Avoid These Mistakes To Grow Your Music Career

So yeah, you went out of town last week. It's my turn. Where are you going? Nashville. I'm gonna be a Nashvillain. NashVegas? NashVegas, indeed. But I'm actually gonna be a Nashvillain. Me and some buddies go every year and we play the villain part at the MLS, Atlanta United versus Nashville game. We go in and just piss off all the fucking hometown heroes and just play the villain. It's awesome. How long have you been doing this? I guess this would be year four, but I missed last year. So I'm anxious to get back out there, you know. Don't do that. This don't do that emotion. It's very like motivational, like kind of swing. God, for those that are only listening on audio, they're blessed. They're blessed. Shout out to you guys. Yeah. YouTube fans, I'm sorry about that. But I do have one great story from a couple years ago I want to share. Hit us. The gentleman will remain unnamed. No, I named him. Friend, Kevin. Yes.

We We walk in. That was amazing. You had to do it. But you gotta got me there. You got me there. I'm not gonna lie. Yo, he doesn't listen to the podcast. You were quick to snitch on this man, bro. I don't know. I kind of trust you a little less after that. Come on. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So two minutes into the soccer game. Two minutes. Atlanta scores. We're up one zero. We're freaking the fuck out. We had just sat down. We were underdogs. We fucking are going crazy. This man stands up and throws his beer in the air, which is a thing that we do in Atlanta in the supporter section. It gets very rowdy there, but that's in Atlanta, and we know we can do that in the supporter section. People bring umbrellas because they throw their beers like it's okay there because it's a thing. You don't do that. In another city, where everyone else is an enemy. He fucking hit a kid. No. He hit a kid with his beer. How old are we talking? This kid. 12. Like he's not injured, but like people were pissed. He got kicked out.

He got kicked out? Immediately kicked out at the very beginning of the game. How does that conversation go? Like everyone's yelling at us and everyone's pissed, and they go get security and they tell them what happened, and security's like, you gotta go. It was very simple. That simple. And then he ended up sneaking back in on the other side of the stadium. I don't know how he got back in. Told us to come over there and sit in the Nashville supporter section. Oh where there's even more like we don't belong, you know, going on. And um, we're cheering for Atlanta, and everyone's pissed because we're like cheering super hard for Atlanta and we're drinking. And they we ended up getting kicked out of that section, not kicked out of the stadium again, but they kicked, they removed us from that section. There was almost an altercation with police. Um we're gonna go for a much more tame trip this year. Come on, man. You have a lot of riding on this. Yeah, you know, the podcast depends on you, bro. Look, soccer's a big deal, man. You know, MLS, What, what's the biggest sport in the world, I think? The MLS. Yeah. Everyone cares about the MLS, right?

I mean, it's definitely global for sure. At this point, I think it's like MLS championship and then Super Bowl? Yeah, yeah, probably. I think that's how it goes. Maybe March Madness after that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, for sure. So, So I've been listening to the blog era podcast. I I vaguely told you about this, I feel like. Yep. And so the blog era podcast is by it's the real. It's the real which is two white Jewish hip-hop sketch comedians, Eric and Jeff Rosenthal. Yes. I do look at them like, wow, we can do it. We can do it. We have hope. Yeah, they're like my my, you know, knight in shining armor, right? Jesus. Um, yeah, so they have this podcast called A blog, the Blog Era, excuse me. And it's uh under the other tone, um Pharrell's umbrella brand or whatever thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

And and so it's it's under that brand, and basically it's documenting the blog era, right? And so it's being released uh almost like a Netflix show, man. Like the way that they're dropping it because they've already recorded all of it. It's only gonna be, I think, 10 episodes, maybe. So it's almost like a little mini podcast series. So it's not gonna be a ongoing continuing show, right? But they're hyping it up like it's a it's a fucking crazy, dude. Yeah. yeah. Yes, yes. So the first episode was about Joe Budden. And did you know much about Joe Budden? Um, like his like how he broke and just his whole story kind of coming up. I know he was part of the um the group, you know, in Detroit with Royce and Eminem and uh Yeah, but that was so far after, bro. Crazy Eyes or what's his name? Um The Guy with the eyes. Crooked I. eye crooked eye exactly, yeah, yeah. Crooked Eye Royce, that's kind of when I got hit too. Um Joel Ortiz, Joel, yeah, yeah, Joe Budden and stuff. Yeah, um Slaughterhouse, but anyway, yeah.

And so he was basically they were trying to make him into this mainstream artist, and a bunch of shit happened where his his song, and I can't remember I'm blanking on the song, but his his debut single off of his like highly anticipated album got released on the Fast and the Furious soundtrack or the too Fast Too Furious soundtrack, I think, right? So everyone went and copped that CD for his song. Like they wanted to hear that song, but then his project flopped with the label. Weird. And so it was like all this conspiracy theory around Def Jam fucking him, I think. I'm pretty sure it was you know, it was Def Jam the label. But anyway, so like there was so all this controversy because everyone was just so much hype and anticipation around Joe Budden. Like this dude is just blowing up. Like he had, you know, pop hits almost at the time, right? Like they were super mainstream, like radio bangers, right?

And no one bought that shit. And he just it was just thing after thing, right? Where he in pure Joe Budden fashion, which now hindsight makes perfect sense. He basically was like buck the system. And so he was almost one of the early uh, I guess, products of the internet, bro. Apparently, he was like super internet savvy back in the day and was in all these, you know, chats and forums and just online communities essentially. He was one of the four 4channer, he was he was just one of the first to like buy into all that shit. Interesting, which I thought was super interesting, and I didn't know that about him really. He strikes me as a smart guy, obviously a troll, but I think he knows what he's doing at the same time, you know. Yeah, but apparently he was the type of guy that was almost like hippie like, like legs crossed in the studio, like a weird dude. It doesn't that does not come across anymore. Exactly. And they were trying to push him as this like street artist and shit at first. And so it just that whole episode just kicking things off really reeled me in.

Like they did a great job. Yeah, and so then the last you know, a couple of episodes have been about, you know, actually moving into the specific blogs. They've focused on not Right.com right now. Not right, yeah. Yeah, which SK was the guy that, you know, founded that, and he was working this part-time IT job while he was blogging, and just hearing the stories of how, how the blogs became such a critical part of uh You weren't you weren't popping if the blogs weren't talking about you. Exactly. And that era. And what years would you say can make the blog era? I mean, I guess this was like oh, you know, oh six to like 2012 type of deal, you know what I mean? Like kind of like late first decade of the 2000s and then early, you know, second decade of the 2000s. Maybe even a little longer than that. Yeah. Like 2015 even. Yeah, man. And so it was just, I'm so excited for the rest of the episodes. Like, damn. Well, you just got me hooked.

I'm gonna go watch it after this. For sure, for sure. But so on this episode, I really wanted to unpack a few of I would say the most common themes that have been brought up on our interviews, right? So for those if you're listening to us talk, actually, you've definitely seen an interview. By the way, we do interviews. Yeah, I was gonna say y'all know we do interviews if you're hearing. it for a long time, A lot of dope people. Check them out. Yeah, go to our page. Yeah, so this isn't like me and Henry's like narrow experiences. We have had a lot of moments where we're interviewing someone and they say something that another guest has said, and it we have a moment where we kind of look at each other like, oh, yeah, there's that again. There's that thing again. Is that annoying, you think for the guest? Do they know what's happening there? They probably have no idea what we're doing. They're like, It's probably pretty creepy. Well, because I have to look over at you away from the guest and be like, right? It's normal for me, because I usually sit there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just gotta go like this.

Yeah, yeah. But so I wanted to talk about and just, you know, briefly unpack, I would say the top three mistakes that independent artists are making in today's music industry. And there's way more than that. There's so many mistakes you guys are making. Don't get us wrong. These are just the top three. Yeah, this is not according to me, although I have my own opinions, but this is according to you know, people that are doing it at an extremely high level, right? So the first one I want to talk about is artists that tease music too long. Shout out to North Ave Jax. His episode, his interview will not be out yet by the time this is out. But this was definitely a topic during that. This came back up with Jax, which is why I really wanted to talk about it. Yeah. But you and I, when we've been working with other, you know, artist friends of ours, we've gone back and forth about this, right? Of like how many TikToks should you make about a song before it's actually out for them to be able to go stream it, right? And I think you can make a lot.

I just don't think the time period, I think that the time in which you make them can't be too long. You know, I'm all for some people are real secretive with their music and don't want them to hear it, you know, until like I I don't buy into a lot of that personally. I say let people hear your shit. People copy shit all the time. If you're scared of that, like it's gonna happen, whatever. Um, just get over it. Like you want to share your good shit and get people buying into what it is you're doing. Sure. But you want to hear a couple of data points? No, no, just a couple data points on this, right? Sure, sure. There's an artist pertinence who I showed you fire. This white kid out in Cali. He's so weird. I love him. He's got like orange curly hair, he's very bizarre. Like his content though is top tier. This dude is absolutely crushing the content game. Pattern interrupts. Yes, is a good one. Every single video you see of his, you're immediately watching. Let me keep watching. Yeah, something weird is happening, the lyrics are fire, whatever. The music is really good too.

So he talked about it. He has a podcast, I think, called Art, not Algorithms. Which is kind of a fire name. So he unpacked, because once again, he's an artist who has, I mean, shit, maybe look him up real quick. Yeah. Uh actually, no, your phone. My phone doesn't even work. Yeah, yeah. I just want to uh you know set the stage as far as um how many monthly listeners this guy has. So you got to do a day to entertain the 201,000 monthly listeners, all right. His top songs, you know, 2 million uh streams on Spotify, 600,000, 860, 200, 270, right? So this guy is, I would say on the upper tier of like, you know, an independent artist uh trajectory, right? So he has a couple of use cases with this exact concept that he talked about on his podcast. So he did one song where he was promoting the hell out of it pre-release, just video after video after video for like you know, several weeks, let's just say, uh, pre-the song being out. The first day streams were about 3,500, I think, like three or 4,000 first day.

Right? Sounds light. You know, I mean, for some people that's fucking incredible. No, for sure. But for the hype. Sure. Okay. Then he did another test where he did not mention a word about a song coming out until the day that it was out. And then it was video after video after video after video, right? Oh like several videos in a day type shit. 16,000 streams first day. How different were the songs? Exactly. It's so hard to like there's more factors. Right. But I'm just saying his argument. It's interesting. His argument was, and I I tend to agree with this strategy is that y'all, he he said this, and I kind of agree is that no one gives a flying fuck that you're releasing a song in a month. If you're an independent artist, just be real with yourself. No one gives a flying fuck, is what he he was saying. And I we've heard that time and time again of like until you've built a fan base of people who are anxiously waiting, you you know, your drops, right? Just release music, bro.

Yeah. And then promote it so they have somewhere to fucking go and listen to it. To me, a lot of it is also how you present it. So meaning what? Meaning if you're saying, hey guys, I'm dropping a song in a month, here's what it sounds like. That's a terrible pre-saved. That's awful. But if I go on IG live. I hope no one does that though. They do though. And it's like, hey, but if I go on IG from an artist and I go on IG live and I'm just kind of talking to the fans, interacting, and then I just maybe casually, you know, go like, oh yeah, here's a song I did the other day, and play it, you know, and kind of and bop to it, and you have people like you creating a like a curiosity around it. And if it's fire and people are like, oh, like, what is that song? What's that? And you're kind of being cool about it. I think if you perceive it as, you know, and you if you tease it in the right way, you don't want to be salesy. No one wants to be told to go stream a song. But if you like hint at that, like, oh, I have this song, maybe I'm dropping it, you know, maybe I'm not, maybe don't even mention if you're dropping it. Who knows?

But playing it here and there just to kind of gauge and give people a taste, I think that that gets a much better reaction than the whole it's the sales thing, man. You don't tell people to stream music, you just put shit in cool places, let people figure it out for themselves. Yeah, but that's true regardless of if it's pre-release or post-release, you shouldn't be doing much of the go stream my song. Like that doesn't fucking work. No one wants to be told to do that. Yeah. We don't want that as consumers. But I think you can do that before to some degree. Yeah. It it just maybe you tease your song and everyone hates it, and then maybe you shouldn't drop it. Like maybe that's a good way to no, I mean, I mean, you bring up a good point. If you're doing it in the like AR sense of doing it, meaning trying to figure out if this is something that you want to drop, I would kind of lean towards agreeing with you, right? But if you're doing it thinking that people are going to want to come back and like mark their calendars that you're dropping in a month, it's not happening. It ain't fucking happening, bro.

Yeah. So, all right. So, enough of that. That's one point. yeah, yeah, because that that's one of the most you know common mistakes I feel like that we've heard over and over again from you know people that are doing it. Keep it pushing. So, somewhat on that note, I would say that um people aren't dropping enough music. Right? So, we we talked about this with Adam Ivy and the clip around the real reasons why Russ blew up. It's doing great. is has done stupid numbers. More comments today. That clip's like a month old. It's going crazy still on Instagram for sure. Yeah, um, so you know, that whole concept around how often should you drop? Should it be every month? Should it be every quarter? Should it be every week? Should it be every fucking day? Uh, you know, what what are your thoughts from everything that we've heard from people? What would you recommend? Like an independent artist out there? How frequently should they be dropping? So, to me, I think that there is a level of like, if you want to give someone a chance to become a super fan, they need to have something to kind of binge out on. If they want to be a real fan, they need to have some material, some catalog for them to go dive into.

It's like if I see an episode of a TV show and I'm like, oh my God, this is the greatest show ever. Then I found out that was the pilot, and there's no other episodes, I'm kind of let down. Maybe I'll forget about it. So I think the earlier an artist is in the career in their career, the more important it is to start building that catalog and have something for fans to go to. Um and then, you know, but if you do have a catalog out already, I don't know. I mean, I think it's less important, but I do still think it's important. I think about guys like a Ben Riley, who drops an album and promotes it for a year. He does a great job promoting it for a year, and he's doing okay. Yeah. Well, it's kind of the counter argument to that. Well, well, yeah, so you're kind of you know, foreshadowing my third most common mistake that that artists make. But I kind of I kind of just want to weigh in on this. So Sean Barron, whose episode dropped literally today, as of us recording this episode, by the time this is out, it'll probably have been a week or two old. Four days or so.

Oh no, yeah, actually, a week and a half. Yeah, yeah, it's like a week and a half old. But uh, he started a record label with Ty Dolla $ign. Yep. It's called Easy Money. Uh, he was a former AR at Atlantic, he was a former AR at Capital Motown. This dude has he was like the first to bring Drake to a record label. They passed. The label passed on him. he was the first to bring Wale. Like this dude knows a thing or two, right? Um his recommendation was for sure, if you're an artist early on in your career, because we asked him about the NBA Young Boy versus Playboi Carti release strategy, which is essentially what we're talking about right now. Um, he was like, if you're early on in your career, drop, drop, drop, drop. Like stay on their ass. That's how I feel too. Yeah. I I just I think, you know, shout out to Ben Riley, who we've had on the pod, who just got off tour with token, a national like 30, you know, plus dates tour. He's also got an amazing team behind him. He's so they're milk, they can milk the fuck out of one album for an entire year straight.

Yeah. Successfully. I would say once again, most people don't have that. I would not look at Ben Riley dropping, you know, a project a year as the recommendation. Yeah. As the blueprint you should probably, you know, think is is what works for everyone. Unless you have Key Henderson behind you. In which case, go for it. Unless you have the person that, you know, first discovered 21 Savage and was there, you know, was instrumental in their, you know, career trajectory. Drop music. Like let people know who you are. Expand the catalog so that if someone does find your 76th song that you dropped, they have 75 more songs to go binge and become a deep true fan of yours. That's super important to me. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, not to bring up this guy pertinence, but I've actually been falling in love with not only his like music, he's dope, but his like strategies and his and you know his content creation. He has 80 singles out right now. Boom. So he's been somewhat adopting that Russ mentality where he's been doing like projects though, but but then he's promoting each individual song as if it was just a single.

Because once again, no one fucking cares if it was a single or if it was on a project that you already dropped, because they don't fucking know until they go click on the song or search the song up. You can add both to a playlist. Exactly. It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter. So for me, when everyone's like singles or or albums, I'm more just about promote each song. I'm about, I'll say this. I say don't drop a fucking album unless it's an a well thought out concept album. Sure. That's what's one of those. Unless it's a concept album, I don't think you need to put a bunch of singles on one big. It's like you're giving someone a playlist of singles. That's annoying. If you have an idea for a project and it flows and has skits, and there's a story and there's a narrative from front to back, and you're painting a picture the whole time, and I can just press play at the beginning and get lost until the end. Dope. Do the album. Otherwise, just drop some songs. Like if you, you know, drop some singles.

Who cares? Maybe four-song EP. You know, you could do a three-song single. You can drop a single that's three songs. Get creative with that. There's just other ways of going about it. Yeah. You know? No, for sure. And you only get one debut album. Yeah. You only get one second album. Like, are you just gonna throw some singles together? That and people are gonna remember that as your second album. Yeah, that's true. I don't know. So the the the you know third topic I want to discuss, and the third, I guess, most common mistake that we've heard people talk about on the pod. Shitty producers. Yeah, and shitty engineers. No, I'm just kidding. So working with me. No, no. Um, so not promoting your music long enough has been proven to be just fucking detrimental to your you know trajectory as an independent artist, right? Now I see where Ben Riley's coming back around. Yes, exactly. So that's why I think it was important what you said about him. He believes in his music and stands on his record so fucking much that this dude has gone nonstop getting creative as fuck. Don't get me wrong, He's not posting the same fucking cover art every week or some shit.

This dude is getting super creative, and it's thing after thing after thing, new video for new song, new bits of content, you know, whatever the case may be, new interview, new podcast, new this. But a year straight, bro, promoting the same project. And it doesn't feel old to me watching the content because it is something new, it is something creative. The songs are well thought out, they are dope, and it and it works. And he milked the fuck out of that album for a year and then dropped another one, and he's still milking that one. And it's working, I think. Yeah. Again. Yep. Yep. And so we have Money Moo on here who had a song that was, I think, three years old. I was gonna bring up Moo if you didn't. Yeah, Hittin'. Uh he he stood on that song. He was working the clubs, working the DJs, like doing as much word of mouth, you know, street promos he could hit he could as he could fucking possibly do. This dude was putting in the work. Uh he ended up getting Moneybagg Yo and Foogiano on the remix. Free Foo. And say what you want about that being the reason that you know the song ended up going extremely crazy. I mean, it was going crazy before.

They hopped on because it was going crazy. Exactly. Yeah. And that it was years, years old. That sent it into another stratosphere, of course. Yes. But the the fact is is that he could have just have I just want to say this. He could have just as easily gotten Moneybagg, yo, and Fujiano on a new song. Yes. Uh as features. They don't, they're charging the same bag, Yep. whether it's on an old song or a new song. And Fu was a label made at the time. So yeah, that could have been, you know, no, for sure. That's easy. For sure. But my point is is that he believed in that original records so much. Yep. that he chose to get them on that song versus just, you know, something new that he was making. Yep. And I think that's powerful. And the the last example I'm gonna bring up is Baby Tate. Shout out Shout out, formerly known as Young Baby Tate. She grew up. Yes, in front of our eyes. Shout out YBT. I'm so proud. Yes.

No, I I am proud, honestly, man. Seeing what she did with her song, Hey Mickey, it was six or seven years old. Yeah. It had, I don't even know, less than a hundred thousand streams for sure. I would, I would almost it might even be less. I don't know. It was an a very negligible amount of streams. When she revived that song by just crushing TikTok like she's been doing with all of her records, which is why she's just in another stratosphere at this point, right? The word stratosphere. I love it. I've said it like four times. It Feels right for this topic for some reason. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Maybe next episode it'll be something different. Um, but no, man. Uh, at the peak of Hey Mickey, they were doing a million streams a day. Amazing. That's insane. Seven year old song, guys. Yeah. A million streams a day. Yeah. Once again, say what you want. She could have been posting TikToks around just her newest song because it's the bright, shiny object. It's the new thing.

Oh my god, I love my new shit. Fuck my old shit. Like, which is what most artists say, I feel like. But no, man. Seven-year-old song. This this girl put in the work, it caught fire. People people gravitated towards it, and it at the you know, at its peak, was doing a million streams a day. I actually want to see how many total streams it was. It's such a sad sentiment that when an artist releases a song, they feel like, oh well, there it is. Like, we released it. Like, it's over. The game's over. Literally, the game begins when you drop the song. That song is now forever on streaming. You can choose to promote it any day of your life until you die. It's not going anywhere unless you stop paying your distributor, however, that works. Oh my gosh. All right. So it was released in 2016. It is her most popular song right now on Spotify. She has eight million monthly listeners. It has done 91 million streams. Unfucking believable.

And as of just months ago. Just because they decided to revive it and make it happen. Exactly, man. So cool. Stand on your records, believe in your music. If you thought it was a hit when you made it and when you released it, don't give up on it. Don't. Don't give up on it. Last little bit. Let's give some homework to the artists out there. You guys have a homework assignment if you're an artist. Oh God. Pick your favorite fucking shit, your favorite old song, and have let's have a just a nice brainstorming session around a dope creative marketing, whatever the fuck you want it to be. And see what happens. You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.