 It's the Metwork! Finally, we have to talk about Kanye quickly. I'm going to bring up the tweets. The main bit I want to highlight, can you see this? Yep, I see it. I'll read this out as well for those listening as well, but the main thing I want to focus on is his new recording and publishing deal guidelines that he's proposed. So obviously, we're on a massive rant about, you know, he leaked all the contracts he signed with Universal and not being in control of his masters. And I just wanted to get some of your thoughts shown on his ideas about the future and what you're going to try and, you know, negotiate for an artist in an ideal world. So the first one is that the artist owns the copyright in the recordings and the songs and leases them to a record label slash publisher for a limited term one-year deal. Have you seen any of this before Sean, these ones, this like outline he's... I haven't. I haven't seen the one-year deal thing, which, I mean, in this way, it just sounds like we're going to follow basketball, right, which evolved to the one-year deal models for more leverage and all that stuff. But then there's this deaf, this tone deaf nature of that, because who did that in basketball? Well, the one who really had the power to do that was LeBron. Kanye could have the power to do that, but you also have to acknowledge that everybody doesn't have that power to do that, right? Like, I can say, yo, Josh, I'm only doing one-year deals for you with you. And if you and everybody like you say, well, that's fine. You have all the power to do that, but I'm not going to do it with you because you're just not worth my time, right? Or you're not worth that risk. Because of it, then it's not realistic at scale. So this is going to have to become more of a nuanced conversation than this, right? Those nice ideals. Exactly, yeah. And there, like, so we can start there. Like, there has to be more nuance to it. But as a conversation starter, because of his platform, even though it's been a conversation for a long time, you know that people won't listen until they hear. Somebody like this say it for whatever reason. And I'm not even talking about, like, people on the other side, just even artists. There's a lot of artists that still are unfamiliar with this conversation crazy enough. So for that aspect and purpose, I'm with it. I'm with it. So I think where this whole thing is interesting is obviously Kanye went on the massive roundabout trying to control his masters and trying to get them back. But Universal really, you know, got him tied down to all these contracts going to be very, very difficult for him to get them back. And obviously, one of the ideas that I like about this is that obviously we know that Kanye could afford to buy back his masters from Universal. However, Universal are not going to put a price on the masters for him to buy back because this is going to keep, this value is going to keep increasing over time. So there's no way for him to put a price on his masters because if they do it now, 10 years from now, they may have messed up because it might be worth even more. So there's no, I don't really see any way of him getting out of this or getting what he wants. Yeah. I mean, that's my thing. When you're talking about artists like him, it's so hard to really evaluate that. I mean, if anything, everything that Kanye is doing outside of the music itself at the point, this point makes his music even more valuable too. So, exactly, yeah. Like, where do we, where do we stop? Where does this end? And that's also the difference between a $5 billion man, you know, on paper versus, you know, actually having $5 billion, whether I don't know, you know, whether those valuations are true. But I know Kanye said he's like worth a $5 billion, the last thing I heard. So like, you know, because I'm sure if he had a billion to throw at it, people might go ahead and jump. Maybe, maybe, I don't know. But, but yes, it's hard to analyze a guy like him. But when we see the conversation that he's having, we also have to acknowledge that everybody isn't, you know, the entrepreneur type, the ownership type, like the, or understanding. When we're talking about, you have to understand the business you're in. One, this is a business that seems to be built around making sure people don't understand the business, right? And staying ahead of the curve in that way. So, the next thing you understand, there's a whole lot of stuff you don't. Even now, general entrepreneur, why is most people mentality, tallies are ahead of where they were in the 90s, right? Yes, yeah. But, you know, you have all these people that just are popular entrepreneur advice people and things like that. You have people who popular with musical advice and all these things. However, you still have, you know, that same layer of a lot of people going through people because it's like the game keeps changing and the knowledge gets out there, the conversation gets out there. But oftentimes that feedback loop is still too slow to truly stay ahead of the game. So, even if people have the deals in this exact same setup, I still foresee somebody having the power, you know, in a different type of way where they're being a different game. Just like now, YouTube and Google and Amazon and Facebook, like they are Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, JP Morgan, right? Looks completely different, different industry, but it's something that connects and everybody's connected to and have to run through. The media is owned by those same companies. So, now how do you understand whatever game evolves in that way? I know I'm getting like a little deep and I don't know if it sounds like conspiracy. It's not like a conspiracy thing. It's really just a straightforward, most people. There's a reason that there's hierarchies and things at the end of the day. Everybody's better than somebody in something. And there's a lot of people that are truly are not, like they don't have the power to do what Kanye is talking about. And then some people don't, you don't need as much power. Like even if you look at a Nipsey hustle, the power that he generated because his willingness to go a certain route and do it in a certain way was far beyond artists, many artists that had bigger platforms than he had, right? And I had bigger platforms musically than he had, but there's not that many Nipsey hustles, you know? Yeah. Not even like, yeah, just when we're talking about the world at large, yes, there's a lot more than one, but there's a very small percentage of the population. So just in a negative or in a pessimistic voice, I will have to say I have trouble seeing this stuff change. I don't have trouble seeing what we want to change, change. But I think the principles of will be the same where whatever the hell we change it to, give it two generations and they're going to see all the holes in the shit that we created because the people before us thought they improved the model too. Yeah, my other point on that is that we have point number three here about dependence. So artists must be dependent on no one but themselves to manage their catalogue. You should need no one else to understand the business you're in. This makes me wonder like, where does the education, what age does the education start on this? If this is the way it has to be because you never know when you're going to blow up. You could be in your early teens or a teen, when are you going to have the time or be educating all this stuff to have all this noise? That's why there are music managers and lawyers and all that. That's why there are so many positions in industry because you can't be in there with everything. You can have an idea, but if you're spending all your time educating yourself on this instead of actually doing anything, you're never really going to get anywhere. You're going to come to consume and overwhelm by all because there's just so much to learn and understand and you're not going to want to go into it once you've seen too much behind the curtain. Yeah, and there's a reason Kai is in this trouble. He didn't know all this stuff. Exactly. He signed deals in his 20s and 30s for albums that he won't see any revenue from until he's in his 50s and 60s because he signed those long term rights away. It's easy to cast these grandiose visions, but the practicality make it very difficult to execute. Absolutely. I look forward to seeing how this does develop and whether he does go to war with them. Obviously he claims he is. He's got the lawyers. He wants to go to bat, but we're interested to see, and obviously his big grand ideas for the future. Again, whether he can even take any implementations to do it, building anything on that. Obviously Taylor Swift had it in the past with the scooter brawn big machine Fiasco. There were some positives to come out from her from that. She did get out of some certain contracts. There are case studies there to say that he will benefit from this. One thing that rings true within this is just talking about the licenses and equity. Of course, that at the very least you want to figure out and maintain. That doesn't make sense for your deal or where you are in life. I don't know, but because of content and the increase in content from so many different businesses and the fact that so many businesses may have to do things in the right way, the most legal way, and you're getting these copyright technologies being able to track all this stuff. There's going to be a time where it's going to be very hard to post on any social network or website anything that isn't licensed without the software picking it up and something going through that. Because of that, that creates a vast market opportunity outside of the general I want fans type of perspective. It becomes a vast opportunity of sync licensing, whatever that looks like. If you have the equity and you're able to license, then that's going to make it so much easier to have a livable age because you're going to have NBA has its social media, NFL has its social media, Coca Cola has its social media and all these official companies that need to use music and they need to create content because the game has become content. So they're just following, they're still going to have to cross the T's and dot the I's and all that stuff. So yes, figure out how to maintain equity and be able to be in position to license because that's going to be a whole game where I think more people, more talented artists are going to pursue that far more seriously than streams. Yeah, just finally what I do implore kind of for doing, obviously this wasn't obviously his why he did it, he's obviously just wanted to speak out and be, you know, his kind of Kanye, but what he has done is put this issue in front of more people like I've had friends last week ask me about, like I didn't know that artists don't own their own songs or masters. That level of awareness has been, you think you think about it, obviously it seems obvious if you're in the space, but if you're not, you know, you would assume because most creative spaces you own what you create, people don't know this. So what he has done is really bring it to a larger audience and that may filter down and lead in the future to people and fans thinking more about supporting artists in the future with knowledge that they don't earn as much as they think they do or perceive them to do if they don't own their own songs. I agree. So that is one positive from this regardless of what, you know, why did it or you know anything. Yeah. Yeah, because along those lines, there's more managers and people like that who are involved in the business because of education and things like this, they're becoming aware in a way of they actually care. So they're trying not to be these characters that Kanye is talking about. Let's say that some people were complicit, but in ways where they just thought they were doing what happens in music and thinking this is just how you're supposed to do it versus seeing the other perspective and understanding that way. So a lot of people who want to be defined or or see themselves as good people in a certain ideal will, I mean, I know managers who are like, yo, I'm only doing, I don't want, like, I'm not going to do any crazy deal. I'm going to go to the extreme of only doing handshake deals with my artists and they can fire me anytime and hold me accountable. I know those managers, right? So there's, yeah, this might, at the very least to your point, make it better for future generations all off of strictly social capital, if anything. Yeah, because while everyone obviously is talking about the rant and pissing on the Grammy and stuff, there is that has clearly asked for it through some people who are asking questions about, well, I didn't know that they, I didn't know this was the problem. So yeah, that that that is one positive Kanye, I have to say. There we go.