 Wow, what's up everybody? Once again, it's brand man Sean and I have to talk about why indie artists in particular will suffer when it comes to Spotify. And I got this video idea just from the sake of the fact I literally just recorded that video talking about how Spotify has removed thousands of songs. But there's a lot more to it. I want to get into the specifics because I explained the overall approach and the reason that is happening framework-wise. But here are the details and here's how you can protect yourself from it. It's the matwork. It's the matwork. It's the matwork. Number one, playlist. They are the center of it. What's the primary thing that Spotify cited in terms of removing songs? Well, that was fake streams. Fake streams. Again, I say fake streams. Where do we primarily hear about fake streams coming from? They're usually playlist. Most people are smart enough now to not just go out all willy nilly doing one of those straight programs where they just give you a lot of streams. I'm gonna pay $15 and get 10,000 streams. Okay, right. I know some of you are still doing that. You gotta stop. But there's playlists that seem very, very, very credible, all right. They seem realistic and that all of that work is being done where even after your campaign you can barely tell, all right, that something happened and you aren't really diligent and understanding on how to gauge that or not. Like that's a real thing, right. And because of that, people get caught up with fake streams that they don't even know are fake. That's the worst part about what's happening to so many URs right there right now, all right. And I already talked about it in that last video. We've been for a while, almost a year now saying clients, yo, y'all, we don't want you doing Spotify playlists, period. But why are indie artists the ones who suffer most from that? Because signed artists get the editorial playlists where there are quality streams. Now record labels in them, they still get some fake streams and stuff too, but that's another story that's more purposeful. Signed artists get that editorial access. Indie artists are playing with a third party playlist and those are far more high of a risk. This is why you think Spotify is bad for it, but this is why they have to go down, crack down so hard on fake playlists, fake artists, all these things that are happening because they pay for it. I think it was either 200 million or 600 million. I have to put it up somewhere if I find it, right? But 600 million, 200 million at the least, maybe it was 300 million dollars that got lost one year off of fake streams alone because they are paying money, right? So these fake streams aren't just ooh of entity metric. People get paid out even though it's a little bit when you add all those artists up, right? It becomes a lot of money. So that's why Spotify has to do that. I don't blame them from that standpoint, but because of that, Indie artists who are more prone to having this issue happen since they don't have access to the editorials, they're the ones who get whacked. I know it sucks. Now, how do I solve for that brand, man? I don't know. Well, actually I do know. So, outside Spotify resources. What does that look like? TikTok. We know TikTok was, well for us, we got probably about 600 million streams all driven from TikTok alone last year, right? Or sparked from TikTok and then grew outside those platforms, right? Had a really good year from TikTok alone, pushed over just as Spotify, by the way. I'm just talking about the streams that got pushed over to Spotify. Now, on top of that though, right? We know that TikTok is, it's a gamble per se. Yes, you can do it systematically. We are very good at making sure we get a bang for the buck at minimum, but or don't waste money when it shouldn't be wasted because there's no chance of virality on TikTok. However, it's still a gamble and there's far fewer songs that is gonna be worth it to do with that route on TikTok. The other route, the most conservative but fruitful route, right? It's ads, right? Why? Because ads, not only are you able to run your campaign, right? And as a matter of fact, I wasn't trying to do this but I'll go to the board. All right, we're talking about these two routes. Playlist and ads. And there's two funnels. We'll look at it this way. All right, you have this huge wide funnel when it comes to playlist. And then with ads, it's a lot more narrow when we talk about Spotify. So let me explain this a little bit more. When you're on Spotify, I mean, yeah, Spotify, you're on the playlist and you get on that playlist. You have all these listeners. You see those numbers, they rack up pretty fast. Why? Because, one, people are directly on the platform and they're hearing your song. We're talking about a quality, like real playlist situation by the way now. We're not even talking about the fake stream situation. We already know where that can go. Fake stream situation is what I'm about to say except worse, all right? But a regular playlist, a quality playlist situation for the most part. Although they can be beneficial, they have been beneficial, they start to put you in a position to trigger other algorithms. Just generally speaking, if you think about play listing, right? It's a passive behavior. Why am I in a playlist? Typically I play a playlist so I can just push play and I don't have to actively choose a song. I just wanna hear what comes up. And there's a lot of times I hear a song but that doesn't mean I wanna stop it, right? So that means your song has to be so good that it makes me stop doing what I'm doing in the context of a playlist where sometimes I might be working out, right? Sometimes I might just be vodding, right? With some homies, all right? Might be setting a mood romantically, whatever I'm doing, all right? I have to be able to like say, yo, know what? I wanna stop what I'm doing. Then go follow that funnel. It's more of a passive listening behavior. People listen to playlists while they at work, right? Where it's an ad by the time you get your listen, all right? People have hopped through some things. So a playlist what we find is the actions after listening. Not just the top-end listen. You see all these listens, it's a wide funnel. On the bottom, you'll see one to 3% save ratio, right? That means I heard the song and I saved it into a playlist or something like that, all right? Then you have the other actions like follow and all that stuff, right? Then from ads, we've seen eight to 13%. I don't know if that number's probably not that clear in that corner. This is the eight to 13% ratio, right? Versus a one to three. Why is that? Because I saw this on, let's just say Facebook. I hopped over to probably some intermediary link, like let's just say smart URL or something like that. And then I hopped into the funnel of now I'm on Spotify listening to the song for the first time, right? Where up here you're starting on Spotify. So the ad is the song. It's similar to YouTube ads. Let's think about it more from that vein, actually. When you look at your interaction rate where most people have those YouTube ads and they got all these views but they have one comment, right? Two comments and a million views. That's what's happening on Spotify. You're on Spotify, so you have that listen that got accounted for but you didn't actually have any backend action, anything that's really gonna do anything for you. And the worst part about that, as of right now, they don't allow you to do it too well. You're not really gonna retarget and benefit from that where at least on a YouTube ad you can at least double back and you have them in your data or something like that. So that's what's happening on Playlisting. We're on, let's say a Facebook ad could be Instagram. There's other ads programs with most people, Facebook and Instagram. You're hopping through two hoops. So by that time, I really wanna hear this song. I heard it somewhere. Click to somewhere else. And then from that other place, I then selected which version and which way I wanna be, I wanna, you know, consume it. I'm more likely not only to hear it, right? If it inspired me to go through those two hoops, I'm more likely going to want to save, more likely going to want to follow, right? So why this funnel is smaller is yes, you're probably gonna have less listens on your song but you're gonna have more fans. And it's not one of those things where the Playlisting usually evens out. It can if it's the right Playlist, but honestly, there's not even that many Playlists that are even worth it, right? A very, very, very small amount of Playlist. And if you doing these Playlisting, it needs to be a little salt man sprinkle, don't just, ah, this is my whole plan. I got people that's come to us, like, yo, I wanna spend 20K in Playlisting. Nah, we had to turn them around, like out the door, bro, or you gotta switch up the strategy. You're not gonna be complaining about us, you know, because you put us down the path of a bad strategy that we don't even believe in, right? So that's why, all right, Playlisting, we already know that's a terrible route. Not always, but generally speaking, when we talk about this situation, why Indies are getting done wrong because they're ended up with these fake streams, let alone if they did it right, it's still not that beneficial. A lot of times, outside of padding in numbers, ads are a great route. Oh, actually, even just getting posted on Instagram, like getting shared by certain pages or influencers, we've seen great results from that. Now, it might not be as big of a boost as TikTok again, not as big of a boost as Playlisting again. However, you can see similar numbers to this scenario, right? If you get shared by quality influencers, quality pages and things of that nature. So those will be your routes to solve it. Let me just list it real clear to make sure we covered everything. We got TikTok, all right? We got Facebook slash Instagram, depending on what works for you. And then we have what we call IGPR, that's InstagramPR, whether that's through some kind of influencer or if that's through being shared on some type of page, whether it's a music page, hair page, whatever your niche is and whatever can make sense with your song. Those are the primary routes where we see high quality and safe ways to get your views on Spotify. Now, it's not that there aren't other ways and it's not that there aren't strategies that are more effective or just as effective, but these are those base ones that everybody can go to. Getting good at them is a different thing. The problem is everybody thinks they're good at them and you're doing good for what you think but you could be getting to 10 times that. So make sure you're practicing and taking it seriously when you do these, but all these work and if they don't work for you, that means you either have the wrong song, right? For the platform like a TikTok, maybe the wrong ad content when it comes to Facebook or Instagram is running an ad and it's the wrong page possibly when you're doing an IGPR type situation or you picked the wrong influencer or maybe the song sucks. That's a real possibility. I can't say this enough because we don't say this to people enough. We can't let everybody going out here just thinking they got good music. Everybody does not have good music, but I believe most people are capable of good music. Maybe some people might need more producer production and mix engineer than others, but it's a real thing. But why it's so important to understand that trash music is real. Matter of fact, not the good trash that goes viral just like music that people, music that doesn't really inspire much is a real thing. It's important to understand that because you're gonna be wasting your money if you don't acknowledge that at some points. You could have a song that's great, right? Out of five, one in five isn't that bad of a ratio. One song could really take off and the other five are just okay and you have to be a super fan to care for it. Be pragmatic when it comes to your own music. Understand that Spotify has all the incentive in the world to eff you up if you do fake streams and it's only gonna get worse. I promise you, it's only gonna get worse. Oh, and I forgot something. So anybody who didn't make it to this part of the video, sorry, Spotify ads. That's gonna get better over time. Now, it might not be as fast as we would like and it's gonna favor labels at first for sure, but over time, there's a good likelihood. I believe that Spotify ads will get better, more productive for indie artists. So stay tuned for that, but that's not a right now thing for sure. These, and of course we'll update you and let y'all know whether it's me or Corey or somebody else on the team who does a video on the channel and lets everybody know when Spotify ads really start to be a worth it thing where you don't have to be lucky or some kind of expert or have all the stars in line just to make it happen. 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