Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] All right, what's going on? So I'm gonna share two things with you. One, actually, not two things. You can take it two ways, and whichever way you take it, it's gonna be very beneficial for you. But one, the message is gonna. This message is for people that are artists, all right? So if you're a singer, songwriter, content creator, all that, this is really gonna help even business owners as well. The second thing that it is, is this is this could be a great opportunity for someone to go open a record label and share and literally do what I'm telling you, what you're about to do. And I'm going to lay out a plan on how to grow an artist so a singer, a songwriter, into having all the way up to 5,000 plus true fans, right? And I describe true fans as people that will literally buy whatever you put out, go fly across the country to go to every single one of your concerts. And even when you retire or you come back out of retirement, they are willing to come listen to you wherever you are, in whatever country you are, because they love your music that much and it resonates with them. But first, you have to find these fans, and that's where we're going to break down, right? So when. If you are starting out as an artist, the first thing you have to understand is what is called sound hacking. This isn't like a new concept that I created, right? Artists have been doing this for years. Is when I was growing up, there's a website called that Piff. This is where people used to go and take remixes or covers of songs and then make a mixtape out of it.
[00:01:27] How I learned about Lil Wayne was when he had this line that said, I'm all over this beat. Like.
[00:01:34] Like sprinkles on ice cream. Or I'm all over this be like ice cream sprinkles, right? And that was like one of the hardest lines that people were talking about over and over and over again.
[00:01:45] So that's how I learned about him. I learned about even Chris Brown, about Trey Songz, other underground artists. I was on that Piff, and I was. And I was listening to that covers. Now, the. The best thing about listening to their covers was I was already familiar with the sound that they were using. So sound hacking is just taking a beat that people are familiar with, we all know, in September, in the first night of September or something like that. With Earth Within Fire, right? You probably heard that song, right? So people hear that and they're expecting earth, wind and fire, but they give you time to actually play it all the way out, and then, boom, you drop your own line or verse to it. Whether you sing the same exact lyrics that they sing, but making it your own, or you rap on it, or you do your talent with that sound. But what happens is people are expecting Earth, Wind and Fire, so they. So they already have an expectation of how much they like that song. And then they give you the opportunity to share your own style and really buy into you. Now, there's a song called Strip by Chris Brown. There's a guy on YouTube called Gabe Bondic. He plays it with a.
[00:03:00] With a guitar, right? And he did a cover to Chris Brown's Strip.
[00:03:04] That's how I found out about Gabe. I was. Look, I was listening to the song, I saw Gabe's cover. I said, okay, cool, I'll check him out. So I checked it out, and then now I'm a fan of Gabe Bondic, right? I listen to his other music. I listen to the other covers that he's done.
[00:03:16] And my wife even. And it's funny enough, when I showed my wife this whole strategy, and right under it, there was another artist that she. That she said, oh, I like him. He does a lot of good covers, too, right? Don't make it harder on yourself, right? If you. If I was opening up a record label today and I had an artist, the first thing I would say in the first year, this is how I would break it down, right? I would tell them, we're going to do minimal edits. Here's a webcam. Here's. Here's your phone. I would play the beat. And I said, okay, you would rap on it. You'll sing over it, whatever that is. And then I would hit post and post it to YouTube. Now, the reason why you want to limit all the edits is because artists, especially, they are perfectionists. They want everything to be all right.
[00:04:00] That sucks. That hinders their ability to release content. That hinders their ability to release songs. Once they get good at posting content. And I'm talking about all the way to year three. Not year one or two, but year three. But in year one, they want to release at least three songs every single day. Just playing the beat, making the music, hitting post, and then you're going to post that to YouTube.
[00:04:23] Just three songs a day. Three songs a day is going to give you 1,010 95 songs in a whole year, right? No one else is doing this. And in this year of you releasing three songs, I promise you, you are going to gain at least 100 true fans, if not more. This is year one.
[00:04:44] And what's so good about this is now you have 1095 songs that you can. That you can repurpose as content on other platforms. YouTube is a gold mine because it's going to stay on there forever. And what happens is when you go viral on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, wherever you go viral, people are going to go to YouTube to try to find what other music you have. You now have 1095 songs that people are going to come back and reference.
[00:05:16] That's super powerful. Now, year two, this is where things get amazing for you. You're going to do the same exact thing instead. Your bare minimum is going to be three songs a day, because you're already used to that. But I'm going to challenge you to release five to 10 songs every single day.
[00:05:35] Now this is where it gets interesting.
[00:05:38] Don't just be. I want you to be an artist. I don't want you to be a rapper or a singer.
[00:05:43] Now let me explain what I mean. Be an artist. So first of all, there is plenty of genres of music that if you. If you want to do rap, right, don't just stick with gangster rap. There's country, there's pop, there's. London has its own sound. India has its own sound. There's bachata, There's Spanish music as well.
[00:06:04] Find the top 100 songs worldwide and just do a cover to each one of those, right?
[00:06:11] A lot of times you'll see a rap artist turn pop. Something that Nelly did very well was he was a rap. He was in rap. Then he. Then he fused himself with Tim McGraw to do a country song, right? And then that brought a whole bunch of fans his way. And that was the first time we spoiled. We saw that happen.
[00:06:29] Now you do the same thing. That way you don't just get in a box, right, and never call your album. Don't never release your own music here, all right? I'm telling you, don't really show music at all yet. All you're gonna do is do covers, okay?
[00:06:42] And in. In year two, your. Your main priority yet again is still finding your voice, still building your fan base. And when I. And also building this email list. This fan base should go on an email list. You should get their name, their phone numbers, their address as well. And then from there, you're also going to start doing podcast interviews. You're gonna start. You're gonna have your own merchandise. And this is where you're going to go do live shows and concerts where you Open up for other people. Building up and building up your stage presence and understanding how to, you know, woo a crowd, get them moving and all that. There's a great.
[00:07:20] Jay Z has a great, great, great story about dmx, right? How DMX was when he went on stage. He would take a crowd through so many different emotions, right? He would pray with them, he would hype them up, make them cry, make them laugh, make them just feel aggression, right? Then take them back down. And Jay Z said he had to perform after dmx. And one of the hardest things is he had to find out what was his thing, right? And that's what I want you to do this year. This year is all about getting those live shows, getting those reps down on the smaller stage before you get to the bigger stage, right?
[00:07:57] You can get a thousand thousand true fans. Year three is where you are. You are probably going to be a hot independent artist. If you're doing what I'm telling you, you probably are going to have multiple videos that are in probably 110 millions or have gone super viral already. Because just by law of law, just the law of numbers, one post, if you're doing five to 10 songs a day, one of them has to go viral. That's just how it's going to work, right?
[00:08:29] In year three, bare minimum is going to be three songs, right? But I'm going to challenge you to do five songs a day. Yet again. There's a catalog of music out there that you don't need to have somebody write you music. Take music that's already out there, make it your own and post it. Right now you might be saying, bertrand, why don't I post my own music?
[00:08:51] Understand here, people don't want to hear what you have to say because they need to feel you first singing songs that they already know before they buy into you and become a fan of you, right? You have to love your voice so that why not give them something by hacking a sound that they already know? This year, you're going to do podcast interviews, you're going to release more merchandise. You can do live shows, and this is where you want to get at least 5,000, if not more true fans, right? This is where it gets interesting where now that you have 5,000 true fans, people that will follow you across to go wherever you are, you can leverage this to sell tickets at any show. You can sell merchandise yourself, right? Your own merchandise. You can. You can charge for features, you can charge for collabs. And if you sign to a label, I recommend that you stay independent because you want to own everything. Own your masters, own your image and likeness, own everything that is of you. Don't let them own it or even give you an advance. All you really want a label to do is to help you to distribute your own music that you put out instead of doing covers. Now you can have an album and do it and do it with them, right? Because remember, in advance is money that they are going to front you to create a certain amount of albums for them. Right?
[00:10:09] Now, with that being said, keep the pace. Even when you get quote unquote famous and you start to feel yourself right, have people in your corner that aren't. Yes, men and women that aren't telling you how amazing you are.
[00:10:24] Eminem treats his music career like a 9 to 5. You want to do the same thing, treat it like a 9 to 5, right? Because one of the, one of the things that even Drake says is that get it while you're here, boy. Because all that hype don't feel the. The same next year, boy. And that's so true is that as an artist, you are playing a young man's game.
[00:10:45] A young man and women's game, all right? Because why the. Everyone's looking for the next hot thing, right? You, you can be hot today and then gone tomorrow, right? But is that one hit, that one hit wonder? You can try. You can use that one hit wonder to last forever. As you know, the guy that sings gold all on my chain, Gold all on my watch, right? Most people, you might be saying, oh, who is that? Right now? He's a writer for other. For other artists. Now. He makes his living producing and writing other artists. And he still gets paid off that show. And we don't even need to know his name, but he found his. He found the song, popped off, got the notoriety, and now writing and producing and has and getting royalty off of other people's music, right?
[00:11:29] Remember, you want to focus on building 5,000 true fans. And the reason being is merchandise alone, right? So think about it like this. If you have 5,000 true fans, right? And what people don't understand is that with this 5,000 true fans, if you, if you were to sell something that was for 20, right, every single month, just sell one thing for $20 monthly. If 5,000 of them bought something for $20, right, that's $100,000 right there in your pocket, right? If you have 5,000 true fans and you sell something for $50. Actually, excuse me, let me do the math right now on the calculator. Because I think I am misquoting myself. But 5,000 people, $20.
[00:12:18] It's a hundred thousand.
[00:12:19] I wasn't misquoting myself, right? Not at all. I know I wasn't, but I just wanted to do it again. If you have 5,000 true fans and they buy something for $50, right, that's $250,000. You are not a starving artist anymore. And it literally just took you three years to get to that point. And the thing is, I know a lot of artists that are servers, that are working bar bags that are starving, right? Maybe couch surfing can't pay their bills.
[00:12:48] This is how you go from starving artists to paying your bills and living comfortably. And now you get to decide, hey, what record label gets to pick me? Because one, you have an audience already. Two, you have a system and mechanism to distribute your music. If you want to just go independent altogether, and three, if you want to throw your own show and, and, and have it paid and sold out, you can do that without anybody's help. So now when people come to you, you have more leverage.
[00:13:20] All right, hey, like I said, this, this podcast episode is for artists. And second thing, this is for people that want to go out there and start a record label and help artists to build up their, their fan base, right?
[00:13:34] You can take everything. I just told you, it's a three year plan. It could come sooner, it can come later, right? But remember, at the end of the day, you have to, you have to tell these artists they have to hit posts, right? You are trying to help them to hit posts and release and release their music out. Because if you don't release the music out, no data comes back. So with that at the end of the day, yet again, concept, just hit post. Hope you enjoyed it.
[00:14:00] Share this, tag it, let me know how you like it, and I'll talk to you all later. All right, peace.
