Why Most Recording Artists FAIL (How to Build a Real Fanbase)

what do you think is the biggest misconception that an independent artist has about the business and how this world works i think the biggest misconception is the fact that they think if they're just good at music and you know and they just consistently work on the music and put it out consistently and without doing anything else everything else is going to kind of fall into place but uh essentially like as a musician you kind of have to wear many hats you know you have to have a team but at the same time early on you

kind of have to do marketing you know you have to do networking you have to put out consistently you have to shoot content for your music you can't you know just focus on the music and expect for the music to take off so I think that's the biggest misconception is thinking that if the music is good and you just keep making music everything else will kind of take care of itself how you doing sir i'm doing good how are you i'm good man i can't complain listen for those people who don't know in front of

me I have promo God absolutely incredible when it comes to the music business when it comes to the marketing the advertising this conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time actually because I think one of the best things that you can provide is a lot of actionable steps for a lot of the audience that watches this podcast right so just so folks know that that he has an artist he's the artist inside of him but what he is really known for is spitting a whole lot of gems on a whole lot of game

online through a whole bunch of different platforms on Instagram you have 250,000 followers that's 231,000 we're rounding up yeah it's getting there appreciate you man thank you for coming uh no worries man i appreciate you for having me absolutely let me ask the first question here for an artist brand new coming into the game what's most important the story their brand or a great song if I had to choose I would say a great song just because uh your end service the end product is always the most important thing because as a musician your music

is the end product of what you're pushing the branding and content is like what's going to get people to the music but essentially you want to have good music because that's what's going to keep people around for the longest and that's what's going to make your song and your catalog you know uh gain the most amount of streams even though branding does help uh there's a lot of situations where artists have a strong brand but they don't necessarily have a strong music fan base you know they're they're known as musicians but they're not necessarily someone

who has you know a big core following based around the music because people just like their messaging so much and they follow them you know on social media and stuff like that uh so if I had to choose it definitely would be the music the music first but to your point though I think some of these people can actually still build really strong fan bases and can make a career out of it if their brand is on point right oh yeah definitely uh the thing is with good branding you can be successful in anything you

don't necessarily have to be the best at it you know yeah um so like you can put out content based around anything if people relate to you and they like you as a person they'll want to support you and just follow your journey as a purpose i think that's what it is they just want to be a part of people's journey that they relate to yeah um so that helps a lot because uh you know every time you put out music you still get some traction or you can start selling you know merchandise and things

like that based off your brand so I I think it's it's definitely you know something that helps a lot but at the end of the day uh I think if I had to choose it would be the music that for sure yeah let's talk about your brand because you built a huge audience how did it start where did it start coming from uh so I started out as an engineer um in Pennsylvania I used to have a little studio in which I would uh help artists record their songs and just kind of mix and master

it and then upload it um a lot of the artists early on didn't know what marketing was when I started talking about marketing a lot of people were like it was super new to them they were like surprised they were like "Damn I never even thought about this." You know they even heard the word yeah they never even heard the word and a lot of people thought it was corny like marketing they thought you could just put it out and if it's good it's supposed to just take off but Right well sorry what year was

this uh 2014 okay yeah so so sorry continue but uh yeah so I started out just essentially as an engineer um that was helping artists get on that PIFF and mixtape websites and just kind of showing them how to upload their music and then eventually I went on Facebook and started posting advice to people because a lot of people like my advice they kind of encouraged me to start posting more online and um you know I started posting advice and a lot of artists just kind of started gravitating towards it and you know start messaging

me and asking me for help directly that's interesting because even for me in my career I started in film and I started in in video production predominantly music videos back when music videos like really mattered and that was like the main medium for artists right same as you is like my career wouldn't have started if I didn't start on Facebook and and I when I say I started music videos it was like shooting videos in the hood for like $400 being the producer the production assistant the director the cinema like everything right you know shout

out to my boy Drew uh who would come and help me out with all of these shoots but and be the editor but then I would go and I'd post the video on Facebook the artists would post it on Facebook as well through their own accounts you tag everybody you comment in there and that's how the business slowly but surely built up and that's uh you know to that point that's actually how I recommend artists kind of fund their career like because there's a lot of things artists can do besides music like shooting videos editing

you know uh graphics whatever it is that you're good at you can kind of do that you can start out there if anything you know and just kind of use that skill that you have that's music related and use that to fund your career you know so if you're like good at mixing and mastering get on YouTube start putting out tutorials Um just essentially teach people what you know besides music and use that as a way to promote your music and fund your career interesting so no what if what if an artist is just really

dedicated and focused on being an artist and they don't because I think sometimes artists not sometimes often it feels like artists want to make just be like known as an artist and nothing else what's the advice there i think a lot of those artists are are basing that off of like the previous eras you're not looking at like the current era what you have to do even artists who blew up before content and stuff like that they're starting to post content and put themselves out there um like a lot of a lot of artists uh

that don't really want to put themselves on cameras there's other ways for them to market themselves through content but they don't necessarily have to be on camera so I I would tell artists you know to do more of like seeding uh promotions and and stuff like that that if you're not willing to get on camera you still have to have someone create content and distribute it and put it out there for you let's break that down a little bit what do you So what are some examples of that so seating for example is like let's

just say you're in rap artist and uh you know you have an audience that say cheese and DJ academics you know similar audience you can pay all those uh Instagram pages to seize your content um you know in in people's timeline so essentially that way you don't have to you know get on camera and put yourself out there but you can have you know a third party you know media page or something like that take the content and put it out there and kind of talk about you uh you know in the captions or something

like that and make it seem like you're an artist that's already buzzing yeah because because that's kind of the uh you know the the purpose behind seating is to put out a bunch of content about an artist through media pages so that when people all see it in their timeline they feel like oh this artist is buzzing everyone's covering them and they all kind of rush to the music yeah exactly and what kind of content would people be seing to these pages would you say for example what do you think works the best it could

be e it could be like a a studio performance a story it could be uh literally anything about you that causes uh you know that makes people want to engage in in in the post that's uh you know being posted for example like some people do it with gossip some people do it with uh you know like a a studio performance a snippet they'll have like artists rapping and they'll people put the media pages will put out uh the snippet and say how's the sounding or something like that you know and they all put it

out at the same time so that it kind of has that compound effect yeah yeah across a whole bunch of different platforms right and would somebody do you do that do you do the seeding uh I do influencer marketing like where we do micro influencers where we find people who are like regular people and we try to get them to make a post about people's songs so um it's a little bit different but it's still the same idea we're essentially posting the content for you on other people's pages it's not media pages but it's like

personal pieces personal people personal pages yeah yeah to all my artists managers and labels how are you making sure your artists biggest supporters actually hear about new releases tours and merch drops because if you're still relying on social media or basic text and email services to do the heavy lifting you're leaving money on the table and I need to tell you about Forever Fan forever Fan is a modern CRM built specifically for the music industry not only does it let you communicate directly with fans via text and email its analytics and automation tools let you

segment fans track engagement and optimize your campaigns to send the right fans the right messages at the right time and that's just the tip of the iceberg i know firsthand that there's million things to keep up with when managing an artist's career especially when you're releasing music or about to hit the road on a tour so the fact that Forever Fan alleviates pressure by making sure valuable data and fan engagement opportunities don't slip through the cracks it is an absolute gamecher that's why Forever Fan is already being used for rising artists established acts with over

10 million monthly listeners and everything in between i even use it myself because you and I both know fan data is gold in today's market but what you do with it after you have it is what really matters so if you want to sell more tickets and merch push more streams and drive real fan loyalty ForeverFan should be your top priority to check out visit foreverfanmusic.com today now let's get back to the pod i found in the past that sometimes record labels I don't think they do it as much anymore but it'd be like "Okay

this one campaign has worked with this one influencer so let's go and throw a bag at this person." But they don't the results are so different they don't have the same amount of views for multiple reasons what is it what do you tell the people that come to you when it comes to micro influencers to uh give the best content or the best shot for an artist to be able to succeed with those kind of things because the price could add up right right uh so typically I try to tell them to uh you know

have different parts of their songs that they want to use uh for example like the hook yeah the chorus and and and stuff like that the verses try out different pieces of content with different micro influencers see which one gets the best traction then when you do your campaign in which you're like putting out a lot of videos go with that uh you know time frame of the song that's doing the best like let's say you put out a bunch of cont a bunch of content with the chorus and if that does good you want

to try to get everyone else to kind of put out that same part and just uh you know post content with it in the background yeah that's a good point and even if that starts to work as well figuring out how to get it to those different IG pages for seating because if it's worked that chorus with the micro influencers chances are it'll work over here as well right oh yeah we've seen that happen a lot where we've seen people trend on the charts because of the micro influencers like Instagram trending audio yeah uh I've

had a several people trend just because we had a bunch of micro influencers post their song you know and like post a video with their song in the background um and like if enough people make videos it start your song starts to trend and other people start to make videos to it and it just kind of like snowballs and it snowballs so do when it starts to trend on IG audio how often are you seeing that going off of the platform and then going onto Spotify so I notice when it's trending uh it like there's

a small percentage of people that go and stream it but when it hits top 50 a lot of people uh stream the song that's when you see the most difference is when you like hit the top 50 charts on Instagram right interesting okay so you could so you would say that you can still go viral on IG with a song oh yeah definitely if you it would cost a lot to put out like thousands of videos but there's been people who do micro influencers with thousands of videos and you know and it kind of just

brings in a a lot more attention because people see it trending in people not especially if it's a known artist if they see your song trending yeah they already know of you you know they're more likely to check it out as well yeah yeah what's the what do you think is the biggest misconception that an independent artist has about the business and how this world works i think the biggest misconception is the fact that they think if they're just good at music and you know and they just consistently work on the music and put it

out consistently and without doing anything else everything else is going to kind of fall into place but uh essentially like as a musician you kind of have to wear many hats you know you have to have a team but at the same time early on you kind of have to do marketing you know you have to do networking you have to put out consistently you have to shoot content for your music you can't you know just focus on the music and expect for the music to take off so I think that's the biggest misconception is

thinking that if the music is good and you just keep making music everything else will kind of take care of itself yeah and and you have artists that you work with who are relatively new in the space or they're trying to get further along in their career do you find that these artists have somebody helping them out whenever they're having a consultation with you or whenever they're taking on your services or is it dooo it's I would say about 90% it's a solo probably okay wow and so do you find that could that be challenging

if it's like the first time trying to wrap their head around what they're doing or maybe not because I mean if they're if they're following you on socials then they're probably in tune with what's going on in the marketing space no uh I wouldn't say it's hard because like right when you know people are familiar with you they kind of just take your word you know you have to make sure you're not just saying uh I mean you got to make sure you're give you know educating them and telling them the right things but if

like people call you they're already have like the mindset that you know what you're doing you know and they just kind of if they have questions um they really like will follow your advice if if you tell them yeah yeah now okay so say somebody you got somebody and you've been consulting them for a little bit and they're really starting to make uh they're starting to get momentum um what are some of the things that you're advising them to do when they're starting to get momentum slowly i guess take me from like 0 to 40

well uh honestly like before we get momentum I try to set up uh make sure they're monetized they're fully registered on old platforms like ASCAP BMI uh Sound Exchange Song Trust and just kind of make sure they're monetized before we get to that 40% but uh we also try to set up like an email service and a text message collecting service where we kind of go direct the consumer so that way along the way as we're promoting because you got to understand as an artist you kind of have to have a funnel you know you

can't just be putting out content and go viral and expect for things to happen you have to have a funnel where you're directing that traffic so before you start promoting you want to make sure you have that set up in the back end so that when the traffic does come in like you're directing them towards different places you know email list phone number merchandise and you know tickets possibly yeah yeah but break that down a little bit more explain what a funnel is uh so a funnel is is essentially the tra like if you look

at the traffic that comes into your page essentially a funnel is like you take them through a a a myriad of like different actions for example you run an ad you bring them in you run an ad on a piece of content you bring them in to follow your Instagram and then you know you retarget them with maybe a consultation call or something like that or try to get their you know their email with a guide or something like that so that you can just have their information and then uh you send them email marketing

um after you know so the funnel is kind of like a continuous marketing uh strategy in which you kind of just take the traffic that's coming in and you just direct it wherever you want and and then and kind of get their uh you know emails phone numbers to kind of uh sell them in the back end right so and like with the hopes of of them becoming a a real fan right right yeah correct yeah so it's like Yeah yeah it's like you get them in with the song or you get them in with

the piece of content and then there's another level there where you maybe you're saying here sign up for an email if you want to get more music and then you can keep going down the funnel for like a piece of merch that you're selling them or whatever it may be would that would that be a Exactly that's that's exactly what a funnel is yeah yeah now do you do you what is your uh thoughts on dark posts versus organic posts that are doing well and putting ads behind that do you have a preference or do

you use both uh I I I do both like I'll put out It depends on what you're trying to do and who you're trying to reach because I look at content as like some content I'm putting out there to reach new people that's the stuff that I would run ads on but there's content that I put out to feed the current audience like people who are already familiar with me like my main talking points for example I like to talk a lot about registering your music a lot of people watch that video and they start

following me then I'll put out other content that teaches them about other things you know how to uh do micro influencer campaigns you know how to you know post content and and retarget create custom audiences so essentially I'll put out something that's meant for uh the average person who's in music that I'll use to uh run ads on and put in front of people and then the rest of the material that is meant for people that already know who I am I just kind of post that organically okay okay so and do you sorry do

you post do you put ads against something that's going that's showing its hand yeah definitely like if you know if if I'm trying to like meet a specific type of uh amount of like people that I want to talk to for the month if I see a you know piece of content that's doing really well I will definitely run ads on that just because if something is doing good organically uh you can just look at who the audience is and you can create a custom audience based off that something you can do on Tik Tok

and Instagram for example if someone watches your video you can create a custom and lookalike audience based of based off people who watch 75 75% of the video video or 90% of the video and you can um you know retarget those people at scale so essentially like let's say you had like 5,000 people watch your video 100% of the way or 75% of the way you can retarget millions of people similar to the people that watch the 75% or more you know yeah yeah yeah go ahead so that's kind of like what I do in

those situations when something does organically I try to see who the audience is and then I try to put it in front of that audience at mass yeah and you said you could do that right there in the in the app in Tik Tok you could do that no you have to do it in the ads manager so uh Okay they both have their own ads manager and which gives you more advanced targeting and options and I do it through that one yeah because there's also you can do ads like boosting a reel or boosting

a post directly on Instagram as well too do you ever recommend that artists do that um most people would tell you not to do that because you can't retarget you can't uh like there's no data that you can use to target with as far as you know boost and post with the boost post you can't retarget people so that's kind of why people are opposed to it because with the ads manager you can retarget everyone that you're reaching with those videos so essentially like most people are against boost and post just because it's randomized it's

not really something that's uh you know gives you the the de detail targeting you know so that's kind of why I'm against boost post so then let me ask a question but so if somebody's boost a post right on an ad so for example if I I've done it before where I'll boost a post on some of my content like I have this post that's going really well with um Corey Litwin who manages uh Buster Rhymes and he was talking about the making of Nice for What because he was involved in it right and so

it was going crazy organically already and anytime I post that piece of content actually whether it's Tik Tok or Instagram it goes um whether it's the hook or whatever and we could talk about that stuff but in the app I would I I boosted it in just directly on Instagram i created a subset in the audience and it converts well i think it's like 16 cents or 17 cents you know a follow I guess mhm um but from that audience can I now I have I don't know how many followers 18,000 right say for argument

sake can I take that that audience that's all following those 18,000 and then through meta ads can I retarget those people have yeah the meta ads manager lets you do that but the boost post doesn't let you do that so that's the difference you know uh that's why people prefer the ads manager because you can literally you can take you know you can take your current audience audience and you can create a custom and lookalike audience and essentially like I do it all the time where I have 200,000 people plus following me and there's like

according to my lookalike audience there's like three million people out there like that just in the US you know so I I would run ads to those people and I'd get a lot of followers like 300 500 for $10 $20 a day you know really 300500 a day yeah like I've had some ads that killed it you know and sometimes like sometimes I'll think like oh they're always going to do this good and then I'll like not run them and then I'll try to run it again again you know it doesn't do as good it

still does good cuz I know how to like work it but sometimes man they really like they want to they really like push your content out and and make sure you get results just so you can keep using Yeah you know their platform but um yeah it's just more about repetition for sure what are your thoughts because I've had some people tell me that they don't use ads and I guess we're going into the ads space here a little bit but um what are your thoughts on some people who say "Oh I don't run ads

because if I run ads then that means my organic uh views are going to go down because Meta thinks that I'm going to be paying money so now anytime I post organically it's not going to reach the same amount of people." I I would say that's kind of a myth because I think the only time people have a problem with that is if they target worldwide or they target a bunch of people that aren't meant to see their content because then you kind of mess up the data you know like let's say you uh boost

a post and you do worldwide and you get a million Indian you know followers or something like that that's going to and that's not your market that you're serving right that's not your market and that's not who you're trying to get in front of so when you start posting you know that data all kind of mixed up it just doesn't know who to show your content to but uh one thing that like one thing you should uh realize is like with the ads if you run ads and you do it the right way um you

know and you start getting traction um you know without without uh you know doing worldwide you can like trigger the algorithm so let's say like you target even a small amount of people if you have a post and you run ads and your your post might not be growing organically you know might be stuck at like uh you know 100 likes 200 likes you can take that post and you can put it in front of the right people once the ad is done running it's still going to continue to grow because you put it in

front of the right people and you kind of like train the algorithm on who you're trying to get in front of i seen you actually post about that in your group i follow your your uh groups in on your chat group on Instagram and you just posted that today uh yeah I think I did post I might have You be posting so much you don't even know what you're posting yeah I just like whatever comes to my mind and just Is it just you running or is there a bunch of people on your team no

it's it's just me i have other like really Yeah I have That's crazy wow yeah I have I have like other companies I'm partnered with but they don't do any of the work for my clients i I help them do the the work for their clients you know got that so besides my company I help I you know white label for a bunch of other companies too record labels and all that uh mainly other independent agencies but I I do work with like today I got off uh I I spoke to a manager who was

like his artist is signed to Sony and he wants to like do a trending campaign or something like that so I do speak to a lot of those people but it's mainly like consultation i wanted to go back to something you said that I because I we're familiar with a lot of this terminology but I don't know how much the audience would be familiar with the terminology so like you talk about lookalike audiences and retargeting can you tell me what a lookalike audience is so a lookalike audience is uh essentially a audience that is similar

to yours so let's say you have 5,000 followers on Instagram you can create a lookalike audience from that so essentially it's going to find everyone else like those 5,000 followers that you have and then you can run ads and put your content in front of them and that'll serve it to like millions of people right yeah so depending on your audience and it goes based off country so like you you need at least 100 uh followers and in you know in in the country you're going to do it in so for example I'll do a

lookalike audience in Australia I'll do one in Canada I'll do one in uh US and I'll kind of like compare them so everyone kind of have every audience kind of has like 500,000 to two million people you know just based off my audience but an artist might have more because you know an audience is like more broad you know as a music marketer you only have so much yeah and what's a what's a uh what's a retargeting audience uh retargeting audience uh well essentially what that is is like when you run an ad and you

look through the results and you see who's engaging when you retarget you want to retarget those people that are showing the best interest you know so that's technically what the retargeting campaign is do you recommend that new artists are actually are doing ads or do you recommend that they're posting organic content and making sure that that content is as best as it possibly can to reach people and then serving ads on content that's doing a little better i would say it depends on the artist like some artist if you're a artist that's ready and you

have like a superstar look the superstar image and you want to go the traditional route it makes a lot of sense for you to run ads and not necessarily put yourself out there too much or or you know or do the kind of like what I do because there's there's artists that are famous that don't necessarily get on camera like me every day and talk to their audience they still put out content but it's in in different ways but uh you know what I would say is like if you're an artist and you know you

want to get to the point where you're successful you kind of have to figure out you know what your angle is and how you're going to connect with your audience it could be through you know nice visuals that you're running ads on with music or it could be organically you just posting and you know getting people engaged like that you know um so it just depends on the artist but if I had to choose I would say go the organic route because it's cheaper yeah yeah it's like you don't have to pay cons ads are

expensive like it's it's you know uh you have to maintain the ad with you know consistently investing in them every single month so I think it's a lot different than content you know because content you just kind of you know shoot a 30- secondond clip and you know if it goes viral and people check you out listen to your music it's all free you know it's a bonus yeah and you could have like it's it's pretty easy these days to have a friend who shoots on a DSLR if you want to shoot a music video

in your neighborhood or wherever it may be you know the cost is maybe paying your your your friend the labor of that couple hundred bucks right right and from that piece of content that music video that's three and a half minutes long say for example you can get 40 50 100 pieces of content right and then you could put it across a whole bunch of other platforms right like when you shoot a music video I would definitely take all the different clips even the ones you didn't use whatever it is uh just as much as

you can make them seem like you shot it on the phone make it look like it's a real or a TikTok and so vertical yeah vertically and then post it that way you know because the content does way better if it looks like it's it's on the phone why is that uh I you know people say it's because fa Facebook and Instagram and all these platforms want you to stay on the app more you know and create within the app instead of uh you know editing in like a third party website and then ex you

know exporting it and trying to upload that way they want it's more based off how much people spend time you know on on on the apps and stuff like that what would you say so if you are running ads because you said that it could get expensive and it can seeding is expensive as well too it's not to say that like you can just post on academics like that's thousands of dollars right definitely right but when you're doing ads and like you know I don't know you said like a a budget could be $10 $15

a day right what's the most important metric is it the CPA cost per acquisition of a fan or what would you say that is yeah so conversion rate is what essentially what we look at when we're promoting um you know like when we're using content to promote a song we're looking at how much it costs to get a person to watch the content and click you know go through the landing page and actually go to the Spotify you know so it's like a bunch of portals they kind of have to go through they'll see the

content they'll see the landing page they got to click to go to Spotify and then you know then people have to press play to you know play as well so it's like we look at how much it costs to get a person to you know convert over to hit and play on Spotify why do you have them going onto a landing page um you're losing half of the people when you go to a landing page and then having them click right why don't you have them go directly to Spotify just out of curiosity uh with

a landing page you can use a pixel okay so a pixel filters out all the bots when you run ads with just a Spotify link you get a bunch of bots because you don't have a pixel that filters out uh the bots using the landing page you know so that's kind of the only reason why people do it back in the days you can kind of use just your Spotify link you know in the earlier days you know you would get some results yeah but now it's like Facebook and Instagram is flooded with bots you

know and if you don't have a pixel when you run ads you're actually getting more bots engaging in your post than uh real people without the pixel you know so the pixel kind of filters out the bots so even if you're a relatively new artist and you're running ads let's say people don't really know who you are you got very uh minimal amount of monthly listeners there's still bots that'll be going to your content or to your uh landing page so uh not to the landing page because the landing page will have the pixel sorry

yes to Spotify right to Spotify like if you were to run an ad right now on like a link click ad or even a conversion campaign without setting up the pixel the proper way you would get like thousands of conversions but none of them would equate into streams it would be all bots that pretend like they're real humans yeah and converting when they're not really you know uh so even when you use a landing page you have to use a pixel or you still get bots so like the pixel is what's filters what do you

have on the landing page uh it depends on what I'm promoting if I'm just promoting Spotify I'll just like to have the Spotify on there because I want to drive as many people to the Spotify yeah but if it's like in the artist's bio I kind of have all the websites there you know like if if it's your landing page and your bio I recommend having your YouTube your email list everything in there you know so you give people the option you know to choose where they want to listen but if you're trying to drive

up traffic on one specific platform I would just put that platform on the landing page there's so many questions man uh appreciate your time here what when you're Okay if you're because I'm talking about ads if you're running an ad what's a good cost for converting somebody to a listener to to Spotify or to a bio i would say to to Yeah yeah i would say anything under 20 cents is good but it's not great you know it's like under 10 cents is great okay like I have people converting at like 5 cents six cents

and it's like phenomenal you know what is it that's making it convert at five cents if if I had to I mean it's the music is good so it's like that's always a bonus when people hear something that they really like but the content is also a key you know if you have good content uh you don't necessarily have to have the best song to convert a lot of people to listen to it you know they might not stick around as long but it's definitely the content you know having a variety of content versus just

one visualizer or two visualizers you're using just testing out a bunch of different things with content do you can you think of any examples of something where you saw that it was like five or 10 cents you're like "Oh this is this is crushing." Well I'm promoting a a playlist like I I just recently did for someone um and we're using like he's not in the visualizers we have a playlist that we're promoting with his music on there so what we did for the visualizers is we had like people dancing and DJ playing like the

it looks like it's like a DJ kind of dancing with a bunch of people and the song is playing in the background okay and it's kind of like a stock image uh that we use we don't always tell the artists to shoot the content themselves sometimes we create like stock footage you know of of like stuff that's already out there and we just kind of align it with the music you know we put the music in the background and uh you know we make it kind of seem like it's it's it's it's like the the

actual video or something is this house music or like EDM space that you're doing this definitely house music yo there's this one clip that I see all the time and it's these four black dudes in a vehicle and it just seems like they're going and doing donuts but they always have banger house records and I'm watching I click through no problem all the time for whatever reason i don't know why but to me personally like house music or maybe it's the vibe I don't know what it is but like it seems to like connect more

and I don't think I'm the only one who feels that way i feel like that's also like a a thing right where it seems to connect more i I think is because whatever is cleaner as far for advertisement it gets the best results you know like rap for example like I have some really great rap that I try to promote and it's like like the conversion rate is so pricey because like the content is just can't show it to everyone you know what's the price you you'd see like if I see something crazy like 80

cents or a dollar or more I'm like you know this is not going to work you know especially when I'm targeting the right audience you know the the content might be because me I want to get like under 10 cents under 20 cents you know sometimes I'll have like an outlier where it's like 80 cents i'm like damn you know this is not you know this is probably not the best way to spend the money yeah so we find other ways to kind of promote the music but the stock image is interesting because even that

same piece of content that I'm talking about I've seen that ad run with like 10 no well don't exaggerate but maybe like three to five different songs it's the exact same clip but it's a different song every time which is interesting to me so like you can do that you can do that you can take something that's converting really really well and just promote your song that way and put it in the background yeah yeah and so you say you're running a playlist right yeah so for for artists that like we can get a cheap

conversion for we try to create a playlist for them that we base around like their subg genre of music or interests that have to relate to their music on Spotify you're right on Spotify or Apple Music for example like like say you have music that people can you know I made a recent video about this like say you have music that people can work out to you know you can make a gym playlist or a working out playlist on Spotify and you can add your music to it and then you can create visualizers for it

and run ads on it on meta ads then you can get a bunch of like listeners that way by you know driving up the follower count on the playlist because once you trigger uh growth for the algorithmic growth for the playlist it starts to grow on its own within Spotify so you don't have to continue to run ads to promote it you just have your music on there and it just keeps growing and and kind of feeding your music to people well because that's one of the more interesting things is a lot of people I

don't think it's happening as much as as as it used to i think it's changed a little bit now and artists are more wise to it excuse me um maybe not you would have more visibility on this but I think a lot of times new artists would think that oh if I'm not on this new music Friday playlist or if I'm not on this editorial playlist then like nobody's going to listen to my music right but it's not how Spotify is not working like that anymore in fact a lot of people aren't even really tapping

into the editorial playlist there's a couple but it's predominantly AI it's the algorithm right right can you talk to me a little bit more about that yeah so uh do you mean like the Well there's two things going on with the editorial playlist is mainly um a lot of the songs on there are also AI songs that uh are not actual real humans and and then um yeah like a lot of artists think that they need those big major placements but you can kind of create your own playlist and you know and people can start

paying you to be on your playlist i've seen that happen you know numerous times where I'll build the artist his own playlist yeah and base it around like for example like house music and stuff like that top hit house hits and or 2024 or 2025 we'll build out the playlist and get thousands of followers and then they'll go and start charging people to be on their playlist yeah because it's starting to connect with the audience on Spotify the algorithm is actually feeding it out to people because they know that they're connecting with that right definitely

like uh once you get to the point where your playlist is growing over a,000 followers I mean you can be a curator you know so it's pretty easy to get a,000 followers on a playlist a lot easier to get a,000 followers on a playlist than it is to uh get a thousand followers on your Spotify profile yeah yeah that's that's really hard what do you recommend for people to get followers on Spotify uh ads work really well for that i've noticed ads are actually the best uh when it comes to getting followers on within the

app with like like say you do meta ads for the Spotify song those get a lot of followers but the playlist followers grows faster but the app the you know ads for songs directly on a landing page they get a lot of followers and playlist ads too it's mainly personal playlist that people add people like their favorite artists to but yeah meta ads would show you a big turnaround in followers words as well that's interesting what's um um when it comes to now let's say there's an artist that has momentum what have you seen that

can actually kill momentum for artists do you have any examples of that uh being too versatile okay so like sometimes artists will put out a song and it sounds great people love it yeah and then they'll put out the next one and it sounds totally different from what what they put out previously and it just like kills their momentum because you know people who who hear the first song they like they expected more of that from them and when they release something that's totally different just kind of throws off the audience but I've actually spoke

to a lot of artists that have that make like a h 100red,000 a year with their music and they're like versatile but their biggest problem was they were because they were versatile they couldn't keep up the momentum like they could have been someone that would have 10 20 million monthly listeners but they're stuck at like 5 400,000 because they're like too versatile every time they get some momentum they put out something that's totally different and it just kind of throws off the audience and the algorithm you know and they would know that themselves when they

were Yeah that that's Yeah like it t it took him a while to figure that out because people tell me all that all the time you know it took me a while to figure this out but being versatile has been my biggest problem you know I don't know what what to focus my music on you know when it's too all over the place it's kind of just pulling in a bunch of different audiences and it's not connecting with that one audience that Yeah yeah yeah i I Yeah i run into that problem as well with

some of the artists that I manage where it's very versatile amazing ac I think that's like one of the biggest issues with somebody who's a great writer is that they want to experiment and do a bunch of stuff but I mean right as an artist when you're trying to connect with an audience to your point of the funnel like you want to go deep with that funnel and find who those people are for that specific thing that they fell in love with you first right it's tough yeah I agree you know just finding you know

who your core audience is who relates to your core values and you know your the messaging behind your your content and music is the most important yeah what is your thoughts i think there's value in it for traditional PR publicist um I don't think there's as much value as it once had for independent artist but what's your take on that when it comes to publicist and PR um publicist and PR are like they're not something that you can uh get if you're up and coming and expect a lot of fans from because PR is something

that works when you already have a little buzz going you know if someone's kind of familiar with you and they see you on a major placement you know they kind of validates you more it adds more credibility so I think the PR is just like getting um next to other artists who are already like buzzing and people know about i think that's what PR is for you know and if you get on like a magazine or something or uh you know you get press that same type of press that a big artist is getting I

mean it just validates you more but it doesn't help you build a fan base if you're starting from zero you know so it's something that I would do once you have a fan base yeah absolutely to your point it's like organic marketing is great or marketing and advertising is great but and and it can those PR people will actually find you from that they'll find your music they'll find who you are from that and they'll I always say that it's probably best if you have a publicist or PR person coming to you versus you going

to them because then you're going to be paying money for them to connect you in certain dots but it's really like what can they do unless you started really having a buzz and then when you have a buzz then they can put you beside the artist at the fashion they can put you in the right fashion show the right magazine you know and that does create value especially if you go and you say you're at L magazine for example now you post that on your Instagram it might be from another country but it's still a

great look right right like uh you know like once I got an artist on MTV and and you know he posted it on his Instagram and it just like made all his followers like him more you know yeah like you know they couldn't believe it you know it's a it's like it's a look an official it's a look right it didn't even really like it helped him strengthen the strengthen the current audience he already had yeah especially if they're if they've been with you from the beginning right hey it's like they're celebrating that success of

you being on MTV even though it doesn't do much but like it does to well I mean it does do a lot for that core audience that's been there for you because they're like "Yes we've championed this person and look where they're at now." Right yeah that's you know back to the point where people want to follow your journey you know and they want to see you become successful they want to be the first ones to discover you and then they want to like follow your journey and kind of see you get you know reach

those milestones and and that's kind of like what the PR does it's like if you already have that buzz and you you know you you show them oh you got on MTV or you're on Lyrical Lemonade or whatever you know it's like a a good look for you you know it's going to make people feel like you're more credible speaking of Lyrical Lemonade you ever have artists coming up to you and saying like I just want to I just want to get noticed by Lyrical Lemonade i just want to get my music video on Lyrical

Lemonade or like on a certain press outlet and then that's the campaign that you got to run to figure out how to target these people does anybody ever come to you and do that yeah it's I don't do blogs for just anyone but like there is people that I do that for where they'll like oh man I just want to get a XXL print mag or you know XXL mag I want to be on XXL's website so there is artists that I I you know cuz I know people that can get you on there you

know so it's like for me it's a little bit easier but uh back in the days like when before I had the connections I would have to like cold email like everyone you know and just try to get as try to get like as many blogs out there just send as many emails out and you know I would get some responses for small ones but I noticed you know that didn't work really as much as like having those direct relationships yeah and do you feel like are there still artists who are coming to you asking

for that yeah actually I spoke to an artist today that I've been working with for a while he's like interested in getting on like XXL and stuff like that yeah well they've been doing it for a minute right just to trying to get that that look uh yeah but we we've have we have got uh them you know on pretty good amount of blogs and so they're like this is something else that they wanted to do so just helping them with that as well but uh yeah there is a lot of artists that you know

I'm pretty sure every artist would want that if they knew you offered it you know yeah it's true that is true you're right do you We're in a different age now when it comes to streaming right and uh Good yeah we're in a different age when it comes to streaming um it's hard to make money just from streaming for an artist what are some other ways that you think artists could be monetizing in 2025 so if it's you know uh I I'll go back to you know what I said about like just having skill other

skills that are music related that you monetize you know cuz cuz that's my biggest I mean that's the biggest way that I've seen any artist that is doing other things that's doing something music related to make their money for example like if you see artists who are uh I don't know if you know about a lot of the artists like Getty for example like Getty was a a rapper who was like also a videographer so he would use his he would use his uh video uh shooting skills to like shoot rappers videos and then he

would take that money invested in marketing his music you know who did that too was 6ix9ine oh 6ix9ine yeah yeah he was a videographer first right to my understanding a lot of them do things i'm telling you like that's the way that's the way in you have to do something music related and the best way to do it is like finding something that you're good at besides just making music and you know monetizing that yeah cuz that's networking as well yeah that's going to help and plus that's network right like you can promote your music

to those people you can say "Hey I'm making music too check it out." Or can collab with those people you can do a lot of different things you know but essentially a lot of artists if you're just solely an artist it's harder to connect than if you're an artist and a videographer you know mhm like having that extra skill set is going to you know put you in a lot of rooms that your music alone couldn't get you in now let's say that your music is actually moving right and you got an audience um what

are your thoughts on direct to consumer what's another way to be able to monetize merch yeah merch um you know direct to consumer um you know direct to consumer merch tickets finding like special maybe special presents that I've seen people like sell send clay pots to their audience people who like really like them you know they'll like create a bunch of like pottery or something that has because their music is based around like meditation and okay you know being soulful and and stuff like that so they would like make clay pots and kind of sell

that to their audience and just anything that you feel like relates to your core messaging so like whatever your your core message is or your core values are as an artist you want to try to sell things based around that that makes sense it does make sense you enjoy this huh you really like helping artists and trying to figure out their Yeah i mean I love music like I listen to music all day long so it's like actually Yeah like I love I just don't want I don't want to do anything that's not music related

i just don't you know this is like this is more like chill and relaxing I think you know really the music business or this side of the business yeah i I for me because I'm I kind of know what I'm doing so it's like I just wake up and do it and I don't think about it really you know and it's just like flows really easy for me and it's I love listening to music so it's like just kind of goes hand in hand you be listening to ask I heard you would um talk about

it on the One More Time podcast um but you're right like about listening to Tupac and stuff like that uh Biggie E but I I listen to a lot of country music rock rap I listen to it all like if I understand it I'll listen to it okay so s let's talking about genres can we get into some examples that you've seen in certain genres that will work you know like a piece of content that might work for that genre that would not necessarily work in other genres so like for example like in the country

space right because I'm I'm something that I didn't say off the top and I should have is that like you've helped over 20,000 artists with their marketing with their strategy and their advertising directly you know and that's through like services that you sell right yeah services and uh some guides and stuff like that and guides and then you you mentioned that to me off camera that there's been about 5,000 over the course of 10 years that you've helped directly right yeah I I would say I would say it's it's probably 5,000 in the last five

years five six years you know wow so you so you're working across all genres yeah i work with all genres you know raw country i used to just work with rappers but something happened in the rap community where there was like no money left you know and everyone was like you know uh from from working with rappers everyone kind of started working with just all the musicians you know i noticed a lot of people did that in the space really yeah yeah for one good for for like four years rap was really hot everyone was

trying to be a rapper and spending money on it and stuff like that and then it just like kind of dried up so it was like it didn't make the most business sense to just work with rappers when I knew how to work with you know even when I was just focused on when I say just rappers I wasn't always just working with rappers cuz but the wording in my content was like you know this is what rappers need to do instead of this is what musicians need to do you know i just kind of

changed the wording oh wow okay and then that kind of attracted all the other genres and stuff like that okay so let's talk about each genre so like what you've seen work the best for this genre and and in this day and age so let's talk about hip-hop and rappers what has been working the best have you been noticing from a marketing perspective uh for rappers it's mainly uh if you can get on playlists that you feel like that are not boded that are already you know have a built-in audience for what you're trying to

get on so like usually what I tell people the best what works is a multiple of things happening at the same time so for like rappers it's always definitely playlist because a lot of their content you can't uh market it directly because it's like not it's not clean you know a lot of times it's like yeah it's not advertiser friendly so having them create their own playlist or putting them on playlists that are already built up which kind of works for everyone but rappers especially because it's harder to promote that song with the visual that

they have right specifically for it especially when they're using their music video as a visual you know so it's like a lot of for rappers ads aren't always the best you know unless you're using it like in a playlist level or something like that you know yeah just for that simple just just cuz you know they don't they don't always approve it yeah of course yeah yeah and and so when you're saying playlist you're saying playlists that already have traction and built-in audiences yeah a little bit of both so having your own playlist that you

kind of base around like subg genres or interests that have to relate to your music and then finding other playlists like that have that have been built out that have share audience that you want to get in front of yeah yeah and just trying to get on those playlist you know um so that's communicating with somebody who's running the playlist correct i see okay and so you would have those relationships yourself right uh yeah i I I work with a lot of like playlist uh I curate my own too but I work with a lot

that a lot of people that already have their own network and stuff like that gotcha okay um what about R&B uh R&B i noticed a lot of like uh studio performances um like and live performances I would say with R&B um like a lot of the females that I'm promoting when they're on stage singing and it's uh like we can get a good footage of of that that's something that I've noticed that works really well with ads um just for the simple fact that I don't know what it is well live performances kind of do

good with everyone but for some strange reason for R&B that's the main thing that I would see that is uh working uh really good is getting performance clips and and just having people Yeah of live singing right okay what about music video for R&B artist is that perform as well or It depends on the content um but you can use playlist on YouTube too so there's like you can there's a way where you can find playlist that uh you know I have some built out too but I have connections to playlist on YouTube where if

the video is not clean we can just put it on the playlist and stuff like that but uh for a you know a lot of uh R&B videos I haven't had too many issues with them like rap because rap is like lean and it's you know there drugs in there and a lot of stuff so gun or two yeah and it's like that's what gets demonetized everyone else I've noticed ads work perfect with you know it's like because ads will you know ads are based off artificial intelligence so it's like whatever you train it to

do it's going to do it you know unless it's like against the against the policy so like with all the other genres I noticed like the ads are are really crushing it you know versus the rap for sure okay so you said in the R&B like a really nice piece of content a nice piece of footage what is that piece of content or that footage is it how it's framed is it what's happening in front of the camera or the can it be from a phone more times than not it's actually better if it's DIY

right right if it's clear and people can hear you singing and can hear the like the actual you know uh vocals and and it's kind of clear i think that's it has to look like it was shot on the phone yes but uh it doesn't have to be it could be a camera that you convert into look like a phone you know like it was shot on the phone yeah yeah yeah one of the one of the the pieces of content that went crazy was for Victoria Monae where she was performing live at um Soul

Bloom I want to say it was and that went crazy and it was just like a I think it was her dancing actually as well because a lot of people didn't know that Victoria Monroe I just had her manager on the podcast and she was mentioning that so to your point like a good piece of footage can go crazy performance footages are are really good for all genres but I say R&B because I I've I've worked a lot of R&B uh like up andcoming artists where we use like performance footages we get a lot cheaper

rates you know on the conversions and stuff like that yeah okay what about country country i would say it's uh organic content because like you ever seen those videos where people just have their guitar or whatever and they're just like singing those type of videos do really good for country interesting i mean that's kind of like what a lot of them are doing you know um that there you know it's a lot of it is like just having an authentic moment you know uhhuh because like I don't know if you've seen uh I'm not sure

what his name is uh but he has uh red hair uh he was a country artist country artist yeah he was just on the guitar and kind of I can't it's not on the top but he was just singing you know his song you know with a with his phone kind of recording him and it just went crazy you know oh is that the one where he was outside yeah it was kind of like a and kind of became like politicized that that video right a little bit yeah yeah what's his name uh you guys

know is he is he country the guy that I'm thinking of is like folk i think he's folk too yeah he was on Rogan like two weeks after that thing blew up i think I Yeah is that the same guy yeah I'm think Yeah he might be folk but uh I'll pull it up hold on i got to find out who the [ __ ] this is something oh I got no service here yeah but it's just organic content for uh because people in country they just kind of want to hear you it's not something

that's based around like antics and memes it's it's like music you know so it's like having that authentic moment where people just hear you sing uh and you know and if they feel what your message is I think those that type of content does really well for country artist bailey Zimmerman uh you familiar Bailey Zimmerman country artist yeah uh I haven't listened to the music but I Yeah he got really big i think he was actually going viral because he was he did a lot of trucking videos those videos go kind of crazy too right

in Tik Tok so I guess they be just random trucking videos where you put the music over it and then all of a sudden it starts to go yeah have you ever Yeah i mean uh cuz you know Tik Tok algorithm pushes out specific content so if you figure out what type of content they're pushing out you can easily just make that type of content and have your song in the background you know and it just like works pretty good you know in that sense how do you figure out what content Tik Tok is pushing

uh you can tell based off the hashtags like if you s like say say for example if you uh if you're you know if your niche is fitness you know and you go on Tik Tok and you search up like fitness uh hashtags or working out hashtags and then you go like to the videos that are getting the most amount of views and you just kind of look at the videos that have the most amount of views and you and they usually all kind of have like a similar you know theme and outline and and

you know like process and and that's why they're all blowing up like so I kind of look at the you know just the hashtags and just look at the videos that are trending just based off like you know it being like a nice nice t-shirt nice hat uh that's kind of what does good yeah so like generalizing the the merch especially if you're not a new artist right oh sorry especially if you are a new artist right new artist yeah so you'll generalize it just Yeah that makes sense um okay let's say for this conversation

that we're having here right this specific podcast put it out to the public say I got $500 and I want people to see this piece of content here that we have this podcast what are you advising me to do in the situation uh one thing we can do is like a collaborative ads uh post like where you get access to my Instagram and my followers and then when you put out the piece of content you can target everyone that follows me and collaborative ad you said yeah there's ways where you can do partnership ads yeah

oh I didn't know that so I can like give you access to one of the posts that I post and then you can do whatever you want with it you know okay and then what would you advise over here i I I'll send you the check afterwards of what you you give me here no but uh I I would I would definitely do something like that uh you know no I mean I I would want you to run it from your end you know I can show you how to run it but essentially like when

I do these type of uh podcast or interviews or even when I'm doing um you know like a sponsorship yep we'll do like a partnership ad so essentially they'll have access to my followers yep they'll be able to target them with the post so anytime they put out a post of me they can just put it in front of whoever is following me got you so say I want to get visibility on this podcast right are you suggesting would you suggest that more visibility more views or you would you say like no Ruiz you should

actually like focus on trying to sell a a product like how would you advise with with the podcast yeah I would definitely just focus on getting the exposure and just kind of building the brand in because uh once you get to the point where you have a brand and people know who you are that's kind of when it gets easier to start selling and stuff like that you know i wouldn't go directly for a sale you know with anything i I never try to sell anything you know that's my kind of key yeah like I

noticed like sometimes I do it it works but mostly when I'm just providing value and not asking for anything in return I noticed you know I get the best uh response but you got to do good branding to the point where like they know you have a website they know you have where to find you if they if they need you know your help and stuff like that yeah absolutely and that that is part of the reason why I asked I mean selfishly I want to understand it as well but one of the reasons I

want to understand because I think people really underestimate how valuable it is to build a brand and especially like in this space for example even music like you might put a like a song once every two months because that's what you know are best practices for Spotify and Apple or whatever it may be because of right you know pitching and all that but you have to figure out in my opinion how to continue to post on a daily basis on a fairly reoccurring basis content for that new song for two months but that that content

that you're posting regarding to that song has to be able to connect with who you are as an artist and your brand right so like giving as much as possible is I think super valuable because at a certain point to your to what you're saying if you have everything set up correctly then you could start to monetize off of that without actually even communicating that right right yeah definitely yeah so like when you're posting and um you know you you get an audience behind you they'll naturally you know check out your link in bio and

see what you have going on and engage with you just especially if you're teaching them something um that they don't know you know you're like helping them with you know with their music through you know through knowledge and stuff like that so uh yeah that definitely does happen a lot where you just kind of post content teaching people um that's what I used to do early on i never sold never ran an ad or anything when I first started i literally just post content and uh on my Instagram and people would just hit the link

in bio and shop with me you know just because I was providing so much value interesting so for an artist what would be some of those things they need to they need to set up you talked about a website what would what would you recommend that an artist should have setting up so they can have the person that is engaging with their music turn into a fan and then potentially sell something to them uh so you mean as far as the back end um backend front end the user experience all that well we could talk

about the back end first well the first thing you want to have is you want to make sure you know you have your website you have a way to collect emails and phone numbers um you know essentially th those are probably the two main important things you have a way you have offers too you know like some things to offer them whether it's merchandise whether it's personalized letters anything to kind of capture their email yeah or even if it's unreleased music on your website that you know they can give you your email I mean their

email or phone number and kind of get access to that music but um essentially I would just kind of have that um you know have your social media set up have your website set up have the uh you know your ads manager set up and just kind of have a a direct to consumer marketing plan um before you start you know marketing and doing what are your thoughts on Forever Fan forever Fan yeah I I like it a lot i I use it i have it in my I saw I saw Yeah yeah yeah shout

out to Sean shout out to Chance yeah yeah what so do you feel like that it's been very valuable using Forever Fang definitely um cuz they have a CRM um which you know like SMS and email marketing and stuff like that so I think that's pretty cool okay so what's what's CRM for people who might not know what a CRM is uh it's just another way to uh collect like emails phone numbers and automatically message them and stuff and communicate with them wi with with it you know it's kind of like an email market and

phone marketing type of uh service gotcha and so yeah how what have you been finding that have you been finding it's been very valuable to Yeah because the landing page because I noticed like more people click on the landing page and then they'll see like what I offer from there you know from each each section and um they're e it's easier for them to identify what they want you know versus leaving um Instagram and going to my website and and and checking it out there you know so it's have So it's been a lot easier

in that sense and people just sign up to to my email list without me you know offering anything so it's like pretty awesome through Forever Fan because it's in my bio they can just go uh to my link in bio the Forever Fan and it it shows them some of my services and then it shows them like sign up here for email and phone number yeah exactly and I get a lot of those uh you know people signing up so it's been really great yeah and what's really good about it as well that I find

because I've been messing around with it a little bit is that the back end is like super simple like I have average intelligence at best at many things in my life so like when it comes to tech not the greatest but I I noticed that the back end is just super intuitive super simple like if you wanted to promote music or you want to promote your email list you can you can move it up to the top right very simple very easy and effective yeah Forever Fan is definitely upgraded a lot you know because I've

been messing around with them for a while this year they kind of stepped it up to like a major level you know okay they have I've been familiar with them for about two three years oh no [ __ ] yeah and then um I I did it my first campaign with them like two years ago and then uh recently they showed me the new you know updates and stuff and I was like man this looks pretty sick it gives you all the analytics in the back end it gives you pretty much all your top cities

the map yeah it's kind of like the heat map that Apple has right and it just uh it gives you a lot of information so I really like it definitely a great service do do you Speaking of the the the map in all the cities have you ever personally thought about going on a tour i've done one i I have thought about it i did a show in Atlanta um where it was like a live show in front of people and stuff like that so I have a little bit of experience there but uh yeah

I'm definitely thinking about you know that like right now I'm doing something in I'm working on a project here in LA where we're going to be doing like conference uh I mean like seminars and stuff like that with a famous artist and um you know just kind of ask people qu we're going to like charge people to you know be there but we're essentially going to have a seminar with me and like well-known artist just kind of teaching up and coming musicians how to you know make it in the music industry that's great yeah that's

great that's good value to that what do you So on the touring side of things what do you recommend an artist to go on tour but not break the bank uh touring is definitely something that is uh I don't think there's any way around it unless you like get on someone else's tour you buy on a tour or something mhm but uh you know in in general just touring it's is if you if you do like a multiple city tour even if you try to do it as cheap as possible still going to cost you

know like it's I think that's toring is one of the most cost costly things out there that you can do um so like honestly I don't there's not too much ways to save with the touring bro and I I also think that like it's a huge misconception i think it's like half of it is a lie to be honest with you people say like all the money you make in the music business is in touring i I don't think that's real at all and I don't know why people say that well the the labels probably

make a majority of their money from the touring because they're in on all the drinks that are being sold all the merch that's being sold and they're taking a big percentage of all that in the venues and stuff like that so it's like even the promoter yeah yeah so it's like uh I'm I'm not sure who's the one that does uh the uh the big ticketing company um Ticket Master live Nation live Nation yeah i think they're the ones that charge a good amount of of like merch sales and stuff like that so I think

those are the people that are making the money in in in Torren so there is money like for certain people but for the artist which they some of them get paid too cuz if they're signed they kind of get paid based off uh you know like advances and things like that but um you know if you're up and cominging artist doing your own tour I mean it's going to be expensive for sure yeah and and it's like what comes first the chicken of the egg because don't get it twisted like you said like Live Nation

AG they are good promotion companies they're amazing but I think as an artist you have to get to a certain level where you know you can sell out rooms right or you know and I would say if you're going 30 cities across the US you know if you're doing rooms that are of like and you're selling them out anywhere between 650 to 800 you can be profitable yeah if you're doing less than that probably breaking even and you're losing money but the but the but you could maybe make it up like because you get the

fee your guarantee as a as a artist but then you could sell merch obviously on the road and then you can do meet and greets where you can upsell the ticket right so like maybe you could break even if you're keeping your cost low and you're not bringing a ton of people on the road say it's you and a DJ right um but if you're doing um I lost my train of thought here if you're doing Yeah if you're doing I mean if you're doing a show and it's it's less than that it could be

it could get expensive right um so but this is what I was going to say the the thing is this though is like in order for Do you believe that artists should hit the road even if they're not going to make money because that's how you establish a real connection with the fans right uh I would say you have to have a real show experience like like as far as like you performed before you know how to you know perform and you're good at on stage that's true that's very true so like that's important in

that aspect just having the experience but as far as like building a fan base and you know getting your music out there touring is probably not the best way to do that because really Yeah i've seen artists open up for even back in the days like this is like 10 years ago people open up for Eminem and stuff like that and they don't they don't see anything different from you haven't even heard from the for Right right you don't you don't know who they a lot of it has to do with their they don't know

how they're marketing themselves like if I if I do a show I'm taking you know I'm taking business cards with my Spotify on there i'm taking merchandise you know I'm taking you know a notebook to get as many people's emails and you know I'm not going to just go and do a show and expect you know a lot of people to uh become fans even though um you know it's possible if you have everything as far as your merchandise and you know like a way to collect people's emails and and and whatnot like you could

accumulate some fans on the road but uh it's definitely not as easy as building an audience online yeah yeah you're right unless you're like doing So to your point if you're doing a arena tour so it's 20 it's 2020 two days before everything shut down in the pandemic my art the artist that I was managing before Jesse Ray is on uh the first date of the North American tour as a direct uh support for Billy Isish we And I'm like we have to figure out a way to capture these fans it's one thing to like

obviously be in front of them and cuz she's an incredible live performer one of the best if in my opinion um and so she you have the audience here for your live performance so I'm like there's another way we got to be able to capture them and and this is at the time when Community is really popping and I'm like what we need to do and she had a song called Phone Calls is like cuz they had the screens we're like put the phone number up on the screen and make sure that during this whole

song these three minutes this the phone number for people to text you is up on there and then we did that in Orlando i remember that was like the first or the second show and we had 2,000 people sign up we were going to do that for the whole tour we would have got like 40,000 but then literally the the next show Uhhuh everything shut down damn yeah it was crazy but that's like that's one way to do it at mass scale but the other way you like you said is like you know if you're

going on the road notebook pen and pen and paper on a merch booth right there right get the email get the phone number get the email and you know and you can you can add it to a email service or a phone number service and you can just directly text all them anytime you have merchandise every time you're in the area um so definitely uh one of the best ways yeah what are what are some of the other direct to fan um apps or or platforms that you think are really good that artists should be

thinking about using um have you heard of even.biz i think yeah of course yeah yeah yeah uh uh what's his name the founder uh Mag yes mag yeah yeah yeah yeah uh yeah i think that's a great platform band Camp kind of does a little bit of that too but I feel like even not biz is more for like it's it's more I think it's more mainstream for me you know even though it's not as big as band camp I think it has the the you know the upside to be something that a lot everyone

uses you know and they just did the campaign with JCole right I seen that y yeah to can you talk a little bit more about what even is so evenbiz is a platform in which artists can uh support you know I mean where artists can sell their music to fans directly and you have the ability to let them pay you whatever they want for the music you know so if someone wants to pay you you know like you can have an album up there for pay whatever you want and people can choose their price to

pay you i know a lot of people have done that and the the the method behind that is you know if you have people out there that are super fans they want to show you extra support you know so some people will pay extra for the album or the or or the song so it's just a direct to consumer platform where you let your fans pay whatever they want for your music how would you message that to say you're working with an artist how would you have people message that and then would you also run

ads against that messaging uh to get people to buy the uh to go on Yeah to to pay whatever they wanted to go to go through even right right so or a platform like even so honestly people kind of have to hear you before they buy it you know so it's like you would have to promote yourself on other platforms first and build your following or whether you you can also have a connection you know with your audience through content and you know uh where you kind of like they you know tell them your story

and and who you are and kind of like some of your interest and you kind of talk about just things that you got going on just documenting your journey um you can do it that way where if you get people connected to your message you know you can when you have an album you can sell it to them and just kind of you know direct them towards the you know the even.biz to pay for it but essentially you want to build an audience before you do that type of stuff but I would I would be

doing it early just in case because as I'm building my audience if people want to support I would want to have that option for them to support you know uneven okay so how early in in artist journey would you recommend that i would start it as soon as possible but I wouldn't promote it you know i would have Right i I would have it in your link in bio and then like as you're providing value and putting out content pe people naturally check out your link in bio and listen to your music and eventually buy

there you know once you have a big following you can kind of promote it more often and you know get more sales speaking of big followings what are your thoughts on subscription models for artists so a fan would pay $5 $10 a month to get something in return i think that's great if you have an audience you can do something like "Hey I'll daily vlog you know if if you guys I'll have a daily vlog on my paid subscription service or something like that you know." Yeah or like a Q&A with the audience or you

know something of that extent so if you have an audience it would make a lot of sense to do something like that because you can definitely um there's a lot of people out there that want to see more from you you know right and a lot of times there things that you can use like vlogging for example you know that's something that can build you an audience you can put out some vlogs like for everyone to see and see kind of what it's like and then you can have the paid subscription fee to have like

the behind the scenes material unreleased songs stuff like that you know just anything you want to share your share with your audience behind the scenes what services are you using for those paid subs subscriptions uh there's there's uh I mean honestly there's a lot of different websites you can use um I use like Instagram has a subscription based platform there's uh you can you can have that's right they you know it depends on which platform so I would kind of have my own on my own website and I would have some like on each website

like Instagram uh YouTube Red and stuff like that do you use the IG one the subscription i haven't made one but I I I I'm familiar with it you know yeah do you think there's value there i guess so if you have an audience right definitely if you're teaching something that people want to know and you know and if if you're someone people feel connected to they'll definitely pay for sure gotcha so so you use your own website for the subscription yeah there's ways where you can do uh subscription based platforms on uh I mean

uh services on Shopify and stuff like that you have to have add-ons and stuff like that like you use these third party apps and they kind of like install them to Shopify and then you can use that to uh you know get people to like pay for a subscription and then they get specific things from you you know access to specific uh videos or unreleased music and stuff like that now speaking of Shopify talk to me how important it is to retarget people who are in the cart like who are going to buy something oh

yeah that's very important you know because those are people who are thinking about buying and a lot of times like they'll forget about you or you know because there's a lot there's a lot of competition out there so you have to continuously be reminding people who are in a shopping mode that like you're you know your your services are available because there's you know like I said it's kind of like being a musician if you if you you know if if you're not promoting yourself or you're not staying active and engaging with your fans your

fans kind of go elsewhere you know right so like I kind of look at it that that way so so can you kind of break down what what that looks like the the targeting those audiences in the cart can just make it simplified a little bit so uh on on meta ads you can create custom audiences from your website yeah and people who have like uh abandoned the cart and stuff like that so you can essentially using a pixel on your website you can retract everyone who's you know you know added something to the cart

and didn't finish um the transaction and you can put out a video on like Instagram you know promoting your services or something and you can retarget all those people so they can see that you know see your your message again and and possibly go to your website you know what's amazing about what you're saying here is that a lot of artists feel like "Oh man I'm overexposing myself i'm overexposing myself like I I'm just doing the the most i'm doing too much." But like not really you know how much content is being posted out there

on a regular day basis at all times like you really got to be providing as much as you possibly can because people will forget who you are to your point right like Oh yeah definitely if you're not consistently in front of people like people are not going on your timeline and looking at what you posted a long time ago you know they're only looking at their timeline and whatever's in front of them that's all they see you know and and they don't ne you know unless someone's obsessed with you they're not going you know on

your Instagram and looking at your first post or something like that they might they might go through your Instagram if they're a new follower right if they're coming in there to just to like explore and see like oh I really like this thing that showed up on my for you page i maybe I'll look through some of those right right but other than that yeah they're not Yeah other than that like YouTube is more has more retention so if you're an artist that uh you know is against the whole Instagram thing putting yourself out there

consistently you can do the YouTube thing because YouTube has a search engine yeah certain like YouTube videos like if you put out this video on YouTube and you chop it up like we're talking about YouTube and you talk about whatever you know you put whatever we're talking about in the title that's going to be relevant forever because it's on YouTube and has a search engine like Google you know so it's not like Instagram if you put that same clip on Instagram I can't search you know hip-hop news or music marketing news on or music marketing

interviews on uh Instagram and see the the interview if that makes sense it's not gonna rank in like a search engine yeah it shows you random stuff every time you search you know yep i'm happy you mentioned that because the thing about YouTube is that it is a search engine it's Google essentially and where Tik Tok what people should think about Tik Tok is they shouldn't think about it either like Instagram they should think about it like Google because it's a search engine right right y right so it's and and one thing that comes up

a lot that people should be thinking about is SEO so what is search engine optimization right so you're talking about your descriptions right to your point YouTube well I will spend I will spend hours upon hours trying to figure out what the title is now with AI though in Vid IQ Vid IQ is the best vid IQ is the best because I'll go So Vid IQ is a website where you go and you'll like figure out like okay what's the best thumbnail or what's the best title and it'll give you a score but then you'll

you'll you'll see like you'll put in any type of keyword right and then it'll be like oh this is being searched a lot but then you don't want to actually go and use that because there's too much competition right right so you want to find something that's like in the yellow or the orange i say that because it's kind of like a dial oh yeah that's kind of uh I I kind of mentioned that in one of the interviews that I did before where like if it's giving you a 100% rating you don't want to

use that one exactly you know cuz that's everyone's using that you want to use something at like 70% or whatever is rated around there you know on Vid IQ yeah yeah and if you noticed if you go search music marketing on there the people that have like the 70% scrolls like they're usually the the ones that have the most views and stuff too you know what's funny is but I will use the it doesn't give a score but I will go I click on outlier all the time and then it'll be like I'll you know

music business whatever that top video is I'll I'll say I like you know like I I'll I'll steal that kind of like what that title is yeah and I'll use it against mine as long as it's relevant right to the piece of content so don't don't get it twisted it's not like I'm just taking the top performing video has nothing to do with my video because if you're not matching your title with what the video is talking about especially within like the first five seconds like people are just not going to I think AI picks

up on that it's like Yeah and they're like just don't push out your content you know because they know what what you're typing what you're saying and everything all automatically you know so if it doesn't align it doesn't show anyone so let's go let's go into that a little bit more i I I really appreciate that you're talking about the YouTube stuff so like kind of how we did with the genres and music let's talk about it with the platforms the the main platforms so what should an artist be doing on YouTube so YouTube definitely

I would uh continuously promote you know vlogs and stuff like that behind the scenes material just kind of try to connect with your audience in a way where you're showing them more about like your day-to-day life and kind of who you are what you stand for like Instagram it's kind of like edits all day long you know so like you put out a video um you put you you put essentially take the best clip you have and you put it on Instagram you know i feel like it's something that it's more like people showing off

and and stuff like that best life yeah like with with with YouTube it's like people want to see your story the behind the scenes how you're living you know what your thoughts are so what I would do if I was an artist on YouTube I would definitely have a weekly vlog which I you know talk about my music talk about some of the things I'm doing maybe do interesting things around the city um play the YouTube game you know figure out how to do thumbnails figure out how to do titles and um make content that

you feel like people would watch and try to get a good thumbnail and you know in title um so that you can get traction within YouTube because if you can get a following based off your content on YouTube you can make more money off that than you can from your music you know yeah I agree i agree i I always think of YouTube is think of YouTube like your own personal version of MTV every artist should be thinking about it like that because now it's like whether you're doing interviews whether you're sitting down you know

talking to another artist whether you're in the studio how you built the record like who like whatever you're into right but create this kind of world for YouTube that is like your own version of MTV because that's what every YouTube channel is basically make your own TV show that's essentially what it is you know that's right you know and uh and then the thing is like you once you build that little following as like an influencer on YouTube like your whole your name holds more weight as an artist too cuz people are like "Oh this

guy has this much amount of followers." If you look at like DDG for example right you know he started out vlogging and he had a bunch of followers first just based off providing value and entertaining people and then when he started his music he already had the fan base that was there to listen to it you know yeah go ahead but ultimately the music obviously is the most important thing you know if the music is good if you're an artist and you have a little following based around like YouTube videos and things like that a

lot of those fans would will support your music if it's good you know so it's not like if you're posting content outside of music and stuff like that it's not going to build you know a following for your music as long as you're promoting yourself um you know you're you're also promoting your music yeah same can be said though like I mean if people aren't connecting with your music but they're connecting with you for other things like man like make a decision like maybe the music just ain't for you there's something else that you're bringing

value or maybe music is just one p one stream of income for you you know don't don't don't treat it like it's your only thing you know just use your influence to do a bunch of things that's a very traditional way of thinking it about it if you're just thinking about music right like there's so many different avenues that you could actually like monetize or like provide value for right definitely yeah do you have um what do you recommend for something like Snapchat because we talked a lot about Instagram we talked a little bit about

Tik Tok but do you do you advise anybody on Snapchat uh personally I don't use Snapchat i used to but I don't I don't do Snapchat campaigns as much as I do other platforms i do like the main platforms Tik Tok Instagram YouTube Spotify uh Facebook okay so like like the main platforms that I know there's like the most amount of people on got you so let's talk about Facebook then most artists will think of especially in this day and age that Facebook is for old heads do you agree disagree should artists be using it

outside of outside of ads i I would say yeah I would say with ads older people respond to the ads really well on Facebook you know so it's like if you're they got bread right if you're also if you're making music that's made for made for older people it's like a perfect place to promote it on on Facebook you know cuz there's like a like a 10 year difference on the people who use uh Facebook and like Instagram and stuff like that you know like the like it's like really a lot of older people facebook

is still the biggest problem but you don't notice it because it's not within you know our age group it's like older people that's Yeah that that and it's not front and center in culture right it's not in front Yeah yeah it's not like culture culture like you know it's not cultural yeah yeah so So what are you recommending people are you doing on Facebook uh Facebook honestly um it the only thing I would use on Facebook is the fan page okay the fan page on Facebook uh because with the personal page it doesn't rank in

the algorithm with the post as much um like if you have a personal profile and you post something that's meant for your music or something it won't get the same amount of traction if you were to post that real like on a fan page you know cuz they treat the fan page is kind of like they treat Instagram in a sense you know with the reals so uh I would definitely post a lot of reals on Facebook um okay short form content is really killing it on Facebook right now i'd build the audience with short

form content and once you have the audience put out something long formatted but uh essenti native to Facebook do it long form uh yeah like within the app yeah yeah so not from taking a link from YouTube and putting it on oh no like that doesn't work uh you have to metadata is very very important like when you upload a video um and if you download it from like YouTube it's going to know that it's from YouTube you know so it might like uh affect the way it it reaches people you know like something that's

fresh fresh from the folder you know yeah and even even to that point even more so is that one should really think about these apps of like how are you going to keep the the audience or the fan or the customer on the platform right because the last thing that these platforms want is people going off of the platform somewhere else so how do you keep these people engaged so if you're posting a link from YouTube right on your fan page it's going to be suppressed it's not going to be shown to people definitely it's

that's why as soon as you try to sell something on these platforms you get like shadowbanned or something you know they don't show your content as much you know like you're trying to sell something like if you try to sell something like let's say you post something right now hey guys I'm selling you know services go check it out like that post will not get any views you know um because like if you're telling someone to get off you know leave the website and go buy something without running ads without running the ads right okay

cuz with the ads they'll let you do that because you know obviously you're paying them to get that sale they're not going to give it to you organically so it's like soon as you start selling something on these platforms you kind of get a little shadow bend so you have to kind of run ads you know yeah but so but that's important because some people won't run ads because they think like oh it's a waste of money but if you're trying to sell something right let's say you're running $5 for a t-shirt and the t-shirt

you're selling it for $40 right well there's your margin right there right so like that ad would be five i'm doing simplifying the math here obviously maybe you can do a better job of explaining it but if I'm if I'm it's a ad and it's five bucks that I'm spending but all of a sudden I've sold three t-shirts and it's $120 total well my margin is made up on the sale right yeah so like I I ran an ad for the trend and audio package okay and then uh what about $50 a day i was

making 1,500 a day so for $50 I spend on the ad I would make 1,500 yeah wow you still doing that yeah like some because it gets crazy i have to I have to like keep up with the orders so I'll like whenever I need to sell a bunch I'll I'll have the post that is doing really well and I'll like rerun the ad and and kind of get the sales to go up again and every now and that when it gets to like 30 sales 50 sales I'll pause it now hold on hold on

you got to break this down from like the top so so what is it that you're doing here so uh essentially what I'm doing is like I'll take a video uh about my service okay and then I'll run an ad on that video on Instagram targeting my followers a dark post or you mean like uh something that's just Are you so like are you putting it on your feed yeah yeah okay yep okay yeah I'm putting it on my feed and then um essentially I'm running the ad and targeting the custom audience and lookalike audience

based off my followers okay and then I'm using that ad and then uh I'm like I have the sign up now button at the under the under the visualizer when I'm running the ad like you can choose which action you want them to take for me I want them to take the sign up action just so when they click sign up it takes them to my website and they kind of see the trend in audio package and that's kind of how I've been doing it oh so you don't even directly promote the trending audio package

you just have a sign up and then they go to their site your site no I have the visualizer that is promoting it so I'll be talking about the how how it works and then under the visualizer it says sign up and that's when they click that it takes them to my website i see that and from that you were running $50 a day and you were selling $1,500 to $2,000 a day i actually screenshotted the uh I posted the ad too but yeah like a lot of times um like if you have the audience

and you have something that like people want like you can kill it with those ads like Yeah you know but it doesn't work the other way around when you're posting organically they don't show the people that are in the shopping spirit you know they they hide those people from your from your post like because if it's organic they want to keep people on the the platform so they're shown a different set of people you know people who are not in the mindset of shopping but when you run those ads and you set up a pixel

it finds the people who actually shop on these platforms and it puts your content in front of them how are you building the the the audience the subset what are you what are you listing for who you're trying to find so uh I have multiple audiences for this specific campaign one audience is my custom audience okay which is essentially the people that already follow me yeah and then one is the lookalike audience so it's uh people similar to the people who are following me yeah and then one is like CDB tune core all those like

every platform that has artists on them i'll target all their followers really i work with artists you know so having my content being promoted yeah i I noticed the cold audiences did better too than some of the the warm audience yeah like people who didn't know who I was were more likely to shop with me than people who knew who I were why do you think that is cuz like that's why that's this is a tricky one like I think when you put content out there and people kind of have like a uh when people

make up their mind about you you know like they see you every day they decide whether they like you or not you know so it's like with someone who is out there in the shopping spirit you can find those people you know who who are looking to shop right in the moment and you can put the content in front of those people you know and those people are more likely to shop you know what man i I it's interesting because I think what you're saying is especially in the music business I think the reason why

you're connecting as well with a lot of people is because it's like very straightforward you're not flashy and a lot of people in the music business are flashy it feels like and there's no [ __ ] like you get right to it and then you also kind of have this like tone that is like I'm gonna give you gems throughout this entire video and it's like very trustworthy actually cuz like when you think about it or when you kind of just do your own digging like most people would do they'll be like "Oh that seems

to make a lot of sense this guy's this guy's not [ __ ] around right?" You know what I mean yeah definitely like when people do their own research and and and they see uh that you you know it is how you say it is they like it more credibility for sure how what have you found like people that are coming across you and they're like why why did you sell them on the service or whatever it may be or sell them on who you are forget the service but like why do you think people

what have been people saying back to you is like no this is why I think you're dope or I connect with your contact with your content uh it's always a lot of different things people uh like you said I'm not flashy or anything like that like people don't like the whole marketers that are like with the big chain the Ferrari and the and stuff like that you know I know a few of them they're cool but it's like people don't connect with it as much you know when they see someone who's actually has no other

uh intentions I think you know they're more likely to work with that person like me I'm the type of person that uh I mean I I'll have a conversation with anyone and I think anyone can make it you know if they just work it hard and you know make the right move so I'm just I'm open-minded you know yeah yeah you bring a lot of value man a lot of value to a lot of people and I think especially in this day and age this is one of the reasons I started the podcast i just

really I think a lot of people value education more than anything else in this day and age um yeah that's crazy because when I first started out that's like what was my main goal is to educate people you know i didn't even honestly I didn't even care about selling anything people were just like "Hey man can I pay you to do this?" I'm like "Sure you know it's like I'll you know I'll do it." And then I would do it for them and they would like it and it was like it was like I started

out at like level zero but no one was talking about marketing or doing anything to the point where like everything would just work out for me you know like Yeah because it was less competition like it it was crazy how much competition there is now compared to you know compared to back then like 10 years ago were you even using that term marketing yeah I was it was like music i was saying music i was calling myself a music marketer 10 years ago people are like what is that what is that yeah they still say

what is that oh for sure yeah so it was like 10 years ago they're like a what like they they couldn't believe it but I apparently there is no term for music marketers so it's like we had to create our own term really we had to create our own niche it wasn't even so so you created the term I wouldn't say I created it but we like the as collectively as like everyone in the scene we call oursel music marketers but back then like you didn't hear anyone call themselves that no no you you talk

about back then is like 10 years ago yeah it's crazy how how fast time flies on that side of things um talk to me a bit about brand deals and sponsorships how can artists get them when do they work well no actually before we get to that because we were talking about platforms and we talked about Facebook and we talked about YouTube how are you using Tik Tok and then also talk to me about live shopping on Tik Tok and if you've seen that work because speaking of not going off platform you can do live

shopping on Tik Tok now which is apparently it's really starting to catch up catch steam yeah so uh Tik Tok live and the Tik Tok shop is actually probably the best two places you know up and coming artists can spend time if they want to make money you know especially the lives like a good amount of artists that I speak to that are making a living with their music i would say over 50% are uh from Tik Tok lives really yeah so like if you go on live and you start freestyling you start talking and

stuff and just kind of entertaining people the live on Tik Tok has its own algorithm it's not like how it is on Instagram where you go live it only shows your followers right tik Tok it shows people and people's timeline that don't follow you so it's like you'll just have hundreds of people coming into your live and if you're like entertaining and you can keep their attention you can make a good amount of money from that you know so Tik Tok Shop on the other hand uh I'm not I haven't I'm not too well versed

with Tik Tok shop but I do know what's competing with Amazon as far as like how much money people were making on there and you know I've seen some of the websites uh I I've used a couple websites that tell you how much people are making on TikTok and it's like crazy amounts people are making like hundreds of thousands a week you know can you say which websites those are where you at uh it's called uh KO KO data or KO data i'll have to send you the link okay but uh essentially we'll put it

in the description of the YouTube channel i'll send you the link but it's like a $85 a month service essentially it you go on this website and it shows you everyone's Tik Tok who has a shop and how much they're making how much they made this week wow it's just some crazy numbers significant money yeah a lot of people health the people who are doing like the health products and stuff like that they're making a good amount of money let's go back to the live for a second how does somebody make money on the live

on TikTok so people send like tokens and stuff like that they can send that you can convert the money do you have to set that up the token uh I'm pretty sure you have to set you have to set it up in your settings um but for me like I have I didn't have to do anything when I go live it's like automatic it happened automatically mhm and so people will essentially they'll set up their credit card to to give tokens right they'll buy these coins and then they'll like send you these lions and little

stars and you know whatever it's kind of like Facebook and and Twitch yeah and Twitch twitch does a lot a lot of that so So you can do that on TikTok and people are sending you these co Why are people sending these coins when they're not getting anything back a lot of it is like younger kids who are just looking for people you know artists to to listen to or just kind of trying to you know um figure out you know just kind of identify with something you I think it's just a lot of younger

kids who want to find people that they identify with that they want to support it's all about getting people that like who you are this is part of what uh like Brandon just like who you are and just be a part of your journey you know if if you have other things to offer i mean that's like the starting point you know if you could get to that point where you're putting out content that's valuable and people are following you i think that's the first step and then the next step is like having something that

is valuable behind the scenes whether it's music that people can listen to or merchandise that people really really like that's going to carry you over to the like next step yeah got you um uh last but not least let's talk about Instagram what um how should somebody be using the platform on Instagram and then can you also tell me is it wise for somebody to use a piece of content exactly the same on YouTube shorts on Instagram reels and on Tik Tok or should you change up the content per platform so personally I would say

it's too hard to do custom content on every platform you know there's no way you can shoot organic content for Facebook Tik Tok YouTube Instagram all at the same time so you kind of have to choose your two main platforms unless you had a team which right unless you have a team you know but what I would do is choose Instagram and I would definitely post on Tik Tok all these platforms but my main platform is like Instagram and Tik Tok and YouTube and YouTube you can use like u in a way where you post

you know fulllength videos that you for your audience to keep them engaged and then Tik Tok and um Tik Tok you can kind of use it as an experiment experimental way i like to use Tik Tok um by experimenting different type of videos and stuff like that cuz you never know what's going to do well on there and the algorithm works differently on there it shows people that are not following you who who your content instead of people that are are following you like Instagram so with Tik Tok I I use it more as like

experimental type of platform you know and uh Instagram I use it like a headquarter you know like this is my main headquarter this is where I'm announcing announcing everything announcing the album you know announcing Good analogy yeah yeah you know and just it just kind of like uh this is where like every it's it's where you put you know all your moments and milestones and stuff like that on you know post about those type of things on on like Instagram that's amazing um yeah I think to your point Tik Tok is really interesting as well

it's like you don't have to have a lot of followers and it can go incredibly viral mind you like even if you do have a lot of followers it doesn't mean that you're going to get a lot of views right right like on Tik Tok just Yeah you know what I mean like Yeah so it's followers don't mean anything on Tik Tok it's literally all about finding your niche and just using consistent hashtags and posting consistently based around those hashtags like what I like to do is find four to five hashtags that match what I'm

talking about okay and just consistently use those hashtags and those hashtags don't matter as much on Instagram no on on Tik Tok it doesn't matter got you okay let's talk about last but not least brand sponsorship what are some ways that artists can um get into that world and and do you advise that artists get brand and sponsorships when they're on platforms yeah definitely because every platform has their own little built-in uh creator platform where you can find brands and sponsorships like I know Instagram has one for me i can go and check like a

bunch of offers and then uh Tik Tok uh YouTube is Do you use it the Instagram one i haven't took any offers but I've I've took other sponsorships outside of like the Instagram stuff i I did the sponsorships on Instagram but it wasn't from the creator marketplace you know yeah like people reached out to my email and were were charging me and they were paying me to post about their products right but uh essentially like when it comes to getting brand and uh sponsorship deals it's mainly about branding like content has a plays a big

role in that so like if you're not consistently posting content and putting yourself out there it's kind of hard to land those sponsorships you know because a lot of them base it off your engagement rate and stuff like that so um you can use websites like Famebit they're still developing for YouTube uh I think there's Grapevine if they're still around but there's a lot of different platforms that you can sign up to where you can have give them access to your analytics on like different platforms and they tell you based off that how much like

you can get paid um you know per post but each platform has their own little marketplace as well what time do you think artists should start thinking about this i think when you honestly you could be a micro influencer and and get uh sponsorships too because that's become a thing like where people are finding um accounts with you know people with smaller accounts and they're paying them to post about products as well it's not as much but a lot of times honestly I would kind of build a little audience first just so that you don't

get in a situation where people uh don't pay you for the sponsorships they just kind of try to give you free material in order to review it if you're a micro influencer so I would try to get to a point where you had a good engagement rate you were putting out content consistently you had some traction going as far as you know having a little community built got you um actually one more question final question here um I'm going to take it back all the way now just to the artist side art versus the business

if you're an artist that's just starting out how much emphasis are you putting on each side of the business when it comes to the content to everything that we spoke about the ads versus the art like how would you have an artist think about that and measure that i would say like you have to have some sort of business knowledge just so that you don't get played or anything like if there's so much people out there that are willing to take advantage of artists like if you don't have any insight on the business I think

you kind of lack in that department you get taken advantage of but at the same time you can't be an artist that's just focused on that you know as an artist you should honestly be focused on music more than anything in content you know while your team handles everything else so I would just say like as an artist um definitely do your research you know before you uh you know get in a situation where it has to deal with business and stuff like that you know um so definitely I would say it's like 50/50 you

know the music is more important for the artist because ultimately you want them to have a team to handle everything else but as an artist you know early on you're not going to have the money to have the people around you because you kind of have to wear many hats yeah so I would just kind of um early on educate yourself as much as you can and then as you're building a following and and getting in a situation where you have uh you know a buzz try to find people that can fulfill that role yeah

or you're trying to get in contact with Promo God you talk to everybody man where can everybody find you uh on Instagram promo_god3 got you okay appreciate you man thank you so much for this this has been No worries man it was a great uh interview thank you so much oh of course man thank you thank you for coming on the podcast