How To Blow Your Music Up With ZERO Dollars

One more time. Then we do it one more time. One more time. Spin it, spin it, one more time. Hit it, baby, one more time. Yo, do you think the smoke haze is like on camera right now? Nah, they don't know. Well, now they know. Well, because full transparency, like, I just had to get out of the studio, bro. Mm-hmm. I can't do it anymore. We just did an interview. And they're smoking. They're smoking bud. This is The music industry is Atlanta. It happens. Yeah, we just did an interview with 24 hours. Like, drop the fucking name. Well, you know. let's keep it. This is gonna be out before then. Exactly. Okay. That's why I want to get everyone excited about the fact that we just did an interview with 24 hours. But your point is that uh you're now the old head that can't even be in the room with smoke anymore. Yeah, like I mean, I I've had my you know, heyday of smoking, and I just I hate how I get, but literally when there's like the guest is smoking, the people off camera are all smoking, and they're smoking fat fucking doinkers, right? Like gorilla fingers. Big sticks. Yes. Like, it get I I had to step outside for sure. Yeah.

Like, and I gotta drink this like, you know, definitely my second third water at this point. I mean, I need to stay hydrated at this point. Like, I hate that I've become that guy, man. Me too. I hate that for you. I I'm I'm on the way to that, I'm sure. Because I smoke less and less than ever, but I could definitely still be in the room, but I I do like see myself creeping toward where you are now. Yeah, like I I definitely I'm I'm comfortable being the guy that doesn't smoke, right? When people are like, you know, smoking and then they, you know, try and pass you, like, no man, like I don't smoke. I don't mind that. I don't like that I get like anxious and or like it affects me just being around a ton of it, like in a closed space. And you're already an anxious person, so it's not good for me, man. It's a bad risk. That's that's where, like, you know, weed and I just had to part ways. Yeah, how did you even do it before? Oh my god. I it you know, people that smoke either say that like it makes them more anxious, or obviously that it does like chill them out. And I just was the guy that it chilled me the fuck out. Like I was so high strung normally, right?

Like you all know me at this point that are you know, tapped into the pod. Y'all know what the fuck's going on. Yeah, like I'm you know, an energetic, like upbeat kind of guy, and just naturally. Yeah, I get that from my mom. Like she's the you know, lady that'll run up on you and talk to a stranger for an hour type of gal, right? And so um, you know, I get that from her. So weed was just what I used to like chill the fuck out, yeah. And now it does the opposite. Huh. Just where switch flipped. Yeah, and I always made fun of the people like me where they would be like, I just get anxious and like I don't like the way it makes me feel. Irony has slapped you in the face with its giant dick. I fucking hated those people, bro. So like everyone throw shade at me. I hate that I'm like this, so like you can hate on me too. Like, that's completely fine. I thought it was super corny that you had to walk outside for sure. But I get it, like it kind of at the same time, but also I hate it. It sucks. What are we here to talk about, Henry? Today we are here to talk about a burning question on every independent artist's mind, maybe, or you've at least considered it. We dropped uh some interviews backstage at the beer and tacos show reunion show at the end of last year, one of them being with the infamous Ray Daniels.

Is infamous a good word for him? Maybe Yeah. he's definitely got a lot to say. He's got takes hot takes, spicy, hot, boiling takes. And uh he would the interview was really fine, it wasn't even anything crazy, but he did drop at the end that it doesn't take money to blow up as an artist. He said basically that if someone is approaching you telling you you need money, they're trying to sign you or get some money out of you, or they're trying to convince you that you need it for their own benefit, essentially. And it sparked, we we made a clip of it, and it sparked a big debate. And we're here to kind of dive deeper into that. You've accumulated some um some things to say, I think, on the topic. Yeah, I think my biggest uh point around the whole, like, does it take money to blow up in music? How much money do you need to blow up? Blah blah blah. Like, that's just a recurring debate and like a recurring question, I feel like. And to Ray's point, there's a lot of bad apples out there, to be honest, that are ruining the fucking game for everyone by claiming it takes X amount of dollars, and that then they're charging you X amount of dollars to be on their platform or to get your music reviewed, and there's just all these fucking people out there. Ray is definitely not a hundred percent wrong at all.

No, he might even be more right than wrong. Exactly. So I think that you know what I have an issue with, and what this episode is really gonna dive into is the excuse that artists use being money, right? That's when you see it the most. That's that's when I I hate it, right? Is that oh, I would have blown up if I had a bigger budget. Oh, if I only had money behind me, I'd blow up, I'd be out of here, etc. etc. Like that is the problem that I think a lot of these artists have, just from my experience, right? Like, we've talked to a bunch and we've just seen a bunch. Uh, when you start, you know, blaming other things for like why you haven't gotten to a certain level. We know firsthand a kid out of fucking Covington, Georgia, East Rich, East Rich, broke as fuck, had no money behind him. We saw him build a fan base to now obviously, like live off of music majority, right? Like, I mean, he's one example of it being possible.

So I think that what I really want to do is not even debate like, does it take money, does it not take money? Even though like that's the question that we're talking about. I want to just dive into if you're broke as fuck, which most of you are, what can you be doing? Like what are the things that you can actually take into your own hands? Like, what can you take control of and own up to as far as like what you can be doing every day without spending a fucking budget? Your goal is to shut down everyone that tries to use money as the reason they haven't blown up. At least to get to a certain level, yeah, right, to build a core fan base that then will get you the money. Yeah. Labels are running analytics, they basically only care about the numbers at this point. So we hear that time and time again. Like, how's your social media look? Oh, yeah, you're talented. But how's social media look? How are you streaming? How are you streaming? How's your monthly listeners? How's your TikTok going? Yeah. YouTube uh watch out this month. How's it how you doing? Exactly. And so I think that there's a lot of things you could be doing that don't require more money than you're spending on a fucking eighth of weed or you know, a new pair of jeans or something. You've hated our weed twice this episode so far.

So just tread lightly. we've lost so many of our core fans. I need to like hit a bowl on this episode to bring them back. Eighth of crack, whatever, whatever your fancy is. I don't know if okay. Do we don't have crackheads as our took it far there? Yeah. Does crack come in eighths? I haven't bought it in a while, Henry. No, but just basically. Wait, does crack even exist anymore? Are there like crack dealers? Are people smoking crack? If you if you smoke crack, leave a comment on this. video. This will be the most comments we've ever gotten on this episode. We have a, apparently we have a rabid crackhead fan base. Yeah, yeah. Jesus. Okay. We skew we skew crackhead. We skew crackhead for sure. Um, all right. So basically, these are a few things that you know, through talking to people in the industry that you know we've seen done uh that don't require some like significant amount of money, right? Like don't really require a budget. Okay, so the first thing is structure your deals creatively, right? So if you're an artist specifically, because that's you know kind of what we're targeted around.

Um the traditional way, if you do have a budget to pay people that are a part of your creative process, whether it's producers, engineers, videographers, et cetera, The traditional way is to, you know, maybe pay them some sort of work for hire or an advance, and then give them, you know, maybe percentages of publishing, et cetera, Right. What we want you thinking about is truly building with these people, giving them a stake in what it is that you're trying to build, right? And if they believe in you, and trust me, there's tons of people out there that will do work off of the belief in the artist that they get to work with, and for honestly selfish reasons, like building up their own resume, et cetera, you can find these people. There's creatives within every little part of the of the equation here that are willing to do things in the beginning stages for free up front and just for like back-end percentages. It might take some digging, you got to do some work, you know, to get there.

It's not just gonna happen automatically, you know. what I mean, but those people do exist, and yeah, you know, people love to be creative with their art, but it's like maybe be creative with your business as well. A lot of artists don't want to touch the business or get involved with the business, but we just talked 24 hours and we broke down, you know, at least having a basic understanding of the business, right? And how important that is. And once you do understand it, then you can kind of get creative with it and you can make it beneficial for people. You can spend less or zero money to get some of the shit you need to continue, right? Yeah, I mean, because there was even a lot of comments uh on the the uh Ray Daniels post that were like, so how you gonna pay for the beat? How you gonna pay for the studio time, how you're gonna pay for the cover art, how you gonna pay for the video? And this is what this first suggestion, right? Because once again, these are fucking ideas, like we're trying to figure this shit out together, y'all. Like, we don't know that like all of these things are easy, hard, possible, impossible. Like, we've heard that they work for some people, so we're just getting you guys thinking, right?

Um, I think that structuring those deals more creatively, to your point, um, is really what can allow you to work with talented people, honestly, that just haven't gotten their big break either, where they're willing to do this shit on the strength and like just make it make sense of like if this works, you're gonna have a piece of the pie. You know what I mean? Or even just bartering things, like maybe you have another skill that is beneficial to someone else that has a skill that you need and you trade skills, you know. what I mean, that's always a beautiful thing. Maybe you know someone that can help them with something that you don't do, right? Like you, you, you know, you build a connection with them and you bring someone else in to help them with with something they got going on. Yep. So, yeah, that that's definitely I think, you know, very underrated. Um, you kind of mentioned this of like, you know, putting up a thousand jump shots to make this a reality, right? Because you're not just gonna find these people on the fucking street, right? Like you're not just gonna meet them for the first time and be like, oh, you're a dope producer, you believe in me. Let's make this song together where I don't have to pay you up front and you get a percentage of my song, right?

Like, that's not necessarily gonna just happen easily. So I think that uh the second thing we would recommend you do is like network laterally. We've talked about that so many fucking times on the pod with with guests is that like the thing that allowed them to now call in favors from their peers is because when they were coming up, they were networking laterally. Yeah, they weren't trying to go and you know build with the person that had already built something for themselves, right? They were looking left and right, being like, what the fuck y'all got going on? And how can I help you, even though we're both kind of at this, you know, lower level right now. Yeah, and and even even to take that even further, I think just the for me it's just being humble and because like if you're an artist looking for a video guy, it's hard to kind of compare like if you're at the same exact level as the video guy in your rap career or not. But if you, you know, if the guy's got 25 followers, but he's got a clip of a video he shot and you love the video, you need to be humble enough to, you know, give someone a shot, and like you said, putting up a bunch of shots and just go off of how they're you know what you think they can bring to the table makes you feel, and not the clout necessarily that's behind it, right? Yeah, and I think a lot of people love to be like, yo, like music videos cost so much money, bro.

We've seen firsthand some creative ass music videos that were shot on iPhone or shot with some very basic camera. Yes, and you didn't pay for the location, you didn't pay for props, you didn't pay for a big studio production, you didn't pay for lighting, you used the fucking sun, right? Like, there's just so many things you can do for free. I think it was I don't know who said this, but uh basically the basis of the the core basis of any idea should be free. Right, and then any money that you spend on top of that should just be extra. Exactly. You should think of a version. So if you're coming up with a music video, idea. the money shouldn't make it dope. No, yeah, exactly. Once again, if people have money, by all means. You can make it dope. We're talking to y'all who are trying to figure out does money, you know, is money a requirement to blow up. And if you don't have any, what the fuck can you be doing to, you know, reach a certain level with your with your artistry? And you need visuals no matter fucking what.

But if you know, if you got a phone with a camera on it and a creative brain, you can make it happen for sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm just gonna use us as an example. We have had uh artists pull up to an event that we you know put on, didn't pay anyone. Yeah, right. And like that's not to, you know, call us cheap, call us what you want. We weren't making any money off of the event. Yeah, we actually lost money, I'm pretty sure on the event when it came down to it, right? Like putting together all the stuff, right? So that's not to to say that like we didn't want to pay the artists. It's that just given the event we were putting on, we pulled in favors because once again, what had we done? We had had them on the pot, right? Like that was valuable for them. So I'm telling you that like when it comes to this networking laterally and like structuring your deals creatively, like it's possible. Like you can do it. Uh uh a fucking artist, uh, you know, guest of ours, Suave, just called in a favor for me to be in his music video. It was like an hour away.

I was in it for five seconds. What'd you do by the way? I skateboarded, he stole my skateboard, uh, and I ran away. All within about 10 seconds. it still sounds better than uh, I mean, I couldn't make it, but apparently my role was to get tied up. So the the the firm requirement, really why I think he needed me the most and Henry, it was just be white in a white neighborhood. Yeah. Straight up. So we had the but we had the relationship. And the white skin. So we it's the perfect storm. It was amazing. It worked out. The stars aligned. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, but it should, that's an example, right? It's like you never know what the fuck someone might need. And then, you know, if I need Suave on something, the homie's gonna pull through. Like he's gonna, you know, he's gonna remember that I drove an hour to be in his music video for five seconds, essentially, right? And then drove an hour back to my house. You know what I mean? Um, and of course he didn't pay me. Yeah right. Like he didn't. He didn't get the bag? No. Did he get that bag?

No, sorry. You need a manager. Yeah, no, for sure. So the the third one, uh, and there and there's basically like four things I wrote down. The third one is uh, you know, organic content, right? Easy example. Easy easy. Everyone knows what the fuck's going on on TikTok right now, what's going on YouTube shorts, um, even long form, you know. Everyone knows what's going on on Twitch right now. There's live streaming, there's short form, there's long form. And what do all these platforms have in common, Ben? It costs this much to make an account. You know what I mean? And people love to hate the platforms and hate on the algorithm, and it's literally free. You're not paying them anything to be there to find fans, free exposure. Hello. Do you kind of have to play the game though and make content that good content? Well, yeah, make content that they want to push to more people because more people liked it. Yes, you have to play the game though. Maybe you have like a beautiful video. The making good content game.

Yeah, well, it's yeah. I go back and forth on that, man. The capturing people's attention game. In the first one second, though, because what if your clip is incredible, but the first two seconds didn't you do the millennial pause and you don't start talking right away, and people skip because of that. Like you do have to know the game a little bit, study the game is all I'm gonna say. Okay, you also need to make music that like the people of this era who aren't dead right now would like, you know. Yeah, but now it's more important than ever to have like five seconds of the song be really dope. Like there are things that are part of the game, and I I have to defend the artist on that one at least a little bit. I gotta defend evolution, bro. Like, just evolve. Stop complaining about like how it is right now, and either like you know, play ball or not, right? I mean, that sure that'd be like us not adhering to like the way that we need to structure our clips and like you know, studying what's working out there. Oh, I know we gotta do it, we have to. Oh, and the same goes for artists, right? So, just the point being of like I know that it's the shitty part of the job, right?

Creating content, you didn't sign up to be a content creator, most of you guys, right? Like, of course, some of y'all love it, and I think that's a beautiful thing to you. Strength. yeah. But the majority of you want to make music, and we get it, right? So there's plenty of people. I think Haley Knox is one that's done it amazing. She's this like soulful kind of white girl that plays all types of instruments. She uses like an MPC and she's recording her uh like bass guitar and she's looping it and she's looping her vocal samples, and she just does these videos that have gone viral as fuck, and the songs are fire, but she's just making music in the content, she's not dancing, she's not doing anything funny. She's literally just documenting her creative process, yeah, in a dope way. Yeah, so figure out what that looks like for you if you're not the type that just wants to like you know, make all sorts of types of content, you know. what I mean, if you want to do the music shit, just do the music shit, but you gotta find like a a cool way to present it, right? Like you can't just do something, you can't put little to no effort into it, you know. You know what I mean?

Like this shit requires a lot of hard work, yeah. Yeah, so and that kind of you know puts me in my my last one that I wrote down. I think that you know, just me even having worked with a couple artists for like a hot second, right? Um I think that putting in the work, there's a lot of things that require shit tons of work, meaning like you know, hours and hours of just the bullshit, like administrative and just not fun things. Learning things, yeah, like educating yourself on marketing and content, uh, you know, hitting up potential YouTubers to make music for them, hitting up playlists uh yourself, like directly, not just paying like five dollars to get a thousand streams, like you know, not doing that, but like putting in the actual work. I think that if you had the luxury of time, even though you don't have the luxury of money and budget, you'd be surprised as to like how much you can do just by putting in the work. A lot of artists, I think every artist probably, at least at some point in the beginning, thought that the life of a famous musician was just so easy, just in the studio making music, just vibing every day and chilling, and it's just not the reality anymore.

I don't know if it ever was. Uh I think it was probably more of that like pre-internet pre-social media for sure. You but weren't those people like flying here to do a radio show, like no, no, for sure they had to work here, like Video shoot here. They had to do other things, yeah. I think I'd say it's different. It's work, it's a job. Like, there's no just easy career, even though it it it can look like that on social media. If you want to get to that level, it's takes the heart and it takes the hard work, and people don't want to hear that. Man, it's tough. Yeah, I think even just mentioning the radio thing, right? Um, most of our audience who are like trying to figure this shit out, they would think, like, oh my god, I'd be so fucking stoked to do a radio interview. Hot 1079, 997 in New York, like call me the fuck up, right? But dude, when you have to do one of those a day, and for every city on your tour, saying the same fucking thing, answering the same fucking questions, yeah, waking up bright as you know, like bright and early because they need you in the station by 7 a.m., whatever the fuck. I mean, you're not gonna love it then, right?

And so you're just at a different stage of like what the hard work looks like. But I do think that, yeah, like most artists just think that it really is still like yo, if I just make the dope music and put it out, like I'm just the most talented I'm the one. It'll speak for itself. I'm Himothy, him him, him Thaniel, him Zell Washington. It's a good one, man. Yeah, for sure. But no, those were my suggestions. Any ones that you had to wrap up? Anything you thought of? Those are pretty fire, man. I gotta say. I mean, I knew you had some uh some good ones to hold this episode down. So yeah, I feel like I was just on a soapbox, but I this is like what I do to Henry. So, like, forgive me for y'all being my sounding board on on this episode, but I just I hate that money excuse. I really do. We all fucking know it helps. Like, I'm not dumb. Like, you if you have some money, you should spend a little bit here, like once again, like stop spending on other things. Maybe if you do want to invest a little bit here, a little bit there, whatever you can, right? Like comfortably, but just don't spend every day saying like if I only had this money, like, dude, everyone has a fucking excuse of like if I only did this, like you know, we've said before, like, if we only had that one guest, like no. I'll add this too.

It's not how it works. I'll add this too. In order to get to the top, top, top, top tier. Of course, it takes some amount of money, but it doesn't take an amount of money to get to a point where you're spending other people's money to get there. You can take all these tools that you named, you can look up more on your own. You can get to a level where you're way high enough where you know, an investor, a label, whoever the fuck, uh manager with some racks believes in you enough to put you in other places to put just fuel on the fire. And then, you know, is money being spent, yes, but is it your money? Maybe not. Well, I also just think to seriously wrap up, guys. I promise that we're almost done here. I got like five more points. Yeah. Maybe we should just make this an hour or two. No, I think that these investors or aka these record labels, they're fucking investors to that point. They're not just spending money without knowing that they will make some money back, at least from a like well, they're guessing. But they're very strategically guessing, especially the way that deals are structured now, from everything I've heard, right?

Yeah, they can pretty much to a T, like, you know, tell you what it is that you're gonna be making, you know, in two years, whatever, right? Like just based on projections of like current streams, et cetera. Right. So just also be like smart and don't be fucking naive and think that like they're just gonna spend money on you millions of dollars because you're a dope artist. Like, no, like they understand the audience you've built, they understand the metrics that you have in place, and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel before they ever write you a fucking check. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, artists, we hope you found some value from this. We did an episode for producers. This one's definitely for the artists. Get your wheels turning, don't use lack of money as an excuse. Get out there and fucking make it happen, boys and girls. Build something that is worth investing in. Non-binaries, build something that's worth investing in. That's it. Indeed. Yep. Until next week, Henry. Getting out of here. Peace out, y'all. Bye-bye.