 What's up everybody, it's Brain Man, Shana and I'll back with another episode of Ask Brain Man where I answer your questions from the comment section below every Wednesday. And you guys have been coming with some great questions lately. I really appreciate it because it's really been more and more fun to answer these questions. And actually there's some questions that I really wanna get deep into, but I don't have time to do that today. It's the network. So I'm gonna run through some of these questions starting with Leisure Love's questions. Feature FM toned in which one is better? All right, so for those of you who don't know, tone in and feature FM most likely Leisure Love is referring to their smart link capabilities. That's when, hey, you lead somebody to your page, bam, YouTube, Apple, Amazon music. Which one do I collect, Spotify? Where do I click over to listen to music? That's what that is. Now, this is how I look at that. Number one, feature FM and tone in have a lot of capabilities. A lot, right? The only thing that matters though, for most artists, 99% of the artists out there, 99% of the time is going to be just a simple landing page feature and a pre-save feature. And the pre-save feature isn't even gonna matter all that much for the most part because everybody's not gonna be running pre-saves every single time they release a track, right? A lot of these features are really irrelevant unless you have a certain level of fan base, unless you're gonna really commit to a strategy, not just a small level tactic where, hey, let's use a pre-save this time. Hey, let's try some hyperfollow one time. None of that stuff matters, but I'll get into that. Before I get into that, we use toned in at our marketing agency. At Contra brand agency, we use toned in. So that tells you a lot about how we feel about toned in. Both toned in and feature FM have some free tiers. I never used their smart link, but I did use a lot of the other things in terms of their advertising platform back in the day, SoundCloud, Deezer, I used their advertising platforms a couple of years ago, haven't used it recently. Toned in, what we like about it is really the entire user experience, working with the team, it makes it easier for us to read and to share the campaigns and keep track of everything. So look, I'll end it with this. Two things matter. One, the basic feature of actually being able to click over to a landing page, they all have it, select Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. And then, yeah, if you wanna use a pre-save, but that's rare, really it's only one thing, that. And then the other thing is simply the insights. What is your ability to read data? So on toned in, I can tell you, we can see how many people viewed the page, how many people clicked through, how many people are most like, how many people are converting over to whatever the country is, right? The top countries and also the top cities, right? That basic information, I haven't really seen too much more detail than that in any of these smart link platforms. They're all, it's a pretty, it's a pretty competitive space and everything is pretty simple to achieve technologically, so you don't find huge differentiations which is why they offer all these other features and hyper-follows and ad platform and all these other things, right? So the thing that you need though, right, is just those things that I mentioned. Now, with that being said, the reason I didn't spend any time going into feature FM for this video outside of what I already knew is because I'm focused on what we're using. And I don't say that, I don't even say that like from a cocky way. I say that from a sense of, that's what more artists need to do. What are the features that you need? Don't pay attention to the rest of this stuff, right? And don't even spend time trying to get excited about these tools and all these different features that they pop up with because it's a distraction. As I'm telling you, again, all the hundreds of artists we're working with, the hundreds of thousand dollars being spent on our marketing campaigns, most of these campaigns are just using the basic landing page. They all got that feature, right? And again, as an artist that's just you, Tonin has a free tier. Feature FM has a free tier. Try them both out, one song to one song, see how you like it again, we use Tonin. But what artists get it messed up is getting focused on these tools and the tactics versus having any kind of strategy. And it don't work like that, man. It does not work like that because artists will say, oh, I wanna do this pre-save campaign and expect the pre-save to be the game breaker for them. It's not the pre-save in itself. It's how do you pair that with your strategy to amplify, right? It doesn't do anything in and of itself. Having a hyperfollow and the ability to collect emails doesn't really change the game for you unless you create a strategy around it that uses that function, right? And so there's so many things, right? Facebook, it's the same thing with Facebook ads, Insta influencer campaigns. All of these things are just different tools in the tool shed, but none of them individually will be the game that break you, right? The game that break you, the game breaker. I don't know, I've never said that before. The game that break you, but the truth is it's the strategy behind it, right? So what are you doing? What is the plan around it and how are you approaching it? I'll do something deeper in that where I might provide some analogies for you but just know that the tactics are where people get lost, right? I try this tool, this tool, this tool, this tool versus building out a strategy and finding the tools that fit within that strategy. That's the approach you should be taking, all right? So that's my answer to Leisure Love and also when it comes to a lot of these questions about reviews on platforms, for the most part I'm not gonna answer to too many of them because I'm not out here trying to be an expert on the platforms, like which who has the better this or that of the same thing, I'm trying to figure out the best tactics to build out certain artists based on their particular strategy, right? And that's what we do and how do we brand, right? So at the agency, we're not testing and playing with a lot of different tools. We're testing tools within a strategy for an artist to grow, all right? And what makes sense for that particular campaign? Last thing, it's always gonna be custom to you though at the end of the day, all right? Now, Drake Taylor says, help backstory. About two days ago, I thought I was paying for an organic promo service but it turns out it's just bots, dang. They won't cancel my order. So far, nothing has been removed but will my profile be shadow banned or will anything bad happen? I don't know what platform you talking about, Drake, right? Drake Taylor, that's, shout out to you because my last name is Taylor. So shout out to you. Now, all right, look at it this way though. I'll go Spotify, then I'll go Instagram. That's likely the two platforms is one or the other. If it's the Spotify thing, there's a pretty decent chance depending on how much of it has happened, how many bots you have, there's a pretty decent chance that you could get banned. Definitely those streams will be wiped away at some point. There's a good chance of that. Now, would it happen immediately? Most likely not, but Spotify tends to do these, it seems random to us on the outside but I'm sure there's a method to the madness on when they decide to do a clean sweep. So you might be good for a year and the next thing you know when they do their purge then you're prone to have a song possibly taken down you gotta put it back up. My question to you, Drake, is if you don't wanna be affected by that, think about how many streams you already have, right? How much action do you have on that track, right? Or your music as a whole, or did you do follows? Because if you don't have that much going on maybe it's worth taking it down, putting it back up and not having to worry about it and just act right going into the future. Now, flip it, Instagram. Now, Instagram, there's a lot less chance of you being banned per se, especially if it's just this one-off campaign but what I will say is you gotta get rid of that because either way it goes, messing around with fake streams completely makes you delusional. You have no idea what the reality is when you decide to launch something your reference points are all messed up, right? So you don't wanna get caught having to chase and create an image that adds up to something that's not true. What you can do is one, well, all right, I'll say this. One, just stop and from now on, build out your campaigns, run a campaign specifically to your Instagram profile and start building up follows that way and start taking those people that came in that period of time, just start taking them out for your profile. Just block them, all right? If you block them, get them off you. It's a one-time purge situation where you do it yourself but you don't have to worry about it in the future. So now you can start to have proper context but I'm assuming that you're talking about Spotify, right? And also because you're in this situation, I'm not gonna, it doesn't have to be too nuanced because I'm assuming you also don't really have that many followers. I wish you guys would add more context and be more specific when you ask these questions because the more you ask, the deeper I can go. But so if you need to, ask another question, Drake, and go deeper into that. Next, Travo. When you say using Facebook, do you mean transferring views to a YouTube video using Facebook ads or actually posting it on Facebook itself? Now, what Travo was referring to is I had a whole video where I was talking about which platform is the best in terms of music, video, marketing. And I didn't say YouTube, YouTube and Google ads, I was saying that Facebook and Facebook ads is the best. So to clarify, which I appreciate, Travo, no not posting on Facebook to link over to YouTube and run that ad, trying to get people to go over to a YouTube ad. I mean to a YouTube video, I'm talking about posting natively on Facebook and running that post as a video view campaign, right? That is the absolute best when it comes to building the best awareness and warm audience for your music video. Now, why is that? To walk through the logic again, Facebook allows for video view campaigns where you are optimizing for the people who are most likely to watch the video, right? Because they're the people who just tend to watch videos, period. Facebook has that data. They also know who people who are more likely to click through a traffic ad, right? Some people who are likely to click are necessarily likely to watch a video. And what happens, right? As you watch that video, right? You also start to be able to have more data where they start to optimize for people who are more likely to watch more of the video or to watch as much of the video, right? So that's something you don't have on YouTube. YouTube is you have your audience and it shows to everybody in that particular category if you're doing a placement campaign. So all the targeting is on you. They don't know, they don't take it much about the end user. It's about saying, yo, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be on aisle three, right? Because that's where all the canned food is and I have canned beans. So when somebody comes looking for canned food, I'm gonna be around the rest of the canned food. That's what a YouTube ad is when you're doing placements. You're just in the way, right? So I wanna, I feel like my music is like Gucci Mane. I'm gonna put it on, I'm gonna advertise on the Gucci Mane video and now I'm in the way they gotta hear me before they hear the Gucci Mane song, right? But it's not gonna learn and better target anybody. The most you can do is the optimization of saying, yo, out of these placements, which ones perform best and then start to delete the ones that didn't perform right and then start to find other ones more like the ones that perform well, right? That's what YouTube comes down to for most people. Getting into the discovery ads, it becomes too expensive for most artists starting out. And let me think about, is there anything else with YouTube ads? Yeah, and the affinity ads are definitely too expensive for artists starting out. It doesn't work. Placements is gonna, it works, but it's not for what most artists are dealing with. Placements is gonna be your best in that simply, again, being placed in a certain position where you are in the way they have to encounter you and whether they like you or not, it doesn't say, oh snap, I wanna show to that person who came down this aisle or that person, I'm just showing to every single person that came down that aisle. Other way around, Facebook says, ooh, I'm gonna start here, but then I'm going to begin to only show to people who are responding to it a certain way. And first and foremost, I'm going to show to people from the very beginning people who are most likely to view my video. So when I'm talking about entire full music videos, Facebook, because you can start getting people to optimize to watch a two minute full video, a three minute full video. And that, when we're talking about experiencing your brand, it's nothing like that. I know a lot of people don't necessarily love that because Facebook is in the platform that most people like to be on. However, just technically, that alone is the best for building out your brand. And then you can get into the retargeting and all those things saying, yo, I'm gonna retarget somebody who watched 90, well, not 90, 75% of this, 95% of it, they do allow 95, which usually we use 75 or 50%. But that experience is something that you can't beat. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm referring to why Facebook ads is so powerful. That's a native post, and you're running it, you're not trying to push them over to any platform. Not even trying to push them over to a smart link. Might have it included, but that's not necessarily to go. All right, now, I wanted to change my artist name for a long time on DistroKid, but I'm afraid that I would not be able to reupload my older songs to my new artist name page. Is there a way to figure it out? Yeah, that question, Tala Eunice. Again, I'm not an expert in DistroKid and the logistics of everything they do on the backend. But what I can say is, it depends on how much music you have out and how many followers and all that activity. If it's not that much, then you might wanna just bite the bullet, take a small back step to start where you want to. I'm gonna start with a new name, but at the same time, you gotta realize it is very hard when it comes to getting the updates. So you wanna change your name as little as possible. You might have to create some alternate names on the side and you brand yourself, but they still know to find you by this one core name or for many of you guys who are still in an experimental phase, maybe consider even just staying on an audio Mac or a SoundCloud for a while before you commit to a platform like Apple Music and Spotify. But just know, it's not easy. They don't make it really easy. Each streaming platform has its own thing, their own rules, even DistroKid does say that. So it's not a DistroKid thing more than anything. It's a Spotify, Apple thing, all right? Now, let me see, last question. Actually, let's do a comment. What's the comment of the day? Da, da, da, da, da, bam, Unders. Unders said, congrats on 100K subscribers. Appreciate that, Unders. Number two though, he said Spotify is the tip, not the wage. Now, this video was under Corey's video where he was just talking about how much artists get paid on Spotify, the numbers and all that stuff. And I love this philosophy in terms of how you look at Spotify. Yes, I do know artists who are making most of their money or their consistent money from Spotify because they have 300,000, 400,000 streams a month and they don't necessarily have a lot of income coming from somewhere else. So I do know some artists that are like that, making $2,000, $3,000 a month off of Spotify consistently and that's their main thing. However, long-term streaming platforms should be the tip. It should be the extra for their experience, right? And that means should be philosophically. In terms of that's the way it should be. I get that y'all don't like what they get paid y'all, right? But I'm saying that's how you have to approach it based on how the game is working right now and look at your main, look at other avenues in terms of making the wage, making your main income, right? Because there's so many opportunities, whether it's merch, whether it's concerts or there's live online experience, there's so many ways we can get into that in another video. But Unders, once again, I appreciate that comment. So many artists need to flip to switch to that. Spotify is just a tip. You can't rely on these streaming platforms and you just call that the cost of the game in the district because you're paying for the distribution that goes along with it, all right? They got the audience and they're taxing you to get to that audience one way or another. Not the perfect analogy, but that's what's happening and that's the cost of building your fan base. And when you get more power, you can start influencing your fans in more high margin directions, all right? So that's it for this video. Keep asking questions. I really appreciate you guys. Like I said, there's gonna be some really dope and detailed episodes coming up. I'm starting to get a little bit more time in my schedule. 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