Work Ethic in Music

I'm afraid that people could hear that and get really lost in the strategic part and spend too much time strategizing. At The end of the day, action. Strategy's great as long as it doesn't get in the way of you actually doing the One More Time Music Podcast. Genuine conversations with genuine people about music. Hosted by Henry with a three and playback Ben. We're from being local to piss off. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back for another episode of the One More Time Podcast. I am your host, Playback Ben, here with my co-host. Henry with a three. Baby. Let's get it. Henry, who do we have on the podcast today? We're doing another one of these no guest things, man. We're gonna see how it goes. See if we're interesting when we just talk about something. It's just me and you. Just us. Mano a mano. Imano. Imano.

And we're gonna talk about another topic that we're interested in, right? What are we talking about, Ben? What are we talking about today, Henry? We're talking about treating your artistry, treating doing music like a career. If you actually want to make it a career. If you don't, don't listen. Tune out. Next episode. This is not for you if that's not something you're interested in. That's right, because we're here to talk about what you should be doing, what we do to really try and take your artistry, your producer career seriously in music. Because this shit's not for the weak of heart. at all. It's not. It's hard work. It's hard work. It's something that I get on you, you get on me. We challenge each other because if it was easy, everyone would do it. As cliche as that is, it's true. It's true. However, This shit is for the people that really want to make it happen. And it goes far above and beyond just wanting to make music. And that's sad,

I wish that it was just a job where you got to wake up and just make whatever music you wanted to every day, and there was nothing else involved. I mean, how nice would that be? Not the case. And really, this is coming off of two episodes that we've done, right? One was with Drumma Jay recently, and one was with Keenan Rush as well. Please check out those episodes. We'll link them somewhere up here, down there in the comments. We might put a link to it up in the in in the video itself. But we've had two guests that have brought this subject up. So I thought it would be perfect for our second episode where it's just me and you. Don't you love when the guests give us our content for us? And then we just don't need them. I think do you think we've had enough guests on now? We can just use all the uh topics. We're good for a month or two, I would say at least. Yeah. Tune back in later this year for an actual guest. Yeah. Uh no, we'll probably have one on the following week. But um, we did think this was important and worthy of you and I sitting down for a little bit. This is an episode about, you know, treating your career seriously.

Drumma Jay said that he treats every night like he's a professional athlete. Yes. He's gonna go out and put up points. I love the athlete metaphor. Yeah, it's great. I love sports and music metaphors in general. They work, they do. I don't know why. I'm not sure why either, but we'll be sure to talk about that on a following episode. Sounds like another episode. It does. Yep. We're gonna do all sports and music analogies. Yeah. Um, but no, so this one, Drumma Jay talked about it. Treat it like a professional sport. You're getting in game time and practice every night, trying to put up points, doing the grunt work, making shit happen. Um, because like we talked about, it doesn't happen on its own. This is just not for those that don't want to work hard at all. Um, and trust me, I've been rudely awakened by that reality over the last couple of years that I've been taking it seriously on my end. Because there are people that are doing that. Uh, you know, that just like there are athletes that are practicing every day, working out every day, waking up at the crack of dawn and working on their shot. There are people doing that.

So, unless you can elevate yourself to that same level or above it, then you're not competing with these guys, period. Shots fired. That's true. Keenan also talked about it as well. He's been around some artists uh in his work with Reach Records, I believe, where he's gotten to see firsthand what it looks like to have a full itinerary where you gotta make a session, you gotta be on a podcast, you gotta do press, you gotta um, you know, network with your fans, you gotta be on a IG live that's scheduled for you. You have a a meeting with your ARs, your label, whatever. He's seen it firsthand. So he started to adopt some of that in his own artistry, and he's thinking that it's really, you know, helping him make strides in the in in the industry, right? He's still got a long way to go, but he's one of the hardest working people we've come across. Absolutely, um, so far, and that's part of why we believe in him so much. Shout out to Keenan. Shout out to Keenan. Um, and it was just interesting hearing it from two different guests.

So I thought that it was great for us to really dive right into it. Yeah. Um, so what's your perception? The average person that wants to do music, what would you say their day looks like? The average person, their day is a mystery to me sometimes. You know, you know. I mean, we've talked about this before, because, you know, sure, you gotta be in the studio, you gotta be writing, you gotta be reaching out to producers for beats and whatnot, but there's way, way much more time in the day than than just those little tasks, you know. So we've had artists where that we support, that you know, that we want to work with, and we've had to, you know, reach out and ask those tough questions, like, you know, what is it that you do all day, you know? Because there's other artists out there that are waking up sending DMs, right? They're writing, they're getting in touch with whoever in the industry that can maybe help them get to the next level of their journey. They're making content, They're planning out their content.

Big one. Yeah, shout out content. Shout out content, content is king. King. But yeah, I mean, you you mentioned something really interesting. It goes so much further than just waking up and I'm gonna be in the studio today. And don't get me wrong, that's a part of it. Yes. You have to make music, you have to better your craft as an artist, but it goes so much further than that. And there's so many other tactical things that you need to be doing that are boring as hell. Don't get me wrong. They're not fun in comparison to not what you think you signed up for when you wanted to be a rapper. No, everyone thinks it's fun and games in the music industry. And trust me, from the outside looking in, it looks glamorous, but I'm telling you that there's so much more that needs to be done. And I think that the artists that win, when you speak with the people that are on their teams and that know what they are doing day in and day out, they're the hardest worker in the room. Like, for example, when I started doing this really seriously, I was comparing myself to my friends that had nine to fives, right?

Went to college, did the regular kind of route. And when these guys, you know, they go to work at 9 a.m., they get up, go to work, and at five o'clock, they get off and they go home. And after five o'clock, nothing related to work is entering their brain, right? Period. It's it's a switch. It's like a mental switch is turned off. They're not laying in bed at 10 p.m. trying to go to sleep thinking, you know, how could I file those papers better tomorrow? You know? And I realized that if you decide that this is really something you want to do, it's like an entrepreneurial mindset. You it's something that is literally never turned off. It's something that should be in the back of your mind when you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. What would you say that you do to try and take your career seriously? Like, what are some tactical things that you have tried to adopt? Because I mean, you mentioned you weren't doing this necessarily first, you know, first starting out at all. At all.

So, what would you say as of recent? And you're not perfect, I'm not perfect, we're still trying to get better each and every day. But what would you say are some like a few things at least that you've tactically adopted? Yeah. From a from a pretty broad perspective, I'd say one of the most important things was laying out in front of me everything that I felt like was necessary to you know further my career. And it's a lot. I'm talking about every single little thing, and then looking at everything and really deciding, okay, what am I capable of doing? What am I good at doing? What do I like doing? And then the things that are either really hard for me or I'm not capable, or I just fucking hate doing it, finding a person that can be on your team that can do it for you, whether they just believe in you, whether you got to give them a little bit of money, whatever it may be. Knowing all of the tasks at hand and then delegating them, taking care of the ones that you're able to take care of, but then finding people that can really be a part of your team and trustworthy to take care of the rest.

That's a major, major thing. There's so many things that you do for me that is just shit I don't want to do, and you're like perfect at it, and you're great at it, you like to do it. So, like that worked out beautiful. So that's one good example of that, I would say. Yeah, and so you're a producer. Sometimes. Sometimes your day job. Um, so of course, producers want to just be making music all day, which is part of what you do. Don't get me wrong, you're in sessions a lot, you're working on beats, you're hitting up artists, giving feedback, you're getting their input on hey, what do you want this record to sound like, so on and so forth, right? So I I get it. You're you're doing that part. What are some of those other things that producers that want to take their craft seriously and make this a sustainable business and a career? What are those other things? You mentioned, you know, laying out the the pieces to the puzzle, right? Yeah.

Take making music is one piece of the puzzle. You know, hitting up artists about the music is another piece. Those are more of the glamorous pieces, I would say. For sure. That's what are some of the shitty, not the corner end pieces of the puzzle that trench pieces. The easy, the easy ones. I'm talking like dead in the middle of the puzzle. Networking is a big one. Sending cold emails, cold DMs, following, and it could be a long game, you know. You could follow someone and start just liking their post. You could turn on post notifications. Here's one right here. Turn on post notifications one more time. I haven't even said it yet, but I will one more time. I'll go ahead and one more time and fuck it. Because it's a good one. One more time. Turn on post notifications for the artists that you really want to work with. So that every time they post, you're right there liking their posts, maybe leaving a clever comment and hopefully getting them to notice you. Eventually, they're gonna click your profile. Maybe see you're a music producer, and then maybe you can open the door for a conversation from there, right? Sure.

So networking is a big one. Um, we mentioned content. But let's break down networking. Sure. You gotta be strategic about it. And I think that where artists fall on their face is that it gets overwhelming of like, shit, I need to hit up artists, I gotta hit up artists, I gotta sell more beats, I gotta sell more beats. But being strategic and and tactful about it is what's gonna work. And I think that we've seen some success in just getting artists that you we made a list of the artists that you wanted to work with, and we wrote them down. I'm all about handwritten goals and handwritten tasks. It just feels more concrete. You can fucking hold the piece of paper that you've written it on, you can hold the whiteboard, whatever you like to do. We made a list, and we then figured out okay, how do we attack this target list of artists that you want to work with? Right? We were speaking on behalf of producers in this case. We took that list, and yeah, turning on those post notifications, sending them uh video and voice messages that are so much more personal than just like video message is a big one.

The video message I think got us like five, ten artists on the hook out of our list of like 20. It was like a 50% conversion. Yo, bro, wanna collab? Or you could be like, yo, fucking Matt, man. Like, I love your shit, man. Like, I got some beats. Here's one right here. Look at that. This shit sounds crazy, man. You should get on this one right here. Hit me up if you need anything. The difference in those is huge, huge difference. At the end of the day, we didn't strike gold on every single target artist. We still have a bunch on our list that we're trying to knock down their door and you know, finally get to work with. Um, but I think that it's a multi-faceted, you know, multi-pronged approach, if you will. The only other side of the coin of that is I'm afraid that people could hear that and get really lost in the strategic part and spend too much time strategizing when, you know, at the end of the day, action, right? We talk about action, action, action. Strategy's great as long as it doesn't get in the way of you actually doing one thing we always say is start messy.

Yes. Just check out this podcast. This is episode nine, and first episode, we may or may not have had some technical difficulties. Second episode, we may or may not have had some technical difficulties. Third episode, you get the picture. But we started. We took action, we're growing, our audience is tapping in. You guys are showing love to the podcast. You're you're, you know, engaging with the content that we're putting out. But we started. Shout out to y'all. We yeah, thank you to everyone who's tuned in so far. You guys mean the world to us. Uh, we'd probably still talk about shit and record it, even if you guys didn't listen, but it's just a bonus that you guys do. It's nice. A couple people are listening. That you guys are tapping in. But so moving into artists, right? What would you say? And we can both weigh in on this, but what would you say are some once again, not in the studio, not making music things that need to be done that are demonstrating that you're taking this seriously as an artist? We mentioned content.

I think it's worth mentioning again. I mean, there's no greater way to build a brand for free. For free. Remember, like, it doesn't cost anything to make an Instagram or Twitter or YouTube channel than to make content and put it out consistently so that people can learn who you are. In this day and age, to me, people are falling in love with the artist before they're falling in love with the music. That's a huge thing that's going on right now. That's why one more time. One that's why you don't be afraid to give it to yourself, man. Yeah, it's weird to one more time myself, but I'll take it. No, you have to on these. Um there's that's why you have these huge people that they have these huge followings, and then they might end up doing music later just because they have a following, which I kind of hate that because they're obviously weren't that interested in music, but it works, and they do numbers simply because they built themselves like a personal brand. So if you can get people, on the contrary, I love those people. Yeah, I love it.

Yeah, it's it's just the way that it's done now. Like, oh, I people fell in love with me because I have so many pounds of weed, and I'm gonna put out a mixtape. No, I mean, that's a very, you know, shallow level of it, but just in general, whether it's people that have built a fashion brand first, whether they've built an online, you know, comedy type of brand, whether they've built um really anything. Yeah, it could be weed smoking, it could be, you know, a number of things, they've still built an audience. You can hate it. You, I'm saying you, one can hate on it all they want. But there's comments, there's likes, there's shares, there's saves for a fucking reason. And it can work. I'm not saying it can't work at all. I just mean there's a lot of people that do it and they put the minimal effort into the music side of it, and the music comes out very bad, and then bad music becomes the norm. But I just think that it the reason why I love it is because it should show the music first people, the ones that are artists true and true to begin with.

That the brand is that that's how important it is. Equally, if not more important. That's it. It's so important. And that's why I love it. Is because it's just it's proven case studies. Yeah. That oh, you think it's just because your music's good that that's what's gonna work? Yeah. Sorry. Did you see funny skit guy that then dropped a single that's done 10,000 times more streams than your last single did, and that's because you don't have a brand that anyone cares about? Yep. And it's not meant to be rude, but it's just meant to be that's what it is. It's real, it sucks. And I it does it kind of sucks in some ways, but it is real. We're having the tough combos here. But, on the One more time music podcast. It sucks if you don't embrace it. Yeah, it sucks if you don't adapt. Agreed. People that didn't adapt to the streaming era or the Napster era got left by the wayside. People that don't didn't adapt to the TikTok era recently have gotten lot, you know, left in the wayside, right? Which by the way, let's talk about TikTok for five seconds.

Rappers, you are not too cool for TikTok. I promise you. You don't have to do the dances, you don't have to do any of that. But we're talking about building a personal brand, and there's no better place where you can post content and get insane free organic reach than TikTok. You don't have to, you can rap, you can just rap on TikTok. Do you make the content yours, make it contextual to the platform, but you're not too cool for TikTok. Get on TikTok if you want to be building a personal brand and get free organic reach. I admittedly have not had enough TikToks, however, you say that. I feel old trying to You haven't been TikToking enough? I haven't TikToked to my maximum. Well, you should TikTok your ass off this next week. I should. Um, but let's talk more about you're not too cool too. You're not too cool to work hard. That was pretty much the reason why we wanted to get on this episode. Yeah.

Because we had a discussion recently, literally, where we were getting kind of heated about like people that we know and that we just see Potentially. thinking that they're too cool to do XYZ, to put in the work, to DM a thousand of their fans, just thanking them for their support out of the blue, not asking for anything even the first time, right? Mm-hmm. Too cool, too cool to put out content. And by the way, this is very situational. You know, this is for people who have their goal is to become a successful artist and make money. You know, if you just want to be a cool rapper with 20 monthly listeners and you're good with that, then by all means. This is for the people that complain about not having had their moment, but that aren't putting in the work. Yep. Those people that are complaining about not getting their moment, not having their time to shine. I'd love to know what you do every day. Yeah, what do you do?

What are you doing every single day? You smoke weed and jerk off all day. I'm talking about when you're taking a shit, are you just scrolling through, you know, pictures of of hot girls on Instagram, or are you hitting up your followers, asking them what kind of content you should be making, asking them what they've been listening to recently, getting to know your followers and your fans? You probably can't even tell me who your target fan is. And that's an issue. And that's because you don't want to put in the work. And I hate being this blunt, but it's it's really gotten me like riled up recently. As you can tell. You're heated. I just see so much potential in a bunch of artists that I either know personally or know of. And I I just know that they can be doing more than they do. And it's it's a rude awakening for a lot of them when they realize that it's not just gonna be this cool music video that puts them over the top, or this feature that they paid X amount of dollars for that's gonna blow them up. Is there a point where like if they're not putting in the work where maybe it's just not in their heart, maybe like is it is there a point where it's just maybe they have to realize it's not what they actually want?

You know, and that they should be doing it as a hobby? You know, like it how much of it is like if you really did want it that bad is the only thing you wanted in life, then wouldn't you be working that hard? Well, at what point did you realize that? Like, was there an aha moment at all? I wouldn't say there was like a definable moment at all. And for all I know, I could still be, you know, trying to move further into that, you know. It's still a battle that I have sometimes. I still have days where I wake up like, you know, is that am I doing this? You know, am I sure? I question myself still, and that's a scary thing, you know. But I think it's normal. I think so too, to a degree for sure. I think anyone in any career wakes up sometimes and says, Do I want to do this? Yeah. You know, I've never had the desire to do anything else more yet. Yeah. So yeah. Um, but I think over the years I've definitely kind of realized more and more, you know, what it's what it is gonna take. And I've adapted to it pretty good.

So I think I probably would have resisted some of the extra work that I've come to learn comes with doing this. Yeah. If it wasn't something that I really wanted. Yep. No, that's true. And at the end of the day, the reason why we're talking about this is because it is a job. As much as people do love their jobs, it's not gonna be all glamorous all the time. So there are gonna be days where you gotta do the paperwork, you gotta make the content that you don't want to necessarily spend time making. You gotta respond to comments, all of them. You gotta hit up people via DMs. You gotta register your songs on your pros and and you know, with put with publishing, you gotta look over agreements, whatever. There's there's tons of things that aren't as glamorous, but it's the music and then it's the music business. Exactly. And so that's why I think that we wanted to get on this this episode to really talk about this. So I I'm here to to kind of look at you and say, Are you doing everything that you think you could be doing?

Are you really? And it's you know, it's something that like you said, you wake up every day, and if you're not getting constantly better, what are you doing? So that's where I think that at least get 1% better every day, get 0.1% better every day. Just take another step above and beyond what you've been doing and take more action, right? Yeah. What would you say are a couple more things that artists in particular can be doing that isn't the obvious stuff? I think engaging in general, it not just with a new audience, but also with your current audience. Yeah, exactly. I think the power of the DM. Do you know how badly artists of the past would have loved to be able to literally connect with their fans directly directly? They had to have mailing lists and uh fan clubs for that type of shit, right? Yep.

You can quite literally within seconds send messages and ask questions and get feedback from and ask for support and thank for support fans of yours right now. Yeah, every single day, too. So it's engaging, man. Yeah, you can uh you could message your favorite artist right now, and there's a chance that they see it. So if you're the artist, why not give your fans that opportunity? Imagine how good it would make you feel. Now, if you send a well-crafted message, you put thought into it, you stay persistent, you engage with them on their content, you you know, show love, you hit them on email, Twitter, Instagram, you show persistence without being annoying, without being spammy, you're going to at least connect with someone. It's not gonna work every time. One more time. One more, one more time. It just goes back to that multifaceted approach where you not only do you Instagram DM, do you Twitter DM, do you find their email, do you tap into a live IG that they're doing, a Zoom, uh, a conference that they're on that that they're a panelist on, whatever.

You can find ways to connect with these people that you want to connect with, whether it's me trying to connect with other like-minded business people in the industry, or you as a producer trying to connect with other producers or artists that you want to work with. You can find these people and you can be professionally persistent, not to the point of being annoying or spammy and just yo, let's let's collab, bro. Like, no, no, bro. None none of that. Stop saying that. Stop doing that. But really, it's amazing to me, man. And I and I just love that it's it's possible. The power of the smartphone. Yeah. And so I mean, you just mentioned, you know, what are the other things. So I think, yeah, it's engaging with your existing followers trying to convert them into fans. Super fans. And then existing fans trying to convert them into super fans. Yep. But then you can literally find new followers and find new fans. Yeah. And people think that that's this impossible feat. If you know what your uh target market likes, let's say you have a fan base that's primarily skaters or gamers.

There are pages online. Find the hashtag. There's Facebook groups, there's Instagram pages, there's subreddits on Reddit, there's YouTube communities, there's all sorts of online places where those people hang out, and you can be a part of that community. Once again, don't go spam them with your links, none of that shit. But you can be a part of that if it's something that you're genuinely interested in as well. And you can attract those potential followers and potential fans. Major. So that would be a major key. That would be the biggest thing I would say for artists for sure. And then it that all starts with. And it applies to producers as well. 100%. But it starts with self-awareness because you have to be really honest with yourself. You're gonna need to get some outside opinions and figure out who is going to like me and my brand and my product. Because some people, like you said earlier, I think uh have no idea who their target audience is. And if you don't know that, it's gonna be hard to put yourself in front of them, right?

Because if you know exactly who they are, what they do, what they eat, where they go on uh their day off, where they work, then you can put yourself in front of them gently without being spammy, and you can build a lot. That's a great point. Yep. And I think just to wrap up, I really love the laying out the puzzle pieces and then trying to fit them together. Yeah, that to me just goes back to writing down goals, writing down to do lists. Like I'm the king of to do lists. Like I love a good to-do list, right? As lame as it sounds, I swear it's like my saving grace. Writing down the tasks that you have for the day, for the week, for the month, for the year, even. And that's something that we've tried to do. We could definitely get better about it. Yes. But I think it's huge. It is short, medium, and long term. Yep, short, medium, long term goals. And if you make sure that you think through the other things that you need to be doing to take your artistry seriously, to take your producer career seriously, to take your music manager career seriously. Um, if you if you write those things down and hold yourself accountable, stare at that list every day in the freaking face, um, you're gonna take action against it and you're gonna start to see results.

I think it makes it easier too. It kind of helps prioritize and you know, you know, okay, I started step one. Yeah. It actually makes the process easier on top of that. You can see and feel when you're checking things off the list, too. And that's where it's like an amazing sense of accomplishment. Get addicted to that feeling, crossing, you need to like relate that to crack or whatever you gotta do to make that endorphin go go off when you and on that note, don't do drugs, kids. This has been another episode of the One More Time Podcast. Shout out, crack. I hope you guys like this format. Seriously, because we really enjoy it. So we're gonna do it either way. Uh we're gonna come back though next week. We're gonna get back into the habit of getting guests on. We've got a long list of guests coming up from directors, uh, videographers, producers, artists, managers, lawyers, A&Rs. We're gonna have people that are behind the scenes and those in front of the spotlight. That's right. In the music business, we're gonna have genuine conversations with genuine people about music. This has been a blessing, folks.

Another episode in the books, one more time podcast. We appreciate you guys tuning in. Until next week, we are out. Peace out. Hop up in a flash carton. Yeah.