 All right, next topic, man. We got some sauce from the Brandman Network community. Just another great conversation. Again, for y'all who do not know, Brandman Network is a community that's free for the artist out there. We have these conversations here, but this is where we get into the details, not just through conversations what I'm about to talk about right now, but also through legitimate classes, information that walks you step by step. So when you want to step by step, the exact strategies we use as an agency, all that stuff's free inside of here, but you got to join and we're not letting everybody in, so it's better to try to get in sooner than later. Now, what is the question? I don't know how to say this name. I want to shout you out, but I'm gonna just call you Jay Cuedo. You know what I mean? Now the question is, what to do when labels reach out? And I want to get into this conversation. Let me pull up the right tab. There we go. Hi guys, I have some labels reach out to me to have a meeting and possibly get signed to them. I'm pretty new to all of that. I was wondering if anybody else has advice on what to do when labels reach out and are there any red flags I should be looking out for? All right, Todd Townsend said, hey, don't have advice, particularly on the above, but what does it say? I'm feeling what you did for what you mad for. That's one of his songs I assume. Shout out to, dang, I wish I could say a name, but what you mad for? Shout out to you for having a dope track to people in a network mess with. Now, Albert Johnson Jr. says, I was approached by an indie label back in 2020, but it was such a wild situation. They ended up breathing their, I think he meant to say breaching, they ended up breaching their own contract because they were harassing me about switching all of my previously released work under their publishing with BMI. Well, I would say, because I didn't know anything or had anyone to have anybody talk to at the time, make sure that they're not trying to get credit for everything you've already released, right? So he's saying, you've done things before you got in the agreement with them, make sure that they're not trying to get ownership of all of that stuff as a part of your agreement, or at least if they are, y'all need to talk about that, right? Next thing that Albert Johnson Jr. said, and if they're asking for your masters, off rip, that's a red flag, right? Might be obvious to some of y'all, but just wanted to say, now, let's stop there, because we know there's more dope conversation in this space, but with that alone, Jacory, what do you think about the advice that Albert gave, and then are there some other thoughts and signs that you feel like people should take into account when labels reach out? Yeah, I think Albert's, Albert, let me read a real quick. Yeah, Albert's comment was legit. So I mean, I think it's about breaking it down into steps, right? And I think that if a label reaches out to you, one of the first things you should do is research, and one, just look into that label and make sure, hey, is this label legit? Is the person that's reaching out to me from the label legit? You can do this to a number of ways, right? Like LinkedIn, like look up people on LinkedIn, Google the person's name and the label name and see if any articles, any references come up that are around that person, but like just do research and make sure that this person, this entity is someone that's worth you talking to, and they're offering you a serious situation. So with that being said, I'm assuming we're gonna move through the rest of the conversation assuming this is a legit label that's reached out to you, to talk to you. I think the very first thing you need to do is just take the call, like have a conversation with them because every label person is different. The way they're gonna kinda approach things is gonna be different, but I personally believe that you don't start to see how seriously someone is thinking about you and their situation until you get a chance to actually have a conversation, right? Not saying you have to go into it with any expectation that there'll be something that happens at the end of it, but like just having it, just to see how this other person talks to you or talks about you or just kinda what their head is at. Why did they even reach out to you? Oh, we saw XYZ and we thought you were cool. That right there, bro. Like that's the biggest thing why I think everybody should have a conversation, right? Because when you talk to these people, you're gonna learn what they look at, right? What they find to be interesting about you and just hear other elements in the game that you might not be accustomed to or you might have heard on paper but you don't see how it is executed in conversation, right? It's a completely different flow of part of the game to get used to. And then you talk to multiple people if you are in a position where multiple people are calling you, then you can start looking at commonalities between conversations and piecing things together and involve your perspective on things from there. Yeah, exactly. I feel like that's the biggest key. Like even if nothing comes out of the situation, you have a better understanding of how these people move for the next time you get into the situation or the next level that reaches out. So it's like every conversation you have strengthens your defense to give them finesse, you know what I'm saying, ideally, because either you're taking enough information to at least know like the right questions to ask the next person you talk to, right? At the very bare minimum, like you should learn enough from call A that by the time you get to call D you already got a list of things you're gonna ask to kind of like feel the situation out, right? Right. But then on top of that thing, also too, just like being normal in the situation is very underrated, right? Like I see artists give these label calls and I just throw every fucking thing out the window, bro. All the rhetoric they've been talking for the last couple of weeks goes out the window. They talking about doing things that would never typically do. Well, hold on, hold on, I need you to be detailed because I don't want people to miss what you're saying. Like what do you mean when you say like they're talking about things they never would talk about or do things they never would do? Are you talking about the label side or the artist side? So I remember we had a situation with a client where the label was telling them to like they might have to take their music down or something, right? And like this person was seriously considering doing it because the label told them to do it. We were like, well, bro, you ain't even signed nothing yet. One, you know what I'm saying? Like, so that's crazy. And then two, like, no, they're wrong in the situation for how it benefits you. They're right for how it benefits them, but they're wrong in how it benefits you, you know what I'm saying? And so, but I think a lot of artists are just willing to be super compromising out the gate without even like one, just saying if they're serious. And then two, like understanding like what could happen if they do follow the direction of this person who to be fair, does not yet have your best interest at heart. There's no reason to have your best interest at heart. You ain't signed nothing yet, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, I can sell you a dream and it sounds good, but like, who knows if this is the dream I want to sell you wants to ink drop, right? That dream I completely switched up, I got you. Now this is real shit, it's about to go down. So I think just like being normal in those situations, not switching up too much, but then just like talking to them like they're people, you know, cause I do also think as artists, you go into a lot of these conversations, looking at the other person is almost like a savior, especially A&Rs, but A&Rs, managers, arguing to some degree as marketers, we get there, but we all get the starry eyes, but they staring at you and you just see all their hopes and dreams being projected onto you. You know what I'm saying? That's a scary feeling to be on the other side of, you know what I'm saying? You know, superstars are exactly not, bro. That's a scary feeling to have those eyes looking back at you. So I think even going into this situation, like, hey, this is another human being, like we mentioned on another call, bro, this is just a person doing a job, right? And understanding that and knowing that like, I'm not going to treat this person any differently because of their title necessarily. I think one is empowering in a sense because people can smell like desperation on you, bro. You've been too nice, you're moving in a certain way, like I can smell desperation or two, which I think is worse, smell that you have not been in this situation before, right? Like you've been too friendly on the call, bro. You've been too talking, oh, bro, I've been looking at you for XYZ amount of years and I think, right, like you, like moving in a way that's like, if I'm a A&R, I've had a hundred conversations with artists as we who are maybe a little bit higher than you, like, they all go a certain way, very concise, you know what I'm saying? Maybe to the point, you know what I'm saying? Not too much sugarcoating maybe versus, you know, newer artists like, it's going to be a lot of sugarcoating because I can tell this is your first time being in this situation. I'm not trying to scare you away from what could be, you know, my career change opportunity, you know what I'm saying? I'm going to restrain your long blue lines the way that I know people like you can be strong along, you know what I'm saying? This will be real, you know what I'm saying? I'll just be a hundred percent. So I think, yeah, like one thing is just like, not to get out of the habit of that, but yeah, the first step I said is like, take the conversation, like talk to them, see what they want from you, ask them what made them reach out to you, you know, like you said, get an understanding of what bread, crumbs they follow to get to you. And cause in that you will learn like what your leverage points are at, right? Like you, somebody might say like, man, yeah, bro, I wanted to reach out to you cause like, bro, I think you're, I'm like, yeah, you two content strategies, like killer bro, like, should you doing better than all of the new acts we've talked to this week? You didn't know that, you know what I'm saying? So they said that, bro. And now you know, like, okay, they really like my content infrastructure. That seems to be a selling point. And apparently I'm doing better than X amount of the new motherfuckers was coming in, right? New information that you would not have had, new content you would not have had if you had not taken the conversation. So I think that's the most important first step, take the conversation, set it up as fast as you can. There doesn't have to be any stipulations that doesn't need to be a specific outcome, but it's like just try to have the conversation as fast as you can have the conversation. I'm with that 100%. Yeah. 100%. And we can get into another comment in a space, Adrian Melanio says, I have had labels reach out at every stage of my career, 1,500 followers, 10K followers, 30K, et cetera. The types of deals and interest has varied for me. I've done a few deals where labels have provided advances, marketing support and exchange for royalties percentages. In my opinion, I think it's better to keep building until you don't need a label and can leverage better deals. Now, just with a little context, I'm not gonna go too deep into Adrian's situations, but on one occasion, he had a singles deal. And I only mentioned a singles deal to help artists understand that, yo, man, there's so many different variations of deals. So a lot of times we think signing to a record label means, I don't know, a 360 every single time, giving up the whole damn shit, right? Or give less of the shit because you really negotiated well, right? But there's so many variations of where income can come from, where income can't come from, what's owned. You could just make up some shit like, hey, man, you get 50% of my masters and nothing else. I don't know. Or you could say you get 20% of my merch and 50% of my masters and I don't know, 0% of my touring or 5% of my touring. All of this stuff can vary and it's up to you to get creative. And it comes both ways from a standpoint of, what's the value of these people? Am I's and of course what value do they see and you or can they bring to you as skill still from your perspective? That's what you care about the most. So a singles deal I think is a good way for many artists to see how much labels don't do oftentimes, right? And it's lower commitment because you're not fully in that relationship. It's only one song locked up. You still have an entire catalog. If that song continues to move and takes off then you now have new attention as being brought to your other music, your brand, et cetera. And that's ideally though, right? The reality is they can lock you up for that one song and not do shit and that just suck. That's the reality of it. But the whole dream is oh, I'm only giving ownership of one song or partial ownership of one song or sharing my royalties for this one song. And when it blows up, I'm gonna have a big name and the rest of this goes into this catalog that I got so much attention for. That is the ideal scenario, right? But both sides is, hey, well, the song actually got zero gains. Only my work that I've continued to do has brought attention to it, but what they've done hasn't really done much for me. So it's an ebb and flow to that and how you approach it. So I'm not saying, hey, just because someone's offering you a singles deal it's a no brainer, you should do it. You still have to get into stipulations like my marketing budget. What is that? If I do get a marketing budget and what does that look like? Because a label will say, you have a marketing budget but when you actually go to work with them you don't get tapped into any of that budget. Oh yeah, we have a 50K marketing budget for you but we have to approve every little thing and every little bit of spend for this marketing budget. So whatever your system was beforehand, I have to approve it or maybe you didn't have a system but you wanna do some stuff. I now have to approve every bit of that spend and I'm gonna be scrutinizing. Maybe I'm more flexible to the stuff that is actually paying me cause you can use my studio or use my content creator use my agency, whatever that looks like. And then I'll say, don't do any of this other stuff. Or maybe I'm just super tight with the purse strings of how I spend the budget. And I don't have enough of a vision and understanding of current marketing to be able to say, yes, that's a good move and no, that's a bad move. So now I'm not approving things you should do and I've seen many times where artists will have a 50K marketing budget and they don't see 10K of it. All right, a 200K marketing budget and they only see 100K of that 200K and the agreement's over and they just never see it ever. But they come in with this idea, this is my marketing budget, this is how much money. So there has to be additional stipulations, one of what actually getting that marketing budget looks like, right? Not, oh, y'all just spend it, but hey, how much of that do I get to take and spend based on my own discernment? But then two, what are the specifics in general? Like, again, not just what I get but how does getting it look, period, right? Not what you're gonna do or can do but under what circumstances you're gonna give it to. And then the last thing is that vision again, all right? How close can y'all get in terms of the vision that you wanna achieve, all right? And how much are they not only aligned with that but understand the type of marketing that makes sense for you as an artist because if y'all are on the same page there, it's still gonna come back to the same thing. Y'all are butting heads and look, both ways could actually be something that work but they wanna go about it in a different way. So I know it sounds like way more detailed and nuanced than you would think when it comes to what should I do when the label reaches out but that's all the type of stuff that you're actually looking for and the more detailed that you're asking some of these questions, the more people start to understand, it's like, oh, this person is somebody who's serious and we can't just throw shit at him. I can just fuck him over, bro. Just can't fuck him over. Look at that, bro. Like have the conversation, ask some questions, have another conversation, get some terms, get a lawyer. Get a lawyer. Get a lawyer, bro. Like, look at this thing. That's what the four or five step process. Right, hey, well, look, get a lawyer is probably number one advice. However, make sure that lawyer's not the label's lawyer. Make sure that label's not one of the home, that lawyer's not one, you know, a homie of somebody in some kind of way, all those things, you know, we think it's obvious but, you know, there's people who are at different parts of the ladder. So make sure that lawyer is, you know, fresh and fit for you. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I say a lot later because I don't think one is needed until like terms are presented. But the moment, like, it's like, if we just having a conversation, yeah, you don't need one, right? We just talking, but once like terms are presented, hey, I think you will look great in this deal. Lawyer, lawyer up. Yes. I once had one of my manager homies, I remember they was doing a girl sharing with a label and he, I always remember it like, cause I always thought it was so funny that he said this shit, but they sent him some contract and he couldn't understand it. And they was about to get a lawyer. They did end up getting a lawyer. So it worked out. But I remember he told the label, he was like, send me this contract, like you're sending it to a third grader. And if my third grader doesn't care, read this. I'm not reading, I'm not sign another. And they did it, bro. The second took this like 30 page document condensing into like four or five pages, bro. It was various issues. It was crazy, bro. I didn't think that was gonna do it. They really wanted his artist, you know what I'm saying? So that was the one to make it work. And then he took that to the lawyer and then the lawyer did his thing from there. But, you know, so I was like, bro, you know, you can ask for shit, bro. That's really it, bro. Ask questions, have the conversation and then lawyer up. And what I like about that last part, as you just said, cause he had, that was always funny to me that that happened, but this is real. You want to make it as simple for you to understand as possible. Yeah, 100%. And I think growing up, you tend to think when it comes to contracts, you almost expect it to be so complex and out of your league. Then when you encounter a complex contract, you think something's wrong with me cause I don't understand this shit. Not something's wrong with them. But you need to be thinking something's going on there. How can I simplify this as much as possible? Again, still want to get that lawyer at the end of the day. But how can I get this to a point where it makes as simple a sense to me as possible? So, yeah, 100% anything like that. Okay, can you simplify this? Can you explain this? What's going on here? Your lawyer's going to help with that. But I love the just, hey, you'll take the whole contract and shorten this shit. Like I've heard the other, like this shouldn't be longer than X number of pages. All right, when people do stuff like that, anything that helps you out. Cause a lot of times there's a lot of superfluous information in these things. That sound trippy over words, man. Imperpetuity for continuity of the universe. You're like, what are you talking about? The universe, bruh. And beyond. That's the, bruh, the universe shit is why I didn't sign that contract when who reached out to me. I don't know if it was NBC or Wall Street Journal. So they were doing a Dominic Fike series, New York Times was, right? And I don't know who the company, whether it was them specifically or the company doing the doc or whatever. They hit me up. They wanted to use part of my Dominic Fike video in there. And, you know, I'm like, oh, that's a good look. I ain't trying to make money out of there and none of that, like that. But I just couldn't, at a time with the perpetuity and the universe aspect of it. You know what I mean? I'm like, I don't know where my career is going to be in 20 years, I might decide to become a politician or something, you know what I mean? Like a run for election, whatever, whatever. And then all of a sudden they had the ability to use this and all these different platforms that might flip it somehow. I told the lady, hey, I would just like it to say y'all can use it for this show, this series and any formatting of this series. I understand that whenever you use it anywhere else in any other way, you still want to be able to use that because you don't know what you're going to do with the series, but nah, I can't just have it languished where you own this content or can use this content for anything beyond this series and I don't know what that is. To me, that was just a weird thing. She was like, oh man, yeah, I'll send that back. So it was like, no, she sent that back. But then of course the people end up going a different direction. You know, it was just a different creative direction. You know, people who were less resistant possibly, you know what I mean? We don't need to have these problems or potential problems, which I get, I respect that at the end of the day. And I was like, dang, you know, that sucks. But I don't know, you know, you kind of just had to take that shit on the chain and I actually say that same thing when it comes to labels. If you feel like you missed out on an opportunity, but it came from you trying to be diligent, you just got to take it on the chain and let that feeling ride because it might feel weird for a second and you might feel like, oh, wins the next one coming but you good, you'll be all right. Yeah, you'll be all right. You'll be all right. Need more opportunities. They're coming. They're coming out. Let's see. The Jermaine Gums say, depending on if you have any leverage, if you do keep your masters and if possible, you're publishing, if possible. Hey, big on that, if possible. And I understand why they like to come for the publishing. We know that's where the money is. Ooh, there's a clip I want you to see. But if you don't have any leverage, you most likely won't even get a 50-50 deal. Most likely you'll only get around 15% for your music. For example, which most people don't know, Bruno Mars, when he had the hit out called That's What I Like, he was only getting around 15% off that song. I found that out when I was being taught in Berkeley College of Music in Music Business 101. So please be careful, man. I mean, that's a nice comment. That's a nice comment. I didn't know that about Bruno. I just realized I corrected that because he wrote Bruno. But let's read a couple of other comments. Let me see. The same said, just be wary of label execs, bro. Any label that would throw 10K at an artist to see if they go anywhere. Oh, okay, he said anybody, any label will throw 10K at an artist just to see if they go anywhere. And if they don't, then they can just dump you and move on, make sure you're ready, and then hire a good music lawyer to make sure you aren't getting taken advantage of. Now, yes, it is a part of many labels business model, 100% to put in a small investment. Pump and dump. Pump and dump, 100%. See that bad boy go if it don't go? Hey, we keep moving. And I think this is the catch 22 of these artist friendly agreements that we see today. We're like, oh yeah, six month licensing deal, one year licensing deal or whatever with an option. What we basically saying is, hey, I'm gonna give you 10K, 20K, whatever the number is. And that's the number already worked out in my investment strategy. If it worked, cool, if it don't work, it's not great, but I'm good, right? So this is the money I'm gonna put in. There's an opportunity here. If things pop, I have the option. That's the biggest thing. People are to be saying, you know, I got an option in my contract. This ain't sports, bro. And even in some sports is different, but you don't have an option. They got an option to say, do you stay? Do you go? So they have that option. Oh, if this works, let's keep working. Or if I, for whatever reason, wanna keep you locked down even as I screw you over, let's keep working, quote, unquote, keep you under contract. But other than that, you lose whatever period of time on your end, what else do you have to lose? I mean, the deal, if it really does work out, it's great, you know, depending on what you have. But let's just assume it's only a royalty agreement. You don't have to give up your masters, anything like that. And you did a, let's say, what would be a number? Like maybe 50K for 20%. And that's very, please don't think that's a standard that y'all should need to sit by. Making shit up. I'm just making, yeah, I'm just making shit up that I know someone who's done that or whatever. But here's the thing, being locked down really matters, right? And I know it doesn't seem like it, because it is, again, it is more friendly than what existed before. But like I know an artist that drops his song, song takes off and they promise him so much money in marketing budget. Let me see, I think it was 30 or 40K, right? And then all this other money that will come after they drop the music video and things really get popping. Let's say song drops in January and his manager got into a lot of trouble combative moment with basically the label. Manager was kind of like flying off the top, ends up having a breakup with the manager. But then the manager says, I still own all this stuff or like he was playing some weird game with them and they end up being in court for six to eight months. Yeah, and the label wouldn't do anything at all until they figured this whole situation out. So now he had a song that was popping moving. This is like SoundCloud, but it's moving crazy, ridiculous numbers. But now he can't drop the music video until 12 months later. Basically it drops in the middle of December. Like nobody's checking for it. You already know what December looks like as a month with zero marketing and they made this entire, they had this entire argument that it should be dropped on the specific YouTube page. And I told them, I told them the whole way along that this shit didn't make sense. So I dropped on a YouTube page that wasn't here that wasn't popping itself. I'm sure that that was probably like their homie or something like that or whatever. Like, so the strategy's all bad. So you can get caught up in a situation with a label even if it's a short term agreement where you end up following such bad advice or they have such power over you that they manipulate your moves and they can suppress what you have going on. Maybe not intentionally, that's not what they're trying to do but they're so worried about whatever their personal incentives are at the time. And for their strategy, you just get undercut as like a stray, you know, you catch a stray bullet and there goes a huge moment in time. It could be a career. So like I've seen this happen multiple times like to artists, especially even with these short term like contracts, like they fuck artists up. And it sounds like, oh yeah, short term. That's a great thing. Yeah, 10 months is nice that it's a short term agreement per se but in music, 10 months can be long too. Yeah, yeah, it's fucked, it's fucked. Like it's crazy. Let's see if there's a one last comment that every label isn't bad, every label isn't good. Let's go with that one last statement. I'll say this. It's all people. Always people. It's all people. That's all it is. All right, so you might have some good people. You might have some bad people. And no, oh, here's another thing that happened in that time with that artist, the people he came in with, the entire organization got switched up. And that's a risk. It's a high risk. They wanted to change things up. There was a whole new guard. So now all these people who believed in you and saw you in the first place were no longer there. Those type of things happen, right? So at the end of the day it's people. He went from a good situation to a bad situation literally because of the people and also the management situation and that legal people, right? So some people have a luck of the draw. Some people are good in the sermon, but however you can, praying, rolling dice, blind luck, whatever it is, man. Like try to find the right people you can in this industry.