 I'd like you to think about something that you absolutely love doing. Now it could be making music or it could be playing football or fixing cars or playing computer games. Now imagine someone comes along and they say look you no longer have to do that just in your spare time but you can do it whenever you want and we're going to pay you to do it. We're going to pay you enough to pay for your house, your car, the fuel for your car, the insurances, the food you put on your table, your clothes, your furniture, things to do with your kids, everything that both sustains you and entertains you in your life. Sounds like a dream come true doesn't it? Well that's what happened for me with this channel but I've learned along the way there is a cost. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I haven't been unfortunately. The last six months have been quite a struggle for me in many different ways. Now I don't want to go into the fine detail because I want to protect the privacy of friends and family involved but I will say it's been a struggle on a number of different fronts. There's been practical issues, there's been physical health issues, there's been some financial issues and definitely I've had some mental health issues and this all came to a head a couple of months ago when I was experiencing some of the most extreme symptoms of anxiety that I'd had in my whole life. Not only was I getting all of the physical symptoms that you can associate with anxiety but I was also very much living in my head. Thoughts were going round and round, not just for hours, sometimes for days at a time, they were torturing me, I was catastrophizing, I was getting paranoid, you know the whole nine yards, it was miserable to be honest with you and as much as I tried to mask it on camera here I think some of you noticed it, in fact I know some of you noticed it and did send me some private messages to ask after my welfare and I thank you so much for reaching out, it's lovely to know that people care about you at times like that. Now I don't want you to worry too much because I think I'm definitely through the worst of it, I sought help, that really has been helpful and I recommend to any of you suffering these kinds of things to reach out for help, it really is a big part of the answer. I wanted to share this with you however because firstly when I start to talk about the background to this you may see some parallels in your life especially if you're a working musician and secondly I want to give you the opportunity to help me. For four years this channel has been about me trying to help you but I'm reaching my hands out and I'm saying after you've watched this video if you've got any words of wisdom, a tutorial for life if you like then I'd love to hear about that in the comments down below. But before I kind of get into some things I just want to talk about a bit of background and about how the hell I actually get paid to do this job. So here's a quick crash course on how people make money out of a YouTube channel. First of all we get paid for advertising. So you know those adverts that you see at the beginning end and the middle of our videos? Well obviously advertisers pay YouTube to place those adverts and YouTube in term pay us a percentage of the revenue from that. Now we don't all get paid the same, it depends on how much advertisers think that your channel is worth in terms of how much they're willing to pay. Now for me personally as far as I know I actually get paid a fair amount more than some other YouTubers and I'm grateful for that. Lucky me I don't know why or how but that's the way it sort of works out. But even with that said it would never be enough to pay a full-time wage. It maybe just about could pay for my rent but nothing else. So if you want to do this full-time you have to find other forms of income to subsidize that. They may be simple things like Patreon or selling merch, things that we commonly do, I don't sell much merch but you know people do that. Also you know I've got a link in the description down below where you can just make a donation if you just want to help the channel out that's another form of income for me. Things like affiliate sales so sometimes when I'm talking about products if you follow the link in the description down below I may get a small percentage of that sale. These are all common forms none of them by themselves tend to generate a huge amount of income but maybe all together they kind of top up the ad revenue. Now a really important one is also when you start to get sponsorship from specific companies. I've got a number of regular sponsors on this channel probably the most notable is DistroKid. They've sponsored this particular video but there's been others at other times. Now some of you are probably already thinking if you haven't already thought about it in the past uh-huh I see a problem you're thinking. Once you start getting paid by sort of corporate entities you're going to become compromised. You're going to start saying things that you don't really believe about products or what have you. Well I want to kind of address that right away. So look I can't speak for other YouTubers on this I can only speak from my own experience and about my own kind of policies on this. So the first thing I want to make clear is I've never received a script for a product nor would I accept that as a part of an agreement. I also don't allow companies to preview videos before they're released so they're not allowed to check if I'm saying nice things about their products before I release videos and I wouldn't accept that kind of agreement with companies. And to be honest with you there's no need for me to do that. There's no need for me to kind of sell my soul in that way because over the years I've really tried to align myself and make relationships with companies who consistently produce good products. So look I don't even mind name dropping people like Arturia or Native Instruments or even smaller companies like Ample Sound. I really do believe that overall they make really high quality products. So it's not too difficult for me to tell you about those products and kind of recommend them to you. I tend to prefer to describe products and allow you to make a judgment about whether it's going to be useful to you or not. So I prefer to just tell you what it does and let you decide. But I do sometimes let you know that I think it's a good product. So that's how I go to sleep at night with a clear conscience because I know that it's just not in me for the sake of a paycheck to let you know about a product which I know is substandard but I'm going to say it's great for the sake of the video. It's just not who I am to be honest with you. But that doesn't mean to say that this is without challenges. Now I think there is something way more compromising in this job than simply doing paid videos and it's something we're all subject to and it's generally referred to as the algorithm. Now the algorithm is what decides in YouTube land which videos should be put in front of which people. So we're trying to get our videos viewed by as many people as possible. So what do we need to do? We need to make videos that will be popular. And so with every single video that a YouTuber releases they're like a politician who is at the mercy of the vote. And whether they get to continue doing this wonderful thing they do or not depends on the results of the election. Happens day in, day out for me several times a week. Now apart from wanting to be popular, actually don't feel the need to be all that popular to be honest with you. There is that kind of need to want to keep doing this job as our full-time job. That takes money because we've got bills to pay and that means we need more views, more subscribers, more watch time on our videos. So when I come to decide which video I would like to make this week I may think hey over here choice A. This is a really interesting topic to me. I'd love to make this video but when I talked about this subject in the past it didn't seem like people were interested. On the other hand I know they're going to be interested in this over here. That's going to enable me to pay that electricity bill that just came through my mailbox yesterday. This is life folks this is we're not playing here okay you may think oh you've sold out no just like you I have bills to pay and I have to make those choices. I don't want to overstate this but I think sometimes for me the balance has gone a bit skew with. So during the height of my misery if you like a good friend of mine Brian decided to visit me and stay with me for a couple of weeks as a kind of a gesture of mateship if you like and some of you may remember this because while he was here we filmed a video together where he looked sort of behind the curtain at how I create videos at creative source. What you didn't see off camera was how creative we were together outside of that video. Brian's a tremendously talented singer songwriter guitar player etc and he's also like me had a bit of fun over the years with videography and things so we were bouncing ideas about different videos we could make and significantly we also recorded a song together while he was here we didn't do it to show it on the channel we didn't do it to gain subscribers or get views or get sponsorship we recorded a song for fun can you believe it um I laughed but it was actually quite serious I actually saw a lot of my anxiety disappear and dissipate during those two weeks and I realized that as a person I absolutely must be creative. Now don't get me wrong I don't want to come off as sort of a little bit first world privileged here okay um I do love what I do on this channel but I don't get to do all the things I love on this channel and I feel that perhaps the balance has really gone out for me and I need to do a few more things in my life whether it's on the channel or not where I'm being truly creative and using that creative muscle it's what I intend to do and it's probably why there's going to be some changes around here but first I've got an immediate plan guess what it is so from the 22nd of November till the 1st of December I've booked myself a ticket and I'm off to Bali in Indonesia I'm not taking a guitar or a microphone or an audio interface or a laptop I'm not going to be making music or videos while I'm there I'm simply going to go and absorb the sights and sounds of a completely different environment by myself and reset I'll probably be thinking about where do I want to go next on this journey this creative source journey and there's a reason why I still want it to be a creative source journey and that reason is you I mean I'm not talking about you as a collective or as an audience even but you the individual watching this video right now you're the reason why I want my creative outlet to be this channel creative source one of the massive unforeseen benefits of doing this as a job has been all of the messages that I've received from you guys over the years telling me about how helpful the channel or the video has been to you some of you have talked about how inspirational it's been about how it's been the reason that you're even recording and releasing music and that is something which is beyond just me being able to do this as a job it's a purpose beyond that okay the fact that I can make that difference to people's lives in any way makes this important to do and it makes it a great place to be creative and that's why I want to ask you now for advice let me know in the comments down below how have you overcome that challenge between duty and creativity and as I say I think this especially happens for musicians perhaps you end up playing cover material at gigs that you're not that keen on but you know it'll get the crowd going how do you work through that how do you prevent yourself from becoming too compromised let me know in the comments down below like subscribe all of that stuff that we need you to do so that we can have the privilege of keep serving these videos to you