't have to do it. But if you add it on top, then there's an Emmy for it, it's gonna hit. Seven three again. Creativity, consistency, controversy. I'd say if it's not controversy, controversy per se, it needs to be conversation. Okay, yeah. All right, just cause, you know, people misconstrued controversy that having to be something so wrong, you know, problematic and things like that. So if you're not comfortable with controversy in your career, conversation, create some conversation around something. That has nothing that has something to do with the music in it. Also it creates a different conversation, right? Cause like his, his line with the Meg, things started with, oh, he's dissing Meg. It's music conversation, right? We're talking about the song. And it's now in the, at this point, like 14 hours that the album has been out, has evolved back into like a domestic abuse conversation. People, you know, making fun of like domestic abuse victims and things like that. So it's evolved from a music conversation to a much broader conversation. See, I've been off the internet a bit lately. So tell me about this domestic abuse conversation. What do you mean it involves into that? And why as a relation to this album? Yeah, cause like Meg made some tweets that was just like, and I'm kind of like paraphrasing, but she was basically saying something like, your favorite rappers come out and make fun of a woman, like a woman that got shot by a man and, you know what I'm saying, something, something y'all kids might, that was the gist of it. What? That shit ain't fair. Wait, hold up. Did they make fun of her because she got shot or something around that incident or? Yeah, what, did you hit a line? No, I didn't. I told you I've been off the internet. Oh yeah, you've been off the internet. I legit been off, right? I haven't checked it all yet. I don't know the exact line cause I haven't gotten to that part of the album yet. You know, small disclaimer, but it's something like, something about the style. Pretty much he says that Tori Lane didn't really shoot her. It's basically what he says in the song. He's basically like, yo, she lying. You know what I'm saying? But he makes like a little double triple and time draw for it. Let's, let's see exactly what went down. Oh yeah, there it is. This bitch lying about getting shot, but she's still a stallion shorty. So she graduated, she ain't earning enough, or learning enough, play your album, try it one, okay, I heard enough. But that's the first line on the guy. I'm this bitch lying about getting shot, but she's still a stallion. Very, very, very, very good. Dang. Yeah, exactly. That's what you missed on the internet. Sheesh, sheesh. It evolved from, oh, Drake this Meg, to, oh, Drake is making fun of abuse victims. And that's now the bigger conversation that man had on like Twitter and the internet in general. So the conversation will start out musically and then built out to more like social issues, you know what I'm saying? Dang, Drake didn't see that one coming. You didn't see that one coming, right? That next step, that slip door, he was walking in line, nah, nah, cause I know he probably wouldn't, yeah. Nah, you gotta know him in, I think Tory Lane's a friend, so. I mean, look, I get the, I get addressing a line and saying that and thinking it's gonna, you know, create a little something, but the slipping to making fun of domestic abuse. Oh yeah, yeah. That twist. Yeah, he didn't see that coming. Nah, he wasn't trying to play with that. Yeah, but it's created a conversation. It's definitely done that. Conversation. I mean, I know we're gonna get into it, but that was even something similar with like the title of Swift thing, like there was a conversation that started around her. Well, she had her controversy slash conversation, C moment, you know what I'm saying? Let's get straight into it. What was hers again? So she has this video that she dropped. I don't remember exactly which video it is cause I'm not a Swiftie, you know what I'm saying? But in the video, she like steps on the scale and the scale said like that. And so it's her talking about her body positivity issues, things like that. And the internet just took it and ran with it. Oh yeah, her community loves that type of stuff. They definitely love that type of stuff. But it's been pretty intense on both sides. Like people talking about, you know, she's fat shaming, she's, you know, contributing to the, what's the word I'm looking for? The anxiety and stress that people in that community might be feeling. People on the other side of it seem like, no, like she's just talking about her experiences with her weight, how she feels about it. She's not making fun of the community. So, but it's created the conversation of, hey, it is Tyler Swift fat shaming. Is she fat shaming because she thought she was fat? Yeah. And the video is like, I mean, when she steps on the scale just says fat, but the way it's kind of been interpreted like, this is how she's talking more about like her self esteem issues and like how she felt about her body and things. And people are like, yo, why is it bad that when you look at the scale, it says fat, right? And now they're taking it to the comments, I think of like, are you insinuating that fat is bad because you in this video feel bad about the scale saying fat, you know what I'm saying? And so that's why I said the conversation evolved to, yo, Tyler Swift is fat shaming. And then now it's both sides of it, either defending her very intensely or going at her very intensely. This is what I love about today, man. It's so easy to create conversation, dawg. Cause Pete, just when you have that scale especially, somebody gonna get mad. Cause that makes no sense, man. Somebody gonna get upset, bro. You can't talk about your own experience. People always are gonna project their insecurities and feel like you calling them out one way or another. Yes, that is interesting. Yeah, but it's, that is interesting. But even Tyler Swift gotta have the controversy, bro. And I don't, going back to what you said about Drake, I don't think she's planned for it. Like she probably, yeah. They always gonna take it that way you didn't mean to. That's just the nature of it. Just like politics, bro. They can flip every single thing into something negative and you think you're good. Nah, nah. Not if it doesn't fit my agenda, but Taylor has been known for this and it's interesting because this particular project, it wasn't as heavy leaning thematically and narrative wise in terms of being about an ex and using the story of who she's dating. That was a huge conversation controversy type thing that she would do track after track after track. And that was like the story that you put around Taylor. But now this one, everything that I've gathered has been like, like confidence. I'm renewed. I'm renewed, right? I'm renewed. I got baptized. She entered her bad bitch there, bro? No, sex. That's the energy she's giving it. And she's giving it. It's like, I'm being the bad bitch that I can be with her brand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He's like, it's not all the way, but I'm trying to be a little bit more dark, you know? And she's trying to create wiggle room and you can go hard with that and Miley Cyrus it. I'm just gonna break the mold and give myself wiggle room or you can play it safe and conservative, which is more Beyonce and Taylor Swift and they evolve slowly over time creating that wiggle room. So, you know, you could go either route and that's what I always say. When people stress so much about their brand and getting caught in a box, it was like, if you know what you're doing, you can always get out the box. You can give it some time, right? But you can just, in that scenario alone, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, oh, we break the mold quickly. Good girl going bad, literally with Rihanna, Miley Cyrus just did it and showed it. But then you got Taylor and Beyonce, right? Which is funny, you got those two sides of the fence, but still they both have both characters, right? And you do it over time. So, now it's interesting what Taylor's doing though because she breaking records. Yeah, right. And I think too what the brand thing is interesting is like, I don't know, I always look at like, when you're a big artist and you have that much scale, a rebrand is just like having different conversations with your audience and showing different parts of your life for your lifestyle. So, it's like, hey, maybe I was very family oriented and super clean and all you ever saw from me was me at my niece's birthday. And you know what I'm saying, me at, you know, I don't know, at the family cookout. Now I want to be this super wild person and you see me at the clubs, at the parties, hang out with certain celebrities. At the time when they were the nice clean family person, they probably were also doing the party club things, right? But now it's, hey, I'm going to show you this. I'm going to talk about things in a different light and that's going to slowly over time make you see me in a different way. That to me is all the rebrand is. I know it's deeper than that because of the things you have to kind of like execute things a certain way. But that's really what it is. Like, hey, I am now a different person and I want to talk about and show you different things. That's all rebrand is me. Yeah, I can see that. That's, yeah, just showing different parts to yourself. And that goes back to artists stressing out about showing too much of themselves at the beginning and not realizing, yeah, just take your time and you can show a different part of yourself because that's going to be a part of your rebrand or reintroduction to expand how people see you. But nobody can catch it all at once anyway. So why try? Yeah. Yeah. And then, well, let me pull this up. So this is the headline. Was Taylor Swift wrong to use the word fact in a video? This woman says, that's how I used to feel whenever I weighed this myself. So I'm sure she's, whether it's sympathizing with Taylor. On the other side, you got to look at these numbers that Taylor's hidden. Which bring it all, bring it full circle before we even get into that. Cause they, Taylor broke, what, 50, 11 records. I think, I think officially likes, officially 73, they said, whether it was iTunes. She was literally every single song on the top 10. I think she was the first person to do that, not just first woman. Yeah. I think Drake was the last person here. Cause you're like five, what was I'm saying? That's something. But where, where can I find this? Well, you know what I'm looking for. There we go. Bam. So y'all, y'all actually can't see this, but if you go to Spotify, it actually says 2022 Taylor Swift at the bottom of Midnights, well the Midnights album. Now, why is that relevant? This is what the record label imprint is usually showing right here. That's what you usually see. Record label, maybe distributor or just something like that, right? Taylor is indie y'all. All right, she for real indie. It's probably like Bad Bunny indie. She might be sharing pieces of her company with people at the level she is, but she's indie. She owns her record label. She owns her company. Just like Bad Bunny owns part of a, what is it, Riser? It started with R. Yeah, I'm in that label. Yeah, whatever the label is. Like Taylor's killing it. She's killing it. And when she re-released her albums and basically instead of taking those albums down, let me see if I can find it. She just put like Taylor edition in parentheses. So the fans know, let me go stream this one instead of the other one. Yeah, which I do. She's gaming the system crazy. But she really, you know artists is big and has power when they make a move and then the whole energy shifts around it within like 72 hours. Cause that's what happened with that. Like it was like within two days, the industry as a whole like Billboard, all these different people had rules about how you can do that now. And it's like, they have that level of, oh no, hell no, we gotta get ahead of that. She's about to spark a revolution. Just like that conversation with the bundles. Yeah. Remember, I think you had shared one of those videos too where it's like, all right, she's still doing bundles, but the bundles had to be around the music. So they got ready like that, the music bundles and stuff like that. Well, no, they didn't get rid of it. Now the rules forwarded like the everything that's in the bundle has to be for sale separately on the website. So you got to be able to buy everything individually. And it has to all ship out the week of release for it to count for it. Yes, that's what it is. That's what it is. So like you got to have the infrastructures even make that happen. The play the money, now you got to have the money to even better play the bundle game. To actually play the bundle game, which is different because now you have to prepare for that. Yeah. Then you have to be able to have to have the money to be able to provide all these things. So you put yourself at risk having all this inventory on hand and not necessarily being able to get off the merch. Or if you get off it, it's not necessarily for the first week, which is not hitting those metrics you want. So because basically build board was trying to prevent people from selling merch, right? Week one, and then not actually shipping it because they really can't do it. So it's like, you just finesse them getting a little pre-sale and you still waiting for your big baller brand shoes five years later. It's like basically the game was really getting finesse with pre-orders like especially like in rap, rap, bro. All that they were killing it with like the different brand collaborations. Like X rapper might do a t-shirt drop with V loan or something to promote the album. And like you said, that shit ain't coming out for three months but they bought that today. And so I understand why the rule change got made but like looking at the title switch situation even the new rules is like, man they really have, if you got to like really believe it that you're going to sell enough that it's even worth it for you to attempt that strategy. Cause imagine like titles with, I don't know buying up a warehouse of like half a million pieces and they only sell like $20,000 or something. That would hurt, you know? Oh yeah. And if you're a small artist and you thinking like, oh man I'm going to do at least 10K this week and you only sell 200 t-shirts like that should hurt. You know what I'm saying? Cause you have to pre-buying or to even be able to play the game. So now you going to think long and hard before you decide, do I want to try? This merch strategy is the potential outcome of it even worth me attempting to do with the game. It would I be much better off still attempting maybe my pre-order strategy or regular merch selling strategy but there's a lot lower overhead and a lot less risk involved with it now because I'm not trying to play that game anyway. So it's like, I think it's going to make artists think real hard about they even want to gain the system. We only going to probably see major label artists and artists with a lot of money really gaming cause it's not worth it for 99% of the other artists. Yeah I think that's a good way to look at it cause it's not eliminating any game it's increasing the cost of the game. You know, the price of entry. So fewer people going to play it, fewer people going to take the risk and the people who do it going to do away less often. So that makes a lot of sense. And then you look at the way Taylor did it from a standpoint of all these incentives, right? It's like, oh I got a couple of songs on this vinyl that aren't on Spotify. Got some songs on Spotify that aren't on the vinyl. And I think she had maybe one other medium that she also provided throughout. Oh, oh also she had the show tickets. Yeah. Got, either they got pre, no they didn't even get the ability to buy show tickets. I don't think they got the ability to buy them early. Yeah. Cause all this stuff she did pre rollout was pointing towards vinyl sale. Like she was going hard for the vinyl sale. Yeah. And probably intense passion of this. You said what? Why do you think vinyl sales was a focus to start off? I think in anticipation of this, like they, you know, cause going back to what we just said, like if you're a artist that knows you have the capacity and resources to play the game, like you're going to try to understand like, what do I have to do to truly maximize my shot at winning this part of the game? But we got to sell a bunch of products and make sure they can move out first week. Oh cool. Yeah, let's only focus on selling product then. Like let's, we don't care about pre save links, right? We don't care about early downloads and nothing like that. We want people to buy this product that is going to help me shoot to the top. And this is the thing. You want to focus on the metric that makes the most sense. That's going to have the biggest impact. And I feel like a lot of people get caught up in their rollouts, trying to do too many things. It doesn't mean you're going to have a simple rollout where there's only one thing going on. Cause a lot of the best rollouts have multiple things going on. But you still got to find out which one is the big domino, right? If all those fails, if this one works, I'm going to get at least 70% of this that I want out of it. And for her, like you said, that's the vinyls. Because also, yeah, I think about it like streaming, the streams are going to happen, right? So don't just focus on that. Like you said, pre save. And she don't focus streaming. And she doesn't mess with streaming. She doesn't like streaming, yeah. She doesn't like streaming, right? For a variety of reasons. The money, the control, all that, the data, all that stuff. But so it's like, where can I focus? And how can I make this a fan experience? She's one of the best at making like fan experiences. Even that you might not check her music or whatever. But like, if you track how she interacts with her fans and how hard they go for it. Taylor's probably, she's definitely top 10 right now. And I'm just saying top 10 cause I don't want to say number two. I don't want to be like number one and then start some conversations. But she's in the top 10 for sure. I can say that comfortably. She's damn near her own league, bro. Is in her own league, for real, for real. It's not, you know, we got Bad Bunny. She beat Drake, bro. Drake, Bad Bunny, the weekend, Adele, they're the only ones that really get close, bro. And they're not even, I don't think close. That's the fact, cause what they said, she got over a million sales in a week, which it was like, what, 1.5 or 1.7 this time around? Yeah, someone there, yeah. And she's the first person to do that since her? Yeah. Yeah, and it was like, I think it was the Beatles had the first however many top billboards, you know, multiple billboards. And then I don't remember if it was her and then Drake and then her again, or like her and Andrew, but like, she just keeps consistently coming up in these very high level of achievement, you know what I'm saying? And these high level of achievements and conversations is like, it's not many artists like doing that consistently. So I've personally earned a lot of respect for Taylor Swift over the years because of that. Cause it's like, you know, you say what you want about her music, but she be out here trailblazing for the industry, bro, like some real shit. Her moves, bro. You gotta watch her moves, man. Yeah. And bro, I've been so deep into the Taylor Swift spear cause that document I sent you, bro, like it's crazy. I'll be saying Taylor Swift in my sleep. Dreaming about her rollout and her numbers, bro. It's crazy. Yeah, we got the whole content breakdown. Well, we gotta put that document out somewhere. Not yet. I got to finish it, but, you know. All right. Oh man. So we also, I'm not sure, I know you haven't seen this yet, but this rollout conversation bringing me to another, another little song. At least you don't think you've seen it, but two, no, I don't even wanna say that. Crystals. You know, Crystals the restaurant? Yeah. You ain't seen their ad? No. Yeah, they're coming up, man. They're Britney renner. I think that is Britney renner, do you? Do you think that's Britney renner? Damn show of the log. Yeah, check this shit out, bro. Attention, a 10 is speaking. These three new Crystal side chicks are thicker, juicier, and crispier than ever. Keep your main thing if you want. You just wanna be your side chick. Bro, I didn't know where that was going. Bro. I didn't know where that was going. Bro, that is so fucking genius. Bro. That's so genius, bro. Who at the Crystals marketing team thought to put that together? Bro, that's what I wanna know. I am glad you asked that. Check this out, man. Check this out. Crystals, Britney, renner, commercial. All right, let's see if they say it without, bam. Two chains and Crystals launched side chick campaign with Britney renner. Two chains. Hey, he got the Saucy ad division. He did, bro. He had division. That's a damn genius ad idea. I can't even lie. Like, I don't know if I would have came up with that. Bro, I think I got it as like a YouTube B-roll ad or something, bro. That shit threw me off, man. Because then I was like, you know, I looked. I was like, who is that? It was an ocean. It was like, just Britney renner. Ah, she get me every time. I might go to Crystals out there leaving me. I ain't gonna lie to you. I think I saw one on the whale bed. Yo, it's a lot of things that I got from this man. One, it's beautiful to see artists take their creativity and apply it in corporate sphere, right? Because that's a very real path and there's so many ways to get the money these days. If you show creativity to artists and we have more examples of this, we actually need to break this down at some point. But when you build out your career, if you go about it in a way that's truly creative, truly thoughtful, then you're basically creating a portfolio, right? Like people see a vision of ability to execute it. The way you understand aesthetics, the way you are to talk to a certain audience, they respect that. You see how that translated for somebody like Pharrell and Kanye versus an artist that you're just hacking TikTok and hacking some of these playlists or just other types of marketing to get the streams. And that's great, because that's not necessarily every artist. Every artist, it doesn't necessarily have a true creative directive visual, a vision. Tyler, the creator is somebody who could do something like that, right? Yeah, 100%. A lot of artists don't necessarily have and you are just more from a music standpoint. And that's great too, but the ones who are truly, truly, like you're creative and that's your bag and I know shit is more expensive to do that way to production value, but the longterm is you can do stuff like this and people respect you for it. Yeah, that's a good point. I never thought about like the creative assets being the artist way of building up a portfolio. I never, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense because music, you don't think about things like a portfolio or resume, unless you're like on the back end trying to get a job. But that's exactly what it is. Cause they probably like, oh, with two chains has, you know, the billboard, was it billboard? No, the GQ show that he did, right? He got two chains that was really creative and amazing videos. He got a lot of videos of crazy pink trap house stuff. Yeah, that stuff. Yeah, I forgot that was a crazy rollout. Yeah, he has a crazy portfolio, but I never thought about that. Exactly. And like the testament of what two chains has done creatively or had done around his brand creatively, even though it was through collaborations is the fact that when you found out that was two chains, you weren't completely like surprised. Yeah. You know what I mean? It actually made it make sense. It made it make sense, right? So it's an interesting thing. And on the other side, right? You got to look at this Brittany and Renner situation and compare it with, I think Meg did something with like Popeyes and Sue did something with maybe McDonald's, we know Travis did McDonald's thing. So there's these opportunities to use your cultural, like savvy or cultural currency to monetize in ways that weren't available before because all these brands are understanding the culture is valuable more and more. So they're like, how can we get in? And they're not being, they're being shameless about it. Back in the day, you know, in the 90s still, and you know, the Tommy Hill figures, all, like a lot of these brands, they became aware, some of them came aware, but they weren't truly acknowledging it. Now that stuff like this, they're shamelessly chasing it down. Like how can we get in and we know we got to use some of these actors in the community to, you know, get that attention. So like the opportunities that are going to come for artists or anybody who makes themselves a character in the community, because obviously, you know, Brittany is an artist, but like I said, the Travis and, and Sweety and Meg have all had those type of collaborations, but this is another thing that was genius about, let me see if I could find it about crystals that I appreciated from this. Let's see, I'm gonna find it real quick. I know they talked about it in Complex too. Let me see. At Crystal, we are here to disrupt the QSR, that's a quick service restaurant, something like that, Landscape, and are excited to be working with Brittany Renner as she has a pulse on the culture. See, pulse, that's what they're looking for, right? We know everyone has a favorite already, so instead of fighting to be your go-to, we're happy to be your little something on the side, right? That's beautiful. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And what makes it even better is understanding your market position. We know we aren't gonna be McDonald's, we know we aren't gonna be whoever is ahead of them, it's a lot ahead of crystals, right? Yeah, I got a steep heel. But building that brand as something on the side, like there's a lot of power in being lifted, not Uber, like there's still a lot of money on the table. And yeah, you might have your appetizers when you're at McDonald's and all these other places, but just as a whole, it's a second option. I'm gonna go to crystals, and they need to stick the landing, right? This is something that brings initial attention. There's a lot of follow-up, right? So we talk about create conversation for the rollout, right? This creates conversation. You gotta keep following up. There's more things that they need to do to stick the landing and make sure it stays in people's minds as a second option. But boy, did they aim, ready aim, fire, and hit that spot with this one. Yeah, I only think I wish they did differently, because you said you got it as a YouTube ad, right? I think I'm pretty sure that I got it as a YouTube ad, if not that, no, it had to be a YouTube ad. Or I might have ran across it as an ad on Instagram or something, but I'm pretty sure I saw it as an ad. I already know what you gonna say you wish they did differently. Go ahead, go ahead. Made it a meme strategy, bro. I wish they made it a meme strategy. You did make it a meme strategy. It's perfect for it. It's perfect. It's made for it, bro. And the internet, well, the meme culture in particular is no stranger to the Britney Renner as a brand. She's the face of hella memes, you know what I'm saying? Yes. It's been perfect, bro. I don't see enough corporations doing that. Like taking advantage of meme strategy. I think, and I don't think they quite understand that part of it. We saw Wendy's really taking advantage of Twitter. Yeah, conversation. Netflix will do it. What's Netflix do? They'll do it around like a code of movies. Like when Bird Boss came out, that was using meme strategy. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They do that. That's true. That's true, but I think that's clearer to them because movies are entertainment industry, right? Yeah, still entertainment, yeah. That's the industry. I think restaurants and some of these other who are outside of the entertainment industry they're starting to understand how we use entertainment figures in culture, but yeah, they don't quite understand all the marketing strategies that are available when you go that route. Yeah, yeah. Like I can't believe, man. I might have to go back and look through the share room or something. Like I refuse to believe nobody posted about that. Hey man, hey man. You know how this goes, bro. They see the meme pages are. Yeah. If they see, you know how to, I got this campaign. What are your prices? Oh yeah, it's $400. All right, bet. You send it over. Yeah, it's crystals in Britain. You wonder, oh crystals. Actually, we're $2,000 for corporate. You know they're going to run the prices up. So I don't even, I think they probably didn't because crystals probably would have still invested in the higher price, right? Yeah. But that's how it goes, right? They literally will just say, oh yeah, no, our corporate fees, which makes literally no sense. It's like, oh, I know you got more money. So I'm gonna charge you money. That's what they literally tell you. But the thing is, what did I just say? Oh, they probably didn't go that route. So they probably didn't get the prices risen on them. But on the other side, you know these companies on the meme side, if they recognize something like that, they'll also say, ah, nah, I'm not gonna pay. I'm not gonna post unless they pay me. Cause they know that they're advertising something. And it's like, you know, understanding your value type of thing. So we see that unless, all right, the power of popping. You get something popping, then they gotta chase it cause they know it's gonna give them views, which is still a value for them. So you didn't have to pay them, but they post it anyway, because they're like, hey, shoot, it's a conversation. I gotta be a part of the conversation. So I guess they didn't understand how to quite get it popping. But this is also the beginning. So maybe it's coming. You know, maybe they're just laying the groundwork or maybe they're listening to this podcast and y'all are gonna give us a little feed for the game. We just dropped down y'all. I don't love to be a part of that, bro. Cause I see the vision for it. Hell yeah. Chris was doing a lot culturally though right now. Cause remember they got the one over in Howell Mill that had, they did the whole cultural movement like Keith did the influencer event there. Oh yeah. And they decked it out, made it the whole hip hop culture. Chris was has been going hard recently. I don't know what's on the agenda for this next coming year, but it does feel strange. You know what's on the agenda? We are on the agenda. We are the agenda. Bro, there's a video. I'm gonna pull it out. We're gonna probably have to do a whole talk on this. It's called How to sell to Negroes. Yeah, I think I've seen that. I had never seen it before. I just saw some of it. We gotta talk about that one. We're gonna do a whole little just like side pie special topic, bro. Cause that is interesting. It brings out a lot of shit. It brings out a lot of shit. And once it hurts, you're like, damn. Right. The nail on the head. You know. All right, but check this out too. I wanna talk about this pre-release marketing matter anymore before that. Could we talk about rollouts? Billy McFarlane, you remember who this is? No. Fire festival. The guy that started it? Yeah, the crazy dude. Oh, he out. Oh, shit. Yeah, he out. And he just as bold as before. I mean, he look healthy, man. He did the hardest sentence. Hey. It was sweeping though, bro. Hey, man. Yeah. As you might know, I after round. And because of that, I definitely found out. Obviously I've had a little bit too much time to think about this, but I do feel like the moment's right. I start making this up to everybody. You might have guessed, but I'm working on something new. This time, it's a little crazier, but a whole lot bigger than anything I've ever tried before. I promise I'm going to tell you everything in November. But before we get there, there's one thing you need to know now. This time, So the way he says is this time, everything is free. All right. And they cut it off here, I think, because he actually got banned on, not banned on TikTok. They banned that specific post though. They took it down and he had to cut the end off or cover it up. So he says, this guy, he's killing it. No, he's definitely fine, man. Everything is free. So he takes the piece of paper off the board and there's a phone number there. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, TikTok don't like phone numbers. I don't even think it was a Billy McFarland thing, specific, because we know you're a scammer type dude. It's like, yeah, we don't like links and bios phone numbers and all that stuff. So. It's how I push these miners off the platform. Exactly. Exactly. But yes, man, this dude is fresh out. First day out, coming in is like, yo, I'm back. Let me play this beginning because we were talking about, it's funny really. Hey guys, it's Billy McFarland. As you might know, I after round. And because of that, I definitely found out. That's actually my least favorite part of the whole video. It is my least favorite part of the video. But again, it's the culturally aware that he plays on constantly. Yeah. And I wonder if he's still messing with the fuck Jerry people. I doubt it. I feel like. I don't know, yeah, that's a slippery slope. Should we be getting back together because of how things went down? But at the same time, I don't know, they were kind of in cahoots. So it was like, I could see them still being cool. And even if he doesn't, today he's probably going to transition to Tik Tokers. 100%. Yes, I'm saying. So it's like, they don't, they fuck with him. They'd be perfect. They don't probably like, well, it's holding the marketplace over here. Let me go hop on these. These, I can't think of their name. The two girls, the sisters. The Milios, let me go hop on these Milios. Give them some ultra VIPs and get them out. Yo, I 100% can, yeah. I can see this thing becoming something. I don't know what he's going to do but he said it's free. I wonder if it's complete misdirection. He's going to drop it in November, he said. So we'll wait and see. But I just had to show you this cause I came across and I was like, yo, that's, this guy is one, this dude crazy. He's just like, when you watch the fire stuff, it's like, dang, this dude just, he keeps going. He messes up and he just keeps like, yo, I'm a finesse at some health. So I was like, no, it's not going to happen. Like the funny, I think this is a Netflix version one. When they were at the, this is like, maybe 10 minutes into the doc. If it's not 10, it's very close to the beginning. And dudes like, yo, man, like everybody's going to have to go out to boats. We don't have enough plumbing for this to work. There's like a legit like architect dude or whatever, or whatever, you know, infrastructural type dude, giving them advice. There's no way you're going to be able to do this on this particular island. There's not enough plumbing for bathrooms, all yet, da, da, da. If you want to do this at best, you're going to have to send people out to a cruise ship at night. And then it's like the next thing. So that guy's gone. What, they fired the only dudes making sense. It was like, this is about to go downhill. And this is the beginning. That was, that was classic, man. Did that come out during the pandemic? I think so. Man, that happened right before the pandemic, right? Like literally the summer right before, right? Hey, let's see real quick, man. It was some good content during the pandemic, man. They had our attention for real. That might have been, it might have been 2019. Yep, 2019. So it was before the pandemic, right before, man. But it was definitely some good content during the pandemic. That was, that was the preamble for it, we'll say that. It's just crazy, bro. Cause I feel like most scammers that try to come back, they usually hop into other industries. Like, I was kind of burning my bridge over there. Let me go, you know, fuck around with something over here. You was like, nah, like I can get it this time. Like this time I got it. This is why I think we're in this slippery, slippery slope error today though. No matter what happens, you can flip it. Yeah, can be insane enough. People just want to be entertained. You can scam the world. And now people want to know how you get scammed the world. And now they know, oh, you're good enough in marketing at least, right? There's no difference then. Oh snap, you just hacked. This government will shoot. We need to hire this dude because he know how to hack. Right? Or, yo, you just finessed some, you know, middle-class folks on Wall Street with your pink stocks. Was it pink? I don't know. Some, what do you call it? It's not the stock market, it's the pink, whatever. It's the lower stocks, like the ones that are less than a dollar. But- Oh, the penny stocks? They found penny stocks? Penny stocks? Maybe. I don't know why I'm thinking it were a pink. It's relevant somehow, but that's what size the point. Wilbur Wall Street, you know what I'm saying? He was doing that. Now, oh yeah, I want to learn your sales system. Because obviously you good at kind people. I just want to learn the skill set to kind people, but not because I'm really good, right? Or we just want to share your story. Here you speak because you're an interesting character. No matter what happens, if you fail at a high enough level, you can flip it today. Yeah, that's a great point. That's the market we are. So if you fail, you fail big, dog. You're not going to fall too far. You're already high up. That's the fact, bro, I saw it. That's how I thought when I was leaving college dog. I was like, I didn't want to go and get some of these jobs because I was like, yo, if I, because I was in the startup world, I was like, bro, if you do a startup, you start something and you get that going far enough, you can get to like CEO or the C-suite faster, right? And then once you're there and you do something legitimate, just big enough, you're going to stay there. People are going to want you to be a part of their suite. Even if you're like, not the CEO, it was like, oh, we want you on our executive team because you master some skill at a high level and you've built this thing. First is going the ladder way up, which just wasn't my way to incorporate that. They just didn't, you know, it didn't speak to my soul. You know what I mean? So like that's literally what it is. It's like, you get to skip steps by going to outside and doing something big enough on the outside where if you do have to be a part of a traditional corporation or anything like that, hey, you can, you start a different spot and you skip levels and people are like, yo man, this person wasn't exed out. He's like, hey man, hey look, you should have taken that risk. You should have taken that risk. You hate that I took the risk and I did some good things. And now look, I failed into where you want it to be. Yeah, so you got a degree, I got results. Hey, results baby. It's just like, what's his name? We work. Oh yeah. I don't know that guy's name, but we work end up being the way he went about it was like a very scam, cult type behavior. And now he's running some other billion dollar company. Hey. I know it started like that. Oh man. Bro, you gotta watch the We Work Duck. I got a duck. Yes. We have, when we gonna start recommending ducks and movies and shit, do we work duck? I swear to God, you'll be like, yo, this is crazy. Like he was doing it like a cult and I was gonna apply for We Work at one funny time. And one of the requirements was you had to be willing to go to this festival. They basically had their own Tomorrow World Festival, right? Or Fire Festival, whatever you wanna call it. They had that type of festival that they did once a year for all their employees. Like a music festival? Yes. It was like lit, like out in the woods somewhere. The music, like the full blown festival on par with any of the festivals that you would see. That was a part of it. And I was like, nah. I was like, y'all gonna grab me do something like that? I was like, nah, that ain't for me. See what I learned when I was doing traditional work for certain types of environments, what I learned was their version of fun was not mine. So when people be like, work hard, play hard, I was like, work hard, work hard again. That's what it was. It was like, I wasn't a big beer guy. Like when I was in the sales and stuff like that and they were, yeah, we had some beers. And I'm like, ah, man, bruh, y'all. And this was Henny, this'll be fun for me. I'm gonna go play ping pong, but it's ain't not that fun. I want some beer. But if I pull out the Henny, y'all be looking at me crazy. You know what I'm saying? So it was like that, I just wasn't down for it. And I was like, y'all gonna take me away from the shit that I'm trying to build myself. But yeah, nah, that watched the dark, bruh. I swear, why should we work dark? And another thing that I've been wanting to watch just because of what we do, it doesn't, I haven't seen anything that makes it seem like it's interesting. So don't, don't watch this anybody and tell me it's bad. I'm just saying, I saw it and I keep saying, I'ma check it out. I'll let y'all know if I think it's good. But there's a documentary on Spotify. You seen that one? Yeah. Well, I haven't seen it yet, but I did see it. It's like all the playlists or something. Like I'ma check it out. It doesn't look good, honestly. I haven't seen anything that told me it looked good yet. But, you know, obviously what we do, I'ma check it out and see what's up. See if some sauce gets up. Yeah, I doubt it's gonna be sauce, but maybe it's gonna be something interesting. I really just wanna see them. I hope they talk about the whole fake artist playlist thing that we're doing. Probably still. Yeah, I hope they talk about that. I'ma watch it too. I'ma check it out. It's not a doc though, right? It's like maybe a movie. I think it might be more of a movie than a doc. So, you know, reenact this. But, you know, we'll make that a homework. We'll watch it and then talk about that one day. All right, man. I'm with it. We put that in there with Intergalactic, bro. You just, you, I've already seen it. Is that on Netflix too? Oh, it is on Netflix, yeah. Yeah, it's on Netflix. You got two things. You got Intergalactic. You got. We got three. The WeWork isn't necessarily, but we should have talked about it because the marketing is crazy. It's a lot of cult marketing, basically. Playlists. And it's not out yet, but when it comes out, the re-re-show, you gotta support Bad Girl Rea. You need to watch her other two shows, bro. Or how she done threes before. If y'all have not, bruh, if y'all consider y'all self-creative, if you think you're a creative, bruh, one, you ain't gonna, you aren't gonna be like turned off by somebody else's drama. You're gonna respect that a woman is doing something creative because I know some of y'all do, are to be like, I ain't gonna watch no girl shit or whatever. But, or it's that genre. I don't listen to rereads music. Dog, her fashion shows are amazing. Yeah, crazy. Amazing. And have you, so you have you seen one through three? No. Bruh. How the hell are you talking about that? I've seen clips. You seen clips? Bruh, you gotta see this show. You gotta see it. Her shit is like for real creatively amazing. It can inspire you for how you do your shows, even if it's something you wanna do in a music video. Like, truly, it's a real production, bruh. All right. That's on Netflix too? That's Amazon. Amazon. What's holding that out? Yeah. The beauty of it though is they use like that to deal with that, to also inform like sales on Amazon. It's a whole thing, right? So we're using the content to drive Amazon sales. Oh, okay. Yeah. Like they're using data like crazy. So her deal with them is pretty dope. We'll probably go deeper into that when we talk about that. So I, getting off subject though. You know, let's go to the next topic. Does pre-release marketing matter anymore? Someone asked us that. And obviously we just talked about three, three releases. You know what I'm saying? Like from Taylor Swift and Drake and then you talk about Billy McFarlane doing this for this show. Pre-release marketing, 1,000% matters. But I think what we are experiencing is we're in a space where you also can get amazing results without pre-release marketing. Yeah. Because one, we know a song could be out a year, two years before it has its pop moment. So if it did have a pre-release, it didn't probably have much of effect in regard to that. But two, we see, we're in a space where you can have a song on TikTok. You just drop a snippet and then a snippet goes so crazy and has nothing to do with your pre-release. And it's gonna be successful as long as you understand how to take that energy and drive it into the song, right? Whether that's about to be a pre-release but then in the same thing that happened right after you dropped the song. So TikTok has created this space where you don't need a pre-release to find massive success. Let's be real about the size of artists that this applies to as well, right? Pre-release marketing actually probably applies a lot less for indie artists. Yeah, 100%. Like indie artists without views. We gotta start putting respect on indie artists' name. Taylor Swift is indie, bro. You know what I mean? You know, bad, run these indies. So a smaller, an upcoming artist with a smaller fan base. Yes, yes, a smaller fan base. Your pre-release marketing probably isn't gonna be seen by enough people and experienced by enough people to actually have an impact anyway, right? So you can't control a narrative and behavior but you can still do content ahead of time, especially do a platform like TikTok to just test and see interactions to gauge how you're gonna go about your full blown marketing once the song comes out. That's one thing. And then two, I mean, we already know, like TikTok is roulette too in some ways, right? You might have that massive moment just for a teaser being posted. But the biggest thing y'all need to do if you drop something ahead of time and it takes off, like once you start putting stuff out, you better be ready to drop that. Don't do the song, there ain't nowhere near ready and I don't have the ability to complete it. Like quickly if it takes off, because if it takes off and you get a big moment and you don't drop that thing until two months from now because you had to complete the song and didn't know what to do, you're gonna lose so much momentum and you cannot buy that momentum. I don't care what you think, how much money you think goes into it, the record labels, record labels have money but they don't have momentum. They can spend money to increase the possibility that momentum occurs but they can't just buy it and guarantee it. There's nothing more valuable than that and that's why, you know, pre-release strategies don't matter as much as they used to because TikTok has just changed that landscape. Yeah, I mean, I think going back to the things we said earlier about the three C's, what was it, creativity, consistency, conversations slash controversy, you know what I'm saying? It's like, as a smaller artist, you don't have enough market space to where people even care to see what your narrative is. And less like the creative element of it is just so attention grabbing that it becomes like your breakthrough moment. I can't think of a specific artist off top but it's like- It could be the M tripling type thing. Exactly, yeah, it's a great example, yeah. So something like that, I was thinking about like Doja Cat move, you know what I'm saying, but I don't think it was pre-rollout. It wasn't pre-rollout, no it wasn't. Yeah, it was out then. But that's still a good example of just a narrative that can cause people to care who don't already know about you. Cause that's what you're getting at. A narrative needs to be interesting enough in itself that even people who don't know about you will pay attention. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's like, you gotta really, I don't know, I feel like, probably because of resources, a lot of the rising and these fall, such as traditional stuff, I'm gonna post a couple snippets, maybe I'll do a live, a little premiere, you know what I'm saying? Even that works like if you have a small audience, right, like you just can't expect massive results from it, but I always look at pre-releases or more about getting your current fans excited than gaining new fans when you're a small artist. Once you're a bigger artist, it's both really like, you are trying to get your current fans excited, but you're trying to create so much of a conversation that new people start paying attention to it as well. And so it's very hard to have the spillover effect as a small artist because it's like, there's 100 people that may, well, maybe there's 100 people that care about you and it's great. You should want those people to care about you, but they're not enough to spill it over into a bigger conversation unless some lucky shit happens, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, I think it's important with the right objective in mind, you know what I'm saying? No, that's the fact that you say something that's really important actually, how your pre-release is something that could be used as a vehicle for your current fan base. Yeah, exactly. So it doesn't mean you don't need to do it. I typically tend to think about growth in general, but you could 100% could do a great pre-release and could be a moment in time. So I also think about the experience for fans who are following you in that moment. So they have something to remember the way you did that pre-release. And then two, a cataloging for fans in the future. All right, so they can go back and say, oh, snap, that was so dope. I wish I was experiencing in real time. Make sure I see the next one. Exactly. So that is something to do and you can get value from it, but just from the short-term thought thinking of, hey, I'm just trying to make this track do the numbers, pre-release might not have an impact. And that's actually one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of people in general, like in any type of marketing, but especially artists in this case, they make the mistake of applying the right marketing tactics to the wrong result. It's like, oh, this didn't give me streams. Well, if you understood, well, it's supposed to be where you were in your career, this is not going to give you streams, but it is extremely valuable for building that catalog in the future, for creating that relationship with the fans. And I know you can't feel it as much right now, but it is happening. And you have to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And it's going to explode at some point down the road. But when you have that expectation, oh man, it didn't give me more streams, which is what most artists are looking for are just to start, right? You start to devalue things that are actually really valuable behaviors and have it to have, just because they don't have that result. So I think a lot of artists, when I say it that way, probably get, I don't know, they probably start off in a weird way, better and having a more holistic view of the right type of actions to take, but they almost get beaten into becoming the monotonous same type of artist marketers just because is like, yo, that didn't give me this result. That didn't give me result. That cool creative idea that I had didn't give me anything. And next thing you know is like, well, let me just do this because this is moving a needle forward. Let me create this TikTok video that's copying this exact trend or let me just run this ad of this style because they at least give me a number. You just got rid of all the shit that made you unique because they weren't giving you quick enough results. Yeah. It's like a marathon, you have to have the perseverance to stay you until that shit works. That's what it is. Yeah. And I mean, I think too is kind of like having the muscle be strong enough to handle doing all of it at the same time. You know? Oh, that's a whole other thing. Yeah, a whole other thing. Cause it's like, yeah, all of these things are going to make all the other number driving stuff work better. But I think it speaks more to like parts of like a TELUSWIFT caliber, like a Drake caliber, like they're not, I wouldn't say they don't care about streaming, but I don't think they care about streaming as much as the rising indie community because they have so many other ways to flip it. It could be like, hey, I could maybe not do, I don't know, X amount of hundreds of millions of streams here, which will be a little bit off brand from me, but this campaign I ran got this whole other industry interested in me and they about to drop a $50 million bag on me to come host an event or put together some type of thing, right? So kind of like you were saying, like there's a different KPI attached to the campaign result at that level than just streams going up. Cause when you Drake, you 21 Savage, you TELUSWIFT, you know your stream is going to jump up. Like it's like, you don't know how much maybe, right? You're that part is still, I guess unknown, but like you know what's going to happen versus like the smaller rising artists that don't know if what they do is going to make the streams go up. So that's all they hyper focus on. You know what I'm saying? Like the shit didn't make my streams go up. And that kind of goes back to like what, I was saying a couple of episodes ago, but I think it goes back to like how long you think you're going to be in the game. If you feel like you're not going to be here for long, then you're right. All that shit's the waste of your time. Go ahead, grab the bag. Yeah, it's like, give what you gotta do, build it up, have fun in a moment. But if you feel like you're going to be here for three, five, seven, 10 years plus, right? Then there really is no fail in doing it because you're setting the foundation up for the next thing to work a little bit better and the next thing to work a little bit better. And then boom, like you say you pop when you have this whole catalog of experiences that you put people through to make them go, damn, I wish I was there for that, but this next one makes sure I stick around for it. You know, like I want to see what he or she has coming next. And that's just as important, you know what I'm saying? Then like, oh, like your streams went up 30% that's saying because you had a successful Instagram ad or some shit like that. Yep. It's the brand impact of giving great value every time I interact with your brand. Yeah. It's like, oh, Kanye's going to do another concert. You know, there's going to be some interesting production value when he goes on tour, right? We saw him do the stage, you saw him do the pyramid with what was that Yeezus album, right? And then the mask and all that stuff and Jesus walking down and all that stuff, right? So you think, oh, when he does something, you know that it's going to be well thought out, right? You see that with the Travis, you see that literally with a YouTuber, right? It's like, oh, I really laughed when I watched that video. Next time I see their face pop up, I know it's probably going to be funny, even if I don't know about the subject that they're talking about. So I'm just going to watch it anyway. I'm willing to give it a chance. I'm willing to give it a chance. And that's called brand equity right there. Now I'm going to go just because it's you. I'm going to wear this shirt just because you're associated with a shirt, whatever, just because you gave me that experience. So that's really what you're trying to do as an artist. Like, how can you maximize that impact? But of course, starting off like you said, can you do it all at once? It is hard. That's part of the game. That's just not going to deny that. It is hard. But you also touched on artists at a different level not necessarily caring about streams, but I think it's still caring about success, right? It's like we have to maintain the perception of success in our main thing, right? So LeBron, Kobe, Jordan, they talk about that like keep the main thing the main thing. They know that's the thing that drives how they're seen in all these other industries, right? So I got to keep winning at basketball. I can't like win 30% of my games season after season because now I'm not looked at LeBron. LeBron's not the dope. He's not this character anymore. I've got to get to the playoffs. I got to put up these numbers at least and then make it seem like it's the team's fault. You know what I'm saying? I got to, you know, get another championship because it makes even, and it's funny enough, even though they probably make their better compensated than many artists, right? When we think about NBA, still most of their money, just like artists doesn't come from their main thing. The ones who are at the top, right? Cause you flip that brand that comes with greatness. It's the brand of greatness, man. That's a hell of a brand. I don't know if you know Tom Brady got like a $300 million contract, just to be like a sportscaster, whatever. It might have been 600 mil. Like it's one of, let me see real quick. Hold up, real quick. It's Tom Brady contract. I think I know what Tom Brady sounds like. What do they call it? Like a sportscaster or something? Yeah, a sports broadcaster or a sportscaster. 10 year deal for three, seven, five, right? And he gets this deal before he even retires. Before he even retires. Why? Cause people just know, hey, I'm going to have the goat on my station, right? I know I'm going to be able to flip that somehow. I just need the rights, right? So a hell of a lot of t-shirts. Hey. Facts, facts. So yeah, the brand of greatness, man, is very interesting though. And so like he says, like, yeah, I care about streams, direct fans and building that fan base called to come up. And if I get there at the top, some of these streams can be fake for all I care. I just need the perception to be that I am successful. And I'm one of the people on that level, whatever that level is for that perceived artist. So I got to maintain that image. That's all it is. Which is, you know, it's a different game. Sounds like the same game, but it's a totally different game. Yeah, two completely different muscles. Hey, for real. Now, we got to flip into some advice. One of my favorite parts about. Giving advice. Not giving advice, showing advice. That's the part right there. Showing advice. You know, other people saying things that we know are valuable. Key, 24-1 Savages Manager. As you mentioned her earlier. No, you mentioned 21 earlier. She dropped some gems as she often does on Twitter. But this is actually a video. It's probably the first video I've seen her giving advice like this actually. She doesn't do a lot of video content. I bet she got a couple of podcast interviews about it. There's not a lot to show. Let's check this out. Come on, man. Get really, really involved in hands-on with every artist that I work with. But if I see the energy is not matched, then it's like, okay, this is probably not a situation that's gonna work for me because I'm not gonna outwork you. And so at some point, you just have to like kind of weigh the pros and cons. Like, okay, is this worth my energy? Is this worth my time? Is this serving me? Is this along my journey too? Because sometimes you'll just be working on something that's not even aligned with where you wanna be in five, 10, 15, 20, 25 years. That comes with just experience and learning things and falling and making mistakes. All right, I'm gonna play that, hold up. I'm gonna throw another one in here because I feel like they're so related. They're so related. Check this out as well from LaRussell. I don't know why I'm starting to mute. Check this out here. Tieta, Tia's over here. So man, I met Tieta last year and I had about 3,000 followers. We currently sit at about 500,000 in a year's time. Tieta has came in and been a right hand and a backbone. She's helped me grow my whole business and brand by a million times multiple from just work. She works. Ain't nobody work hard as me except Tieta. She just enabled me to be more artist, right? And to be able to really focus on my craft and cultivating these experiences and every idea I've had with the selling stock, selling gold cards, doing our own shows, creating, she created all these forms to execute them, you know? And incredible. Tieta, you doing independent work, Tieta? You doing an outside work? She got one artist out of Tom's way. You over, see, you the nigga he talking about. And you just sitting here trying to steal his work. And she own equity in everything she's ever touched. That's dope. That's over 100 pieces of songs, content, music, everything she's touched, she own equity. Congratulations, Tieta. Have you seen any of the return yet? How you starting to see the return? For certain. The distro account coming in. It's changing your life? Yeah, that's because that's a new jacket. You didn't have that jacket. All right, looking at those two back to back. What's the first? I want to let you go first, man. What's the first thing you think? The time aspect, like working on the thing you want to be there long term. Actually, I think that's a good point. That's not what I'm thinking. I just want to know what you think. I'm not trying to leave you, man. I'm not trying to leave you. See, whatever speaks to you, man. Whatever guy drops on your soul, man. No, that's not what I thought. I thought I was missing something, man. No, no, no, no. No, I mean, the key clip initially, I think, is just going back to the old adage of, like, I don't want to work with somebody that I'm working harder than, especially at ARS, bro. Because we've seen it. There are so many things that the ARS needs to do to make what you do be successful, and there's nothing you can do about it if they don't do those things. Well, us in marketing, we need pieces of content for this. I can't get up and go make it for you. I can't be you. So if you don't do it, I have to drive to create certain things. Man, pretty much about wasting your time coming up here and doing something with us. There's not much we can do for you, right? Yeah. So I mean, I think that's just like that being reinforced. But the part that she said that really stouted me was, like, yo, are you working on something that you don't even care to do in five, 10, 15, 20, 25 years? The only part that I would send my disagree with is just because we're on music, and there's no, like, real path to go through things and get experience. Sometimes you have to work on things that you may not see yourself doing in a couple of years because it will give you the experience or connections to be what you want to do. So that's the one point was, like, it's very hard. Like, life for us now, who's to say in 10 years we don't want to do marketing anymore? Like, we don't know that right now, you know what I'm saying? But maybe we don't, we feel it away, like, around year nine. We're like, man, I don't do that shit nature, right? But there's no way I can know that now. But I know that if I do feel that way, 8, 9, 10 years, whatever experiences we got through the marketing thing will probably carry over into it, right? And we'll be able to do it off. So that's the one part of it I kind of was, like, about. But, like, everything goes. I feel like we're dope. Now there's the Russell clip. This is the Russell clip. It's the Russell clip. It's beautiful. Because one, one just the story of, hey, I was at 3,000 followers. When this person that Lily changed my life, came into my life to help me. Because her clips that she was making for him is the reason he started going viral on TikTok. And I don't know. So now it's her who's putting them on? Because I know he still doesn't really have a TikTok, right? Well, they have, like, a company page. Like, they have the good company page. I think it's like his brand. So he just posts all his videos on there. He doesn't have, like, a little Russell page on there. But that whole, like, style of, like, the vintage-looking, you know what I'm saying, video clip with the bright yellow phone, that was her making it. Because the only reason I knew that is because I remember the first time I found him was through a viral TikTok of him rapping. I think one of his, one of his earlier songs. And then he had another clip where that same song that was going viral, she comes into the camera and she's rapping it. And, like, it's just a video of, like, her rapping his verse on the camera. And then he comes in to end the video, takes the mic from her and finishes. And that was probably one of his earlier viral videos, too. Right, because he has poetry or something like that. Yeah, he has, like, poetry, writing and stuff. And I just remember seeing her tag, I'm like, man, who's this? And I go to her page and I look at her page and she's using a lot of the same fonts and, like, colors and styling that she, that his post has something like, oh, this must be the person behind, like, her post. I mean, his post, right, like, putting it together. And then, you know, more information comes out. He talks to the other one. It's like, yeah, this is the person, pretty much, driving my creative direction. So it's like, one, he was able to find somebody with that type of eye and skill set super early on. I can't imagine that at 3,000 followers, he had a lot of leverage to get her to do it for free. She probably just saw the vision, like, how I fuck with you, maybe I have friends or something. I don't know too much of that background, but probably with friends or, you know what I'm saying, good acquaintance or something like that. I was like, hey, I have this thing that you believe in. You have this skill set that could benefit this thing, I believe in. Is there any way that we can bring these two worlds together and make magic happen? And, you know, they did. Like he said, like, he found an agreement, giving her equity and everything. I feel like it's unheard of, especially for, like, I'm thinking her role, probably, technically, would be, like, creative director or something like that. I'll be thinking, I don't know if creative director is simply going to get equity in the stuff they work on. Yeah, because she's not technically a manager to my knowledge, to my knowledge. But, I mean, now you have to think about it. We talk about artists trying to see themselves as companies more and more, right? As you grow, as the industry evolves. So with company comes equity. Yeah. Like, as a real conversation, I'm not saying just go divvy out equity to everybody. You know, they got to deserve it, they got to be strategic, has to make sense. But that's a real conversation now, right? So it could be everybody in your team, just like you have companies where literally every single one of their employees has the ability to have some level of stock within a company. There's some companies that are like that, right? Do you want to be that type of company? Or is it just a certain, you know, amount of people who you interact with and then everybody else is a contractor. Or you have people who work for you, but they have other forms of compensation and work days and all that stuff. If you think about yourself that way, what is the culture that you want to build with your organization, your team, right? Around you. And I think that's something that a lot of artists aren't doing yet. And the Russell, you know, he's been, I mean, he's been moving different in a lot of ways that I appreciate. And this is one of them, just not even fully off of understanding how he's looking at his company, but just off of the relationship, right? You can appreciate, you know, this person's giving me value and I'm going to give them a real return, a piece. I don't know what that, it could be point, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don't know what that is, right? She seems happy though. That's, you know, from what I could tell from before. So, right, that's a real conversation. And you take key, right, talking long-term, right? You want to be a part of something that you can see long-term. And then you combine that with artists looking at themselves as a company. Now, do you want to, your goal should be, right? To find people who want to be on for the long haul, but does that mean that artists should be looking for CEOs and chief of marketing, you know? I don't know, chief of operations, whatever, right? Like looking for those people as physicians and not just trying to hire a intern, right? To get a little work done. Not just to hire, oh, shoot, even a marketer just for the sake of marketing, right? Now, you can have, there's a difference between hire and a marketer. Obviously we have an agency, right? And it might sound like, hey, we giving advice against us. But like if you have a marketer on your team, especially as you grow, you still might work with agencies, right? There's a lot of these companies that have their own marketing organizations, whether it's inside music or out. They have, like the labels, they still hire us, right? For multiple reasons. Maybe you have somebody who's really strategic and they can handle all the rollout like a product manager, right? But they still need other people to execute, right? So you still might want to find somebody who has that strong vision and the ability to understand marketing at death, right? But that means you got to see that person and as long term, you should be looking for those pieces in your team of somebody who can think that way. And then, yeah, you might fill out the work and the execution, the deliverables with a third party. But I think a lot of people are just trying to third party their way through everything. And now you got to charge. You get charged every time you want to move. Yeah, yeah. Or you do this work, but you can't, you don't have any like insight or data or anybody who's been trained. So if you think about it like this, even if you're working with a marketer, right? A music marketer that's technically not on your team, like you're working with us. We know when we work with our clients time and time again, we begin to get to the point where we look at them like their own pages. We keep up with them naturally and we'll just send them over ideas just cause cause we've built that relationship or we can't stop our mind from seeing the connection and thinking about ideas, right? And now we know the history. We understand your goals more. So at least if you can find somebody to work long-term with, there's an extreme value there, right? Because the cost of training is very high. Like we know that when you hire somebody, we hire somebody in, take three months, six months, maybe to get somebody to be cold at what they do. And every time you work with somebody new, yeah, they might be well-trained in what they do, but they're not necessarily well-trained in doing it for you. Yeah, in your system. And your personality, the things that you like, your style of content, the shit that you're comfortable with, the shit you're uncomfortable with, but you still need to be pushed on and the stuff that you're uncomfortable with, but it really needs to be like, nah, this ain't me. Like I don't wear dresses or I don't, you know what I mean? Or I don't do funny stuff. I'm a chill personality, right? I love the money phone, man. Like I gotta keep doing it. Whatever it is for you, like the team gets to know that, right? And we can make recommendations, right? And that's the same thing goes for your internal, but also how you move external. So I think it's really important for like this type of stuff what LaRussell's doing, man. Like find those people outside of your manager that can be long-term too. Yeah, and I think it speaks a lot too to have like this person, because going back to the equity thing, right? Like the beautiful part of finding someone that's willing to take the equity is, one, you probably don't have to put up too much money in the beginning, right? Maybe money needs to make sure they have like the equipment and things to do their job for you. But then two, it increases incentive for them to work just as hard as you are. Because now like every, when you get, every W you get, right? Every, you know, every time you level up, they also level up because they get a percentage of it, right? So it's like, like I said, maybe we don't know, 2% whatever. And the first year is 2% of $1,000, but then five years later it's 2% of $5 million. And then 10 years later it's 2%, you know, 20 million, right? So they're incentivizing to continue helping you and building you out because they literally see that result come down even versus like, you know, someone like us, like we've talked about before, it's like, but we could take our artist from zero to 10 million streams and like, you know, all we got was whatever we charged before in the beginning, right? Like there's no real like extra incentive beyond like just doing a good job and reputation and things like that, which are important. But like going back to what you said, like there's a very strategic long-term value when having a person that is very invested in your success. Like outside of just like, you know, like keep taking us like we're invested in your success within the campaign window, right? So if you hire us for six months, for six months, and you know, if we like you enough, of course, even beyond that, like we still want you to win, but like we're invested in your success during the time we've contracted for versus this person on your team that is only eating when you eat, they invest in that shit 24 seven, but they're going to sleep waking up, thinking about, damn, how can I get do lit, right? How can I, man, that last post only got a thousand views and in the 12% watch time, right? How can I get it up for him? How can we, how can we get that going? And like it creates, I think, a level of like hustle and the people that work for you that sometimes just like paying them out right just what it doesn't do, right? And I think, I even think sometimes like one of the biggest lessons that we've probably learned is like agency owners is like learning like what incentivizes your employees and what incentivizes your people, right? Like we talked about some people are incentivized by status. So you work for me for a year, at the end of that shit, you're gonna be, you're gonna be literally, bro, everybody in the industry gonna know, but you're all right, you're incentivized by status, or a lot of people have money incentivized, I can pay you this much, this shit next year, it increases this much, whatever the year after that, it increases to this much. Some people are incentivized by freedom. Hey, bro, you can do this shit from wherever you at. I don't care if you went in Miami, you know what I'm saying, getting drunk on the beach, just get this shit done about one o'clock. You get this shit done about one, do whatever you wanna do for the rest of the day, right? And then that's probably like other small things that people are incentivized by. So those are definitely the main three, though. Yeah, it's always the main three. So it's like the bigger point I think that even kinda comes from his situation, even outside of just equity, is like you're finding these people that you think are really benefiting you and you don't have the infrastructure or the money you had to like just pay them out right, it's like figure out what else is important to them that maybe you can provide. Cause I'm pretty sure like outside of just the money aspect to it, like you said, like I wanna say she's like a writer or she had like other creative aspirations. Now she has this crazy case study of artists that she, like he just said, but she took me from 3,000 followers to half a million in a year time. She could probably go to any other artist or creative person, write him. She wanted to build out an agency, build out an agency, you know what I'm saying? Like and have things going for something cause she has the working proof that she can do it. And so it's like, I wouldn't say that, you know, I don't know, we don't know they're back in conversations about that's what maybe he promised to her, but I'm pretty sure at some point she thought that, you know what I'm saying? Especially when she really started moving, like if I get him lit, not only do I get what he promised me, but like I can talk about this and I can tell people this is me, you know what I'm saying? So that's like the fourth thing. And in many ways it's a culmination of those things, but it's career, right? You got those people who truly say, I want to be in this industry. So I'm willing to one do work that might not be for pay as much because I find value in this industry. I'm just happier working in this versus, I don't know, working at UPS or something, right? Even if it's three times the amount of money. And then on top of that, it's like, I understand this is a case study for the future of my career, like you said, right? Whether that's my own independent agency or if I want to go into the system, right? Work somewhere at a label and I can say, well, I worked with X, Y and Z artists, right? Or well, if you're an artist yourself, right? You just, I work with this artist, but then it's on you to be successful. But of course, of course they want you to be as successful as possible because then they can say they work with you. So that's all it is. It comes down to exactly what you said. What speaks to somebody? What are their motivations? And now you got your company, all right? Go back full circle. We talk about hiring, the way you look at your team, how you motivate them, whether it's equity, whether it's understanding these other personal behaviors they have. But if you want to take on this whole, this true mindset of I am independent, you got to say, all right, that means I have a company. If I have a company, oh shit, I'm the CEO or I'm at least the board of directors, you know what I mean? Somewhere in the C-suite. What does that mean? That comes with additional responsibility and I feel like a lot of people, they like that idea, right? If I'm a owner, I'm a boss, but they don't want any of that stuff that comes with it. It should have been my phone. I don't care what nobody says. Nah, it's a job, but it ain't fun. The end result, right, is the most fun part in freedom. Like, there's some personality things that it might speak to, but the nuances are not fun at all, you know what I mean? Like, sitting down, paying payroll ain't fun. Paying taxes ain't fun. Every time something don't click, it's like, damn, you really don't got to figure out how to make your good do it. I got to figure out how to translate this knowledge in my head to make you understand or you're gonna go find somebody new and start from scratch, right? It's a risk. Both of those. That's a whole other conversation. We're not even gonna get it to that. That'll be like a special episode so y'all can be ready. We can do a deep dive in thinking about just team, you know, company ownership. That is, that's... Yeah, you speaking to me, bro. All right, see where you going. Let's bring up this next topic though. Russ took over the Egypts. No. Russ took over the pyramids of Egypt. I'll just show this quick little clip. All right, the audio is less important though. The point is, he took over the pyramids of Egypt. He did a performance right in front of pyramids. It's a great, great look. Just the scenery of it, that image of it. And there's so many things that I like about it, right? I think they said, technically, like he was like the first artist, right? Somewhere, I don't know where it was. I saw it on some clip. Yeah, he was like the first artist to take over the pyramids of Egypt. And one, being the first is valuable. There's a narrative there, right? And, you know, there's probably so many places in the world that you could just be the first. Russ isn't the biggest artist in the world. We know that there's many artists that if they wanted to, they could have done this and been the first, right? So I don't, hey, are you gonna do it in front of Niagara Falls? You know what I mean? Like, we're eight wonders, 100th wonders. There's so many places that you can do a concert, right? And, you know, I think he has the benefit of having a fan base that's there too, where it was different the way he came up. Like he actually had like Liberia, Egypt, and somewhere in some places in the Middle East. Like some of them actually, because of his look, I remember talking to a guy, they thought that he was one of them. I think it was like Persia or something. That's funny. Yeah, yeah, he actually finessed and leaned into it for a second rest, apparently. Cause the guy was kind of salty when he was talking about it or whatever. But being the first is a huge advantage. So that goes back to creativity, right? We keep talking about being creative. So you got this narrative of being the first and whatever this is, right? That makes it matter instantly more. But then just the image though, it's a dope image. And as an artist, you know, it's one of those things that begins to sound narcissistic when you think about artists talking and their legacy and how they're going to be seen in the future. But truly, if you think, man, this is going to be a great look, me in front of some pyramids and that image lasting, like. That's shit, I can't. Exactly, it's a great image. So you have to think about like, how can I put myself in a position to look great? Just like we do the camera angles and it'll be nobody at the club, but it looks lit cause we did the right camera angle. Put on the right 20 people. It's the same game at scale. That's all it is, right? So how can you find a position and give yourself a good look, man? I think this is that to a T. Like Russ killed this one. I don't know who gave him that idea. Yeah, and it's such a unique first two. Who would have thought to do that? Other than Russ, apparently. It's cool cause like the whole first thing can always branch cause like Russ, you know, first artist in the pyramids and I don't know, some artists come along. Hey, now you're the first black artist to do a show at the pyramids. Then you know, two years later, now you're the first Latino artist to do a role. You're the first country. Like it's so many different ways you can branch the whole first conversation. Yep. I like it because it's like, man, he looked outside of just like regular music first, you know what I'm saying? Or even just, I think a lot of music artists focus more on like breaking records and being the first a lot of time, you know what I'm saying? Cause I guess at this point it's only, it's probably perceived as like there's only so many firsts you can do now like they're very slim. We can break some shit somebody already did. See, but that's when you're looking inside that box though. Yeah. Right? Cause if you're looking at stadiums and all of them type of things, which was a really, you know, a thing. Oh, I'm the first artist to perform in Madison Square Garden. I feel like, like when Jay-Z performed in Madison Square Garden, it was a big deal for some rate reason. I think he was the first rapper? Something is, it was something like that, right? But yeah, oh wait, let me just look outside of these pre-established venues, right? And now it's easy to be the first and the easy to be the biggest concert, right? Cause I'm the only concert that's, we're in a world where it's a lot cheaper to do stuff like that didn't used to. This probably would have been, I mean, you know, this is probably still pretty expensive cause it's the rest of the concert, whatever. But, you know, getting your own team together, you can get in different locations and have high quality videos and moments for way cheaper than you used to. Yeah, and cause I would say cause of technology too, like we get a lot of first kind of throwing at us. Cause remember when NFTs and like the whole metaverse thing first kickoff break with a lot of those headlines, certain such artists are the first artists to sell an NFT. Certain such artists are the first rapper to sell an NFT. It's the first artist. Right now, they like the mainstream industry took advantage of that to just like build out. We were working with the artists that were trying to do the whole, I'm the first to do this thing in this space. That should get annoying too. From a marketer's side, I must say. So the first, while we say what we're saying, right? The first doesn't always have value, right? Like it has to be done in a way that people care, right? And all right, I'll actually say this. If you get people to be aware, people will care and remember it. It's something that sticks. But a lot of times people think being the first is going to create the attention. And that's not necessarily so. If people don't care, you're the first one to do it. Exactly. It was shows and nobody was checking for that, right? But he just let us know. Oh, I found this, like this hello, y'all seen shit. And I don't know if he, he probably got paid for that. You know, he probably got paid and posted this. Him, I don't know. If you look at this, this is very, this is very, I get paid for post format. You know what I'm saying? I'm only gonna say yes, because I'm suspicious of everything. Look at this. It's no way my page will look like this. And I'm not getting paid for post. Like this is just, this is that. This is that. And then he has the rest of the platform on YouTube and all that stuff. Nah, I mean now he might not have gotten paid for this, but if he's not getting paid for post, come on, nah, nah, it's no way. The way I've seen him move, I don't know everything about him. I don't know too, cause he's a rush fan. Like I'm only trying to talk about being a rush fan. And I think like, it's like, these are like damage, like these are like damage that he gets paid by most labels, but like he also posts things that he knows are gonna get him attention. So I could kind of see that same route. Okay. You know what that means? He's a rush fan and rush is smart. We know that rush was smart. He pays attention to these types of things more than most artists because he's not so reliant on labels, right? So this type of independent outlet matters, which means with his platform, Hello Y'all Scenes, and all of y'all should take note on something like this. I don't know if this is actually true, but like if I was rush, right? And Hello Y'all Scenes was a fan of mine. And with the level, with the yellow platform, yes, I would actually talk to him at some point. I'm reaching out. We would have a relationship cause he's third party. He's not within the mix, right? He's not in the group, which means I can get direct access, probably not be overcharged or just worried about all these gatekeepers, favors, and all those additional things. And somebody like Y'all Scenes will get a great look from being connected to me. There's a lot of value to that. Maybe one day we do a real interview, at the very least, he has access to somebody, the type of person that he normally doesn't have access to being a third party cause people don't respect those. Like just no way. So again, if he didn't get paid for this, he did it off a relationship's sake. Yeah. All right. I can see that. Cause I don't even know if I saw any other page talking about that. So I could see him being like, hey, hey bro, I fucked with you. Here go to school. Hey. You know what I'm saying? Break this. Cause I don't want to go to these academics. I don't want to go there. But actually I'll have to look more into that and see if I stand on that. But I don't think I saw it anywhere else. I did not see it anywhere else to be real. You know, again, do people care? Yeah. That's true. You know, do people care? So you have to make a lot of people aware for them to truly care. Cause it is something really dope. I think a lot of people would like, it's an image you are not going to forget. Yeah. So that's the thing. So to hear something and then follow it up with an image like that. Oh yeah. It'll be drawn in people's mind. A lot of people who don't even know who Russ is would be like, oh yeah. That was that rapper who performed in Egypt. Yeah, exactly. But that's something to remember. It creates like a random fun fact. You know what I'm saying? You like, cause you see it and you're like, damn, was he the first person to perform in Egypt? Now you Googling it, you looking it up, trying to say, damn man, he was the first person over there, bro. Right there. Fun fact. Yeah. That's like the, another way to think about the value of narratives. If your narrative can become at least a fun fact to people who don't care about you. Yeah. That means that thing is going to stick. There's some power in that narrative. Cause again, a narrative is nothing but a thought. It's a meme. And your goal is to get people to know one thing about you and then get them to know another thing. So that person who didn't care about you and don't know much about you, they know that one thing you performed in Egypt. The next time they see, oh wait, what? The rapper who performed in Egypt, the first rapper to perform in Egypt came out with a song. Yeah. Hmm. I don't remember that. Let me check out that cause now I know him in some sense. Let me see. I like the song. Oh snap. Now I know one thing about him and I like a song. And then you hear a third loop, that song and the rapper and this, oh, this is the same guy who performed in Egypt. And then, I don't know. He punches Qwando Rondo. That was a real big, right? No, that wasn't Qwando Rondo. It was Smoke Perk. No, it wasn't Smoke Perk. It was Smoke Perk. It was, uh, uh. We gonna say Qwando Rondo even though that's not a fact for the sake of the example, right? So you know the rapper in Egypt just punched Qwando Rondo and, um, fourth out Guapdad. Okay. Guapdad, they had a little fight. That's what it was, right? So now you got three facts about this person. Me, me, me, right? Oh, that person collaborated. So you can go any direction, right? It could be, oh, you collaborated with this or you get, or you could just get people to know three of your songs and love three of your songs. They love four of your songs, but these side narratives help just as much and help bring attention to more of your songs. It's really the step-by-step version of what you're trying to accomplish that we talked about last time is creating a brand that people love enough to give you another chance, right? I like you. And because I know so much about you, I'ma see what's happening, right? If your brother, like, drops some music, you'd be like, all right, that shit was trash. You know, then he dropped another song. You'd probably check out the next one enough, right? And then, okay, you might start ignoring it. It was all right, I'm not gonna listen to every single one because it's like, you're feeling pretty bad. But you finally, when it finally starts to hit a little, you're like, all right, little bro, kind of good. So I'm havin' it. And you're gonna want him to win. You're gonna want him to win eventually. But you are so wrong, you know? Not give clout where it's not due. That's all we're saying. Now my little bro's not to earn that support. You're gonna have to earn it. You're gonna want it for him, but you ain't gonna give it easy, right? Yeah, it might be up into like song. It depends on how many in a row or bad, you know? Do I see potential in one? Like, okay, this isn't great, but like, all right, I see what you- Potential. What you at, little bro? If it's just like five, just like, mm, nah, you gotta stop, man. Around number five, I'ma say, hey, little bro. I want you to know the other paths in the music industry. Everybody doesn't have to be a rapper. Everybody don't have to be a rapper, fact. Oh, but speaking of rappers, I can't play this without first-hand RIP takeoff. Very, you know, very, very unfortunate, crazy, you know, just being from Atlanta, and Jacory, you're Jacory, the outskirts of Atlanta. I was in high school when I started following up. Yeah, why? Just definitely RIP, very unfortunate, big loss to the city. And man, they won me over, by the way. And that's like, you know, when I first heard of Migos alone, you know, just like, I don't really want to go with this. But then they won me over. And those are usually people I like the most, the ones who win me over versus the ones I like when I first hear them. I didn't realize how much I would raise by the Migos. They've been around since I was in like 10th grade, like 9th to 10th grade, right? I literally can remember the very first time I've heard of Migos alone. I was in the backseat of one of my friends' car. I ain't even played the early demo version of Versace, that you really only knew if you was in Atlanta, you know what I'm saying? It was the first time I ever heard of it. I mean, like maybe like months later, like the Drake thing happened. But I remember sending them that mansion alone. I remember them in this damn mansion. I can't remember, right? I can't remember who the artist was. There was this one Atlanta rapper that back in the day put off this long ass music video that had like every pop and Atlanta rapper on it at the time. And like they were in it. And I think it might've been either a Sorry the Kid or maybe a Slim Duncan song or something. I'll define, it's called like 300 Spartans or something like that. It's like literally like it's like Migos or something like that. So I already trouble, you know what I'm saying? All of the Atlanta rappers at that time would come like train out at James, you know what I'm saying? And I was like, that video's from a long guy or something. I was like, I didn't even realize it was like, I was like, damn bro, I was raised by the Migos. This is crazy. Like they've been here a damn near my whole young adult to adult existence. I actually think I might remember that video. Now you say, damn bro. Damn. Okay. Look, I'm gonna move to this clip. We could talk about them forever actually. You got to take me back. But this video is just about finesse, but we're gonna flip it in the marketing because everything's marketed. Now we're trying to get richer. You got to like, like a real family. It's different when you walk in there. They don't even want to say, you know what? They act like they don't got no watches. But you got to like, you got to know it when you walk in there. Yeah, you know, let's be clear. You know what's real and real. I walked in richer to get the shit in today. The guy goes to me, huh, you must have connects. Yeah. But I knew I had to connect. And he said, he said to me, in order to get on our list, you got to buy three ladies watches before you go. So you got to buy, what if I ain't got a lady? Exactly. Let me go direct or rolling. Well, let me, let me tell you why this thing is, it's genius. It's genius on so many levels. First of all, playing hard to get, we know it's just a common, you know, common marketing strategy. Exclusivity, man. Hard to get, yeah, exclusivity. This thing don't get thrown out at anybody. And it can't, can't just anybody touch, touch it. You know what I mean? That was my, yeah, I was thinking something else. But, so it's great for exclusivity, cool, hard to get. And then, you know, obviously, if you add a little luxury, the aspirational brand to it, but the sauce, the biggest sauce that is two-fold, number one, it says you have to buy three to be able to get it. You got, you got to get on a list. Saying we have a list already said, whoa, okay, you got a list. But you got about three to be able to get that thing, all right, that nice men's piece that is equivalent to the shit the other dudes are flexing, okay? So you already got to give me more money just to give me money. Yeah. I turned it into a prize. I gamified getting my, my peak product, right? But then, these fools said you got to get three ladies watches. Like, like no one said, what if I don't even got no lady? Still, hey, go find them. You got to get three ladies watches, all right? Now, what do we know about women? I like spending money. Look, I ain't trying to get you in trouble. That is not what we know about women. I blew the alley at the wrong basket. Oh, man. I was going for them as consumers and them as being drivers in the marketplace of a brand's value. Yeah, that was gonna be my second guess. Right, right, right. We know that they're gonna put it out there heavy, right? And then there's a sense, I can even see a lady be like, man, like, you know, he got me some Richards. How come, like, my friends got Richards. How come you don't got me, Richard, right? And then you also create a club faster, right? Because now you don't just do one purchase, it's multiple. So it's one thing if I said, oh, you got to get four, but I might keep all four to myself. But Danny, I'm not gonna wear the women's watch. So I'm gonna get them. So now I'm spreading the love to at least one other person, right? And you start to build community that way, too. There's just all these little nuances, man. You can really break that down. But like, gamifying it, exclusivity, and then finding a way to leverage women, which we know are the primary influencer in most market spaces. Easy. Easy, easy. Because like, but I'm marketing the males. It's a craze. And we know what males, they're like, males, what they get from women to gas the power. And it's kind of a flex, too. Like, oh, shoot. You kind of put me in a good position in this. I don't even think they thought of this, but always look for brand experiences, right? So, no, I didn't want to buy a woman a watch just for me to get my Richard, right? However, you made me do it. The experience that I got when I gave that woman a watch, though. Damn, I fuck with this brand. You know what I'm saying? I now have a memory, a good positive feeling for this. So I'm getting equity beyond that last prize, which is the watch that I came for in the first place. There's so many ways to slice that stuff, man. And if you can figure out how you can build narrative story or just different experience around your product, especially for artists, like this is obviously a watch. But when you can offer actual product, which I think more and more artists are gonna be doing beyond their music and create experience like that around it. So it starts to feel like a community, man. Like, that's what I love about this, right? That's what I love about this. Basically a paid referral program. It's a paid referral program. Yes, give me some money. So you have the right to give me some more. Yeah, which is crazy. Now, thinking about it, it's like, man, if you see somebody with it, you know by now knowing all they went through that process, you really got money, you know what I'm saying? You weren't able to just afford that. You afforded for it. Like I said, at least one other person possibly able to afford it, you know what I'm saying? I think you really, bro, you just nailed it. Because that scene is that type of watch. That's why it's in the records and stuff. And imagine being somebody who knows, right, in general, like, and you're like, man, they really got money that they went through that process. But imagine like when you first see the flex and you start to hear about it, like, dang, I want a Richard. Like, I see these people, the Richard's over kind of hot. And then you just go unknowingly and you hit that experience. And you're like, dang, they did that. This is what it's like. So then your mind gets blown. But I've gone to places and I expect to pay $5 and they'd be like $10. And I'm like, yeah, nah, I'll be back. It's not even, they don't have the money. Sometimes it's just the expectations. Like I expected to pay $5. I wasn't ready for $10. Let me come back in like a few days. For the $10 element though. Yeah, I wasn't ready for that yet. You know what I mean? I remember I went to a place that and I had been wanting to go for a minute and I was with my girl and we pulled up and then they had valet and all that stuff. And that was the only way to get in. I wasn't ready for valet. I wasn't in that mindset for a place that was only ready for valet. I could only do valet. I just wasn't in that mindset. So I was like, nah, we'll come back. I mean, I went back. It's not like I couldn't or I can't afford it. Even at that point, it's just that gap, it changes how you see everything. It changes your perspective. So I was like, if I walked in for a richer and I was like, dang, I came in for one but I got about four basically. Total. And I think too, it kind of speaks on like the overall experience, I don't know, man, I don't know if they thought of it this way if it's a part of psychology, but it's like, we're gonna start you off with like these two barriers of negative experiences. First one being, you gotta find out. You gotta have the connections to get this shit with empire pain and you calling around, talking to people, trying to see who on your circle can get me onto this wait list. You gotta wait. And then you do all that waiting just to find out. Damn, I got about three of these to get one, right? So like you have the back to back to back negative experiences for it to end with like you said, one, you probably had a positive experience having to give it to the women you had to give it to. Even if, you know, like platonic, like you gave it to your mom or something, like your mom's responsible is probably gonna be crazy, right? And then you walk away that was the ultimate benefit of it, the status. You know what I'm saying? And you feel like, like you fought this journey, you know what I'm saying? You hike this mountain and then you're at the top and it was all worth it, right? You don't even remember it or even care anymore about like then I was on this wait list for X amount of months. And I had to call 50 people just to get connected to this random dude in New York or whatever they could get me on. Damn, I just had to drop. However much, you know what I'm saying? 10 to $1,000, because like, they push you to the positive point. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like they got you there. It's like a whorehouse almost. Like you scare it all the way in the end. You go through the gift shop, you get a cruise. You're like, man, that was fun. You know what I'm saying? It was terrible while I was in it, but that shit was fun. Like what? Was it? Was it really fun? Could be like that of my daughter sometime. I'm like, dang man, she showed on like she didn't join this. And then in the night she's like, and somebody will be like, oh, how was it? And she was like, that was fun. I was like, you had fun? Your energy did not give me fun energy, but you use the word forget. Never underestimate the power of a human to forget, bro. Like you give them a new experience. So quickly do they adjust? We adapt to the new experience, man. Homeostasis where I was just living in this house. You in the new house for a month and it feel like you've been there forever. So people wonder why you can have a news cycle and something's hot on an artist, right? It seems like they about to go under what's going on with Kanye right now. Don't be surprised if people forget in a year's time especially and Kanye's not moving just how he was. Because we forget our own experiences. Oh, you working that job. I remember I was working this job. If I think back, it felt like I worked for a year, but I was only working there three months. It was a dead beat job when I was in college. And once I got out of that experience, things gone. It was gone, man. Gone never happened, bro. Never wiped it under the rug. So yeah, man, like that is actually like that last domino in this scenario you just said, man, that forgetting is powerful. You go through that pain, but boy, once you get to the top of that mountain, boy, that rush of adrenaline. And you don't even, you don't realize that they kind of did you dirty, bro. You kind of got finessed this whole way. You're scarred, you beat up, and bleeding, you know what I'm saying? Y'all open wounds. What do they call it? Not impossible syndrome. What's the one? The one? No, the one when you're in prison and you start to love the people who are in prison. I can't think of the word for it. That's what that is. Yeah, it is that. Yup. That's exactly what it is, bro. It's really exactly what it is. That's what it is, man. They playing with it, so. Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm, there we go. There we go. There we go. All right, we got two quick topics, but some quick hits, but I definitely got to play this because we've been wanting to play this for a couple weeks. Travis Scott with the bots. Have y'all wanted to know how to talk about it? His old managers. Man, he used bots, man. He's in nothing else. That's all that happened. This clip is crazy. That is about to shatter some hoax and beliefs and reinforce some of y'all conspiracy theories. Check this out. His old manager, Steven Morris, admitted that he hacked the SoundCloud system when Travis was coming up to. First, my name's Shane Morris, not Steven Morris, and I didn't really hack the SoundCloud system as much as deploy a lot of bots, and I'll show you how I did it right now. Turnkey, cloud, server of your choice, I like Ubuntu 2204, $6 a month. Firefox doesn't depend upon Wayland, so you'll need to run Xorg. Yes to install. Run sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. As a technical note, you can also run Ubuntu inside a container. If you want to do that, I recommend Docker and then you could redeploy them with Docker swarm and you could scale this almost infinitely. Anyway, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean. Sudo apt install X init. It'll install, it takes. All right, I don't want people's brains to fry. I don't know what he's saying about that. Especially for y'all who are just potting. Like, you can't see it. Basically, he got bots for $6 a month. Yeah, and it was for SoundCloud, which we know what happens when people figure out new tech before the rest of the industry does it. Yes. It's really the true like ultimate cheat code. If you can figure out this big tech driver before everybody else realizes you can do it, you're gonna grow like crazy because by the time everybody figures out they can do it, one is too late, and then two, there are things that have been implemented to stop it. By the time everybody else realized they could do the bot strategy, because there were hella people in, what was that, 20, probably 16, 17, maybe 18, implementing bot strategies, they were too late. They were now doing it at a time where people were getting caught for it. And then you think about where SoundCloud was at the time, and even to something like that, we weren't aware of it. So our first thought isn't like, oh, he's gaming this, you know what I'm saying? Because we don't even know that could be done. Maybe some industry people probably thought that right, but. It's like when people first started to have like, oh, 50,000, 100,000, a million followers, and you don't even think that any of these could be fake. And it's like, we talk a lot about how much perception plays into your marketing. So I can only imagine back then probably looking like, oh man, some Travis Scott's running like crazy on SoundCloud. Labels probably saying they're like, oh, let's have a conversation with him. And he made good music, like I feel like we have to emphasize, like you can find a finesse. If you have good music and you can find a finesse, chances are you're going to be all right. You know what I'm saying? Cause the finesses only work for the artist with good music. If you finesse without good music, people, we just laugh at you and think you're crazy. Right? It's like, damn, why'd you do that? That shouldn't make no sense. But the fact that he was so early to that, one is crazy. Two, change background, like just being lucky enough to be connected to someone like that, that can put a system like that together for you. That is luck in itself. You know what I'm saying? Like think about all the managers artists come across where how many of them know how to speak whatever language that was? How many, you know what I'm saying? Like I think a lot of managers, not I wouldn't say a lot of managers, but like you think of managers having like traditional skills though they probably understand record contracts and no relationships was probably all things. I'm sure he understood the time as well. But then it's like, Hey, my manager has one very unique skill set that most of y'all managers probably don't have and we bought a gas this year. Yo, that's a, that goes back to that conversation about the people on your team. Like you can find people who have these additional skills outside of music, especially for indie teams. Like you want to find value in places that the industry typically doesn't have on lock. Because then you'll be able to have a connect. It's like, Oh man, this person has all types of sponsorships because they came or they understand the sponsorship arena because they work corporate and they have all these connections so they don't need to go through labels to get you the money. They can go straight to deals even though you're not a big artist because they ran that game, all right? Or yeah, they might be from tech or it got a whole bunch of tech friends so they can code and hack to do certain things. There's all these other seemingly obscure talents that you can apply to you. And if you look at your team, if you can find a couple of folks like that who have different arenas and backgrounds to add towards the standard that's required in music, that's when you start doing stuff different, right? That's when you are early to something like NFTs because they're just in NFTs and you're able to do it right. Not like, Oh, I just tried to drop something and nothing really happened or I did a little scam but no, you did the thing right. That's what Snoop Dogg is doing so well. He knows how to keep people who understand these other categories outside of music around him. However he's doing it, right? Like we already know for him to discover our boy and hop on a track with, can we even say that? Not quite, not yet. Yeah, but to even understand and find that he existed at that level and hop on a track, right? Yeah. He's crazy, you know what I mean? Yeah. So that's something that's valuable at every single level. And for those who are hearing this, I'll just leave it at that, like yes, even somebody at Snoop Dogg, like at that level, right? Typically to stay at that level, you are keeping your ears to the street in some way, whether that's the street on the internet and you understand that very well. Cause you gotta think Snoop Dogg has also been doing the YouTube show for so long. Like his digital game is stupid for artists his size. There's nobody moving like that at that size. Like he's moving in a true like, indie organic grassroots way in what he's built digitally. Or you just translate it to a more traditional, I'm Jay-Z or somebody like that. And we have young people around us, right? To let us know what's going on with trends in music or kind of trends in fashion or whatever, right? Keeping your ears to the street in some form of fashion is extremely valuable once you get up there. But it's exceedingly valuable when you're just trying to make it and get on the first place. I think people need to stress that a lot more. We got this other, this last thing, cause we've been holding on to this. And it's just about the suicide boys. I don't know if y'all know about the suicide boys, but I was checking them out pretty heavy and probably starting three years back. But what's crazy is suicide boys are the highest streaming independent artists in the world. Pre-tell us what? Pre. Ha ha ha. Oh, that was suck. Ha ha ha. That was suck. You're not getting that back. You don't get it. Ha ha ha. Yeah, Taylor came and messed the game up. I'm like, man, that'll count cause. She tell us what. That's the arc man. I'm like, bro, she tell us what. We're not beating her bro. Right. That is for real. That doesn't really count. But it's still impressive because of one, like how long they've been around. Two, just how much they stray away from like mainstream looks, which speaks a lot to that. They legit stay away from mainstream, yeah. Like I don't know. I don't want to say it's scary, but like, they're really just like, nah, we not doing that. So to be even considered, should even be considered to be one of the highest independent streaming artists with that type of reputation speaks volumes. It really shows like, hey, like you don't need the mainstream looks per se. If you can build like this cult fan base, which they have, they have a massive cult fan base at this point, they've been around for like a long time. It's like, bro, they'll push the needle for you in such a way that you'll still be competing with people who get better looks than you. Because there are probably thousands of artists that we can name that have gotten better looks than they have over the course of their careers. I'm not even close to touching their numbers. Not even close, so 1.8 billion streams lifetime. Right now they have 9.5 million monthly listeners. That number, I mean, once you start getting to nine, once you really get to two, three monthly listeners, you're doing something special. I consider one million to be like entry level mainstream. Entry up. You're like at the bottom of the top of the totem pole. Two, three is like, okay, you starting to get a little footing in it. Five and up is like, you know, cause I want to say like Smino probably has like five or six million monthly listeners. To me, he's like in a weird middle space, you know what I'm saying? Now Superstar, but he's not like smart or is that? So it's like, yeah, about nine million to me would be the equivalent of being like a seven out of, like a six or seven out of 10. You know what I'm saying? Type of artist. All right, so what's, that's maybe five, six. Let's start at 10, what's 10? That's like the Drake title slip. So that's 50 million and above ish. Maybe 30 million, nine might be 30 million. Yeah. All right, so that's like JZ's at like 30 million. Yeah. All right, Chris Brown. Chris Brown? I think he's at 20 or 30. Let's see what Chris is. What, how does Chris have less than JZ's? No way. 48 million. Oh, 48? Yeah, so yeah. But he also got a viral TikTok one right now. Yeah. Yeah. But he's the one, he being like the nine kind of guy. Yeah, but that was also an old song. All of it counts, all of it counts. So then, yeah, that's like, so yeah, that 48, 50 million, you are 10, 10 off of all artist brand. I'm actually surprised JZ has somewhere in the 30. But I think he's at 31, you know what I mean? So all right, so that's nine. Yeah. So 20's is eight. Yeah, so 10 would be like seven. Oh, wait, what? No, 10, no, no, if 20's is eight, yeah. Okay, 10, yeah, the teens, yeah. So nine is six, right at six. You said six, seven. I can see that. So six, let's go all the way down a row. Let's go a little rank them then. So six, if you're, now it has to get smaller. You're at level six, if you're between, let's say five and 10? Yeah, five, yeah. Well, we said nine for that, because it'd be like five to eight. Somewhere in there, five to eight point something, you know. No, nine is six. That's something like nine million up is a six, right? No, nine million is basically the cap. 10 million in up is a seven. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. So that's nine, six, right, nine, six. But yeah, so five would be, yeah, I probably said like six to eight, somewhere in there. Four being, you know, probably like closer to three or four, three being. Three or four monthly lessons, million monthly lessons. And then, so then two is two million. And then one is one million, so. Anything less than eight is not in the game yet. You nine. Not the mainstream entry level, man. Well, not the mainstream game, believe me. No, what? I would take that back. I would say, seven hundred, seven hundred. If it's a consistent seven hundred to a million ish, that would be level one entry level mainstream to me. I don't know, like seven hundred thousand? Yes. I feel like seven hundred thousand, you're like standing on the doorstep of mainstream. They just ain't open door for you yet. Because once you're at seven hundred thousand, you just couple it with looks. Cause remember, looks can make you more mainstream than you are musically. Okay, that's true. You know what I'm saying? That's true, that's true. So that's what I'm going with, seven hundred thousand. You could be mainstream if you have certain types of looks, but if you just straight streaming, then you know, you're doing well, but you're not technically mainstream, just off of the stream of streams. Yeah, yeah. Cause I feel like a million more like the major industry starts to take you seriously. To them, you're like a new artist. If I'm like, oh, I got a million. Oh, if some of these folks, if you have a million streams and they come across you, they just discovered you. Yeah. Like they are the one. Oh, I remember one. I discovered such and such that you had a million streams already. They out here, Christopher Columbus and people, basically. They discovered, but bro, was that five million months ago this one, when you started talking about it? That's not nothing on my scale. All right, you a little itty-bitty. Right, it makes me think of this conference that me and Sam went to one time. Cause I always remember this. Oh yeah. Yeah, bro, it was like a booking conference. And I just remember this lady on stage talking about discovering new talent. She talked about how like, yeah, we got this new artist we're excited about. Like she's new bubbling. Her name is Summer Walker. And like, bro, this wasn't that long ago. This is like two, three years ago. I'm like, I remember when she said it, me and Sam looked at you like Summer Walker, a new bubbling artist. Like, what are you talking about? And that would want to click for me, like how out the loop people at that level really are. Or like, or even put into context, like what they consider to be like underground and new and bubbling, right? It's like, oh yeah. Like I think she had just dropped the first song she had with Drake on it at that point. And so us that knows about her, that's kind of like, oh man, this is a huge moment for her. She really don't level it up. But then that was probably the point where probably like 90% of that roommate ever first heard her. Now kind of looking back on it. Thinking about the people that were in that room, the environment and that moment. Yeah, it was just wild to hear, bro. Like when she said like Summer Walker, a new artist. What? Like she's on millions of streams at this point. But it's like being in a room for the billionaires and you talk about your 100 mil. Yeah. Like I think it's good for you, bro. Yeah. You'll get that one, baby. Oh man, new will be on your path. I don't know if you remember, but it always makes me think of that first time we went to that. When we went to that Playlist Supply Conference and we was at that YouTube thing. Playlist Supply Conference? Not Supply, what was it called? Playlist Push. Was it Playlist Push? Remember that influencer conference we went to? In Florida? Oh, not Playlist Push, that's the company. But Playlister, I think. Something like that. Something like that. Yeah, in Florida. Yeah, when we were in that room with the other YouTubers and they were just talking. I was like, oh boy, y'all 100K, and y'all get that million one thing. I was like, bro, we didn't even come here as YouTubers. We came here as business people, bro. Don't be over here breaking down my back then. I ain't asking you to do that. Let me give you me words of encouragement. I didn't pause on that. I was about to ask you for your influence. Why are we talking about me right now? Right. But it clicked for me then too. I was like, man, there's a level to this hierarchy, bro. It's been like, you just got in the game. But you got a whole other level that you got to keep working your way into. That is she wonder why they keep working so hard when they're already there, because they started meeting new people, bro. Yeah. And that was the same conference where I remember that woman saying that to brands like in the YouTube world, that ain't even considered even a game to use a million subscribers. I remember that was the first place I ever heard. And I was like, damn, a million? Nah. How about in the K-Plot? Now we got nine months to go. Dogs. It's a different word. I remember Mario. You remember Mario, the let me love you. So I remember hearing him talk about, you know, the actor, artist, money, all that stuff, you know, running numbers up. And he said, you start getting his access. You start being around these people who got way, way, way, way more money. And like, you never heard of them, not associated with music at all. He's just like, man, they just changed his whole perspective. And he was like, man, I gotta figure out how to get up out of music. Yeah. But it's like, wait, you owned it? So are you such and such daughter? And it's them levels, man. You got a gravel company? Like how much from that? Gravel company. Who is, my dad told me yesterday about a black-owned bread company. I think they were the first launch black-owned bread company. Like it's just sliced bread. Yeah. It's like, hey, man, like people do gotta eat bread. That's what my name is, but I'm making cement or something. I don't know. I'm making sexy, man. Like for real. And sometimes you ain't gotta make it sexy. Just find something boring that nobody else want to do well. I definitely be thinking about that in my, my, my music retirement. Go find one of these companies, chill out and then just pop up. Yeah, maybe flippin' around. Maybe at a time like, I don't know, like Tom or somebody be livin' up. Like, hey, bro, come be the face of my concrete company. Nobody's going to see it coming, bro. Nobody's going to ever expect the RS to be the face of a concrete company. We could change the landscape. Let's do it. How we gonna, how we gonna tie the mail in with, you know, the tie the mail in? Well, every, every 16-year-old in the country would be asking for bricks of concrete for Christmas. That's what I want to ask my man. Hey, bro. You can use Gucci, man. Actually, that would be fine. Bricks, baby. That would be crazy. Hey. I can't believe nobody's ever tried to do that before, bro. Get your bricks from Stanley's bricks company. Hey, bro, you want to, you want to be able to sell bricks without having to get you in trouble up for, hey, yo, we sell up bricks, baby. Oh, man. Nobody about to steal that, I'll do. Oh, nah, yeah. It's not a bricklayer that's watching this. No concrete people watching this. Actually, bro, I did a confrontation call with a guy who was actually laying brick as we, we talked. That's crazy. Yeah, it was funny enough, bro. It was crazy part about it was, he was not that far from where I was in a moment. Cause I was like, bro, he was on Zoom. He was working. He was like, my bad. You know, I'm doing the work. I was like, bro, you in the cater? He was like, yeah, man. How you know? I'm just like, yeah, man. I recognize, I'm from the cater. I just recognized what the sky looked like. The tree, you want to just sell it? I mean, dude was literally, yeah, laying bricks while we, while we talk. But hey, with that being said, man, we got to get out of here. Do not steal our ideas. We're going to start coming with left field ideas and just implementing for these Gucci man with the bricks. We're going to find all kinds of companies where I match people. And we need to figure out how to get that money. Brick layers, if y'all out there and y'all need a connect, we will connect you with Gucci for a small fee, you know, and a little equity, but the money you make will be worth it. This is another episode of No Labels Necessary, coming soon to be Tuesdays and Thursdays. Check for it. I'm Sean. I'm Kovir. And we out. Peace. Peace.