 Baww, what's up everybody once again, it's Brandman Sean and this video is brought to you by brandmannetwork.com because I signed myself. Now I gotta talk about a video that I dropped because it ended up being pretty controversial and I didn't even necessarily see it coming. What video was that? Well the thumbnail to this video was Music is a Bad Investment and the title said he successfully building a fan base without spending money. Now that was Waizu and Ghost that I was interviewing in that video. And one thing that people really didn't like was just the fact that Ghost kept on pushing this mentality of I'm not going to invest in my music, I'm not going to invest in my music, I'm not putting my money up for my music. And I'll get into that in a second and get into some of the details why this is so relevant, this is so important for artists to actually think about in this conversation and hear it broken down a little bit. But again I gotta say this first, my channel is not about dogma where I'm pushing this one perspective and this is the only way that things get done. This there's not one way that things get done, that's just the way it is. Some artists blow up on YouTube, some artists blow up on Google, some artists blow up on Facebook and I mean literally you can have a label, anybody working at a label who has multiple artists will tell you that they blow up different artists different ways even if they have all the resources that there's so many different ways people blow up and it's the same way when it comes to how they approach money how they invest in themselves. So you're not going to ever hear me say that there's one way to do things and just say oh you gotta be independent, all artists are not meant to be independent. I don't care what the common popular theme is and I'm very pro independent if you can be and you have that mentality, I'm pro that first. I'm pro ownership, bigger than anything I'm pro self-awareness knowing what works for you because one person's win is an L for you and your win might be an L for somebody else. What's more important is to get the information, know what you went out of things and make sure you make it work for yourself. So when I bring people on the channel, they might not necessarily share the exact views that I have on certain things but it's to share a certain opinion or just a certain perspective of how they're making things work and then you can kind of flip that up and work it for you, right? Like oh I'm going to take this from this person, this from this person or I just want to think about it, nah, I don't like none of that. That's perfect, that's cool. But if you want somebody to just sit up here and tell you how to think at all times 100%, this isn't going to be the place to be. Now I saw a lot of comments on the video where I was like, okay, whatever, they just don't get it, whatever they just don't get it. But then I had a conversation with somebody in my DMs on Instagram, they hit me up and the way they approached it, I was like, let's talk. And we talked for a good minute, quite a few messages and exchanges. And the conversation was just a go. They weren't coming disrespectfully and they really had some genuine like thoughts and concerns that they wanted to go through. And I was like, you know what, it's worth doing this video. And I look back at the comments and not only did I see the things that were kind of like disliking them or having to distaste for ghost and waasoo and that approach, calling it trash or this is what's wrong with the industry. Yeah, we know there's industry and then we know there's the art form. The art form has little to do with the industry as a whole when we talk about just the business and how to run things. But even more importantly, I saw this one comment that really helped me just break down how I wanted to approach this video. Cody Ray said, Dame Dash says, put up your own money. So I'm taking Dame's advice. Waasoo then responded, I love Dame, but check out Biggs interview. If you guys don't know who Biggs is. Rockefeller was founded by Jay-Z, Dame Dash and Biggs. And he said, check out his interview with Drinkchamps. Dame and Jay went to him because he had the money. Biggs was a multimillionaire before music. It's easy to say put your own money up after having successful businesses like The Rock with high revenues. Now I'm not gonna say I know all the details about how, you know, Dame Dash got his first big scores or anything like that. But what I do know is there's a thought process on two sides of business where people say, always put your own money up. And there's a lot of people say other people's money, OPP. And that's the only way they do business. And there's successes on both sides, a lot of successes on both sides. So there's no reason to feel like there's only one way to do these to be successful. Of course, you can have your own personal philosophy and stick to that. Great. That's awesome. Some people might just want to, you know, do this at this time and then do this other one at another time. That's great as well. But if we look at people like Jay-Z, Jay-Z said that he's been playing with house money since like, I don't know, some random year, like 98 or something like that. And what he means when he says he's playing with house money, that means he's spending other people's money. He's spending profits that doesn't have to make him touch that core money. So let's look at Dame Dash's approach and Jay-Z's approach. Dame, once again, is always putting up his money first. He puts that money up. He bets on himself and then he takes that money that he bets on himself with, flips it and then he's broke sometimes because all that money is invested in business. So he's not necessarily broke from a network standpoint, but as far as a cash standpoint, he's moving and shaking and it leaves him cash trapped in some situations. And he's talked about these things openly in some situations, but for a highly skilled entrepreneur and salesman like Dame Dash, that works. And then you can look at somebody like Jay-Z. Jay-Z has had a lot of successes, right? Obviously, he was hustling all that stuff in the streets and then he's flipped that into the industry and he's been making money after money after money, but let's break down a lot of the businesses that we see him do. He doesn't really do as much where he's putting his own money up in some senses. I'm not saying that he doesn't bet on himself and he doesn't ever put his money up first, but if you look at a lot of the businesses he's a part of, he's doing partnerships, right? He's owning portions of business. So it's not all his own money. This is a pool of money and it's not necessarily just like, oh, it's homies, right? The portion of title that he owned. I believe he has a majority stake in title, but it's still other people's money as well. Rock Nation is a partnership with Live Nation, which is a whole other situation and he's not necessarily having to put a lot of money up as well as far as physical cash and we're putting these things up. And that seems to work for Jay-Z. He doesn't put all the risk out there. He has these strategic ways that he moves and for somebody who's good when it comes to like human nature, right? And moving and shaking and being strategic when it comes to, you know, how you deal with people, right? A high emotional intelligence when Dame is not as great with a lot of people, right? He's brash and a lot of people don't like him or they don't like his approach, but both are successful in their own right. Yeah, you could be like, hey, Jay-Z's worth a billion and Dame is worth whatever Dame is worth, but at the same time, Dame is still successful. So I wouldn't even discredit that. And let's not even act like Dame Dash was always highly regarded this way. People were talking down on his name for years. People will call him crazy when he was having his approach to business for years. And now it comes out and you have YouTube and he can tell his story and he's been talking a lot these last few years and people are rocking with him again. And then we can look at somebody also like Diddy and we can look at somebody like Dr. Dre, right? Dr. Dre didn't own most of Beats Music. So when it sold to Apple, right? He didn't become a billionaire because he owned I think either 20 or 25%, something like that, which is a hefty sum and a big number. Cool, like bruh, like give me that money. I'm good with it. But if you go with the whole, I own everything, I own 100% of everything. I put up all my own money. It's harder to get to that number because sometimes you gotta play well with others to do bigger things. Even somebody like P. Diddy, P. Diddy started on a label. He was working for people, right? And then he got pushed out the label. Well, you know, fired, you know, if you know that story, but he still had label money and invested somewhere else. He flipped that money, he flipped that money, makes other partnerships and, you know, makes things happen from investor groups. His entire way of going about things isn't necessarily, oh, I just put my money up. And especially a lot of these big moves, you need other people's money. It's like, yeah, I'm a 300 million there. However, I need a billion dollars worth of investment. So I gotta get other people. And just flip all of that into like the tech world. The tech world, so many people are looking to get venture capital, right? Or angel investors or, you know, institutional investors, and that's other people's money. And that's essentially what Ghost and Wa-Soo were saying. They look at labels as an institutional investor. So he's looking to put himself in a position, right? Taking care of the product, not looking at the industry from a standpoint of, oh man, I don't really care about this quality of music. You can look at Wa-Soo's quality of music and you can tell that he's an artist artist. As a matter of fact, his artist is like, that's what he focused on, the artist, the business guy or the manager in the group is the statements that people had a problem with. But they're focused on those strong mentality so they can really do what they do to the best degree. So while you have a great product, but why if I could do all these other things to get myself to this level without necessarily having to put out money like this, and I can make sure I get money from shows by working these relationships. And then when it's time to really blow up, I'm going to use label money, which is just a traditional way of doing things. Artists used to not blow up without labels. And take this investment where I never had to put my own money at risk. Flip that, let them recoup. And then I still have money left over. That's the way they're going about things. That might not be what works for you, right? But it's still a way that works. And so many people are still making things work that way. Don't let all this, oh, you got to put your own money up and you got to be independent stuff for you and the thing and that's what everybody's doing. Cause a lot of people are talking at stuff and aren't actually doing that stuff. And there's so much more to industry than it seems like because they aren't really talking, they're just winning, as opposed to speaking a certain message online that are winning in this other direction. But if you have your preference, again, I'm all for self-awareness, do it your way. That's what the important thing for me is for people to figure out and get educated in everything they can so they can take control of their situation and make sure they win in a way that's comfortable for them. But that's it for this video. I'm not gonna go too much deeper into it. I mean, we can talk about this thing for days and days and days. I might even have them back on the channel and maybe some other people who disagree just to see what that conversation looks like. And again, that video, if you missed it, if you don't know what I'm talking about, the link to that video is in the description below. As a matter of fact, so many people took that one snippet that I had out of the context because I basically took it out of context by giving the interview snippet. But if you listen to the rest of the interview, it would even make sense to think that they think in the way that a lot of people interpreted that. But you know, the internet be that way. Again, I would love to know what you guys think about this topic as a whole. I don't even know what I'm gonna title this video. We'll see. I wanna make sure people see it. As always, this video's brought to you by brandmannetwork.com because I saw myself, if you like 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.