Listen on your favorite podcast platform: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Acast
This week, Ari is joined by Dustin Boyer, Director of Marketing at Venture Music.
00:00 – Welcome
05:20 – Fake music business feuds to ramp engagement, Spotify’s Discovery Mode, ad platforms for gaining fans
13:39 – Meta ad strategies for musicians and funnels
21:27 – Tracking conversions and the only platform that properly does this
28:23 – Owning your audience and fan data
35:13 – TikTok ads killing organic reach
37:50 – Breaking out Ashley Ryan
45:33 – Artist growth strategies around content
51:33 – Routine and social media
Edited and mixed by Mikey Evans
Music by Brassroots District
Produced by the team at Ari’s Take
Transcription:
Dustin Boyer
Here’s here’s what I think is going on in terms of like TikTok strategy. Certainly they’re trying to get people to spend money. And they understand the best way to do that is to feed you a little success, and then hold on to success and hope that you spend money and like a drug dealer. Yeah, I mean, that’s what they’re doing. It’s about finding a base and manipulating it. It’s just like music, right? People do that when they create music, they find their sound their feeling, and then they tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak as they get more experience and understand their audience more and more. Forget about the gatekeepers. It’s all about listeners, don’t worry about the gatekeepers. Don’t beg to be on a label on an agency, go after listeners and all that other stuff will just come.
Ari Herstand
What’s going on? Welcome to the new music business. I’m your host, Ari Herstand and author of How to Make It in the New Music Business. The book, Third Edition is out now everywhere whether you like hardcover, audio book ebook, it is everywhere. Today, my guest is Dustin Boyer. He is a Music Industry Marketing Specialist with over 15 years working with major label and independent artists and working with their brand presidents and revenue. And after working as 10 years as an artist manager, he now runs a venture. It’s a digital marketing agency and he runs a marketing service he’s worked with artists like Matt Mason restless wrote American authors, FLOBOTS, Zack top and who we spent a lot of time talking about today, Ashley Ryan, who is this country artists who went from kind of a couple of 1000 monthly listeners to over a quarter million monthly listeners and millions and millions of streams pretty much from their efforts and kind of working organic TikTok you know, venture has been around for a little while now. And they this music marketing agency where they have gone through the evolutions and changes in the in the industry and just kind of how it started. You know, music marketing was just like running Facebook ads. And now we’re like, how do you come up with interesting Tiktok strategy. So a lot of this conversation really is around really how to approach music marketing right now. We get a bit heady we also get a bit in the weeds. So this is an episode for the marketing experts out there, the specialists but also the artists and the managers that want to take their marketing seriously. He there’s a healthy balance, I would say, of both very practical specific tips. And, you know, very specific examples of what to do, how to do it specific specific examples of how stuff works. But also, then we get to the other end of the spectrum where he does a good job of just really getting you to think differently, conceptually challenging maybe your belief system. And we I push back on many of his platitudes, I guess, and some of his advice and I question them and yeah, so it’s, it’s a it’s a very interesting, intriguing, fun conversation for me. You can find Dustin adventure music on Tik Tok, he does a lot of these like quick little tips. So if you enjoy listening to him today, go follow venture music on tick tock, I always get a lot of value when I see the venture posts pop up and Dustin is on there pretty frequently sharing very practical really excellent advice on tick tock, so I would check them out there. And then if you have a bit of a budget, you know, venture music is a marketing agencies. So you know, they primarily are working with labels. And artists, managers that have a bit of a budget, because like any marketing agency out there, and like the ones that we’ve had on the show, they cost a lot of money. But you know, the reason that I like having the marketing agencies on the show, especially right now is that, you know, they’re the ones that are managing lots of artists and lots of accounts right now. And working with labels and just kind of seeing they’re at the edge of it. And they’re experimenting, daily, seeing what’s working, what’s not working. So I wish we had three more hours to chat. I felt like we were just kind of getting cooking. But, you know, I want to keep this, you know, right around this hour mark. So that’s what we’re getting into today. But it’s only the beginning. And I’m excited that we finally got to talk about country artists today because I haven’t talked about a lot of backcountry artists on this show. And we talked a couple of we talked about a couple of them today that venture has been working with venture being based out of Nashville, but they work with all artists as well. So no matter what kind of artist you are, I think you’re gonna get a lot from this episode. You can find all of us that make the show happen at Ari’s take on Instagram tick tock and Witter X threads whatever. Facebook I suppose I don’t know. You can find me at our rehearsed and Instagram, and Twitter, X. Whatever bread’s I don’t know, I lost track of those of those platforms, but I’m on Instagram. But really, you should just go to RDS take.com get on the email list, email tried and true of these social media platforms come and go. That is where we’re gonna stay connected. That’s where you’re absolutely going to get the most up to date relevant information about the new music business, no matter what platforms and social media things are coming and going and changing the names or ownership or whatever the chaos is that is happening in the social media landscape. Just get on that email list. Call me, grandpa, but honestly, it is tried and true. And we talk a lot about that on the episode today. But if you could pause the episode right now, hit that subscribe, hit that follow button. Leave us a five star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. If you like the show, that really helps. I very much appreciate it. Yeah, all right. Well, let’s kick into the show. Dustin Boyer. Welcome to the show.
Dustin Boyer
Hey, man, how’s it going?
Ari Herstand
Hey, good. This is it’s really funny to see you. And I’m sure it’s freaking people out right now seeing our two faces next to each other for those that are watching this on YouTube right now or the replay clips on on Tik Tok. Because, like, you know, I would imagine that a lot of your Tiktok followers for venture and a lot of mine overlap and kind of see where like, you know, two of the people that are kind of, you know, sharing the tips for the indie music community. And I always appreciate everything that you post and you have brilliant takeaways and everything that I you know, I’ve reposted a bunch of them. So I’m glad that we finally get to converse and chat outside just the comment box underneath the videos. So yeah, I’ve got,
Dustin Boyer
you know, in the future, if you ever want to start like a fake feud to go back and forth. That’s what I’m looking for. Next is music marketing, feuds.
Ari Herstand
Yeah, totally. Well create a super, super sub niche sub genre. And we’ll have seven followers that are just gonna be living for our next feud, right?
Dustin Boyer
Like, I don’t know what these guys are talking about, but they’re angry.
Ari Herstand
Damn. That’s right. That’s right. We’ll get into it over to discovery mode. And people like what the fuck if all 12 people I’d be like, Yeah.
Dustin Boyer
And it’s so funny that you say that too, because that has been because I’ve had some really negative experiences with discovery mode, and people have no so contentious about it like they, they have been like, Well, it’s been great. For me. It’s amazing. What are you talking about? And it’s sort of like, is it really like, experiences may vary? I imagine?
Ari Herstand
Well, they totally do. And that’s the thing. I mean, you know, it’s discovery mode. And for those that don’t know what that is, Spotify has been running and testing. This, this program, discovery mode is essentially an internal marketing program where they keep an additional 30% Commission. And then they juice up your songs within the radio, within radio playlists, and within autoplay, on like similar artists, and so you kind of go to the top of the top of the line for where you’d normally appear on radio, giving up a 30%. Commission. They’ve been testing for two and a half years, they publicly unveiled it to most artists and most distributors at the top of 2023. And yes, there has been a man it, there’s no, there’s no, you know, everyone was singing its praises up until it went public. And they opened it up to everybody. And I have heard fairly contentious things. And it’s not consistent across the board. I mean, you know, we just had Ryan Vaughn on for backline management and had pitch music. And, you know, he said it that it was working brilliantly swimmingly perfectly for him for like two years. And then when it went public, he’s just like, it just, it just crashed. And so working.
Dustin Boyer
And what’s crazy is I have one artist in particular, it literally brought them from like, 5000 monthly listeners to half a million, but he submitted when it wasn’t open to the public, like crazy numbers, right. And I have not experienced that since especially not since it went public. But I had a manager friend of mine called me this morning, and was like, Dude, can you look at this because I need to figure out what’s going on. And I looked at it. And overnight, he got something like 90,000 listeners, and he only had 4000 listeners before this happened. And I was like, well, you need to check with your label, do you think they did discover and he’s like, I think they might have just not told us and that’s that kind of and he went and checked in that’s 100% what it was. I have not seen that since it went public like that kind of activation. But even so I’ve only ever seen it be like met or like out like home run No, no in between like, like completely changing the artists career or nothing. That’s been my experience.
Ari Herstand
Well, for the few artists that I work with and run the discovery and we’re there kind of, you know, Spotify behind the scenes and managing that. I can tell you that At that I have an artist that it’s been, it’s been man, it’s been the in between, it hasn’t been career changing, it definitely did not go from 4000 to 90,000, or whatever, that’s crazy shit. You know, and they were part of it prior to it it going wide and going public kind of mid last year is when they started releasing singles for their debut leading into the debut album, it was doing really well, you know, started this artist started with 800 monthly listeners before, you know, they only released a couple kind of live stuff before and before they started the debut single and album campaign. And like four or five months later, it went up to like 25,000 monthly listeners. And a good number of that was from discovery mode. Granted, there are only like two or three singles out, and then no tick tock virality no real ads or anything, it was like discovery was really powering a lot of that that’s not life changing numbers, but then we you know, they’ve been kind of sitting there and discovery has been kind of over the last six months or so less than less of the part of the equation of what’s driving the majority of the traction. And so it’s like, I’m on the fence with it right now. I’m just like, I don’t even know if I should keep it running. And I look at it, and I’m like, man, you know, every month has been kind of worse and worse month over month. Whereas like, last December, it was gangbusters. It was nuts. It was like, you know, 3,000%, higher, it was great, you know, not career altering, but really, really good. And now it’s like 250% Higher, and I can’t quite tell if like the one song that’s doing really, really well is because of discovery mode, or if it’s just normally naturally doing well. And I’m just giving up an additional 30% of royalties where I shouldn’t be I don’t know.
Dustin Boyer
Well, you know, we’ve been curious about the actual value of these people listening and what we’ve done with that one honors I mentioned that went from like 5000 to half a million over the last year, we’ve been running ads to the highest US markets through discovery. And we have noticed considerable retention, like these people are actively engaging with the artists, but they need that push because I think they’re when they listen to the radio. I mean, we’re all like that, right? We get into the radio algorithm, and we’re listening to the playlist. And then we’re just kind of going through it and hearing it. But once you are targeted with an ad or something else, and you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I heard them on Spotify. That’s when you can actually like collect that person as a fan.
Ari Herstand
Yeah. So I want to will clarify for a second when you say you’re running ads, where are you specifically running ads targeting these cities?
Dustin Boyer
Meta Tiktok. Google?
Ari Herstand
Okay, so not You’re not talking Marquee ads within Spotify is what you’re running. You’re talking like Instagram ads, Facebook, Google tick tock,
Dustin Boyer
correct. Although the marquee ad is a good way to follow up on those people, the problem there is that it’s not that you own and it’s not hyper targeted per market. So we prefer if we’re going to spend money on trying to collect fans and not reengage them, that’s the best way to do it is to find a platform where you can actually target those markets.
Ari Herstand
What do you mean collect fans?
Dustin Boyer
So it well, it depends, right? Like, what you want to do with a fan, whether you are just trying to create a touch point where they can actively engage with you. So for example, like, like I said, they’re hearing you in a playlist, they might not even know your name, or even look at what the song is. So they’re sort of familiar with their music, but it they have no idea who you are, or who to attach it to. So in my mind, it’s sort of like pennies on the floor, like, you just got to pick them up. And it’s as easy as that. So just connecting with them and connecting the dots is a really useful thing, bringing them back to a DSP platform. And then from there, obviously, there’s a lot of like, ways that you can retarget them down the line of whether you want to get them into like an email, funnel, SMS discord, but just connecting those dots is is really important, just foundationally
Ari Herstand
right now, you know, just because I know a little bit about running ads, specifically, like you know, meta ads and whatnot, you know, Instagram, Facebook ads, targeting people in US cities is extremely expensive. I’m curious, like how you can justify spending that amount of money for the return that you’re going to be getting, which is like, I mean, we’re talking I don’t know what numbers you’re seeing, but like, it’s gonna be like, what $1 A click through or something like that, or $1 a conversion, I suppose. If you’re going to like specific cities in the US and like, that doesn’t seem sustainable to me. But even if you do get them and you convert them and you get them, bring them over to the DSP, like, how many streams will they have to get to like, convert that over? So what do you you know, what are your metrics of when something is successful or how you’re going to spend on ads and where and how much.
Dustin Boyer
So a lot of that’s based also off what the artist is trying to do. accomplish, especially if they intend to tour. So a lot of the times we talk to artists about like, Hey, okay, so you’re going to tour this year or next year? Where do you want to go? And they can kind of stipulate, okay, these places. But if we’re running like discovery mode, if we’re getting data, I would rather look at the data and say, Hey, man, look at these, like five cities, specifically, if any of them stand out, right. So Chicago is probably the biggest streaming market in the US. But it’s like the number one market is Charlotte, let’s say, okay, Charlotte’s a smaller market, but it’s your number one market in the US on Spotify, it means that there is a sort of critical mass of people listening. So targeting that market is more valuable, because it’s more likely, you can actually like expand that market and create like a true fan base there. But the thing is, is that obviously, results may vary. When it comes to AD, I’ll be honest with you like for us on our end, if we’re targeting individual US markets, 50 cents is sort of our benchmark, and that’s still expensive. And you’re right, it’s a loss leader, you’re sending people to a place where you’re not going to make your money back. And there’s a lot of conversations about how you can leverage that person on Spotify to activate the algorithm. But I think in this particular conversation, it’s one of those necessary things that you have to spend money on, and what the valuable part is, the data you collect along the way and continuing to funnel those people further and further down until you get them into like an email cycle where they’re buying tickets, buying merch, that sort of thing.
Ari Herstand
Well, that’s what I was gonna buy. That was my next question. It was just like, you know, what are you seeing the the return? And I guess, what is the focus and the goal of running these ads, you mentioned touring, whereas like, if you’re running targeted ads to Charlotte, or Chicago or whatever, I’m like, I want you to step me through this funnel is just like, Okay, you’re running an ad on Instagram stories or Tik Tok, or wherever you’re running it? Where do you point them to? Like, when they tap it? Where do they go? And then how do you you mentioned retargeting for, like, explain what that means? And then how do you retarget but really, the whole, like, zoom way out? It’s just like, how are you going to eventually convert them into a ticket buying fan, Spotify does not connect the artist with their fans, there’s no way that I can like message my followers on Spotify and be like, Hey, I’m coming to town, here’s the link to buy tickets or whatever. So like, how do you do it? How do you convert them to become a real ticket buying fan sent me through the whole funnel and journey?
Dustin Boyer
Absolutely. And look at it, it is a difficult thing to do, because it varies greatly depending on the artist. But let’s let’s stay on the string about like a touring artist, because I think that when it comes to creating revenue, I think touring, and ticket sales are probably one of the best ways to do that. It’s it’s about creating touchpoints enough touchpoints that eventually, they feel like they know you, people around them know you. And so eventually it be created comes like a community critical mass moment. And I’ll give you like one example of a strategy we do. So let’s say that we have, you know, 100,000 listeners, which is great in the US. And we look at me see, okay, so these are our top 20 markets in the US. And let’s say we’re touring some of those markets. But we have a tour coming up, let’s say we have 15 dates coming up. One strategy we like to do is that we’ll take the tour poster for that, right. And instead of just targeting the markets that the tour is in, will actually target the entire United States, or just those top 20 or 30 markets. And we literally ask the question, are we coming to your market? Are we are we headed there? And the whole point is, let’s say we’re not going to Chicago. But we know there’s people in Chicago that we can retarget. And what I mean by retarget is let’s say we’re running music ads and all of these markets, right? When somebody clicks and converts in that music ad, we’ve collected that data. Now the integrity of that data is suspect lately, just because of the all the ios changes, but it’s still it’s still possible to retarget a lot of these people. And the idea is that when you put up that Tor poster ad, you’re hitting those people, but even if you’re hitting like cold people, let’s say that to Chicago, you have a Spotify ad that when I say Spotify, I mean excuse me, like a an ad specifically driving people to Spotify or any DSP, you have that tour ad that I mentioned. And then let’s say you have a like SMS signup ad. So all of a sudden, maybe across multiple different platforms, you have all these different touch points. And then while all that’s going on, let’s say you have like a little virality on a piece of organic content. Well, at some point, there is a critical mass moment in an individual’s mind where they even if they’re not like truly invested in the music, they heard it here and there. They’re like, I’m going to add this on to my playlist I keep hearing it, I really like it. I’m just going to add it. Yeah. Then you’ve, you’ve collected them, right? Like you, you, they’re aware of you in a way that they’re more willing to sign up for SMS or buy a ticket.
Ari Herstand
Do you run ads? Encouraging people to sign up for SMS? Or is that just not? I mean, how do you convert them to your list? Typically? Because, you know, the standard strategy, yes, is running an ad on Instagram, Facebook, you know, maybe tick tock or whatever, and then sending them to the DSPS. Because that’s, you know, a lot cheaper. Your banners, helping train the algorithm on the DSPS converting the listeners, but how do you take that step further, you mentioned SMS signup, is that the focus these days over email? And then do you see that there’s actual real conversion that makes that is worth the amount of money that you’re spending on the ads?
Dustin Boyer
Absolutely. At first, I want to, I do want to take a step back and say this, okay. And this gets into like, heady ad, and if there’s people who run ads, but yeah, never run an ad. That’s not specifically a conversion ad, which is basically when somebody clicks on an ad, and then you get like a form or you’re somewhere else. And you click again, that secondary click is what you want your objective to be. Because at the end of the day, all these platforms are going to optimize to your objective, and you want to get it as in scope to like the actual objective as possible. So it’s important, like if you have anybody running ads for you, and they’re just running traffic ads, that just don’t bother it, because you’re
Ari Herstand
wasting impressions don’t do like clicks is a, you know, one of the things you can choose it’s actual conversion now, I mean, but I’m just to interject. You know, once once, Apple and iOS did their updates, where they blocked a lot of this track these tracking capabilities are you seeing because most of these as people are clicking through from their phones from their iPhones? Are you even able to track conversions anymore? Like, do you think that data is accurate?
Dustin Boyer
So I got a couple of things to say about this. If you’re using the pixel, it will track enough results to understand how to optimize it. And that’s the point. It’s not that you have to track every single person, it’s that you want to make sure that the ad understands who you’re targeting. That said, and there’s rumors going around that they’re gonna get rid of the pixel because it’s that unreliable. Right? What you really want to do is set up something called an API conversion token. And there’s only and I’m only going to plug this site because they’re the only ones doing it. But we use a website called ArtistHub.IO, because they’re the only ones who use metas API conversion token, which will track like 90% of everybody. And we have we’ve run tests compared against five six other platforms that use the pixel and ArtistHub always, always wins. I say that it’s nobody knows about this site, and it’s sort of a shame because it needs more support because it
Ari Herstand
will every Ari’s Take Academy student knows about the site because that’s actually created by our instructor Lucidious is who runs are yeah so so every everyone who follows artistic knows about ArtistHub I’ve just because Lucidious and his partner Derek created ArtistHub, there is typically because we’ve been teaching right Derek is the one who’s the genius behind the you know, the coding, but it’s him and Lucidious and they you know, it has been road tested by 1000s of our ATA students who we teach them how to run these ads. And we’ve gone through all of these these roadblocks over the years as iOS has changed this and meta has changed this and yada yada yada. So it’s nice i validation. I’m sure they’re gonna love listening to hear you say
Dustin Boyer
that wasn’t even mean I legitimately like without ArtistHub. And it’s so funny because with all the rumors of them getting rid of the pixels every what are we going to do? And I’m like, I work good. Like, because we use ArtistHub. Yeah, no, dude, they’re there.
Ari Herstand
You gotta hit him up for some commission. Damn. Sponsorship now. That’s cool. That’s, that’s super helpful. Yeah, it’s it makes a lot of sense.
Dustin Boyer
But going back to your question about like SMS and thing. I think people, overcomplicate what it takes to collect information. I think that artists Forget that. Why is it that somebody would sign up for an email or an SMS? What is the value there and they try to set up like contests or do they do presale where they collect information and the problem there is that you lose people on the value people don’t have time. They don’t really care about whatever you’re trying to give away unless you’re a massive artists. And even if you’re giving away something like monetarily like an iPad is not related to your right. Yeah, right. The thing that we use and it’s so simple, and it works so and we get like $1 to $2 Convert sends an SMS email, whatever it is, is that you take a song, let’s say an artist wrote 10 songs for an album and is scrapping one of them. And we say, and they’re like, I’m never gonna put out that song. Great. So what you say is that you say, Hey, I’ve got this song, I don’t know if I’m gonna put it on the album. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna put it out. But if you want to hear it, and tell me what you think, like, shoot me a text. And it’s, it’s that simple. That’s the message. And we set up ads like that all the time. And if people just people just want to know, they just even if they don’t know who you are, sometimes we just get people to be like, I want to hear this song.
Ari Herstand
Yeah. And complete and complete the journey from Oh, sorry, keep going. Go ahead. What was the question? Absolutely complete the journey. So you say I mean, I love that and brilliant. And one of the things I love about you most Dustin, is that you are this specific, and you give away all these very specific tricks and things that you’re working on. So, but I want to complete the journey, though. So you say, texting me this song? Is there is the number on the screen? Are you saying are you clicking to a landing page that says insert your phone number here, like like actually helped me set this up?
Dustin Boyer
Yeah, so there’s, there’s multiple platforms to use. And they vary in price, but almost all of them have sort of some sort of signup function. And I used to love it, because you used to literally be able to like text these numbers. But now there’s more, there’s more laws in place where you have to get like certain permissions, which is good convert consumers. So you land on a form, you give them your text message, and it auto generates you building on the back end. It’s so simple on any of these platforms, like community or LELO. And those are like kind of the top tier and bottom tier and expensive. Yeah, yeah, community is expensive. But man, it is expensive. I don’t know about Leila. But cool. It was like 25 bucks a month or something great. But, but if you set up like it automatically sends the song. But here’s the thing that I think a lot of artists really misunderstand about it is that they think that these things SMS and email are in place for like a monthly newsletter. And which, you know, I think are you and I are of similar age and background where like those big bulky newsletters used to be a thing, right, where you’re like, your story, and like, here’s my dates, and my merch. And now it’s all about whether it’s email or text, it has to read like a text, it needs to be short and sweet. And so what I’ll have my artists do is that somebody will sign up, and it’ll auto generate be like, Hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s the song, let me know what you think. And whether that person responds or not, I have the artist get into that email. And by the way, all this works with email as well, whether it’s email or SMS, and respond and be like, Hey, this is so and so like, curious what you thought. And all of a sudden, they have the artists responding to them. And it does really make a huge difference on the open rate. The open rate is literally like, let’s say it’s 10%. Normally, it jumps by 10, or 20, or even sometimes 30%, when you have that consistency, and that value, connecting with a human being on the other end.
Ari Herstand
Yeah, no, that’s great. And that’s a great point. I mean, just taking that one additional step for the artist to just send that text. The What do you think, you know, one of my artists, on our last tour, she uses a service where you’re able to, it’s a short form, it’s a short number, and you’re able to actually sign up via texting it and so on stage every night on tour, she’s like, Hey, everybody, pull out your phones, I’m and, you know, text 55444 and text the word mother because or albums named mother’s hammer, and, you know, and you’re gonna get all my music in here when I come back to town. And you’re gonna get some additional fun little things, and we can we can chat about it. And everyone does it. It’s like, it’s almost I mean, it’s pretty nuts. It’s almost like 25% of the room 25 to 40% In some rooms actually like texted and as a short form text number. But now we have those people’s numbers from the you know, stage where they don’t have to go to the signup on the email list at the merch table or whatever. So anyway, but like, I think we’re getting to the same point that is that I want to hit on that it’s important for everybody to the understand is that, you know, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal is how are you going to own your audience and own your fans, whereas just like if you get them to follow you on on Instagram, or Tiktok, or Spotify, that’s not really owning them Instagram, Tik Tok and Spotify own them, that they’re subscribed to Spotify, they’re not subscribed to you. And so like, the overarching thing that we’re really getting to is just like, how do you get how do you own your fans? So then you can contact them directly? Because yes, we you know, we’re old enough to remember, MySpace, and like what happened, you know, I toured with an artist who was a superstar in MySpace. But we toured two years after MySpace died. And we couldn’t get anybody to come to the show, because like he had not connected, he had not transferred that audience to whatever the next platform was. And we see that again, with vine. And we see it again, with Facebook, and we see it again, you know, platform after platform, it’s like, you build up all your fans and your followers, like a social media platform, they can flip a switch, it can die, it can, they can change the algorithm, you know, iOS can change, you know, Apple can change their regulations. So it’s kind of like, the ultimate goal is to own them. And the only real way to own them is through email, or now SMS, I suppose. Yeah.
Dustin Boyer
And I always was told, never build your business in somebody else’s backyard. That Well, that’s, yeah, that’s, I was told that I was like, Man, that’s so true. Because even take like Tiktok followers, man, what a what a useless metric. Like, it might as well just be like, This is how many people you convince to hit this button. And that’s literally all that metric is worth. So, you know, artists used to come to us, and I mean, they still do, and they’re like, Hey, can you can you run ads to drive them followers on Tiktok. And I’m like, That’s a terrible idea. Like, for one, it’s worthless. And two, you’re gonna get the most low engaged people on the platform to follow, you don’t really care about your content. And don’t get me wrong. Like, we have artists that wants once you hit like a million followers. There’s like something on the back end, where tiktoks Like, maybe we should let the followers see this cut. But, I mean, I know you have something like, like, 80,000 followers.
Ari Herstand
Now we have, well, Ari’s take has like, 30,000.
Dustin Boyer
You’re in the same boat? I am, then. Yeah, yeah, we’re around
Ari Herstand
the same. And, you know, we’ve been growing. I don’t know, when we start we started a couple years ago or something. But, but yeah, I mean, that’s the thing is just like our third video ever that we posted on RDS take, when we had 20 followers, you know, the third video ever got, like, 400,000 views or something, you know, and it just doesn’t make any sense. And then now with like, 30,000 followers, it’s like, yeah, some videos get 800 views, or whatever. And it’s like, it’s just it fluctuates, but also the artists that I work with the same kind of thing, it’s just like, followers, and I’m in this like, private Tiktok too, texting community group from some, like, it’s all musicians that are just like, you know, fairly big on tick tock that are, you know, working artists, musicians, and they’re just like, you know, sharing tips and tricks and commiserating and be like, whatever. Some of them have millions of followers, and they’re like, Yeah, I can’t crack 3000 views on any of my videos anymore. And I’m just like, what the like that, but that, but this is just the common story that we’ve heard over and over this is not a new story. Like, this is what happened with Facebook 1012 years ago, when they’re like, Yeah, build up, you know, likes to your page and followers to your page. And then they flip the switch, like, guess what, you can no longer reach your followers anymore unless you pay for it. And so I’m curious from your perspective, what you’re seeing with tick tock now, do you think because now they’re started, they finally started to get their ads platform working, I guess, or I don’t know if it is working, but like, a little bit better than it was a couple of years ago. Are they pulling the same thing that Facebook pulled 1015 years ago of just like, now, you’re gonna have to pay to find an audience? Are you still seeing organic success and organic reach on Tik Tok?
Dustin Boyer
I mean, organic success and reach absolutely happens. I mean, we we commit to it for so many of our artists and excel in it. But I, here’s here’s what I think is going on in terms of like, tick tock strategy. Certainly they’re trying to get people to spend money. And they understand the best way to do that is to feed you a little success. And then hold on to success and hope that you spend money and the private drug
Ari Herstand
dealer. Yeah, I mean, that’s what they’re doing first hits the best, you got to come back for more.
Dustin Boyer
And then I’ll tell you what, I have accounts that I’ve never run ads on, like the venture account never ran an ad. And I’ve never had an issue with the algorithm, seemingly shadow banning me if you will, or like, feeling like I wasn’t getting the numbers I deserved. But when as soon as I run an ad on an account, it is like it kills organic reach just absolutely kills it. And I have I have an artist, a well established major label artists. And that was reaching before they came to us last year. They were reaching I want to say 30 or 40,000 people a post just really great all the time. The manager ran an ad for like 500 bucks in October of last year. And ever since then, that couldn’t hit over 1000 It’s like the Oh my God, dude. I mean, this is this is a song. If I said the song you’d be like, I know that song. That was a hit song. Like it You know, and it, it is, it is absolutely. To me, it says to the tiktoks algorithm like, hey, these people are willing to spend money. You know, why don’t you hold back a little bit more. And it’s it’s been a nightmare trying to get over it. And even when we do, like, we had this string of posts that were reaching 200 300,000 for about a week, and then it just crashed and burned all over again. And in and I would say, like, if that was just a pocket where I was like, well, that’s not conclusive. I’m telling you, every single time we do it, it happens. Doesn’t matter the size of the artist.
Ari Herstand
Wow. Oh, that’s such a bummer. Because I just started I tried, literally last week and was like, You know what, I’ve never run Tiktok ads before. Let me let me try it from this artists account. Because there’s nothing there’s no traction happening on Tik Tok. And like, the, the running the ad, first off was a nightmare, because, and I’d be curious to know, I don’t wanna get too into the weeds in this, but like, I ran it not from like the Tiktok ads, Business Manager marketplace, or whatever the goods called. I did from the actual artists that count. But now they have this new thing. We have to buy tokens that converts for I don’t know, you’ve seen this. And so they’re like, oh, this costs 6000 tokens, and you have to spend $100 to get 6000 tokens, whereas like, normally the ad would have been $60. And, and I hadn’t seen that before. I think it’s like a very new thing. But anyway, I bought the tokens, I ran the ad, it did whatever. It was just like a lot of aggressive, angry old men commenting, I’m like, Well, this, if I wanted that, I’d go to Facebook. Like that was a waste of fucking money. And like, you know, demoralize the artists having to like respond to all of these assholes. And I’m like, never again, but now you’re telling me like shit, I might have just ruined the organic reach on Tik Tok. And
Dustin Boyer
I don’t want to jump in. And it is something that we’re just noticing. And there are definitely accounts that we work now that are out of that hell, or whatever it was, was going on with that good. But there are accounts that it definitely feels like it’s a data thing. Like the more you’ve run the ads, the more data you got to dig out of, I have some artists that have run ads for a year straight. And we’ve never been able to dig out of it. All of our ads. We do run from that back end on the ad manager, but we run them as dark ads, meaning they’re not tied to any account. Yeah, we run a lot of ads on tick tock, we just don’t do it that way. Because to me, there isn’t a post. There isn’t a way to achieve success on Tik Tok. Unless you have a post do well organically around your music. I was talking to an artist do you mean? So to give you an example, I was talking to an artist. And this is probably something you’ve talked about ad nauseam, where he was pushing his music pushing, his music wasn’t working. And then he did a random like, Hey, I’m gonna make coffee this morning. And he did a video about making coffee. And all of a sudden that blew up. And then he was the coffee guy. And every time he posted around his music, it didn’t do anything. But the same goes for ads, like if your ad is if you’re just like, I want my music to reach as many people as possible. So I’m going to spend as much money as possible just to get people to hear it. It’s just not the kind of people that you want it the algorithm does a better job of targeting your potential fans, then the ads ever could. So you might as well just keep focusing on the algorithm.
Ari Herstand
Right? Okay, so let’s talk about this a little bit more specifically, I want to I want to focus on an artist that you have worked with. Her name is Ashley Ryan. She’s a country artist. And you know, an independent country artists. Now granted with a company called spindle music YC that you’re partnered with. We’ll talk about that more later. But specifically, you know, I haven’t really discussed country too much on this show. 150 episodes running, I’m looking to change that. I have nothing against country music, we just haven’t had many people on it. And I’m going to be bringing more people on. But specifically, she’s just country artists. And talk to me about, you know, when you started working with her in the journey, because it’s been, it’s been impressive to see. And as of late, it seems like stuff is still working. You know, some people I’ve talked to even on this show six months ago, like ticked October tiktoks dead, it’s done time to find the next thing. But then I saw, you know, a video that she posted, like last month or something did really well and got a few million views and the song is is doing pretty well as well. So talking about the journey with with Ashley Ryan and kind of how you orchestrated that or what your participation was with with her journey.
Dustin Boyer
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll tell you that for whatever reason, country’s having a moment on Tiktok that’s for sure thing, and it has been for the past eight months. I want to say nine months. I don’t know why but all of a sudden it’s just like it I think listener country listeners are more open to hearing newer acts than pop. Hmm. Other type of, it’s just my
Ari Herstand
complete opposite to be honest,
Dustin Boyer
I you know, and if you think about how country radio has always worked how like one unknown artists can hit like number one out of nowhere that happens all the time in country and doesn’t happen in pop. But you know, just to kind of give you the lay of the land. You know, we started working with Ashley in December. And I will say this, I’m a part of this team. But there are two people on our team that are truly the reason behind the ideas that helped her explode. So I don’t want to take credit for that. If there’s two people on our team Janie and John, who just are absolutely crushing it. But you know, she came to us and she had 2000 monthly listeners. But she, the songs are just phenomenal. And by the way, at the end of the day, our strategies are more or less the same. Across the board. The song is most of the time the differentiating factor. And this is sort of a rare case where the first song we tackled happened to be the song that said, Everybody went into it being like a little baby. Hush, little baby. Yeah, everybody went into it thinking like, Hey, we’re gonna put this first one out. It’s not the song, right? Like, that’s how it always starts. Like, you’re, you’re like, hey, we have 10 songs, we’re gonna ease into the song. Like, nobody knows what the song is never like. Nobody’s ever right. So right out of the gate. I think we’re calling it internally. We’re calling it murder country. Because it’s about a mother. Who murder ballads. Yeah, murder murder ballads. It’s about a mother who is protective of her daughter, and men mistreating her daughter. And I think we stumbled on this. But we were we’re not this smart. But we’re not that dumb. Either. That there was Georgia and Ginny, the new season of Georgia and Ginny was coming out simultaneously earlier this she TV show. Yeah, yeah, the TV show. So we kind of knew that that was happening. And the stories were the same. If you’re not familiar that, well, the explanation of the song is pretty much the premise of the show. But really out of the gate for us, it was about branding, it was about creating atmosphere around the song that would connect people to the topic of the song right away. And she was already shooting a music video. So we’re like, just just unload BTS on us. And it’s sometimes it’s as simple as that. Like, sometimes we go into shoots, and we’re like, this is a complex ideas. Sometimes we’re just like, if we can just get the mood of the song through BTS, then we can compile hooks that will get people to stick around long enough for them to hear the song. And we were hoping that people would connect the dots with Ginny in Georgia. And right out of the gate. We did that. And we leaned hard into that. And I call that
Ari Herstand
Yeah, so one of the videos that said the text on the screen at the top was if Georgia wrote Ginny a song, and then boom, hit, you know, the song starts playing she’s singing it right?
Dustin Boyer
Yeah. And that that happened once we saw people already connecting the dots were like, Oh, wow, okay, have all our hooks all that stuff, we’re just gonna lean hard into this. Sure. And she you know, that song got millions of streams within a couple of weeks. But at the end of the day for us, it’s sort of never ending either, like, where that song was by the end of January, everybody’s high fiving and they’re like, Okay, on to the next song and I’m like, No, this song can grow all year long. And that video that you mentioned that you saw from like last month was just her performance was just a shooting a performance. And that did better than any of the previous videos from January and write that song just has a life and those numbers don’t stop growing. You know and people give up on song so quickly, but there’s no reason to especially when you see something have legs
Ari Herstand
well that’s interesting because right I you know, that’s the video that’s pinned right now is for live performance video. So I took a look at that first I was like wow, like this one you know has 6.7 million views but at the same time then I started going backwards and I watched the full music video which is a very high production music video I mean granted like you can call her an independent artists but there’s a lot of money behind this and so like we can’t we can’t overstate that. There’s a lot of money that took to to get to this point now and I if I’m doing my quick back of the napkin math here, it hasn’t recouped. So I’m like curious about like, what do you gauge his success when you’re working with an artist like this? Like, you know, God bless her that she has so much support right now independently with a lot of financial backing because like I know your services aren’t cheap. I know that the music video I know a music video cost that shit is not cheap. So it’s this like, on one hand, I’m like, Cool props to you guys for kind of figuring it out and testing it and mind you, you know, yes, you know, she’s all in which is great, you don’t always find an artist who’s all in like she’s posting and she’s, you know, doing taking it on her own initiative. But like, you know, I’m curious about like, I think there’s gonna be artists that are listening to this that know the story is like, Yo, like, yeah, if I had $100,000 to I could be successful as well and be able to test all this and shoot, you know, super, super expensive music videos and higher venture music at your data, the so like, I want to kind of take that back a little bit of like, alright, this story is still great not to discredit or belittle any of the actions, because it is all brilliant, and it worked really well. But is it because she has this really, really expensive music video that you could work with an all of this content? Or like, what if there’s an artist out there? This is gonna be like, Yo, like, here’s the common theme here. Like, I don’t have any money, like I got 100 bucks. What am I supposed to do here? The deck is stacked against me.
Dustin Boyer
So I’ll say this out. And to be honest with you, I’m not sure if they recouped it, it’s it’s going well, for sure. And she’s getting a lot of opportunities. And you’re not wrong, like there is there’s like an independent label behind her. And they are putting money in I don’t think it’s quite as much as 100,000. But they they’re spending money for sure. But here’s the thing, like, all the things that we do, and that has blown her up, have haven’t cost anything in terms of what it costs to make these things.
Ari Herstand
We cost well, the music, video costs money, correct costs money,
Dustin Boyer
but if you go, we just talked about that piece of her performing that was shot at a rehearsal. Most of the content, like with the reach that she has is stuff in her backyard talking to the camera. My point is that like when you start to funnel people, when you start to create a business and a mechanism around an artist, that does take money to grow a business, that discovery, that thing that took off in January, she could have done that any artists could do that without shooting a music video without having ads, not all of that took place in a vacuum. And trust me, I have been a part of many projects, that the songs or whatever it is, has had a lot of money behind it. And it guarantees like nothing. The only thing he guarantees is the artists has the time to pursue their art and this content. And that is really where it’s in my opinion is truly unfair. Because the guy who’s working 40 hours a week may still hear me say that and like, that’s great. Still, I don’t have that. You know, and that is that is real. And that is a hurdle that as somebody who is also coming from a I built a business, right? Anybody who builds a business understands the hours that it takes upfront to do that, where you’re still working a normal job, I spent my entire 20s working seven days a week, unfortunately. But I want to encourage like, a lot of artists come to me and they say, Look, man, I’ve got $5,000 How do I spend it, I’m like put it in your pocket, take two weeks off, get your music done, and and shoot content. That’s that’s what that is literally the best way to spend your money. Because no amount of ads are ever going to break you period. I’ve never broken an ad from or broken an artist from running an ad. I’ve broken artists from making compelling content that tells a story that connects them to an audience that creates value in a listeners life.
Ari Herstand
So I Okay, I appreciate that. And I get the sentiment and I understand, take the two weeks off shoot the content. Here’s the challenge. And this is why this is why I see so much value in agencies. And you know why I wanted you to kind of talk about this today is because like, so many artists that I talked to, you know, they’re, they take the time they do the content batching they make a gazillion videos they post every day, nothing happens. And like it’s it’s not I mean, this is unfortunately, a very, very common occurrence. And these are brilliant artists, like I’m telling you, this is not their music. It’s like baseline. The only conversation I want to have is that their music is brilliant and amazing and deserves to be heard because like we of course it has to be baseline that’s always baseline whenever I’m talking about anything and I know you talk about this all the time, it’s just like, you can’t polish a turd. So we’re just going to start baseline your music is brilliant. Baseline amazing. Maybe let’s just say it’s the best music ever made. Whatever, you know, like that’s, it’s always subjective, but what I’m getting at is really, you know, what is it like? Just somebody Film me like, most artists don’t know what works on tick tock and like, so just filming a bunch of videos and posting it. Like, you know, the campaign of the that you guys ran with Ashley Ryan and all of this stuff and making these clips in the text on the screen and this part of the song, even if it wasn’t the music video, but like the Gini and Georgia TV show relationship, like damn, really super smart, like, so, you know, how do artists know what to post and then even if they post, like you even said it, they don’t know about the shadow banning or maybe they ran $10 in ads, and like fucking, you know, if they didn’t run ads, like these videos would be exploding, but because they ran ads, now the algorithm is penalizing them and they don’t even know. So what’s what, like, really, I get the idea and the sentiment, take two weeks off and film content and make videos. So they do that. They take two weeks off, they film content, they make videos, they have 30 videos, they post them every single day. And then a month and a half from now they’re in the exact same position they are today. And what like now what
Dustin Boyer
well, and and the take two weeks off is probably it actually is not great advice that the idea is that you have to build these things into your life, just like you do anything else that you want to create routine, because the problem there is that you post for 30 days, and you say we’re gonna take another two weeks off, or whatever it is. And I will say this, if you were to do something like that, I mean, it’s like taking time off to get into the studio, you’re making a little bit more content than this is gonna last you just a month. But your real, the real way to win at really anything is to build it into a routine to like I posted on Tik Tok. And I have, I feel like I’ve got three jobs. And then I post them tick tock, but the only way that I could do it is that I had to build it into my everyday life in a way that was functional for me. Even if it wasn’t like the most optimal like I got guys that are get on tick tock. And if there’s edits, it looks amazing, I can’t do that. I can’t build that in my life. So you have to know your limitations there and understand what am I actually capable of. But yeah, I think that outside of that, I just want to correct that. Because I think that’s not actually great advice. But I still like the idea of like you put the money in your pocket, you try to buy yourself time somewhere. But I will say this, that the artists have the biggest problem with when it comes to experimenting, because the true path to success when it comes to content and finding your audience is not being precious. And I’m not saying that artists need to be goofy. They need, they need to be themselves. But they’re so quick to button up what they’re willing and unwilling to do in content, that it limits their ability to experiment. So they will come up with a few ideas, and they will beat those ideas over the head regardless of whether they’re working or not. And so, and that’s a really big hurdle. That’s a hard I don’t want to act like not being precious is I’m precious still about a lot of things. I it’s hard to overcome that. But look like we’re talking about capitalism, right? We’re talking about a world where people can beat you out because they have more time and they have more money. So in order to compete with them, because at the end of the day, you’re a commodity. And that’s why good music goes unnoticed is because there’s so much of it. It’s commoditize commoditize. And so, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to put in nights, weekends, you’re going to have to fight harder than the Taylor Swift’s who grew up being able to just focus on music, not to say, right, incredibly talented person, but it requires time plus
Ari Herstand
baseline, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And look, there’s
Dustin Boyer
no, there’s no good answer. But I will say one of the things to make a point about all of that. Baseline music is good. That doesn’t mean that you are targeting the right audience. So Ginny, GA, that’s the right audience for that music. It coincides I like to call it my upside down unicorn, not to get into why I call it that. But the idea is that instead of focusing on genres, similar artists, you focus on brand in niches that you can tackle. We do it all the time in gaming, especially we find communities are a game around Anomie. You need to find your community. So it’s not even about like, the music is good. Yeah, but if it’s hitting 45 year old dads and you’re writing like synth pop, then yeah, of course, it’s not resonating. So your next goal is to figure out how do you build your content in a way that out of the gate. It’s telling the right audience to watch this and the wrong audience to move on.
Ari Herstand
How do you do that? Against samples
Dustin Boyer
not not not being proud hashes. So let’s say I have an artist, that is, let’s say, the genie and Jordan, you know, we’ll just keep using genie and Giorgio. Right, we found a show that there was a community around. And the idea is that you can’t just post once because that first one might not find the genie and George, GA audience. So you create 10 or 15 pieces around that audience and you post and that’s why consistency is so important. Because every time you post something, it hits 250 people sort of that random based off of previous data. But if it’s a new account, more or less at random, so that those are the wrong 250 people, then you can’t look at that idea and say, well, that doesn’t work. So then you you keep posting. And then there’s a point of exhaustion, there is a point where you’re like, I posted 15 things around this idea, and it still hasn’t found an audience, I’m gonna move on to a different community. Okay, but you find that niche that brand, that’s something that fits in line with your music and with you personally, that feels right for who you are. And then you start to align your content as much as possible. Because idea is that once somebody swipes and sees that piece of content, you want them to feel like this is for me, this is me. And if and look, that piece of content where she’s just singing. It doesn’t do that. But the piece before that, where she’s in the rocking chair, where it’s first singing the song, it’s very moody, that does that sets a mood. And that’s really the difference,
Ari Herstand
huh? Yeah. And I saw another one of your artists. Similarly, and I’m curious if this is in line with what you’re talking about. The artists, similar country artists act top, there was a video that was just somebody wakeboarding. And it said, there’s four types of women. You know, which one are you and like, would go through and this song is playing, it’s just a dude wakeboarding. And it’s like counting down. Now. I’m curious. Were you trying to find the wakeboarding community there or just having like a compelling video component or trying to? Like I’m curious, the the what was the strategy behind that?
Dustin Boyer
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you this, that sometimes this happens when we do these shoots, that shot was on a boat. And the idea there is that it was we shot that earlier in the summer, right? So we wanted to reach out in country music, there is a very large party boating community. Right? So immediately out of the gate, we wanted anybody who’s interested and in that community to see this and be like, this is for me, which worked really well. Now, when we do things like that. We again, not being precious, we like to experiment. And yeah, I’m trying to understand the angles, in certain brands like the wakeboarding like, you know, where, and I’ll be honest with you, I did not make that piece of content. So I don’t know the particular thoughts behind we, there’s 12 of us here, okay. There’s a lot of content that gets made that I never even get eyes on before it goes up. Okay. But I can for sure I know what chute it’s from. And I for sure know, it’s because they’re like, let’s see what happens here, where she probably had a Janie made that. And she probably had a thought of like, I want to see what happens when we tackle this angle on it. And that’s, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about finding a base and manipulating it. It’s just like music, right? People do that when they create music, they find their sound their feeling, and then they tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak as they get more experience and understand their audience more and more.
Ari Herstand
Hmm, that’s a really great analogy. And to kind of continue on the the sentiment of not being too precious. Like, I get that in the sense that, you know, artists need to understand and remember that tick tock is not Instagram, Instagram, most artists have approached for the last 567 years or so. As like, almost kind of a new website where you land on it, and you get a quick glimpse, and a glance at just like, what is the essence of this artist? Who are they? And it’s like, this is the new website, you look at their Instagram profiles, like oh, this makes sense. That’s it, here’s a music video, here’s them performing live, here’s some photoshoots here’s some behind the scenes, here’s them being fun, you know, you get a personality, you get an essence, okay to make sense. Whereas Tiktok you know, a lot of people aren’t just landing on the profile necessarily like that. Because like, I think an artist would think about that as in like, well, if I have 15 videos in a row, all of like either wakeboarding or have the, you know, the TV show content, or, you know, like whatever other the sub communities that I’m looking to target like let’s you know, I’m targeting the anime community or something and there’s like 10 anime videos like wait, is this a Is this a game? Or is this like? So? You know, I suppose that makes sense that because like every video may find an audience or may get squashed, the Tick Tock artists profile is going to look dramatically different than like the Instagram artists profile. Right?
Dustin Boyer
Yeah, and Instagram is really in my mind it, it feels like more of a portfolio less and less. But tick tock, tick tock in my mind, I it there’s engagement, but in my mind, it’s YouTube. It’s not Instagram, you know, and don’t get me wrong. People engage in a way on YouTube that they look back on old videos. But this is this is so much more flying by people like they’re flipping the channel. They’re just flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping. Nobody’s like, well, let’s look back in time and see what else they posted. And oh, isn’t that embarrassing? Or that doesn’t seem right, or people, they just, and I think that’s the hardest thing to understand from a marketing perspective, is putting your head in the head of a listener, putting your brain in the head of a listener, and truly understanding how they think and how they consume. Because once you do, it frees you up a lot, like artists feeling like the need, and this has always been my big thing, feeling like the need that they have to say, here’s my new song, it’s out now. There’s artists that in rights that I work with that feel like if they can’t say those words, they are not doing the song justice. And um, I asked him, What is that song doing for? I mean, what does that phrase doing for you? What value is it doing for the listener? How is it explaining to the listener anything about you? And it’s not?
Ari Herstand
Well, well, well, hold on. And I, I’m going to push back on that a little bit. And I internally pushed back when he first posted the viral Don’t say my song is out now, which was a big controversial post tictac that you made months months ago. And I know. But the reason that artists still say my new song is out now. And we’re talking superstars, mid level, entry level, or merging whatever of all, because for their fans, that does something to them, because it tells them hey, guess what, I have a new song about it. My favorite artists told me like, Yo, this song is out. I’m like, Oh, shit, I didn’t realize, you know, let me go check it out. Cool. As a fan, I get that. But what you’re really, I think what you’re really focusing on what you’re really mentioning, is that, what does that do for a cold audience? Somebody who doesn’t know you at all right? Are you still saying, Don’t ever say my new song is out now? Even to your fans, or anybody?
Dustin Boyer
I’m not saying that you don’t say that, like you, you functionally need to that needs to exist somewhere. But if I’m talking about whether I’m reaching a warm audience, a cold audience, and my copy the thing that I’m writing, to let people entice people to listen, if that if it starts there, if it’s if that’s it, even even if I’m Drake, that’s going to draw people, there’s Drake fans, yeah, is that the most compelling thing that he could write, or his team could write? No, not at all in. And that’s the thing like it, whether it’s said or written, there are far more compelling things that I challenge artists to creatively try to think about when it comes to exposing their music. And that doesn’t mean that in the description or the comments, you don’t mention the logistics of it. But if you’re, if Drake’s whole thing is he gets on he’s like, Yo, my new song. This is out now. Fine. There’s probably something that he could have literally just performed the song. And it probably would have been, he could have sat there and just had it played and stared at the camera. And I think you could do it better. It just the word. Those words are so boring. Like that’s, yeah. Imagine Bed Bath and Beyond being like, Hey, new curtains, come get new curtains. Right. Like, okay, you curtains like what is the new curtain? Like, why? You know, it just needs to be a grant, I just gave an example of a company that’s out of business now.
Ari Herstand
Cool. Awesome. Well, Dustin, this has been so great. And I appreciate all of everything that you have revealed to us. And I know, we could be talking for the next two hours, you know, keep going. But I do want to let you go. So I wish I do have one final side.
Dustin Boyer
I’m actually really enjoying this conversation.
Ari Herstand
I know and I have like five more questions that I want to get to but we’re gonna have to do a part two or something or keep going.
Dustin Boyer
By the way that that to me, I think is what people need to hear from, you know, he’s siding with the artists because I think that they get tired of people like me saying these things and then they have so I love that you were doing that.
Ari Herstand
Run out. Well. Thank you and I will continue to do that in the comments box or maybe we’ll start that that new new takes for the for the super nerds. But anyway, I have one final question that asked everyone who comes on the show. What does it mean to you to make it in the new music business?
Dustin Boyer
Forget about the gatekeepers. It’s all about listeners. Don’t worry about the gatekeepers. Don’t beg to be on a label on an agency. Go after listeners and all that other stuff will just come.
Ari Herstand
Dustin Boyer. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you sir.
Ari Herstand
Today’s episode was edited by Mikey Evans with music by Brassroots district and produced by all the great people at Ari’s Take.
