The AI Playbook for Indie Artists With No Team

There's three main types of independent artists that watch this show, Ben. Talk to them, Henry. And because you just clicked this episode, I'd be willing to bet that you fit into one of these buckets. Okay, what are they? I'm gonna break it down. Bucket A. These are the people that spend all day on the business and the admin side of their careers. They're doing the things they know are necessary to move the needle, but they're finding themselves not able to work on the music as much. They're never in the studio. They signed up to be in the studio. Sucks. And they're barely working on music. Oh my god, keep going. Absolutely tragic. Bucket B, these are the people that are just so intimidated and terrified by the business side. And they don't have a team, so they just are frozen. They haven't even tried to get into that stuff. And clearly they're not moving either. They might make a lot of music. They got a lot of songs in the vault. Should probably turn into a hobbyist. You might have a lot more fun with music, actually, if you just stick to that. That's depressing. And then bucket C, these are the people that have miraculously found time to do both the music and the business side, but they're just stuck and they're not having that motion and they don't know what to do next. They're overextended and they're not moving.

So if you fit into any of these buckets, we have a major episode for you today. Absolutely, because I feel like as an independent artist, the reality is that you are a tiny little music company when you first start out, right? That's what you are. You are the founder, the CEO, oftentimes the CFO, the COO, and all the CSOs. yes. Um and there's a lot of shit to do to run and grow a business, bro. I mean, we're trying to do it, and we're overwhelmed by all the shit that we gotta do. So, like, as a musician and as an artist that's trying to build a company around your art, there's a lot of shit to do. You gotta make the songs, you gotta make the content, you gotta market the music, you gotta run ads, you gotta pitch to playlists, you gotta uh do the admin shit, like registering your songs and uploading the distribution. I mean, there's so many things to do. You gotta make money. Where's the money?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who's making money in this shit? Yeah, true. Just kidding, we're here for that too. Uh, but the the luckiest, I feel like of independent artist, you might have like one team member, two, maybe, three would be not three. Nobody has three team members. Okay, for sure. It's insane. But most of you guys are doing all of this shit on your own, and it is exhausting. It makes a lot of you, I know, want to fucking give up and quit. And the world needs to hear your music, so we're here to help you not do that, okay? Yeah, your bottleneck oftentimes isn't that you're not talented or that you don't even have the drive. It's literally your capacity as a human being. It's hours in the day. Why did we do that? Oh my god. I hated that. Ooh. God. Anyway, so enter AI, all right. And so before you all click away. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you say artificial intelligence? I did. This is an AI episode. I use it, I use the short script for it, but uh, but yeah, no, I mean, before you click away, seriously, this episode is not about whether you should or shouldn't be using AI to help make the music, okay? It's a very controversial topic.

We did an episode with the top music attorney about AI and the things to watch out for. If you are using AI in your creative process, this is strictly talking about how you all can leverage AI to handle the boring shit. That boring shit is shit that we all know needs to be done, but we don't want to fucking do it, man. We want to make music. We wanna make the music. That's right. Maybe we want to shoot some videos if we're into that, but like definitely we want to get back in the studio. And to be clear, like, obviously, it would be great if you had a real qualified human team of people. Oh, we did it again, dude. But most of you don't. And I promise you, just as someone who's used these tools to do shit that I don't want to do, having AI help you with this stuff is beating having no team 100% of the time. You know, maybe if you had a team of humans that were all using AI, that's even more insane. But you can have it do things that would fill all these roles of people that you don't have, right? The manager, the AR, the publicist, the booking agent, the content director, the business manager, the brand strategist, the rollout expert. I've been amazed.

Like I'm the classic old head that's a little bit slow to adopt using AI. But Henry has, thank God, Henry has been like spearheading how we as a podcast and a media company and a platform can help use AI to free up our time to do the shit that we want to do. Because there's a lot of boring shit running the company that we're running that we don't want to fucking do. And I'm amazed every time Henry brings me something that AI can do instead of me having to do it, um, so that I can focus my efforts elsewhere. Like that's what this whole thing is about. This is not meant to again replace team members, should you be able to hire them. It's just that oftentimes y'all don't have the team right now. And even to your point, if they did have the team, AI should still be a part of everyone's workflow moving forward. That ship is sailing. Get beat or get left behind. Again, not on the music side. This is if you're trying to run and grow a business, which as an indie artist, you are doing that. And if you're watching this show, you 100% are wanting to do that.

Absolutely. And we're happy to have you here. Even though about 75% of you are not subscribed to the channel, and we know you're out there, you're watching, you're getting the value, It'd mean the world to us if you just click the little subscribe button, maybe hit the bell, like the video and comment. Optional, but that'd be great too. We really appreciate you guys being here. We have some amazing stuff coming up to solve these problems and explain how to use AI efficiently. So, where are people going wrong trying to use AI? So, again, from my own personal experience, because I am using ChatGPT, I'm using Claude now, thanks to Henry. So I think the biggest thing that I was doing wrong that I think a lot of artists are doing wrong as well, because they come to us and be like, Henry, Ben, I tried using AI and like I got some really shitty responses. Yeah, what like what are what are people prompting? What are they saying? They're just being like, give me content ideas. Write me an Instagram caption. How do I build me a brand? How do I get more streams? Yeah. Like, no context at all, right? Context is the key word. Yeah. The the biggest thing that I've learned is that the responses are gonna be super generic and very useless if your input is generic.

I think like the golden rule, and we're gonna get to some other golden rules at the end of the episode, is AI is as only as good as the input, right? It's only as good as what you put into it as to what you get out. Garbage in, garbage out. Garbage in, garbage out, right? I literally met with an artist this morning, we had coffee, and um I told him exactly this, right? I was like, look, the more information that you can give AI, the more it can help you. Okay. So my suggestion to him was literally use voice to text and just go on a walk and just data dump everything that's in your mind as it pertains to your artistry, your artist brand, what kind of music you make, what kind of stories you like to tell through your lyrics, uh, you know, what kind of content you like to make, what kind of visual aesthetics you think you have, literally anything, all right? No stone unturned, because the more information you give it, the better. Like, there's no such thing as like too much information when it comes to input into AI. Sometimes the weird little stuff that you don't think matters could even turn into a big thing. That's why, and if it's it is something that you say that's ends up being not that important, it'll ignore it.

You know what I mean? So the more you give it, the better. The emphasis on the voice to text, yeah. Yeah, that is a very big one. And there's other things like you know, paid versions have memory, so you're not starting fresh every single time. It can have a file of everything about your career. Not your entire life. Just give it the stuff, you know, on your career. Don't give it your bank information. You know what I'm saying? I mean, but everything that you, you know, if you hired a manager would need to know. Yeah. Tell it and talk to it like you would your manager, and it'll be able to help you way better. I mean, I love what you said about AI being able to maybe just like just like using humans, right? You know, just like asking friends, asking, you know, colleagues, asking collaborators for their input on things. Sometimes we're too close to this shit. Like you're you. You don't necessarily understand what makes you you from like an outsider's perspective. God damn. This is like, we did it again. This is so lame, bro. I know. We didn't mean to do this. No. It's actually getting insane for this episode.

Um, but no, I love that because we've had it happen too, where it's like we uploaded all the transcripts from all of our episodes we've ever done. So the the analogy would be you do the same thing, you know, for your lyrics, right? Yeah. Upload the lyrics to all of your songs. Ask AI like what kind of patterns, what kind of things do I talk about that you might even not know that you're talking about on a regular basis? Like this artist didn't realize how many of his fucking songs were like hopeless romantic type vibes where he's like, you know, romanticizing relationships and what what used to be and what could be, right? Um, those were like certain themes that showed up time and time again in his songs that he didn't really understand that he was making that many songs about. That otherwise you would need someone that really cares to sit down and go through everything and give you honest feedback. And once again, you don't have the team. You don't have a team, you don't have it, and then they would need to be awake and available. And AI, even these free versions, there are free versions, by the way, um, that is ready to work at all times. These are just team members sitting around waiting for you to activate them.

So, drum roll, please. Let's go. Leading into this product. Yes, sir. Free product, by the way. Oh, free. That we uh built for you guys. Because we have no money, we have no team. No money, we have no team. We're trying to solve for that. Let me take a moment to interrupt this episode and tell you about our friends over at DistroKid. DistroKid is easily the best DIY distributor on the marketplace. Let me tell you why. It's only $23 a year. That's less than two bucks a month for you to upload unlimited music to all of your favorite streaming platforms on the planet. It's so easy that it takes me like five minutes per upload, and that's when I'm multitasking dealing with my two-year-old son. Hands down, my favorite part about DistroKid is how easy it is to add credits to an upload. I don't know what distributor you're using, but with DistroKid, it's super easy. You can put the artist, the producer, the songwriter. I'm pretty sure you could put like the junior associate engineer of a song. And me, I I want to know who's on the record. And if you sign up using this link, you're gonna get 30% off an already insanely low price, and you can finally start adding your collaborators because they are checking. They will notice when their name's there, and they will thank you for doing it.

Let's get back to the episode. What do you think? Okay, Sorry to hurt my leg. Let's go. Yeah, I did the wrong sound effect. Anyway, it's called 10 AI Super Prompts for Musicians. Woo! It is a list of 10 super prompts, as we call them, so you guys don't have to figure out the prompts on your own. They are designed to fill one of 10 different roles or team members that you don't have. How much does this cost, by the way? This sounds expensive. I think we landed it. we were gonna charge absolutely fucking nothing. Let's go! Absolutely fucking nothing. God, we love you guys. That's what we do, man. That's what we do here. So, what it does, there's 10 prompts. It's as simple as picking the role or the team member that you feel like you need the most, clicking copy on the prompt. It's a very long prompt, pasting it into any free LLM, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, doesn't matter. And it's gonna set off a series of events. It's gonna start by interviewing you. Oh gosh. Two, three questions at a time. This goes back to the voice text. Right. Don't be voice to text. Keyboard warriors. You can if you just love typing, but seriously, the details really matter.

Yeah, don't type. Seriously. Be thorough. Even with voice to text, you can expect like 20 to 30 minutes of talking to this thing to get the full detail. We really want this to be good without having to just spend all day on that, right? Yeah. So you answer your questions and it's gonna give you a deliverable. It's a document, right? That you can refer to, you can edit, tweak, you can share with a team member if you magically find one day. A girlfriend. Mom and dad, whoever. Um so, real quick, the 10 roles that we are solving for here. Number one is the manager, it's gonna give you your artist dossier and a 30-day plan. Yeah. We've got the AR, Sonic fingerprint, and a three song roadmap. Oh wow. Very nice. Okay. AI is your label head. We're gonna get a 90-day strategy and a weekly operating system that you can live by. Operating systems are not just for phones and computers, guys. We have our own, you know, as humans. We got the rollout strategist. We're gonna get a 21-day release and a content engine. That's a big one. Yeah. Gotta get these rollouts right. The content director, very big one. You're gonna get a 30-day calendar and a repeatable series that you can do, which we always encourage you guys to figure out.

Some type of repeatable series you can do with content. It's gonna give you lots of suggestions to just take as is or to tweak and make your own, whatever you want to do. It's gonna get the ball rolling. That's what this is really about. Yeah. Is just getting the gears turning. Because you got the taste is still yours. You have to make the decisions, but this is gonna just accelerate that process. Yeah, this is to get you all comfortable uh outsourcing the boring shit to AI exactly that's what this is about all we're trying to do is start small just just like we have and we're slowly but surely like rant like shit's getting kind of crazy around here. It's getting crazy around here I can feel it yeah getting amplified we're on the cusp of like a lot of automation and a lot of uh AI assisted workloads that again we just don't have the time for it it's fun by the way like I got a two year old and a four year old y'all you think I have fucking time for this shit it's so much fun when you start like you start with one thing and then you unlock and now I don't have to do that and now I'm doing something that I'd rather be doing Yeah. and that compounding over time is a really good feeling so the rest of the five we have the copywriter it's gonna give you hooks captions CTAs we have the publicist it's gonna give you a press kit and pitch templates and you go even deeper where you're like sending pitches automatically Okay. Chill, chill, chill. don't scare them Jesus Christ we've got the brand strategist it's gonna give you a full brand system we've got the tour manager it's gonna find your local fan base and give you scripts to find people locally and finally the business manager we're locking in on monetization we're gonna get you a funnel set up we're gonna try to make some money because there is no money in this shit man. there's just no money yeah so again we want you to start slow don't do all 10 today all right pick the one for you that you think is your biggest bottleneck all right we don't need you to do all 10 today right yeah it's very easy to get overwhelmed so just pick the thing that maybe you've been avoiding the most the role and start there copy your prompt open up a free LLM whichever one you choose paste it in and check it out and we have an example of what that might look like. We have a valued community member, Madeline McDonald.

Shout out Madeline. We did it again. That's so many times. That's too many times. Completely unplanned, all of them. Oh jeez. Absolutely insane. She chose she chose super prompt number five, the content director. I feel like everyone's gonna choose that one. That's a big one. It's the most annoying content that everyone hates. Annoying and it is mandatory. We all have to do it. Yes. So she chose content director. She pasted the prompt into ChatGPT, the free version, and she got her response. And then just for some extra credit to just show you guys what she can do. I took her output that she sent to me and I put it into free Claude, and I literally just said, like, make this look nicer. That basic same information. That's literally all that's it. Okay, don't do that basic with all the other answers, but this one. Yeah, I'm not encouraging bad prompts. I was like, whoa, man. Take this and make it into a thing. Yeah. And we got this right here. Very clean content strategy and 30-day calendar document. Completely tailored.

I mean, she was very thorough. She was very good with her answers. So this is like built for her, right? Starts with our content pillars. One, two, three, four, five pillars to always be thinking about in every piece of content that we make. We've got 12 concepts for repeatable series. Yes. I mean, these are sick, and they're super important. They're serious. If you read them, like I'll leave them on screen for a second. They're they're not for you. Like they're for her. Yeah, all based on her exactly who she is. Don't do hers. No, don't do hers. Unless you somehow magically, if they call it, I guess they call it to you. Go ahead. You almost did it. I know. I I follow it. That doesn't count as well. That was a delay. That was not it. Keep going. We've got hook styles, right? Five hook styles. Like these are the kind of styles you want to be using in your hooks. We know how important the first one to three seconds are so important. In your content. Because none of the other seconds matter No. get there, man. Scroll all the way, man. Some do's and don'ts. And then the 30-day calendar. Here it is. Like very example. Like each day, try this, try this. We're mixing up the content. We're seeing what works. You know, it's nice to think that we're doing this ourselves sometimes.

Like, I'm switching it up, I'm mixing it up, but having it in front of you, organized, man. Like, as creatives, I know myself. I'm not that organized of a person. No, he's not. No. I'm just not. Thank God he's honestly thank the Lord for AI. Finally providing Henry with some structure and organization in his life. It's something that I've been missing, man. AI is running Henry's life at this point. It's getting there. I actually called Claude, like, what's Henry up to? It's not that bad. It's Okay. sorry. We have batching workflows. Here's like how you can actually batch the content, shoot it. I mean, your minimum viable week. Comment to content loop. So thorough. It's amazing. It's so thorough. And again, this might take you 30 minutes if you're really thorough with all this. And again, like this is the free version she used. If you do have a paid version with memory, it gets better. You can save all that, and you don't have to repeat the answers if you want to go on to the next prompt. You might even be able to you in the free version, say, give me a document with all my answers. Yeah.

And then put that in. Yeah, fuck the paid version. You don't even need that yet. There's these workarounds that you can figure out. Hey, real quick, since shooting this episode, we actually added that idea to the prompts. It's called an artist context card. And every prompt at the end is going to give you a little briefing of who you are. For those of you who are on free plans that don't have memory, you can paste this little context card into the next super prompt when you're ready to use it, and it'll save you a bunch of time, not having to repeat yourself. And also on saving time, we added quick versions of every prompt that will take significantly less time. If you don't have 30 minutes to answer questions right now, I get it. Use the quick version, see what this is all about. Get your feet wet. Although we do recommend using the deep versions for the best results, obviously. Anyway, let's wrap this thing up. So that's the product. We'll leave a link to it in the description. We hope it really sets shit off for you guys. For sure. Excited. Here, kind of to wrap up like the golden rules that we need all of you guys to live by when it comes to using AI to help be a part of your team when you don't fucking have one. Number one, AI is only as good as the context that you give it.

Okay. We talked about earlier, we talked about that earlier in the episode. Mentioned it twice for a reason. And it's it's that important, seriously. It it cannot help you to the best of its ability if you're putting garbage in. It's gonna give garbage right back out. AI is actually kind of stupid, like in weird ways. 100%. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? It's like smart, but it's so stupid. 100%. So the context is key. Yeah. Rule two this is not something that is gonna replace effort. This is not a key and unlock for you to be lazy. You still have to put in the work. It's just gonna amplify the effort that you're already putting in. We cannot have you guys like coming out here thinking this is just gonna replace trying. No, did you see the document we just shared? Yeah, it's now to go do all that shit. You can't just read the document. Yeah, yeah, it does nothing for you. Number three, treat AI as a first draft, right? We're constantly reworking and retweaking the output that we get from AI. Iterate. Um, because again, it's it's a good jump off point, okay? It's a good get the creative juices flowing, get us you know, unstuck when we're feeling stuck, so that we can then really make traction.

Yeah, so you don't have to treat it like the gospel, like it sends you something, and that's it. Can't can't vary, you know, can't vary from that at all. That's how you get slop is by taking the immediate first output, verbatim, and using whatever exactly this is how slop is generated. Absolutely. You gotta iterate and make it yours. Rule number four, we mentioned it also, but it's worth saying again. Start with the tasks that you really are avoiding. Yes, start with the boring shit, the shit that you know is important, but you don't want to do it. That is where you start one task at a time. Yeah, just start with one, guys. Like don't bite off more than you can chew with this. I know we gave you we gave you 10 options. Let's let's chill. That's a recipe for burnout. Yeah, for sure. You don't want that. And the final one, number five, do not outsource your taste. This is my favorite one by far. Yeah. I love it because AI can give you structure, it can give you ideas and drafts. It can give you an angle on something that you maybe didn't see. But your taste is who you are. It is your identity. It's what makes you unique.

And it is your superpower at the end of the day. So don't do not let this replace that. Lean into you. Just use this to amplify you.