 I did exactly what you guys see Drake doing. I brought out all the tickets with my credit card a month before the concert for $40. I re-listed them a month later for $100 so I could make my $60 flip. Next thing you know, Chair, focus, little baby money bag. Yo, I performed in front of a sold out crowd. So I'm going to break this down to y'all. Y'all going to lose your minds with this one. Little baby and money bag. Yo, this is before little baby was who he is today. This is before he was 200 occasion. Whatever that little baby version is. This is little baby at $30,000 a show. This is little baby at $30,000 a show and Chair focus at a half a million dollars a show. And the way that you do it is, Ticketmaster is going to go ahead and, if you make a deal with them and you're going to be a promoter, you can go ahead and buy y'all the venue. So let's just say you buy y'all Meku Pavilion or you buy y'all Madison Square Garden. You paid them upfront. They want to get 30% of whatever you do as far as a net. The day that the tickets come out, you got something called a fire sale guys or early bird sale, which means that you can probably get the tickets for less the first day of. What companies like Ticketmaster were doing and record labels were doing is they were buying out 80% of the tickets the day of at the lowest price that you could, all right? Because now, unless you guys understand why this is genius, they can write that money off as marketing. So they giving your radio station tickets, they giving tickets to the kids, they giving tickets to the artists, they going all types of promotional things with those tickets. But now in the concert looks like, yo, this shit about to be jamming. Like, yo, this joint almost sold out. Yo, you gotta get you a ticket before there's none left. Now, Ticketmaster owns those tickets, bro. They now are going to upsell them for 200, 300, 400% to mark up. The week before the concert releases, you got 20% of people that actually brought the tickets because it looked like it was sold out and they really want to go to the show. That week, they start to re-release tickets. It starts to look like people was refunding tickets so you got a spot available. Ticketmaster is just re-releasing their tickets back on the platform. So now that they bought it at $50, you now can buy it at $100, $200, $300, $400. They're gonna always break even for life, guys. They will never ever miss. They know how this game works. By the day, by the night of the concert that Friday night, they're gonna release even more tickets but then they're gonna put them on third party websites, your Event Brights, your Stubhubs, and now they're gonna sell them from $50 to $500, thousands of dollars, $2,000. By the day of the concert, they're gonna have their own ticket scalpers in the street that work for them. The guys that me and y'all know that we wanna go to a basketball game. We wanna go to a Drake concert. We call Mike Mike up and he got the tickets for us. You guys know what I'm talking about. Everybody has a street team, all right? The day of the concert is called urgency and it's called scarcity and we are marketers. It's the same thing they do with PlayStation. It's the same thing they do with Jordan. Same thing we do with Yeezy. You buy up the market, you make it unavailable and then you make it available for people that are desperate enough to pay whatever they want to get their hands on it. There's enough people that have money that will pay any price for a Drake ticket, a Taylor Swift ticket, a Beyoncé ticket and they've been doing this forever, guys, from Metallica, Drake, Jay-Z, Beyoncé. The first concert that I did that at guys was Jay-Z and Beyoncé's On a Run Tour. I took my entire hood, 50 people and then I sold those tickets that I had left over that were front row tickets for 100 grand. So I took my whole hood for free, spent 50 grand and then I sold the other $150,000 tickets for 100 grand. So I was making money, taking my homies back and forth with me, putting them on front row and I started to figure out like, okay, this is what Ticketmaster and this is what the live nation and these guys do and if you're an artist, you just wanna show up and make sure that your concert is sold out. You don't really care about ticket sales. You don't really care about record sales. You just wanna do your job. So y'all look at interviews, right? And they ask these guys, do you care what your first week sales are? What do they always say? No, I just want the people that have the music. That's not what the execs are saying. That's not what the marketing guys are saying. No, we gotta break even, we gotta triple. So when you got a concert, concerts get canceled by them not being able to do the pre-sales, guys. So those Taylor Swift tickets that y'all seen, I can guarantee you that 75% of those were bought by somebody internally that made that entire craze about the Taylor Swift tickets that made me and you talk about it. So even with this Drake thing that's happening right now, guys, is marketing. All publicity, good publicity. The concert gonna sell out and you gonna go see Drake. Quick second. Have you ever seen an artist catch some traction and then they start to move? The numbers start to grow, they might even go viral but then fast forward a year from now, somehow their numbers haven't really grown that much. They dropped back close to the same monthly listeners they had before the traction and viral moment. Well, that's because you have to know how to convert those moments into careers. And we've done this again and again with not only songs but artists. And so has J.R. McKee who's been a part of helping artists like Lil Durk, Rod Wave, Justin Scott and Money Long. And we just did a collab where J.R. McKee does a step-by-step breakdown of how he took Money Long from zero to millions of monthly listeners and winning a Grammy over Beyonce, Mary J. Blize and Jasmine Sullivan. Check out this breakdown while we still have it up. You can check it out at www.brandmannetwork.com slash Grammy. Again, that's www.brandmannetwork.com slash Grammy. Back to the video. Now, I'll rate this down though. With that in mind, now that people have a sense of how that works, drop that Lil Baby Concert story. So here we go. Lil Baby Concert chair focus. This is the, I'm the most unknown guy that ever got paid the most for like, you know, being open to that guys. I'm gonna break it down for y'all. If you're local, you know that promoters are gonna go ahead and charge you and the local guys that come and perform for your acts that come to your city or your Goddies or Rick Rosses. Y'all familiar with that, right? We all from that gang. So I always had my homeboys and they would perform and it'd be nobody in the crowd. Like, why are you paying $5,000 to perform for Rick Ross and Rick Ross fans on here, bro? You performing at two o'clock and he performs at nine o'clock. So what I did that was different. As I said, you know what? I'm gonna be a promoter. I need ownership over the merch. I need ownership over the marketing. I need ownership over the visuals. I need control of certain things and I want a certain percentage of the tickets. I want this percentage of the front end. I want this percentage of the back end. So I negotiated what I call an amazing leverage deal. I'll take care of the venue. I'll take care of paying Lil Baby what he wants, which we had a team of guys and promoters that paid Lil Baby. So he gets his $30,000. Money Bag Yo gets his $40,000. You got the concert, you got the venue and you got the mainstream X. Now, all I gotta do as a marketer is find the audience that wants to see Lil Baby and Money Bag Yo. Next thing you know, I make it as a co-headlining situation. Come see Chair Focus and Friends, Lil Baby and Money Bag Yo. Now, I know I can't pack a venue with 6,000 people by myself, but I can probably bring 200 to 300 people. I can bring some of my other local artists and they can bring 200 to 300 people. But Lil Baby and Money Bag Yo is gonna bring them other 4,000 to 5,000 people. But when you look at them flyers, when you look at the promo and you see me all over it, you hear my voice, you see my content, you see my merch, it looks like it's a focused, random event. So as the promoter and the co-headlining artist, I was able to sell out the venue and then I was able to oversell the venue out because I gave away a bunch of different tickets. I did exactly what you guys see Drake doing. I brought out all the tickets with my credit card a month before the concert for $40. I re-listed them a month later for $100 so I could make my $60 flip. I made sure all the other promoters got paid. I made sure all the other ticket master guys got paid. I released another 1,000 tickets on StubHub guys for $500, $600, $700, $800. I gave away 400, 500 tickets to the kids that was in my hood that never got to go to a concert, that never got to go ahead and see that favorite artist up close and personal. And then I let all the local acts from my hoods perform for free. Next thing you know, chair, focus, little baby money bag. Yo, I performed in front of a sold out crowd. I own a visual of those guys performing and now we legendary. We made $250,000 net profit because the money I invested was $250,000 as far as your artist getting the venue doing all of the marketing and being able to go ahead and upsell the right records. I mean the tickets for a certain amount of money that was the game changer, bro. So if I could have done that over and over again, bro, that was also one of the biggest situations before I went to prison. I was doing this to concerts, I wasn't performing that. So I planned on starting a tour with all of your biggest artists from your young dawgs, your Rick Rosses, to your little wings. I was going to be the co-headlining act and I was going to make money in all the mainstream artists because I was going to be the promoter and I was going to be the artist. Scalping your own concert, bro, I love it. I love it. I love it. That's part about the headline, Sean. They say, yo, he put $125,000 to his own concert. They never gave nobody no context. So I just never argued. You understand what I'm saying? It was a great hairline. Yeah, like if I did that and nobody came to the concert, I think we've seen that before. We've seen people who try to embellish who they was. They got fake followers, they throw a concert and nobody shows up. My shit was different. Spent the 125 grand in marketing, 125,000 dollars to throw the event. I made $250,000 and I only performed two songs. So that was the conversation on Vice TV is what happens when an artist figures out the same process as Live Nation and does it himself independently. It's also another reason that the industry is scared to shit a chair and focus because these are the conversations that we have on this platform that not me, Sean, but LA Russell or Jada Kessler, those guys see, they got people that are paying them a small portion of the product coming performed. So what if they bring in the promotion side in-house? What if they start doing that themselves? You understand what I'm saying? The promoters be making a killing. But if you're an artist and you really wanna be a boss, you gotta be your own promoter. You gotta be your own manager. You gotta make sure that you take care of everything in-house. Yeah. And you see it a lot with talent, right? When the ones who figure out how to make the money is no different than Floyd having his own promotion company. He's like, yeah, I'm a boxer but now I gotta own a promotion company. Now I'm promoting for other fighters and I'm promoting for myself so I can get the big cut, right? So like bringing the house is big and I feel like, I don't know, man. Some artists, they don't want to do all that though. And they hate that the game is that way. What do you say to those artists? I feel bad for them because you gotta be from, you're not allowed in the city from the mud or whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean that you're not really hungry, bro. I got too many miles to feed, bro. I can't just let, I can't let certain dollars go out the window. I'm gonna put in everybody to work. It's just, it's a mentality to me. You understand what I'm saying? And you gotta look at the people that we working for. They bought to figure it out. If you're a ball show, you figure it out. So guess what? Build your team, bro. You only as solid as your network and your team. That's why guys like Sean and Jacoby, that's why you guys is the shit in the industry because if you can't figure it out, you outsource, go. You know what I'm saying? You split some money. I can't let you mess my guy up name again one. Just call him Corey, it's Jacory. Jacory, Jacory, my fault, Jacory, man. I apologize, bro. You had a writer. Sean and Jacory, I apologize, big brother. But what I meant from that Jacory though, is I think that people should go ahead and build their team, bro. And also put people in position. And y'all can help out a lot of people. And these artists could find people, as help is there. But I don't think that they understand that you gotta share a bit of the power and you gotta be informed about what's going on. So getting taken advantage of is a choice. Not knowing certain information that you guys know is a choice now. Yeah, I think too, touch on Sean's point. I think the most successful people in music realize that at the end of the day, this is really just a game. And so it's like, if I go play Monopoly and Sean reads me a Monopoly rules, I'm like, man, I don't really fuck with those Monopoly rules. Sean's gonna be like, well, it's the only way you can win. You have to play within the rules of the game if you wanna beat me, right? And I think that's what a disconnect is. Arts will come in, not realizing there are rules to the game. They'll learn the rules to the game, but that's not right, that's not fair. And then people like us are like, well, it is what it is. So I'm gonna go figure out how to at least play it before I start trying to change things, you know what I'm saying? And I've seen that a lot just with what I consider to be successful and unsuccessful. The most successful art is even they put out the image that they won't play the game when you talking them behind scenes is a completely different story, you know what I'm saying? They're like, no, I did this because I need to do this and my manager put me on this game and that's what made this go.