 What's up everybody, once again, it's Brand Man Sean and I'm extremely excited to introduce you to another special guest. This is Amir. What's up, Amir? What's going on, guys? This is Amir, R&B artist from Toronto. What's up, Brand Man? How's it going? Nothing much, man. I just wanted to say before I even get into the conversation though, like Amir, there's a reason I have Amir on here. This guy has done some interesting things. He has about 30,000, 40,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and he has about 12,000 listeners or followers on Instagram. But once again, it's not the fact that he just has these people, like I know 30,000 or 40,000 listeners monthly on Spotify is the largest thing, but it's considerable. I know a lot of you aren't there, but even more importantly, it's how he made it happen. It's one of the most doable ways for most of the artists when it comes to repeating. So we're going to get into that. Make sure you listen up. You're going to learn a lot of good stuff from this man. So again, Amir, what's up, how you doing? As you say, you're an R&B artist. First of all, how long have you been doing this in the first place? Yeah, what's up, everybody? Thank you, Sean, for having me on your channel. Appreciate it. Yeah, like, so I've been doing music. I actually started off as a producer and writer. I had no intention of being an artist initially. And then kind of the way the industry changed and opportunities for producers and writers got less and less. And then I decided, you know what? I happened to sing. So why not just build something on my own? And that's kind of how it started. So I thought I should just own my own thing, my own brand and my own sound. So that's pretty much where it started from. And it was pretty much part time until about a year, year and a half ago. So that's when I really started going hard. God, so I mean, it's interesting you say that because I find that, especially in an industry like a music industry, but in a lot of ways, just across a lot of industries today, at some point, just building your personal brand also becomes a leverage just to kind of maintain and keep you from losing your value. And right, people will work around you. People don't need songwriters. People need a reason to work for you outside of your actual skillset, D-Zave. That brand is. Yeah, man, you nailed it. It's like, and I saw that like back in 20 up until 2014. I only wanted to be a songwriter, like a major label songwriter. And I had some opportunities. I've worked with some major label artists here and there. Like, but I don't know, man. There's always like the sense of like dependence, you know, like you're always dependent on somebody to give you an opportunity. You could write a hundred songs. One of them might get cut and then it doesn't make their album, or if it does make their album, if it doesn't become a single, then you got, you literally, you're going to make like a hundred bucks for all that effort, you know, like it's, it's not, it's not really worth it. So it's, it just depends what you want. And for me, like that life just, it just didn't appeal to me anymore. So I figured, and I love making music and I figure it's better if I'm going to invest all this time making all these songs. I should at least own those songs and release them and maybe get something out of it that way. Like maybe some people will like it. Maybe the labels might not, but I might get fans out of it or so. Did you write four labels? Uh, well, I had like, I've, uh, not necessarily, I've had songs put on hold by labels, like major labels. And then obviously that whole dance, I'm sure you know how that, that happens, you know, where they have songs sitting and they get circulated and then nothing happens. Then two years go by it and the sound changes. And then I just got tired of it, you know, like, I'm like, forget this, I can't deal with this anymore. Yeah. It's the different side of that, that label beast. We talk a lot about that in terms of artists being shells. But yeah, when it comes to the songwriter thing, it's brutal, man. Because like, and now artists are writing their own stuff pretty much for the most part and they have their own teams. And if you're not in their team, you're not going to, you're not really going to get in there unless you know somebody. Right. So true. That's probably need to do an entire interview. Yeah, yeah, because you, I think you talk more about artists, but I think you've done some videos on producers and songwriters too, from what I remember. Yeah, not as many on songwriters yet, but that's because I have a, I plan to make a few things happen. I'm more on that later. Right. Before that in 2019, I guess. Yeah, exactly. 2019 to come. So check this out, man. You talked about the fact that you've been only doing this seriously about a year, year and a half, right? Yeah, before that it was like super part-time. I would put up a video like every three months, you know. Right, right. So what was the biggest shift? You said, all right, you were less consistent, it sounds like, but tell me some more in terms of, as a matter of fact, if you could paint the story of what your day-to-day looked like before any of you were working a part-time job. Yeah, like I had a job I actually used to work in finance and accounting, believe it or not, but you know, and then it sounds bad, but I absolutely hated it. So, you know, so I'm like, I always wanted to do something in music because that's just where my interests lie. And because I'd been doing it part-time and on the side for so long, I had built up a skill set as a producer. And I'm like, you know what, like I can do it. I'm not exactly where I need to be skill-wise, but at least I can do it now enough where I can put out pretty decent content. And with every song you get better and better. And as you release more, you keep improving and building on it. And at that point, I just decided to just pull the trigger and just go full time with it. So that's kind of how it happened. Yeah. I'm hoping in the interview, man. What's going on? How are you? Whoa, man. Hey, that's my dad. Actually, I'm worried somebody might walk in too, man, so let's see, you know. All right. Don't worry. Yeah, that's my dad, man. Don't worry, man. You can see me? Of course I can see you, man. Yeah, but so check this out. I'm going to get my train of thought back in line. All right, so also, that was like early 2017 when I went full time with it. When I released my song, Choice, around that time. OK. And actually, that song was part of it, because when I saw the reaction that that song got, I'm like, and I'd never gotten a reaction like that on anything I'd ever released before then. So that's kind of gave me some hope, like, oh, wow. Like, people really like this, so maybe it should go a little harder and invest more into it, you know? So. All right, so with that being said, let's go into the mindset of being super consistent. You're one of the most consistent artists I've talked to on your level of, you know, you're working pretty much by yourself from my mouth. And every time, everything I've learned about you and the conversations we've had, I mean, it was more of a, what do they call it? I mean, you know, just the consistent, the tortoise slow and steady wins the race. That's what that's your mentality seems like, right? This feels pretty slow to me, because I'm like, in the trenches when I'm doing it. But yeah, like, you know what? Because I'd never been consistent before then. And obviously, if you're not, and my advice to any artist would be whatever you're going to do, just do it every day. Even if it's like two hours an hour, whatever you can do, just do it every day. Because it's very easy to lose momentum when you take two weeks off, three weeks off, and then getting the ball rolling again is not easy, right? But keeping it rolling is much easier. So that's kind of where my mentality came from. Like just, I'm like, I have to, because I have free time now, I'm gonna do this full time. So I have to be putting out content regularly. I have to be constantly improving my production skills, my mixing skills, writing skills, mastering, all that. Like I do all that stuff myself, right? So... How many songs do you drop a week or a month? So I did weekly songs, like what people like to call the rust strategy, which is only the surface of the rust strategy, by the way. That's not all there was to it, obviously. But I did that for 35 weeks. And it wasn't all original songs. Some of them were covers and remixes, but it was a lot of work because I made all the beats. I had to do all the mixing and mastering and recording and vocal comping. It takes forever to do all that and doing it. And every Monday at 7 p.m. for 35 weeks, I dropped a song. And after that, I switched to like every other week or every three weeks. Like after that, I'd built up enough of an audience where I felt like I wanted to focus more on quality rather than just churning out content. And I also kind of eventually want to move away from doing covers and remixes completely. So, I hate to say this. I did burn out a little bit, but I'm still consistent. Like I'll never go six months without dropping a song. Like that'll just never happen now. So... I mean, you trained yourself. You kind of... Now you know how to move it. But like the good thing is like those 35 weeks, it wasn't just to grow a fan base or an audience. It was also to build discipline, and also to build skill and to improve. Because I knew I had to get better at mixing and I knew my vocals had to get better. My production had to get better. It was good, but it wasn't as good as it could be. You know, so those 35 weeks, they forced me to improve like crazy. I packed them like three years of work into seven months, right? So... I'm so glad to hear you say that, man, because people ask the question so much about the rust strategy, quote, unquote, like you said, from the standpoint of just dropping a lot of music because they want attention. But I really try to get, especially early on, artists to focus on the fact that you need to get better anyway. And that's 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Like even if you aren't dropping the songs, you still should try to be saying, hey, I'm gonna have one song every single week or something like that. Some kind of an office because marketing only works if your product is good, right? And just you could have a million dollar marketing budget and not have a horrible song. It's probably not gonna do that well. Maybe it might, you might get lucky if it's so bad that it goes viral just because it's that bad, you know? But... Another thing, yeah. But you don't want that, right? Like no artist wants to be, every artist wants to be taken seriously. So for that, you have to put in the time. And unfortunately there's no shortcut to that. And because with me, I didn't want to just be an artist. I also wanted to be a producer and mix engineer and all this stuff. So I have to put in even more time because I have to acquire more skill, right? Yeah. So... Okay, so let's get into the details of this weekly drop that you had. That was almost nine months. So... Nine months, yeah, exactly. Drop a song every week. What platforms are you dropping your music on? And then after that, what are you doing to get attention on those platforms? Okay, yeah. So yeah, like you mentioned the Russ strategy, like I'm sure Russ was doing a lot more than just dropping the songs because you have to drive traffic to your songs too. Otherwise nobody's gonna hear them unless you're already famous. Right. Unless you already have 100,000 followers, your songs are not gonna organically spread. You know, so it's... So what I was doing is it's a combination of things I tried influencer marketing, I've tried Facebook ads, I've done all of it and to be honest, it wasn't just one thing. It was kind of... It was a combination of all of them. And eventually, like as my stream started growing by putting in the weekly songs, I hit a turning point after like week 10, 11 where I got... Then what happens is Spotify has algorithms that you can start triggering too, especially if people really like your song, you know? So then you might have some organic growth when you hit the algorithms. So you mentioned platforms. I didn't... I was releasing the songs on every single platform including SoundCloud. Now I don't really release music to SoundCloud as much anymore. I'll do it maybe once every three months just to keep it kind of alive. But that's cause SoundCloud, I feel like it's... Honestly man, I hate to say it, but it's like a black hole. You know, like it's... It's like you put music there and it's... You got nothing out of it, you know? So now they've offered monetization to some artists, but I don't know man, I don't think it's a good platform to grow a fan base. That's just my opinion. For me, I don't think it's the best. Like I think YouTube is a much better platform if you want to just organically try to grow a fan base. Well, that's just my opinion, you know? I can be... I don't think I have that opinion though. Sorry? Why do you have that opinion? I would love that perspective. The reason that... Well SoundCloud's algorithms have changed. So like back in the day, you could put up a song on SoundCloud and it was searchable. But now nothing is searchable on SoundCloud. You have to drive traffic to it. And if I'm gonna... If I have to drive the traffic to it, then I'd rather drive it to Spotify because Spotify is like a much healthier platform, right? Yep. SoundCloud is not. And also Spotify, you get a return on your investment on SoundCloud, you don't. So just from a business standpoint, I don't think it's a smart idea to be driving traffic there. And also YouTube, YouTube has a better search algorithm than SoundCloud does. And the suggested algorithm, like the suggested videos, it's much better. So you have a much better chance of organic growth on YouTube, I find, than you do on SoundCloud. But again, man, that's just my opinion. That's just my experience. So I don't know, somebody else might have had a different experience. I think SoundCloud used to be good back in like 2014, 15, but now I think it's basically useless. Generally speaking, I can pretty much agree with you. I'm not gonna get into an argument or anything about it because I pretty much agree with you. But I also just wanted to make sure people heard your additional perspective because I hear so many people speaking for SoundCloud and not that many people speaking against it. But to really hone in on your process, you drop music on every single platform. Yeah, so like the same song on Monday. On Monday it would be on YouTube, it would be on SoundCloud, especially in the earlier weeks. And then I used DistroKid to get it to Spotify, Apple. And they're pretty fast. Like you can get a song there, probably the next day or the next two days. What about when you try to line it up so it matches up exactly on Mondays, but I couldn't always do that, so. That's a different thing. So when you talk about influencers and all these other things that you did, right? That was just trying to figure out what's going to work. Of course, some of the things work. It was all experimenting. Everything was an experiment. Like this whole year was a giant experiment for me. Like I tried so much stuff. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. Some of it was a huge waste of money and time. Some of it was a good use of money and time. So yeah, man, and I encourage all artists to do this. Cause to make it really simple, it's just about making the song, finding your audience and driving traffic. If you want to make it super simple, that's really all it is. And how you drive that traffic, I don't think is as relevant because it just depends on your genre, your niche. And what you feel comfortable doing. Like I tried it all pretty much. I tried influencers, ads, doing covers and remixes, all of it, you know? So I'll try anything just to see if it works or not. Right. I mean, I think it's important for people to definitely remember that you, everybody's going to have a different way of driving their audience a lot. Exactly, exactly. Particularly at the beginning, but you talked about something that's very important when it comes to, you had all these things that you did at the beginning, but after a while, you talked about Spotify kind of automatically triggering things. So when I found, like even with the YouTube page, right? No matter what, whatever kind of audience you're trying to build, there's always a threshold where at some point, like at the beginning, you're reaching out, trying to get in people's face. Hey, I need your attention. I need your attention. Come to me, come to me, come to me. But at some point, you have enough of an audience where you can be a self-contained. You still want to bring in new audiences, but you have, you know you're going to like drop a post on Instagram and get at least as many of likes, right? Which can then possibly trigger the Instagram algorithm and eventually boost it to the explore page based on your own audience. Exactly. Outside. And it sounds like you went through that process. I did. And what Spotify had happened earlier because I was more, I don't know, like I was more active about driving people to Spotify initially. I even get algorithm bumps on Apple Music now. Really? I don't drive, I never, ever drove traffic to Apple Music ever. So any, and I think I just, I'm about to hit a million total streams there now. When Apple Music? Apple Music, yeah. Never drove traffic there. Never drove traffic there. It was always to Spotify because I feel like Spotify is where there's, there's more users on Spotify. So I feel like it's probably better to invest in that for now, even though Apple has caught up a lot, like Apple's bigger in the US, but globally Spotify is still much bigger. Right. I think that's investor, it's a better investment in Spotify as a whole right now just because of the actual work that an artist has control over. Spotify is more malleable to their impact. Like it's very little that an artist can do with like no connections to certain people at Apple or in the industry or something like that, that they can do on Apple. Right. Exactly. Self-contained, it's, it's interesting. And also like I feel like Apple Music's algorithm is weird, you know, like I don't quite understand it. It seems almost random to me the way it works. Yeah. Like one day I'll see, oh my song got put on all these people's playlists, like personalized playlists and I'm, I just don't understand it because I don't personally use Apple Music, I use Spotify. So I understand Spotify a lot better than I understand Apple Music. For sure. Okay. And I also like it better, you know? I just think it's a better platform but that's just my personal opinion. So. Cool. So first of all, you start doing what you're doing. You're on all these platforms. At some point you make a decision that you're on Spotify. You're on Apple Music. You're not doing SoundCloud. That was something based on what you learned. Now, and you know, and then you made a perfect personal decision what works for you and what you prefer. From that standpoint, because you started off doing everything, what after all of your learnings, what now works for you as far as your system that you like? So now like, I'm kind of doing that. Like now I am having some organic growth too. Like I think I mentioned, like I used some, I tried influencer marketing. Like now a lot of influencers are using my music without even me asking them to. Yeah. It's happened a few times now. Yeah. So like people with like hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram or even YouTube are now starting to use. But see, I can't control that as far as things that I can control. Right now I'm going to try to re-strategize. Like I've pushed a lot of singles. So my next step might be to push like a project and see, because I haven't experimented with a project yet. So that's kind of my next, I would encourage as an artist, if you have like no fans, don't even bother making an album. It's just going to be a waste of time. I would just do singles, release the single, learn what you can, move on to the next one and repeat that process over and over again. That's just, again, that's my opinion because I feel like an album is a huge investment. Like you're going to have to spend like six, seven months making it. And if you have no fans, you just did all that work. And now the real work begins because now you have to start marketing it. Like making the music is the easy part, right? Like getting it heard is much harder, especially now because there's so much music being made. 20,000 songs get added to Spotify every single day. Like that's the competition. It's ridiculous. So tell me more about, because one of the things that baffled me, I wouldn't say baffle, but what I loved, because I didn't hear other artists talk about doing something like this. And once again, it just speaks to consistency was your $5 a day Facebook strategy. I did that in the early days. So like I think when I spoke to you a year ago, I think that's when I was doing that. So I did that for about three months. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to let it run. Like people like this song, I'm just going to just let it run and see what happens. And honestly, like I kind of forgot about it. And I just let it run in the background. And then after three months, like I did build up when I looked back. I'm like, wow, it actually built me up a little bit of an audience and a fan base. And people were checking as I was dropping those songs every Monday, my streams on Spotify were starting to slowly creep up. And then I dropped, I'll cover, sorry, a mashup I did of Tamiya song into you. Yeah, I remember that one. And I matched it with Russ's song, Why Few Up. I remember that one. And that one like really exploded, you know? So like people like that one just hit all the algorithms and went crazy. And I think it's almost that half a million streams now on Spotify. Oh, that brings a question to my head. So that's essentially a remix cover. I've been asked before, and this isn't really something I get into as far as some of the legality type things. But I've been asked, when you put a cover on a platform like Spotify, what does that do for you? Like, can you do that? Have you gotten any kind of strikes or anything like that? No, I haven't because, well, with DistroKid, the good thing is, and I would use DistroKid for any artists watching, they acquire the cover license for you. So you're covered. And keep in mind like there's two licenses, right? You have master recording and you have song and you have the copyright, which is the writing of the song. So I don't own the writing of the song, but I own my master, which is the version of the song that I created. So I'm allowed to use that and put it, like I'm only getting master revenue. So Spotify also pays publishing royalties to the songwriters that wrote the song, right? So they would be getting the backend royalties that way, which don't come to me because it's a cover. I didn't write the song, but I created that arrangement of it and I created that recording. So... It's all in both sides, like just a songwriter. Now everybody who's covering my song is, like, I'm getting back to it. Dude, there's tons of covers on Spotify. Like, yeah, like there's artists who only have covers on Spotify. It says you just have to buy the license, right? You can do it through DistroKid and there's a company called Louder. You can do it through them. Tunecore has their service too, where you can use it. I don't use Tunecore. The reason for me is not because they're not a good company, but because I released so much music that it was cost-prohibited. Like, I would have been paying, what, $5,000 a year just to Tunecore and it just didn't make any sense. Gotcha. So, just to hone in on that process a little bit when it comes to DistroKid and how they kind of obtain the rights for you. So you're saying once you submit a song, that algorithms pretty much picks up on the fact that it's a cover and they obtain it or do you submit and let them know that it's a cover? So when you choose the option, they ask you, DistroKid, is this a cover? And then you click, yes, it's a cover and then they ask you who the original songwriter is and sorry, who the original artist is and then they go and obtain the license for you. So I like that better because it's less work for me. Now I don't have to use a third party to go get a license. You can buy a license yourself. You can just go to louder.com and buy one. Right. So you don't have to pay anything extra. They just handle the money. No, you do have to pay. So you have to pay, I think it's a dollar a month to have the cover license. So it can add up, if you're gonna keep it up there, it's not bad, it's 12 bucks a year, you know? So for the service they're providing, like now you have peace of mind, right? You don't have to worry about getting a license and worrying about all that. I'd rather just pay the 12 bucks and not worry. We're sure, especially as an artist. I mean, primary, anything. I'm already doing too much work, man. That's like one less thing for me to do, you know? I need peace of mind as an artist. Yeah. Cool. All right, so after the Facebook strategy, which worked for you, you said you saw a decent little bump and then after that you started to also see some organic and it wasn't the beginning of your strategy and it's not what you're doing now. You stopped doing it, why? So it's not that I'm gonna, I've stopped it completely or I don't wanna do it, like I'm back into the experimentation phase because I've reached a certain level now, like I have a certain amount of fans and I have a few million streams here and there on Spotify and Apple, whatever, which was almost nothing a year ago, you know? So now to get to the level higher than that, I'm gonna have to do something differently, right? Like I can't be doing the same thing over and over and expect different results, right? So I have to, I'm kind of gonna like maybe visually, I have to try different, if I'm gonna run ads, I have to try a different visual maybe, or you know, like maybe I'll try to promote a show instead of just promoting music all the time, because I have a pretty decent sized catalog now that I feel like I should be building another part of the business, which is like the touring business. Got you, and I wanna get into that, but right before that, you mentioned visual, which reminds me, I haven't been in a long time, but I could have sworn you had a YouTube page and you had a decent little traction there. Did you not? Yeah, like I do have a YouTube channel. I have about 28,000 subscribers or so. That's more than decent. How did that? That was pure organic. I have never run like YouTube ads I don't do at all because I just don't like YouTube's targeting, I don't know, I've tried them, I just don't like them. Okay. So I'm not saying they don't work, like they obviously do work, otherwise they'd be out of business, right? But I don't know, for me, they haven't worked. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe I need to learn more about them, but it was all organic just from posting covers and from posting remixes. If it ever becomes relevant, maybe we can talk about that offline because your music is like, it's pretty clean, so to speak. It's not like something that they would ban your ads, which is the problem. Most artists that have to do it anyway, there are some beneficial things. Not saying it is something that you should do, but maybe we can figure out. Maybe because my visual is like, I don't have a music video, it could be just that. Like my copy or like the way my visuals look were probably the reason then, because YouTube is very visual driven, right? So it could have just been that. It might not become your ongoing system, but at some point there's probably gonna be something where it could be beneficial for you. But what that means is that you have 28,000 people. This is all organic. Is it because you did some covers? Is that what you think it is? Mostly covers, yeah. And then I've had influencers on YouTube use my music too, so they drove traffic as well. So things like that happened as well. One of my covers, like I did a cover of an ACON song back in the day and that video's starting to blow up now. It's almost a half a million views now. So, three years ago, I don't know why. I don't know why I decided to take off now. It just sounds like all your shit just starts moving at some point. You have a lot of, you have your system, but it just sounds like you have a lot of stuff that just organically starts to move at some point or another. Why is it? Yeah, but I guess like I think the reason why that happens is like you have to be willing to take the action without knowing what the result is gonna be initially. Because I could never have predicted that ACON cover. Like that song is like 11 years old and my cover is even three years old. What a thought, you know? But, and a lot of things like I did a cover of like a Savage Garden song truly madly deeply. Now it's blowing up on you Spotify. I think a year ago it had like nothing, like five, 6,000 streams and now it's at 200,000. I didn't do any promotion for it. It just took off on its own. So just at some point you have the main things that you are promoting, but because you're building this catalog and things are starting to tick and catch on at just random times because you have more people that are coming in the funnel. Yeah, because like I have a mixture of original songs. Like I have a ton of original songs too. It's not all covers and remixes, but I'd rather put like marketing effort towards original music because I see the covers and remixes as two things, as content and as marketing because people are always gonna be searching for those songs. Maybe newer songs get more search volume, but even like an old hit like that truly madly deeply like that people are still gonna be looking for it. That's true, that's another thing because you did do things that are SEO driven. These are covers. People are always gonna be looking for them. So you will have organic marketing. You don't have to always be marketing yourself. So that explains some of it. I'm gonna just make that clear for people who... Exactly. I don't want people to think, oh man, this guy is just making stuff up or like he's just a lucky person. Then there was a... I can say man, like there are artists who get lucky but we all know that 99% of artists are where they are because they worked extremely hard and they spent... And like it doesn't happen for free. Like it costs money to get to a certain level. If you wanna be as famous as Usher, that's not gonna happen for free. It's gonna cost millions of dollars. Definitely that. Well, I mean, and even when you think about some scenarios to bring even more logic to it, let's say that huge movie for Queen came out recently. What is it? What was the name of it? Oh, I haven't seen it. Queen is a big rock band. I haven't seen it, but they were huge back in the day. Right, they were huge, yeah. One of their... It's a movie named after one of their songs that came out, a very popular song. Oh, Bohemian Rhapsody is a... Bohemian Rhapsody, yeah. Bohemian Rhapsody Mercury, yeah. Exactly. That came out probably last month. And when that movie came out, I guarantee you there was an influx of listeners to the songs because this nostalgia, all that stuff, now people are looking. If you did a cover of that song, more people are also gonna find the covers of those songs that they started to look for again. So there's all these real world things that could happen at any point that could trigger your organic movement once again outside of just the fact that new people coming into your funnel can just all of a sudden start to find interest. Like my Fetty Wop video, which is my very first video, it looks good now. There's like a hundred, something thousand views. Maybe it's a two of seven, look at that. Oh, I see no one, yeah, yeah. That was my very first video. That video was, I mean, I was like, yo, this thing is moving, man. It has way more views than everything else when it had like 200 views, right? But then that was just my most popular video. But it stayed, like it took maybe two months for it to get to a thousand, you know? Then it maybe three months, it got to 3,000. But then one day like my subscribers start going up and up and I'm like, what the hell is happening? And I go back and look to that video and then like it got caught on some random YouTube playlist and I just started moving. So once it happens, once your shit is out there, it can happen. Just keep- It can happen if the content is good and like you're consistently uploading new content on YouTube. Like YouTube does reward people who are consistent. Like I remember like you were dropping videos like left and right, man. I remember you had that phase where, because I'm subscribed to your channel. So I know I was watching them. And I actually found your channel through your Russ video on the, when you did a video on how Russ blew up or whatever. I think that's over a year ago and that's how I found your channel. Because I was curious about Russ's strategy because he peed. I feel like I think like him because I'm all about self-reliance. Like I don't like to rely on other people at all. And not because I don't like other people. It's just because I don't know, man. Like after I had that bad experience like doing all that songwriting and producing and waiting for labels and artists to give you the green light, I'm like, forget this. I have to do it myself. So that's what got me interested in Russ. And then I was searching about Russ interview, whatever, blah, blah, blah on YouTube. And that's how I found you, you know? So that video will probably like keep getting you people. And I think that's how YouTube works. Like when new people get interested in a topic, they're gonna start searching it. And as more people search it, you're gonna start rising in the algorithms. And that's organic. But I would like to say that you can't rely on that. You have to keep moving. You can't wait. That too. That's the biggest difference. And that's the difference that I had in mindset. Like back when I used to do music part-time, I'm like, oh, I dropped the video. It didn't blow up. Okay, well, I'll just wait now. You can't do that, you know? So you have to just keep moving. Like once I release a song, I forget about it. I even forget the lyrics. Like it's completely out of my mind. And I just move on to the next one. You don't even remember the lyrics if you have to tour and it blows up and all that stuff. And another thing I did a lot is like, I used to do a lot of live streams on Facebook for my Facebook page. And my fans can attest to this. Like I forget lyrics all the time when I'm even singing my own song. So I got to start rehearsing a bit more, you know? So that's the downside of releasing too much music. So. That's hilarious. So I'm sure you'll figure out a popular set especially as you move into a certain level of your career when you release projects. Of course you'll probably be moving at a different pace where you have it all in your mind. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely true. You have to keep moving. Like you can't, I don't care if you're on a label or not. Like everywhere you are in the industry, you pretty much, no matter what happens, you have to keep moving as if. I have to. And I've seen this happen to a lot of artists where like they get YouTube famous. Like they might hit like a big amount of subscribers and then they get signed and then they think, oh, I'm signed now I can just chill and let's let the label do everything. And then what happens is the label tries, it doesn't work out. And now because they haven't been active on YouTube, they've lost all their fans. They've lost their deal with the label because they haven't been profitable for the label. It's just not, you can't think like that. You have to just be in it for the long run. For sure. The label is gonna stop giving you attention if you stop moving anyway. But I mean, just another back to that Fatihwa video. Again, that's my first video. I was probably like 20 videos, 30 videos deep before it started to take off. So definitely couldn't have waited for that. And if I didn't do those other videos, I doubt that video would have even taken off. No, it probably wouldn't have. YouTube rewards consistency. They do. That's just the way these algorithms are set it up. Keep that in mind. So to nip that in the blood, I wanna hear your mindset on this next phase because you've done what you've done. You built true systems where you will be consistent. Hey, I'm gonna release a song a week. I'm gonna do this $5 a day thing on Facebook. Like just multiple things you talk about. Like it's in a systematic way. It's not, hey, I'm gonna make this huge effort and go hard for a month and then just sit back for three months and things like that. That's what I really love. I hate to admit this, but I used to think like that three, four years ago and now I don't because I know it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It really is. It's just a really unhealthy way to think cause it's like the lottery mindset. Like I just wanna win the lottery and then this chill, right? With that. You really don't play the lottery. Yeah. I don't either. I don't gamble, like I don't do stuff with that mindset cause I don't wanna, it's just- That's the exact same reason why I never got into Bitcoin or any of that stuff because it was lottery mindset. You know, like I'm just not gonna participate in that. Emotional. Yeah. So the thing is like, so from the next phase, I'm not gonna lie like it's very, every plateau as you get to a higher level is harder to break because now you're competing at a higher level, right? So when you have no fans and you have no streams, it's hard because you have no social proof. So you have to work very hard to get a small fan base and then, but once you're like, once you're kinda, once you have it like you said a system, after that to get to a higher level where you can tour, where you can pack 500 people in a room and do a show, that's gonna require a much bigger investment. It's gonna require higher quality content. It's gonna require smarter marketing, not necessarily more marketing, but smarter. Like how can you scale? Yep. You know, so these are things I'm still trying to figure out. I haven't figured them out yet, but I know I have to change something in my approach to get to that higher level. And in the meantime, I'm not gonna stop creating content. I'm still gonna drop a song every two weeks because you have to keep your skills sharp and you have to, like the fan base that I do have, I wanna keep them engaged, right? And I can't just disappear and expect them to like be happy with me for doing that, you know? So, well, the biggest thing that happened, I guess for this year is like, I learned a lot, not only about like getting better at producing and singing and all that, but just like, well, who my audience is, you know? Like I know who likes my music and I know who doesn't. So now I know for any future marketing efforts, I know exactly who not to show it to and who to show it to, you know? So I really have a very good understanding of who my audience is now. So I'm gonna use that knowledge, whatever I try next, like maybe different influencers, different visuals for YouTube ads, maybe whatever, you know? I don't think that the strategy, that the actual action you take matters as much as like the overall vision. So as long as you're constantly trying and improving everything you're doing, like it should keep building. So. I'm gonna push back on that. I need a little bit more clarity. It's like- Yeah, I hope I'm explaining this. The reason is like, I haven't fully decided what my next step 100% is gonna be, but I have an idea. Like I know I need better visuals. I need more songs like the ones that did well and less songs that were experimental. Like I know what my fans like and I know what my sound is now, which I didn't 100% know a year ago. So I wanna apply all this knowledge now to the next phase and maybe try the same marketing with better content, better visuals, better understanding of the audience and see what happens then, you know? Okay, so overall, I guess I'm interpreting it as, as long as you're committed to the overarching vision, the strategy right before you that you're using doesn't matter less. It's more about being committed to the action of figuring out if that strategy works or not and starting another one if that one didn't work, right? Exactly, so like let's go to a specific thing. Like let's talk about ads, for example, Instagram ads. I see 30 Instagram ads every single day from different artists. I don't know about you, but I see them all the time. Oh yeah. And I hate to say this, but 99% of them are very bad. Like I would never wanna click on them. Not because the music sucks. I'm not saying the music sucks. I'm saying the ad sucks, you know? So these are things you need to test and try it. But I give those artists credit because at least they're trying, they're testing, right? And same thing with influencer marketing. Influencer marketing can work great. Or it can work very badly depending on who the influencer is. Like for example, I had one of my songs used in a makeup video and that video has like 1.6 million views. And because my audience is 90% women, that was a perfect fit, you know? Because I don't know a lot of guys who watch videos like that. And because I'm an R&B singer and most of my fans are women, that video would be a perfect fit. But then if like... I've had girls who are like fitness YouTubers and fitness Instagram models use my music in their videos and those ones didn't do well because that maybe their audience is mostly male, you know? Yeah. So they might be following them maybe because they just think that she's attractive or whatever and they wanna follow her for that reason and they're not gonna give a shit about my music, you know? So... The full context is everything. The context is everything. So and the same thing goes with ads. Like if your ad is shown to the wrong person it doesn't matter how good your ad is. Yep. Like when I see an ad on Instagram like I'm probably not that interested because A, I'm an artist. I'm so busy with my own stuff. I'm probably not that interested in seeing an ad from another artist, you know? But I might be interested like I like... If I'm into martial arts or cars or whatever and if I see an ad for that I might be much more interested in that. Yeah. You know? So it just depends. Like you said, the context is everything. Ads can work or they might not work. The downside of ads is that it costs money, right? So if you get it wrong, you're gonna lose money. Yeah. Yeah, I want people to really hold onto that context thing because that's probably a lot of where my personal genes live like I overindex sometimes even on just context. I think about the context of everything. That's why I told people to stop getting their music on dance videos and twerk videos because people... This doesn't work, man. Yeah. There's things that can pop off 100% but if a dancer is posting every day and they're posting the new songs every day you might, you could get some incremental gain. Don't get me wrong, especially if the song is good but you're not gonna get the impact you think in reflection to what their follower account is because people are there to see that dancer be great at dancing. They're not there to listen to the music, right? Exactly. All those things. It can happen, yeah. It can happen, like you said, for example, you know, Tank's song, When We? Yeah. That song became really popular choreography-wise on YouTube. Yeah. Which is why your song to become popular choreography-wise is not good. Yeah, you know, so like it can happen but then what I'm thinking is that's not the dancers making the song popular. The song was popular with them, you know? Exactly. So like you said, it's context. Like if a dancer, people are probably following that dance channel just to see the dances, they're probably not that interested in the music, right? Because their music is so varied, it's so different. Yeah. And they're gonna be dancing to different types of songs every single day, right? So if it was just like an R&B dance channel or a hip hop dance channel, then maybe, you know? Then it might work, but it's all about targeting an audience. Like you have to know, I think the biggest way to save time for new artists is like don't promote your music to everybody because 99, this is gonna sound really harsh but 99% of people are not gonna like your music. 99%. I know that sounds bad and it's harsh, but even if I look at my, like my favorite singer is Craig David. I don't even like 90% of his songs and I'm like a huge fan of his, you know? You know, but because I don't care, like I only like his big songs and I like some of the songs on his albums but I don't like every song he's done. I'm a huge fan of his talent, I'm a huge fan of what he's achieved and it's the same thing with music. Like if artists just know who to show their music to, they'll save a lot of time rather than trying to win everybody over. Like you just can't, not everyone's gonna like it. Well, that being said, kind of off base. It's not specific to you, but I also, it just reminds me that I remind people, especially if you think you're a diverse artist, but even when your songs don't seem super diverse, there's still some nuances. You can market different songs to different people. You don't have to, like there might be some overlap, but you don't have to just put your music on one group of people, especially if you don't think that same group will like the next song. Exactly, like you could have different groups, like a lot of my fans even like country music and my stuff doesn't sound country at all, you know? But that kind of tells me that maybe I can try marketing something to a country audience and see what happens. It could be a good experiment, if anything. Exactly. Now I don't encourage it personally. I like for artists to keep a certain sound and energy just to keep building and penetrate with a certain audience before you start to push too much diversity, but you always have to be cognizant of what people like and where you're putting it. Otherwise, you're just interrupting. At least- And as an independent artist, you also have to be mindful, like if you want to be like somebody who's on like top 40, top 40 radio, like they have huge budgets, you know? Like million dollars, half a million dollars, like that's what it takes to win over a huge amount of the population, right? Yeah. And how is an independent artist supposed to do that? It's almost impossible. Unless you have a huge investor backing you, you can't do it. Yeah. That's very real. So just to start to close things out, because I don't want to hold you for too long, I really would love to know your mindset in terms of touring, a manager, like those more business or more logistical types of things. Are you at a standpoint where you say, I need some more people on my team and I'm trying to, like just what is that whole process? What's your thought process? Cause I know you don't have those things yet. I don't have those things yet. So it's funny you mentioned that, like I've been realizing these things now after doing all this work, like I think I spent probably 4,000 hours in the studio over the last year and three months, something like that, you know? Like just churning out these songs. So I've realized that to scale, I can't possibly do everything on my own forever. I just can't. There's just not enough time in the day, right? Unless I completely take a backseat from like making content and then just focus on touring, marketing, whatever, then I can do it. But I agree. Like I think to get to the next level, like I'm probably going to have to learn about the touring side of the business because I don't know much about it. I've only done a few shows here and there and they're mostly, they've mostly been private events and things like that. But yeah, man, like I think eventually to get to the next level, like I would have to add people. Maybe a manager, maybe a lawyer, an entertainment attorney, somebody who can guide you and like a tour manager or something like that because otherwise there's just not enough hours in the day. I do have a co-writer I work with who I write the songs with. And I also have like, I used to have a mixed engineer, but now I do the mixing myself. But eventually if to scale like, I think you have to have people on your team to get to like the higher level. Like even Russ, like Russ did all the making the music himself, but he had a manager and he had like a graphic design person. I have like a graphic person too who are you for certain things, but so things like that, man. Yeah, I 100% agree, like definitely. Because that's like uncharted territory for me. I haven't done touring yet. So I'm basically starting from ground zero for that. Nice. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to another update sometime when you really get into that progress for touring. Yeah, now we should. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's just been crazy, man. Like how it's just such a process. Like, had I known it was gonna be like this, I don't think a lot of people when they start, they realize just how much work it takes. People only see, oh, look at Adele. She's like a multi-plot in the martyrs, but they don't know how much work she's been behind the scenes to get to that level. I still see a lot of time that people believe all you have to do is make an ignorant song or something like that or do something crazy to get a lot of attention to have a career. Nah, it's a lot more complicated. It might give you a short lived spark of attention, but actually capitalizing, being sustainable, actually having a legit fans, all that stuff is real work and you keep doing the work. And I look at Russ, that's why I have so much respect. I know he gets a lot of hate, and I think it's unnecessary hate from that's just my opinion, but. Yeah, people are gonna hate you because you've mentioned him so much this interview. Yeah, because I respect them so much, man, because he produces, mixes, masters, and I do that stuff too, and I know how much work it is. And R&B is even, I would say it's a little bit higher on the complexity chart mixing-wise, like mixing and production-wise, it can be. Just because of vocals, you have to do a lot of harmonies and things like that. So, with him, and he does both, he sings and he raps, he does everything. It's the work, and he dropped 300 songs and he still only had 1,000 followers, and then he started doing his weekly songs. Yep. Like I have, how can you not respect that? I mean, I definitely do. I always try to make people clear that I started watching him before he was even on SoundCloud. Like Mike, just having that experience and to see how it came about, like to see the progress of going on YouTube, like I met him for kind of a split second, told me about some of the stuff I went on YouTube and said, who the hell is this guy? He had like 11 videos, not the highest production, but like 11 videos I didn't expect that versus literally every other artist I met that night had one song or one video or nothing. So, when you met him, he already had his 10 albums done? Like, or? Probably, see, but at that time, like the story of 11, it was 11 albums was not a thing at that time. I liked the content, right? I didn't, and I looked at everything individually because you know, I didn't come in as, oh, this is the album or anything like that. So, I'm not completely sure. I think that probably was it, but I just knew it was a hell of a lot of content and I was watching all videos. I'm sure he had his regular song somewhere, but I got tired of watching the videos just from sheer length, but I enjoyed all of them. And that time, it even felt like the videos were higher quality videos than they are in hindsight. It was like, this is some good shit. He never talks about like what he did marketing was, but because no artist likes to talk about that, yeah, it's like showing the magic trick. Nobody wants to talk about that, yeah. So it's, I don't blame him because obviously he did 11 albums and then nothing popped off. He probably figured out, oh shit, I better start marketing too and I'll drop a song a week. And I think that's when something clicked for him because if you would just drop songs and driven no traffic to them, nothing's gonna happen, right? So. Yeah, and I've seen enough where like, it's pretty clear that his grind is legitimate, right? And think about yourself, right? As an artist, your grind is legitimate. And the things that you've done, whether it's the Facebook ad thing, whether it's trying influencer, so many of the things, once things do start to click, the click for you isn't necessarily, oh, there's this one big thing I'm about to do, is really a culmination of so many things. Yeah. It's hard, like you don't even necessarily feel like there's this one big trick, you know what I mean? So I don't even believe in a big break anymore. I don't think it exists. Honestly, I don't. Because there's so many little things that go into it that like Russ mentioned that it was a song, what they want that popped off for him. But, you know, like after doing 350 songs, something is gonna have to, something's gonna have to give, right? So now some people would call that as big break, but I don't think that was as big break. I think it was just thousands of little things that added up a lot. Yeah, at that point it's just the result of your work, right? You know, it's not a break. Like Tylee Kuali always says that people say he put Kanye on, because he took Kanye, he was the first person to take him on a tour. But Tylee Kuali always says Kanye put Kanye on. He's like, I got a lot of cousins that rap, a lot of people that rap, but I thought Kanye was dope, and I thought he would help my tour be even dope. You know what I mean? Now some people do like trash people ahead of them so they can look good, but he obviously isn't one of them. But that's how I think about it. Like if you're shit is dope, like you're doing the work, like you do deserve like, you know, whether it happens or not, that's a whole another story and getting to smaller stuff. But when stuff happens, it's the result of the work. Something will happen if you're constantly getting better and you're consistent, like you might not become Ariana Grande, but whatever, you know, like whatever something should happen, you know? You might not become like, you might not be as big as Justin Timberlake, but something would happen. Something should happen if you're putting out good stuff and you're doing it consistently. Yeah. You know? 100%. Hey man, I think you, you probably hit the record. You're probably my longest interview. Oh yeah, well it was good, man. Like I remember like kind of catching up to, right? From a year ago, we should- I know, man. I know, man. I really wish, this time around, I gotta make sure I check in with you more often, man, for sure. Yeah, man, definitely. We'll keep in touch on Instagram and yeah, man. I still watch your videos, man. You have such good like information and bikes, I like that your videos aren't like 20 minutes long because as a viewer, I like, I hate that, man. Like just having to sit through 20 minutes and the first 10 minutes is BS. Like, I love that about your videos. You get right into it. You get to the, you explain and it's really helpful. Don't, hey, I appreciate that, man. You tell that to the people who would used to be in my comments saying, hey man, every single video should be an hour long. Nothing less. Well, some of them, like this interview's gonna be long, right? So, I think those little nuggets are much easier to absorb for the viewer. So. Is there any last thing you would like to leave everybody with? Yeah, guys, thank you for watching. I hope I helped in some small way. And if you guys wanna, any R&B fans out there, you guys can check me out on Spotify, YouTube. It's just my name. All my socials are Amir R&B, A-A-M-I-R, R-N-B, so. That's gonna be up on the screen as well. Thank you again, Amir. It's been so much, man, it was a pleasure. For sure. As always, everybody, if you got some comments, go ahead and put those things in the comments section. We'd love to know your thoughts on this interview. Definitely, Amir, you can answer and get to people. Yeah, guys, if you have any questions about like any stuff I did, feel free to DM me or reach out to me. Love it. Happy to answer any questions and happy holidays. Thank you everyone so much. Yeah. Happy holidays to you, man. I really appreciate you sending your hand out to the subscribers. Hey everybody, if you liked this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, might as well share it and if you're not subscribed. You know what to do, hit that subscribe button.