 What up? What up? What up is brand man Sean and I'll cover you catch us here on YouTube Spotify, Apple Music or whatever. Wherever you stream your podcast shopping it up about music marketing and the monies because that money part is important. Now some advice. That's where we like to start. I don't even know whether we call this advice. We probably just have to stop calling stuff advice. I'm just going to play a hard clip that y'all have to take and 50 cent all regularly. Schedule guest. Yeah, that's why you need the call. Call a 50. We need you on here man for an episode. He got some more gems for y'all. I think this is from his audio book like that last clip and good book goodness. All right. I'm just going to play this clip and artists this might hit home for some of y'all. I don't even know how to tease this but I'll say this. Adapt or die. All right. Adapt or die. Another time I sat down with him just when IG was starting to pop off and tried to drop this gem on him. You got to get on Instagram. I encouraged him. You can be a little awkward in person. So this is actually a better way for you to communicate with people. By the way, he's talking about Lloyd Banks, right? If he said had a G unit, Lloyd Banks was a part of it. He's talking to Lloyd Banks in this clip saying you got to get on Instagram. No, I don't want to do what he said. Why not? You can literally put punchlines under your pictures, make some new fans. No, that's corny he told me. Before adding Biggie and Poc didn't do that. They're dead, my man, I told them. They died before this stuff was even invented. And how do you know they wouldn't be posted on IG if they were alive? It was a line of thinking that really blew my mind. It suggested that if Tupac was alive, he'd still be wearing another vest and red bandana tied around his head, sending girls his beeper number or the biggie would still be wearing koojee sweaters and playing Mortal Kombat 2 every night. It's ridiculous. When Banks made that comment to me, I realized he had gone as far as he can go. In fact, my exact thought was this is someone I can't invest another minute or dollar in. Realize he had gone as far as he could go. Man. I'm so damn happy to see that there's somebody that goes through this like 50 set. Actually, I'm actually more mind-blown than happy. For real? I'm mind-blown that 50 set at 50 sets level. Maybe because the lawyer is closer to a peer than just being like, you know, part of to a random upcoming artist. But it's like, you're not listening to 50 set. What 50 set is done? And you're on that level. You already have some level success. And this is the exact same conversation that artists have when, oh, she tried his platform call to TikTok. Oh, no, TikTok corny. I don't want to be like that. And all the people I looked up to didn't do that. Jay-Z didn't have to do that coming up. This is real comments that I remember coming. It's like, Jay-Z blew up in the 90s. What did 50 set have to literally say? It's like, Bruh, like two parts wouldn't have been out here sending girls his Bieber number. It's just not the same. It makes zero sense. But to know that conversation went exactly, literally exactly like it goes when we have it. Not just someone being resistant, but having to give the same examples and the fact that they insert random artists who blew up in the past as their defense. Yeah. Bruh. That's my dilemma. Sometimes successful artists will give the same stupid excuses as the smaller artists. It's genuinely like, because you think the gap, the gap was straightened that out. That's the kind of shit that made me wonder the classic question. How did you get like, what? Thinking like that, but they're 50 to his defense. All right. 50 set is kind of sort of about them like again and again. Yeah. About buck, Lloyd and, you know. All of them really. Yeah. Like, Hey man, I tried to kill these guys and then I had to stop investing. That's the bigger part right there. All right. He said, yo, he's going as far as he can go. That part is like deep. Yeah. He's kind of sorry, Bruh. Like he didn't want to have to leave him back there, but it's like, I gotta let you go, Bruh. I'm not willing to make an Instagram. It's so simple. It's so just not either well or to make. He even gave him the formula. He said, Bruh, just post some pictures with some bars on there, which is, you know, very simple formula for what I'm going to sell them was probably like 2016, 2017, you know. It's not one of that. But you've got to go look at his. I'm about to go see him. I'm about to look at Lloyd, man. Instagram, Bruh. Don't let him be on Instagram now. Don't let him be on Instagram today. There he is. Oh, he verified and all that stuff. Huh? How many followers does he have? Because it's like we always said, man, you can fight. Oh, 793, 793 thousand followers. He still ain't using it great though. It's like you can fight consumer behavior and what the people want. You can fight all you want, but eventually that's going to win because it's just going to keep evolving and getting bigger. Yep. And eventually it becomes so, so, so monumental that you have to break and be a part of it. We're watching the same shit go with TikTok. How many people that we see in 2019, 2020? I ain't never going to make a TikTok. Look at some motherfuckers now dancing. Damn, bro. Here I come. Let me go and make my pay. But the shitty thing about it like 50s and 50s and that's probably the thing is like in many kinds of like, bro, like, you know, I mean, he always has. Yeah, exactly. There we go. The cow is like, you're Lloyd Banks. You don't always have an audience there. But it's like that shit probably didn't hit like it hit when 50 was tight to do it. You know what I'm saying? Because that's the moment where you can get new found fame, right? Because you're early. So you want to get more attention because of who you are already. But then you get new attention because you're already one of the strong leaders on that platform. It's the same shit that Jason Derulo did when you think about it. It takes all year, right? He was already Jason Derulo, but Jason definitely went to another level. He didn't have bags that he was getting for the sponsor deals. That alone, like, he was getting like 30 to 80 racks, like better than show money. You know what I mean? For short videos. And if I am the platform for it, because of it, like the platform, like you get in bed with this tech giant really early. It's from being one of the few people to help. He's like, there's no belt. That's no belt thing. When Snoop Dogg talked about how him hopping on Instagram early led to them fucking with him and helping him do shit, bro. It's like, wow, who doesn't want a tech giant? You know what I'm saying? Because it's good for you. This was good for me right now. You want to be like, look, man, Lloyd, that's tough. But I am so grateful to hear this snippet because I feel like if artists can not only just hear this coming from what he said, I think it's more powerful to hear it coming from what he said, talking about Lloyd and then seeing how history plays out, right? Insert yourself. Insert yourself. Just check that shit out, man. Man, if he did sound heard, then. But that's what I'm saying, bro. I ain't want to let you go, man. I got to let you go. I got to leave you. I got to leave you because I got to keep going and when that person gives up in the movie, you're like, call on without me. You don't got to die here, man. If it was like, all right, bro. You was about it there. Now, with that said, we got another topic because record labels are using bots. They are using bots or not. Our record labels using bots. Now, so many people have said that record labels are using bots. We've talked about many people in the industry using bots. However, there was a specific instance, maybe even two months ago now, where Atlanta Records, many artists off of Atlantic Records were outed, right? For their bot usage, which I don't think that's fair, man. You know what I mean? Aren't you not supposed to out people, bro? You can't just be clean. But it wasn't like, it was like a little, I saw the Instagram page of it. I watched it from ground zero, half and bro. All I'm saying is today, you can't out people. I feel like people are a mid-tier music industry and we all get it. Below mid-tier and below bro, they don't respect it because they don't get it. They're not playing the same game. Look, I'll just fuck with y'all, but look. And if the artist has suffered, that's the biggest part about that. Like y'all think y'all talking. The artists don't know some of these times, some of these times. But let's talk about why we're bringing up this subject. Shout out to K.I. She is a Brandman Network member. If y'all don't know about Brandman Network, well, it's where we put our marketing strategies that we use for many of the artists that we've helped break. Saw us that we've helped break over the years and we put it in there for absolutely free. Go to brandmannetwork.com to get some of that information while we have it free for everybody, but completely free courses and community. Check it out. Now, K, what did she say? She said, yo, record labels are using bots to fuel artist streams. Do you guys think bots are slowly starting to become a secret mandatory tool of the mainstream music industry to ensure high streaming numbers? Yes, I think that is. But Atlanta Records denies using bots for any of its artists. Now, I think this is a complicated question in some way, right? Because I wouldn't be surprised if Atlantic Records was not using bots. They're like some third-party marketing agency that I read or something. Right. But not even just that, because I would not be surprised if it wasn't even employee at Atlantic Records. You know what I mean? Using the bots. Because we already know how many of these record labels use us, right? Just for regular marketing activity. So do they have a bot farm on staff? No. I would be surprised if you could be at the record label and not know. The highest motivation is the artists themselves and their teams. There's a lot of artists that don't know that the labels using bots or their manager got some bots used or their not the record label or their marketer might have even been Vanessa a little bit and did some bots. But there's also, let's be real, there's actually a lot of artists that know that bots are being used. They encourage it. Well, they encourage it, right? They don't get too deep into the trenches with it, but they have the conversations that, hey, what's up? Can you get your man that do what he do? That's 100K. Right. So, and we talked about this in our bot video before. Yeah. But just to add to it, I have another, even another scenario to make it clear why bots do make sense in the mainstream. So I've talked about how you literally might have a million streams. I'll make it up a number, right? You have a million streams and unless you get two million streams in the next 30 days, you might not have access to the next hundred thousand dollars of your budget based on the way the record label is set up and the way they have incentives or just the way they move because you have to make things move in a certain period of time. There's people who are going through scenarios like that. All right. I know that I was having a conversation with somebody recently who was talking about the way the radio works. All right. Okay. Okay. They had paid the money that they paid to get things popping on radio song went pretty damn high. Right. Let's just say 40s on the radio charts. The specific one they were talking about. Now, they already said the difference between let's just say 44 and 40 is a lot of money and decent amount of streams and everything. Point is they got the song popping on the radio by paying on the radio and getting that marketing visibility. But even radio today, even if it's popping and performing well on radio says, yo, what does streaming do? So to get it to the next level and take it to the rest of the markets, you can't just have good performers on the radio. You have to be performing on a stream or on the streams as well. Otherwise, it's not going to get clear because I guess it's like a quality control check or something. I don't, whereas so it can't be completely gained musically. I mean, off of money. I don't know. But well, when I do in that scenario, oh, I would say, well, shoot, I just pay for my artist to get here and I just need to pay $30,000 because I already just paid $250,000 to get it to this point or however much I pay. I know I was going to spend another $30,000 so it can go to the next notch and get paid. I'm going to get sent to like 100 more stations or whatever that number looks like. So there's incentives where in the game, there's going to be plenty of people using some formation of box always because it just doesn't make business sense not to. And just like what marketers do all the time is, yes, we know marketing isn't guaranteed in terms of the result that it could get. But we want to control as many variables as possible to put in the best chance of success. Yeah, that's why I get it, bro. It's about social proving. Like you just said, all these different entities who won't even give you a chance in some aspects because you don't, the numbers don't look a certain part. And then I think what people need to understand, bruh, is people have been finessing their music since the dawn of time, bruh. There's a new finesse every music generation. Like my mentor told me about how they would buy their own CDs at venues and they have the venue on the sign off on this account towards Billboard, I'm saying. He was doing this shit in the 90s and 2000s. There's always something, right? What's the difference between an artist doing a show and bringing out 30 other friends to fill the crowd out so the rest of the crowd thinks they're lit, right? These 30 friends aren't really your music fans, you know what I'm saying? But they're convincing everybody else in the venue that you are someone that's worth paying attention to. Theoretically, is that not the same thing that you're trying to do with the boss, right? So I think at least for me, that's how I've kind of like justified it for myself and kind of made it make sense for myself. I'm only ever against bots for artists who do not yet have a marketing infrastructure, right? Because I don't want the artist listening to be like, okay, Sean, of course, I'm like, I need to go and run some bots. No. But Don Tolver running bots around his album. It's not the same as little who the fuck whatever running bots around his debut single that he put out to his 10 month listeners. There's no marketing infrastructure. There's not enough going on around you to where people would believe you, right? And the success of a bot campaign is all about the people believe you. Yes, right? How blurry is Drake runs by as we believe it makes sense that Drake could have got no two million extra views on this and that. That sounds like something that could happen, right? Versus like if like I said, a little who the fuck whatever, you've got two million views in a day. Oh, Cal, ain't no way, bro. You got 100 followers on Instagram. You got 30 month listeners on Spotify. How you get two million views on this video in a day and a half, right? So it all comes down to believability, right? And how much of that can you actually make sense? We're going to have somebody on to go deeper into the bot conversation. Really? So, by the way. Oh, we are? Yeah. Right with the guy you're from? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to have more once we get into the vibe of doing interviews and everything. But I'll say this, it's crazy because one of the last conversations I had about the guy was telling me about some significant people doing some shit, right? And he was telling me how much money people are making off of it, right? I'm not talking about the people who are doing it, but I'm talking about the artists because you gotta still think. If I give you a thousand dollars to give me X amount of views on YouTube, I'm still getting paid from that from the content ID. Yeah. And that point you basically, which is Not content ID, but you know what I mean. Yeah, which is like, that's the part of it that I think regular artists need to understand why the negative bot conversation is up. These labels and people are not against bots because they think the playing field should be fair. They're against it because of what you just said. Yo, these motherfuckers basically robbing us, you know what I'm saying? You're going to pay this guy a thousand dollars. And because he helped you make an extra 10K from YouTube, extra 40K from the spot, but you're basically robbing these platforms, you know what I'm saying? And that's why they're against it. Not because they want the playing field to be even, bro. You need to get a fake artist page or something, just a page just to give ourselves some views. How you make care about the outcome or brand? Let me just give you this random page so I can make the money. But you know, a lot of the companies that are on that level, they only deal with very high level clients, right? Because of course you want to keep your hush hush as possible. And when the people who are paying big are in control of why you make, does it make sense to spread it across a whole bunch of different pages? But John Paul also on the brim and neck never comments for this post said, no, ultimately bots can be discovered relatively easy. It's a matter of priority on the part of streaming platforms. So he's saying it's not worth doing bots or it's not going to become massive in the mainstream music industry. The problem is artists want to rely on algorithms to grow their fan bases. I understand the practicality and the appeal of that. But at this stage, the most important thing to focus on is creating better content and better music. Yes, that stage, that stage. Proving the product does still work. So what's the point of focusing on something you can't control? Now you can't control bot. I'll tell you something about the algorithm, you can't. Oh, the algorithm yet. Focus on that. And I get that. There goes back to our conversation in that last episode. Yeah. All right. Now what that being said, I want to switch up the flow a little bit and get into a conversation. Well, we'll start with a simple question. Is this what the rap industry is really about? Because I don't think it's about music. The more and more we had these conversations, I don't think it's about music. Save the deal, boss. And this clip added to the clip that we just had on the podcast. Well, well, I am. But y'all haven't seen episode 34. Go watch episode 34. You're doing yourself dirty. This clip right here that we're about to play is yet another interesting encyclable. Clip, shout out to the rap radio. My dumb ass. Is that rap radio? It is rap radio, all right. My dumb ass used to think it was about being dope. And then I realized the music industry was designed to capitalize on orders. A lot of us just be making music and we be having fun. It'd just be fun. It'd be the homies. And then you attach the industry to it. The rap n*** is getting the least money off the rap n***. 99 times out of 100. The drug dealer, the jeweler, the strip on the club, the publicist, the flight, the airlines, the travel agent, the CEO of the label, the homies. He going to put so many people kids through school before he put his kids through school. Even the rapper that get a whole bunch of money from the industry directly cash out. You cash out 30 million, 40 million for an hour. That's not just because you're so good at making music. Or because you're so good at making money. It's that you advertise to the audience a lifestyle that go along with what the industry trying to sell. The industry trying to sell liquor in the club. So he gets to the club. So he gets to the show. You're the billboard. So if you go back to the things that Will I Am said that music has always been used to sell something else. It's used to sell hardware. I want to sell my radio. Well, I'm going to use music as a marketing mechanism to make people want radio so they can hear this music but not selling the music itself. This actually alluded to that same thing on that part of it. He talked about other things. Like, all right, at first I just thought this shit was about being dope, actually being good at it. Nah. All right. Then we get into the marketing and brand and who's more of a talent or just all these other elements. So there's one part of, oh it's not about necessarily the best talent or doing the coolest thing that already sucks to hear from many artists. But when you get back to that point of, yo, you represent a lifestyle. All right. And the industry as a whole is pushing this lifestyle because if you aren't holding the bottles, all right, if you aren't holding the chains, then my industry dies. All right. A lot of times we think specifically that's what I love about this. A lot of times we think specifically about the brand that we're touting at the moment. We say, oh yeah, I'm not about to have Cristal because I don't want to market Cristal. I'm not about to have De Leon because I don't want to market De Leon. I'm not about to wear a chain from Johnny or shout him out because I don't want to shout out Johnny unless I got a cut of these businesses. Oh, I'm doing something. But then you go to the next level. Oh, shit. If I just got you wearing a chain, drinking something, you know what I mean? Flexing some type of vehicle is all going to come back to me at the end of the day. It's the same reason why you see McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King all next to each other. Because Ava, as long as people know this is the area I go to without Hungary, at some point they're going to hit on the block. I'm one day they're going to be like, I'm tired of going to McDonald's. Let me get something different. Well, what's another option over there? So as long as we market this industry as a whole and grow to pie, we're all going to win. And again, it's one thing to think about the individual brand equity that you may or might may not have because of it. But it almost gets into that conspiracy side of things where you think about just pushing an idea and I want to market this lifestyle, not even on like the evil side of it, but just what am I encouraged and incentivize to allow to bubble to the top? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's why I want to smile that I was doing research into what non-music industry, the music industry is invested in. You know what I'm saying? I know there's that conspiracy of them being deep in the prison system. I wonder if some of these labels and things are invested in liquor companies and maybe they have a lot of stock in gold and shit like that. Right? And it's like, hey, we need to keep pushing anything that they sell us. I'm just thanking them to speculate and I'm just wondering. You know what I'm saying? Because it will make a lot of sense to me. And then some of it too, I think is just the fans put those expectations on the artists. Hey, bro, you don't drink. You don't have no chains on. You ain't got no cool car. You know what I'm saying? You fucking, especially in rap, but rap fans are toxic. You know, rap fans, rap fans are easily the most toxic fans there are. So I think what I will hope that artists kind of take away from that is that I need to be conscious of who I can sell things to and what I would sell to them. Because it doesn't have to be these things that we're talking about. I know that people are like, I don't want to sell liquor. I don't want to sell liquor. But even if you're someone like everything about it, we talked on the last episode about how certain female artists are just better at selling products because they can monetize every aspect of them. I can monetize my lashes, my nails, the polish I put on. Things like that, man. You can always find something in your brand that you can sell if you're willing to look outside of the usual. You know what I'm saying? If you're not, liquor chains, cars are always there for you, especially if you're a rapper. But if you want to do something different, the world is kind of open enough and fans would kind of have enough interest where you can monetize different things around them. Like I remember pitching an idea to a homie of mine about selling custom skins for PlayStation controllers because his fan base is really big in the game. And my brother just makes him like $20 PlayStation skins, you know what I'm saying? Sell them shit. Shit will go up. You never did it, so somebody wants that idea to go for it. You know what I'm saying? But it's like things like that, right? Like you have as an artist have to always remember at the end of the day, the industry respects, supports, and promotes the person that can sell shit. They don't care what you're selling, but can you sell some shit? They sell something. Something. Right. So if you can just prove, hey, I can sell anything. T-shirts, hats, stickers, kickball, tournament, tickets, you know what I'm saying? And you can prove that I'm speaking to whatever demographic like, I mean, you'll still get that. I think still get the same look just in rap. We just saw use of that being like the big, the big three liquor jewelry cars. I'm saying, but yeah, bro, like that's the also my big takeaway from the clip is like, this shit is way more than talent, bro. It's always going to be about what's your brand? What's your look? Who can you sell to? And then, you know, after maybe three or four other things that I can't think of right now and then use it. See, this is why I always can't respect when people like to say stuff like music doesn't have any influence. All right. And I was like, oh man, yeah, you know, oh, there was a lot of negative music that I heard listen to and I love to listen to the drugs, the guns and all that stuff. But I don't do the drugs and the guns and all that stuff. Yeah, you might have had a structure that it didn't work for you. Right. And you were able to not do certain things. However, on a macro, the number of shows, it increases the behavior of whatever that is. Like whether we're talking about drugs or guns, whether we're talking about party, whether we're talking about twerking, like whatever it is, it starts to affect every single thing else, right? It's because it's marketing. That's how it works, right? Sensitizes and then encourages at the end of the day. So music is the perfect conduit to like hijack people into whatever space that we want to get them into. And it made me think about cigarettes. Now, there's something deeper. Maybe it was something else that I was actually trying to think of. But I found this about cigarettes, where it said in 1940s, doctors were part of the original endorsers of cigarettes. Luckily, we had to convince people to do this thing, right? So it said in 1940s, tobacco companies hired doctors and dentists to endorse their products to reduce public health concerns about smoking risks, using slogans like just what the doctor ordered and more doctors smoke camels. The tobacco companies mislead people showing that physicians were also smokers and that cigarettes were fine for your health. All right. So we use one thing to bring people over to the other thing. All right. Same type of interesting mentality. Now, it is another thing. You gotta use celebrity endorsements, old film and things like that. Like it looks so cool. You see it all the time in old film. But what I found this was interesting. And this is in the 1990s, which just makes it even more interesting. Kid-friendly characters. In the 1990s, tobacco companies introduced cartoon characters like Joe Campbell to heighten tobacco's appeal for kids. The practice has since been banned, but the deception still continues by means of fruity flavors and brightly colored tobacco packaging. Tobacco companies also use products and advertisements in stores and gas stations at direct eye level of children, which, you know, I might start paying attention to that. Never, whatever. Looks like the current vape industry. Have you ever looked at some of these vapes, brother? I remember seeing this guy with one and when you hit it, it started like spinning at the end and color started flashing. I was like, bro, that was not made for an adult. Bro, that was made for kids. And you know what I'm saying? Some impressions of the kids. But the tobacco industry is great at marketing, bro. I can't say they find a way every couple of years to like weave their way back into society. The vape is basically that. Yeah. It was dying, but vape was a cool way to bring it back. Right, exactly. And marketing, the thing that is. Yeah, exactly. And along the same story. Now, I don't know how true and literal my dad means because sometimes I don't know. Bro means he says stuff so nonchalant. You don't know if he's serious, but I really do think he was serious because he never lies. You just laugh kind of like Adam. And he was like, what are you laughing at? He said the reason he got into, oh boy. He said he really didn't mess with smoking weed like that because like, oh, niggas are doing it too often. All right? He was like, I can't do this all the time. So he had to move on with something else. So it did what he said. Cigarettes, the reason he started because he wanted to learn how to do this trick. Like those man smokes to this day. But it was like he had, he was some guy that was like blowing some kind of circle. And of course you got the circles that you blow the big circle. You blow small circles in between. It wasn't that it was more like, I don't know, some kind of ongoing circle, which I don't know. Oh, cigarettes are only built for that. You have to be really talented, dude. They, you know, it's different. Point is, if you think about this same type of marketing, like kids or whatever, I don't know how old he was, but just like, we do it. No, little, simple, cool shit like that can attract people. You know, so it's interesting and that music is, I mean, it's just fertile ground for any version of making something cool and influencing something else. The artists are participating in the least of it. Hip hop got smart first, where we started saying, okay, we want the endorsements. We're bringing people this money. Steve Stout noticed that when Will Smith had the Ray-Bans on and the Ben & Black movie, the Ray-Bans sales went crazy. You know what I mean? Jay-Z started to notice some things and Boycott, all this great stuff. But we still are a long way from even the understanding that music apparently, right, isn't, it's to be consoled, but it's not for sale, which is a hard concept to get with. And I think we were in a newer generation where Mr. Led to thinking, oh, well, they were selling CDs. So music was for sale. But then when you break it down from the Will I Am concept and basically say, no, they weren't selling music. They were selling the CDs and make that smaller differentiation. They've gone back to, well, shoot, music right now is probably being consoled most like it. I want to say it's the value of music. Music is obviously valuable, right? But in some senses, the value of music has been showing truer than it ever has on the negative and positive side. Positive because we can track more of its usage, right? Positive because we can see how culture of music impacts other spaces. But the negative in terms of what consumers are really willing to pay for it. That price has technically always been the same. I was willing to buy that CD because I really wanted to hear this music so I was able to jump over that barrier. But that changes when it was an album, that's changes when it's an Mb3. It changes with whatever it is. And I don't know, man. It's still something that I'm wrapping my head around. Again, I get the basic concept, but I feel like at one point it's going to click. There's something happening in my brain, bro. I'm telling, I'm going to come back one day and I'll just be like, Tureka, you referee. We need to flip X, Y, and Z. And I done hacked the game in a matrix in a whole new way. But I feel like you start in the matrix, then you can see the matrix. Yeah. You know what I mean? But just because you can see the matrix, don't mean you got to hack the matrix. I feel like a lot of people just be seeing the matrix and I realize that's not enough. I want to hack that shit. You know what I'm saying? I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Just wait on it. Just wait on it. Now, next topic though. Sales are extremely important when it comes to music or not. What do you think? Before we even get into it, what do you think? Yes. The sales matter more than the music itself? That's a good question, man. No, I want to say no. My heart and the foresight into the comments wants me to say no. Okay. All right. So here it is. Academics explains why album number sales are important data. Responding to Lil Yachty's comment saying that we shouldn't focus on the numbers. Let's play this clip. Stop complaining about numbers. Right? The numbers are what they are. And yes, the numbers do like content. But the numbers are, the numbers will prove if you're doing something that's really special. It's a reason why, for example, nobody likes, nobody likes if the first week projection comes out and says you're not doing it, no one likes it. But if you're projected to do 50,000 after the first day and after the fourth day, you're projected to do 65,000, they love to point out the growth. Why? It shows that there's, the numbers are going to highlight the fact that there's a change in the culture based on the music. And that's what the numbers do. The numbers signify who's consuming it. Let me ask you this question, right? This is an Aaron question that goes outside the music. How are we going to stop it at that before you get into the abstract question? About tree falling, woods and stuff like that. I think there's one comment that's pretty clear. Dream Raheem says, artists love numbers and sales until they start falling though. Yeah, that's right. Artists love numbers when the numbers are high for them or they're going up and they don't like it when they can't play the game, right? But that's why I say it's a weird line to walk. But I think if you are entry-level mainstream and the game numbers matter, if you are not or not trying to play the games, then numbers don't matter. For me, I mean, I think there's a couple things about what academics said. Of course, could be fishing. You could say, well, what do the numbers really mean if somebody was using bots? What are the numbers really mean if it's about catching the algorithm and you have all these additional actors in the space? And I think that's where artists try to disconnect the judge of quality of music and numbers themselves, right? Which is understandable. But something that academics mentioned later on in this clip, when we talk about the music business, money numbers matter, right? It goes back to that same point. Hey, bro, keep it to yourself. Keep it on your hard drive if you don't want to deal in the music business, right? Or just share it with your friends and all that stuff. Don't think about growing from a music business standpoint and navigating that if you don't want to think about the numbers. That's just one thing that comes with it, all right? It's why people think numbers because they matter. I'm not even talking about that person who's just trying to appear bigger than who they are, but literally when we talk about charts and all these other things, they matter in ways, 100%, all right? Because you at least get to say that you had these numbers. I just saw a clip where 50 Cent in an interview was saying that who did he use as reference? Future, all right? He said, yeah, I could perform my song today and it doesn't really matter how the crowd reacts. Like these songs are number ones, right? I can get paid certain things because these songs are number ones. But somebody like Future, you might say, oh, yeah, the streets rock with me, board and hold, right? And they're playing on music more, they're holding music. It's great because it's true in that way today. But 20 years from now, without the number one attach to it, people aren't reacting the same. You don't get to say, well, at least this thing was a number one. You also can't flip it the same, all right? Because you can't say people are like, people hire based off of those type of numbers because they want to look, because I'm a company and I want to say, oh, I had some random artist that performed or whatever and look at how cool we are and say, he's a number one artist, right? You get those type of accolades. Not that Future's never had any higher charting things, but 50 was referencing those specific songs. So numbers matter when we talk about real life, period. Now, art itself and your judgment of it, no, you shouldn't want it to matter in that way when you're talking.