Universal is Opening a New Hotel… From Streaming Money?

Tons of stuff is going on, and I got a whole slew of videos that are gonna becoming out real soon, but I came across something really interesting and I figured I just hop online and just talk about what's going on. So, here we go. Let's get into it.

I wanna talk about the hotel that's being opened and down in Mississippi, specifically, Universal Music Group is actually opening a multibillion dollar Hotel in Mississippi on the coast in Biloxi, and it's kind of being built from stream money. It seems like everybody's making so much money from streaming, seems it's enough to open a hotel, and this is not like a new thing, a lot of music companies are starting to diversify their accounts, so to speak, they're making money again, and just like any good business would do, they're diversifying where they put their money so it's not all in one basket. So, quite simply, they're opening a music-themed hotel, I guess, to maybe rival something of like a Hard Rock.

Apparently it's gonna be like just saturated with music, live music, and also like music artifacts and stuff, which kinda makes me feel like it's like another Hard Rock type of franchise. A cool little stat of the week that they threw out that I thought was really interesting also, which spurred me to have this sort of conversation with you, is that Universal Music Group has committed to launching this hotel terms, the appropriate Spotify recording music royalties payouts generating 12 billion would cause local artists to clock up 300 billion streams on the platform, pretty cool or pretty interesting, maybe not cool, but a quote from the committee simply says that “guests will discover the soul of the city through its rich local music or local music heritage. You music hotels are committed to helping those communities thrive, creating jobs for local residents and supporting local businesses and suppliers, and creating opportunities for local artists, such as the establishment of the new state of the art music venue.” 

It sounds pretty interesting. Entertainment is the fabric of our lives. It's literally what makes us forget about our problems that we encounter. I'm all about new opportunities for people making money and performing their art, or even just doing a cover gig and making money, if that's what they want, but you gotta wonder where's all this money that's being generated from streaming, when is the artist going to get a bump, when for the people that are creating the art, when are we gonna start getting a little bit more of the slice of the pie, and as I've said before, if you followed any of my YouTube series videos, I feel like that day is coming. I feel like it's people that are always quick to the ball or people that know business, and when this business model was brought up, it was sort of a situation where I felt like musicians just don't know business, they just know music and art, and that's what they focus on 24/7, they have tunnel vision, they don't understand the ways of the laws are even in a lot of cases, payouts and royalties and all the different kinds of royalties, etcetera, and so business people are gonna be what business people are... They're gonna take advantage of that and they're gonna make as much money as they can, and eventually the scales will eventually start to balance how far they balance, who knows, but with the viability of streaming and us moving forward as a group of people in this world that are embracing technology more and more every single day, we're not going backwards, so there is a lot of money to be made online.

 I've said that a lot in the videos in the past as well, really gaming the system and figuring out a plan for your art and releasing it in a brand new way, a way that maybe isn't necessarily intuitive to your artistic upbringing is required, now you've gotta reprogram your brain as to what you feel like art distribution is the glory days of taking three years to put out a masterful record. Yes, you could do that, but you might go broke in between or you might not like your reality in between, and there's not to say you can't take that same sort of care about your art, but you just need to think about releasing it in a new way, whether it's doing the single thing and releasing one a month or something like that, and then maybe it all amalgamated into a record that you're really proud of, and everything in 12 months or 16 months later, your fans or the people that encounter you along the way can see the finished product and your finished dream that you had for the music, but I think it's safe to say that the new world is here and they're obviously profiting from it in record numbers, and it's revived the music business in a way that was just not viable previously, so... It's just the truth, it's just where we are and we as musicians are creative people, we just need to learn how to move a little bit faster and maybe become a little bit more educated about who we are and what else is out there beyond just our art in our business, which is what a lot of this channel is about.

Anyway, I'm Sweet Deat, thanks so much for checking out this post, and I hope that you continue to ask questions and inquire about things do you want me to talk about, 'cause I've really enjoyed all the feedback that I've gotten from all of my friends, both good and bad, because it makes me better and it makes this channel more helpful for you.

Alright, until next time.

Is Touring Worth It?

Is touring pointless? Fair question. I'll answer it next.

Today's title couldn't be more click bait-y, but I do have some really interesting thoughts on this topic, and I'm really excited to share them with you.

Before we get started, it’s time for the artist of the day, so let's get to it. Today's artist of the day is someone that you're very familiar with, but is starting a new venture on his own, and that is Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers. So you know about the Wood Brothers have been around forever, they put out so many great records, and I can't tell you how influenced personally, I've been from them. Once upon a time living in Atlanta, I had a chance to take a lesson from Oliver Wood, and he was the nicest guy on the planet and still is, I was young, I didn't really have much together and I was really curious about transitioning from one phase of my musical life to another, and he unlocked all the doors and it was really awesome. He lent me a book that was really helpful, it's called Songwriters on Songwriting, which I thought was a really helpful book about how to organize your time. But anyway, Oliver has finally released a new single all to his own Soul of this Town. If you're anywhere close to a streaming platform, you should stop what you're doing and make sure you go and listen to this song, it's really cool, it sounds really timeless and classic, just like Oliver always does, and I think you really dig it. Take a second and check him out!

As for now, let’s get to the topic at hand. The other day, I was talking to my friend, Nick, and we were talking about how the music industry has changed seemingly overnight, all these practices that are now becoming common place like live streaming and things of that nature, it used to be things that people sometimes did on social media and other platforms, but wasn't really a priority in their career. I think most people are just caught up in playing gigs and in getting from one gig to the next and taking the time to learning about all of these things just seemed like kind of a daunting task and something that maybe the next generation was really gonna have to deal with, but for us, late 30s, early 40 year olds, it's probably past us and we can probably exist in our little bubble for the rest of our music lives and get by with it.

Fast forward to right now. And that has changed.

I was reading an article about a touring musician, and she was just talking about how she's been out there roughing it for years, and only three people and all in one little car traveling with all their stuff and playing all these clubs and always losing money or breaking even if they were even lucky, and it kinda got me thinking, what is touring gonna be like for the beginner or medium-level artist when this is all over with, is everyone gonna go back to just getting in their van and hitting the open road and doing 60 dates in a row and coming back with next to no money, or in the whole... Or are people gonna start embracing technology and realizing that they can reach people for far less cost just from their own living room or a really nice decorated space somewhere?

I got to thinking, I wonder what it would be like if a band really embraced technology and sort of marketed shows night by night as if they were touring somewhere and advertise them to specific areas and then showed up each night after night and recorded a show, or even if they didn't wanna get together and do a live stream every single night for a certain area of the country or a city every night, maybe they just put together one amazing show that was really well produced and then broadcast at a each night to a different area of the country.

These are ideas that are just flowing around my head, but I'd really be interested in what you think in the comments below, the advantages of something like this would be mainly logistical, I would say; you don't have to spend money on gas or hotels or food from going out of town, you don't have to worry about random breakdowns of your car or something like that, trying to get from gig to gig, which happens all the time, you save all those hours in the day, so you're more energetic if you're gonna go do a live stream. But there would be negative to something like this too, there's something about experiencing life with people and just being on the road and traveling with them and getting to know them on a more intimate level, that's something that develops a bands music, maybe just as much as practicing and playing shows. It seems like in the world that we live in now with bands becoming harder and harder to assemble because everybody is so involved in so many different things that this might be the new model of a band.

What if you put together a bunch of friends in a band that would normally never be able to be able to commit to being in a fulltime band, and you were able to come together for a few days and do a series of shows for different parts of the country?

Aside from the actual continuity of the musicians and being out and playing for 35 days on the road, and sort of the magic that happens with that, and I am not underestimating that at all. I think that's probably one of the best things about being on the road and really honing in on a set, is the experiences that you have with those people, economically, it makes a lot of sense, and if you look at some of the artists that are out there today that are really blowing up the airwaves, they didn't really tour at all either, they just basically had a PR machine that pushed them.  So I think that's the reason why it's important these days that musicians learn the value in learning how to use Facebook ads manager and the YouTube advertising platform for their art, so they can get people to check them out all over the world. This has just been a random thought of mine since this all started, because it just seems like everybody's investing into live streaming and making more videos of themselves during this pandemic, and when things end, I just wonder how practical is it to continue to do all of those things .

I've often even thought about, what if it was me and a few other people that I knew that was really interested in chasing art and promoting ourselves and stuff, and maybe I just went in unlike a building somewhere with someone and help paid rent, and we all... Just shared the space for our live recordings and share the equipment and all that kind of stuff. Now, I wonder if that's gonna become the new model anyway, today it was a little bit more of a loose, conversational, less factual kind of reporting episode or something, but I hope this generated some thoughts for you that could impact the future of your business.

Until next time, I'll see you soon!

Covid Live Concert Testing with Humans

The Germans put on a concert in front of about 1500 people just to study covid transmission... I kid you not. Let's talk about it.

What's up, everybody? My name is Sweet Deat, and I am so glad that you have found my channel, if this is your first time. Before we get to this whole covid German live concert thing, let's talk about the artist of the day, shall we?

Today’s artist is a band that used to have a lot of a fame and maybe has fallen off with the times, but they were released the record that really didn't get a ton of play, and it really should have looking back. That band is Silverchair and the album is Diorama. Probably my favorite orchestral rock and roll record, maybe ever. The arrangements are super brilliant, the lyrical context is really great, and just the overall songs are just good, this was definitely released around that time period where rock and roll bands doing orchestral arrangements of their songs was kind of the trend. I would say that this particular album is just really, really great, and if you've never checked it out and maybe liked Silverchair back in the day, this would be a good record for you to dig on, so that's it. It's all I'm gonna say.

A band performed in Germany on August 22 for a group of about 15,100 concert goers. Does it sound a little crazy? Well, it should, but... This was done all in the name of research.

Martin Luther University is conducting the study using a variety of techniques and tricks and things to just try and figure out how diseases like Covid-19 get passed from person to person, but specifically in an indoor arena. This particular event was a 10-hour study, and all the participants were under 50 years old. Yes, there were masks and there were all sorts of protective measures that happened, but they wanted to measure social distancing in three different ways. and also use this reflective sort of hand sanitizer that would light up under a specific light if something was touched, so they can measure the spread of germs and stuff like that.

This is a very big one for people like me and all of my friends in the music industry that really would like to get back to work, playing for lots of people and making good money, I think it's pretty brave and also pretty awesome that people were willing to take part in this study, and I'm very anxious to view the results, which should be coming in October. As you know, music venues of that kind of size, say 1500 people were probably the first to close and they will likely be the last to open, making them the largest to be impacted through this whole pandemic, the more studies like this one that gets made, the more we learn about the virus and how it's going to affect our industry moving forward, so like I said, as October comes  around and the results are released, I'll be sure to let you know.

As musicians we’re starting to see all sorts of little patio gigs come back, and those things are very good for right now, but you know, they don't really pay the bills, if you know what I mean. So hopefully, this study will give us some sort of light as to how we can proceed safely and reopen these venues and get back to work safely. 

In the meantime, I'm Sweet Deat, and thank you so much for stopping by.

Trump is in the Music News… Again

Trump is in the music news again, that wiley guy. We'll talk about it.

What's up, everybody? My name is Sweet Deat and I am so glad you have found this blog! We talk about music, finance, business, all things guitar, basically everything under the sun in the music business. You'll find right here. So if you wanna learn how to build your business in the music industry or just know what's going on in the world, click the Like button and consider becoming a subscribe, it would mean the world to me, so thank you for considering. If you're a returning subscriber, you know what's up next, that's the artist of the day before we get to the main topic, so let's get to it really quickly.

Today I want to talk about Aaron Parks and the wonderful record he just made. The album is called Little Big II, Dreams of a Mechanical Man, and while that's a pretty specific and kind of complicated topic for what you maybe would normally see on an album cover, it is absolutely unbelievable. Probably my favorite jazz record that I've heard release this year, so Grammy awards, if you're already looking to fast forward your plans and save a little time, just go ahead and give this album the Grammy... It's truly unbelievable. The production is one of the best that I've seen this year or in some time, it actually kinda makes me remember Brian Blade record that I really, really loved, called Seasons of Changes, and it was really amazing, came out probably seven years ago or something. It really takes you on that sort of proverbial ride, so if you like instrumental music, you like jazz music, improvisation and those types of things, but not in the traditional jazz since maybe with more pop sensibilities, this might be a record that you want to get to know and now, onward with the show.

So I'm sure if you click this link, you're probably wondering What did Trump do this time, and this one's kind of blatant one, honestly, just recently at the Republican National Convention, he used two versions of the song Hallelujah, which he did not adhere to the request of the Cohen family and not using their song. So let's take it back for just one moment, previously I covered him not obtaining the sync license to use some of Neil Young's material, and his lawyers took action against Trump, and I'm pretty sure that's still being worked out. This time around, he decides to ask the Cohen family for the use of Hallelujah or his people do, and of course, Leonard Cohen's family said, Oh, hell no.

And then Trump or the convention or whoever decided it was okay, just decided to say, oh well, they probably won't do anything, right, let's just go ahead and use the song anyway, and so they did... Not once, but twice.

So now the Cohen family is very upset and they are not liking the fact that their song that was written by Leonard Cohen was used in such a manner to prop up Trump, so now they're gonna sue them. The legal representative from Cuenca State had a really interesting little dig though at Trump to this whole thing. And I'll tell you about it, she said that they were very surprised and dismayed that he went ahead and used the song, but had another song that they would have probably approved, that they would have just asked for it. That song is called You Want It Darker. And I had to go look up the lyrics to this song because I was kind of curious about this hidden message they were trying to send, check this out:

If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game.

If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame

if thine is the glory, mine must be the shame

You want it darker… We kill the flame.

Listen, there's no reason why Trump should have used this song. I mean, there's plenty of other songs he could have used, he was just kind of being a bully on this one, there's plenty of people out there that support him that write music that I'm sure he could have used a song and it would have been great. And it would have been allowed and all the things, but he just chose to push forward with this song, and if you ask somebody and they say No, and then you wanna go ahead and do it again. Anyway, that's kind of dumb. 

Tell me what you think in the comments below. I'd love to hear your comments on this one. And Until next time, I'm sweet deed. Best wishes. Talk to you soon.

Facebook Livestream Controversy

So what's up, everybody? How are you doing? Doing alright. Good. Let's dive into it.

So Facebook is starting to crack down on live streams and everybody kinda knows that at this point, nothing new to report here, the whole music community immediately erupted when they released that press statement saying they were going to crack down on all of these people playing copyrighted material online through their platform, and also I did a video a few months ago on Facebook signing a licensing agreement that was slightly more favorable... Van, a YouTube licensing agreement with the pros and the labels and that sort of stuff, just to sort of incentivize people to start releasing original content on their platforms, and in their latest statement, they sort of made reference to that as far as that they had struck a deal on their licensing agreement nd that they were also not going to disclose all of those details because their details are confidential. Makes me wonder how many pennies on the dollar everyone was sold for, but anyway, the whole idea here is that they're cracking down on these live streams, and they don't want people playing music that they don't own on their platform.

And once they sign this licensing agreement, I'm sure they were like, Well, if you wanna get into this game, you gotta play by the rules, and I'm pretty sure they didn't wanna pay a bazillion dollars in lawyer fees to essentially allow this to continue. So making this slight adjustment to their platform, from Facebook side of things, they're basically just passing the buck along because they don't wanna help be held liable, and so now they're gonna start policing your live streams and seeing what kind of material you're playing and what you're doing what kind of concerts you’re throwing. 

I'm interested to see how well Facebook actually polices it.

Threatening to ban your page, the threatening to strike you down and all that kind of stuff. But I'm really curious to see what they do and how they're able to do it. And sort of... Are they gonna give you a three strikes and you're out kind of rule like YouTube, 'cause there's not been a ton of information shared about all of that other than they're just threatening to strike down your page and delete you. But the fact the matter is, is that Facebook is not your platform, it's a free platform, and they gather your information and sell that to advertisers, that's what it is.

It's a fun platform, play on, it's one of the best platforms in the world, if not the best platform in the world, 80% of the world is on Facebook. So if you're advertising a product or doing anything like that, it's one of these platforms that just literally is the best there is. It's the best bang for your buck. And sometimes we get very controlling about, This is my space, this is not to actually use the social term MySpace, but this is like my cyber space, but it's not... It's Facebook, and so they make the rules. You're living in a Facebook world and Instagram. You're living in an Instagram world, which is also owned by Facebook for those who don't know. So the moral of the story here is if it's not your music, you shouldn't be playing it, or you should be doing it behind a pay wall, that will make it a little harder for people to find you and police you. 

So just off the top of my head, if you have a small group, maybe you don't have a lot of followers and you really rely on Facebook for like just people stumbling into your page and then wanting to give you money, this is gonna become a little harder for you to do this, for sure. And that kind of sucks. But again, it's not your material. 

Whenever you go into a club and you play music, that club is paying a blanket license fee for you to go in there and play those covers, if you ever go play, say like Eddie’s Attic, a great club here in Atlanta, if you play a cover song at their show, they are going to charge you... Per song that you play, it's on their spreadsheet whenever you play. Then you get handed the pay out at the end of the night that you were deducted $5 or whatever it was for that one song that you played that was not your own. So it's kind of one of those situations where you just gotta play by the rules and the rules are catching up to the technology advance here, and Facebook is starting to probably feel the heat after signing that licensing agreement. 

My advice, if you were to ask me, I wanna play covers. That's what I do. I play covers. People like it, people pay me, they tip me. I don't know, I'd be interested to see how well they do monetize videos or if they're gonna do anything like that on YouTube, if you upload a cover song, they'll demonetize it because you don't... If it gets above a certain reviews and it kinda gets into their spectrum, they'll find you, they'll strike that down, and they'll say, Hey, that's not yours.

Also that depends on how aggressive the band management or... They are like... For instance, the Eagles are like notorious for finding you, Don Henley, we'll find you and stick the lawyers, he's got 20 people on staff that literally just scoured the internet looking for people reproducing their content to strike them down, to monetize them, etcetera.

So that's sort of best of the game we're playing now, since this is a cyber space and not a club, somebody has to pay those royalties. And being that Facebook is so expensive, I just can't imagine that the bill would be worth it to them, you know, so I'm sure that's the reason why they've come to this place where they're just not interested in anybody playing covered or copyrighted material on their platform and being held accountable to the fire, I don't blame them. 

It sucks for us musicians, but that's the way it's gonna be. So if I were you... We have to October 1st. October 1st, they started getting real. So you've got like 15 days or so. If you really wanna fast forward and generate an audience right now that could maybe follow you to a platform that could then hear your cover songs behind a pay wall, say like a Patreon, for example, although I'm very interested to see how Patreon is gonna react with this also because at some point, I'm sure they're gonna come along and they're just gonna say, Hey, we know what's going on behind that paywall, I'm very interested to see how that evolves, but for now, that might be a good lateral move for you.

All of this technology is just totally revolutionizing the industry so fast that it's almost impossible for us to keep up.

So quick recap, you have to October 1st, then they start striking your videos down and / or suspending your pages or giving you warnings, I don't exactly know all of that information quite yet, I've seen varying articles online talking about things, but the one thing is for sure they are going to track down your page if you keep doing it, and they keep seeing you... They are prioritizing smaller clips, so they don't want you to be online, I don't think from when I was able to gather from this article that I will tag below when I find it again, they want you to do smaller clips, they don't wanna be a long form... Type of thing. So maybe a song at a time, if you're going to do a live stream or something, which again, that sort of defeats the purpose of getting everybody there and keeping them around for a while to make money, but they want to prior to smaller clips. Not the longer form. That has been said. So if you want to continue live streaming, find an alternative platform, people are saying Twitch is the new thing, and everybody's gonna move to Twitch now, but which is gonna have the same problems eventually, if they're not already feeling it.

So all of these moves are just lateral moves, I would be more interested if I were you and trying to find something that was more permanent, so you didn't have to keep moving your audience from platform to platform, Now follow me here so that you can watch me here, that sort of move gets old after a while.

I guess that's something I need to investigate what platforms are out there where you can just be yourself and you can just live in that space, and it's a private forum. It just makes it harder. It's not gonna be as easy anymore, and I believe in the statement also Facebook was really trying to encourage creativity and original content, no matter if you're a guitarist or drummer or whatever it is, coming up with original content is gonna be your best way of doing things they just don't want to pay these fees, and I'm sure the bill is huge, so... That's why we're here.

Comment below! Tell me if you think it's not fair, tell me what you think you're gonna do, what are your solutions to the problem, like what options do you think we have? Creative thought wins here. So that's the point. So anyway, until next time, I'm Sweet Deat and I love you, and I hope you're doing great out there and let's connect. Alright, take care.

Who is Making $1Million Every Hour in the Music Biz?

You just heard me talk about labels making 1 million per hour from streaming, and we're gonna dive right into that.

But as my return subscribers would know, this is when we talk about the artists of the day for 25 seconds, so let's do it! All right. Today's artists that you might not know about, but you should know about is: Buffalo Stack. This band is led by a wonderful guitar based in the Hudson Valley, Beacon, New York; his name is Andy Stack, and he's been touring and playing with many artists as a sideman for a long time. In the last few years, he started releasing records and singles under his own band called Buffalo Stack. I have always been a fan of Andy's playing, and also at the way he writes songs - it really sort of has that Hudson Valley singer songwriter of vibe to it, with all the roots and all the depth that so many musicians and artists that have come out of that area really possess. Under normal circumstances, you can hear him play all over the Hudson Valley all the time, at venues like the Falcon, which is like the best venue I think on the East Coast. So enough of me gushing about Andy and his wonderful band, click this link to listen!

So let's talk about that one million.

I don't know about you, but this year I had really big plans for 2020. I had it all figured out, written down on a sheet of paper ready to get started, and then March came around and everything went to crap. Well, that's not the case for the record labels. I should clarify that they lost money in live events and their artists going out and working, but what has not fallen off the face of the earth as far as revenue is concerned, is streaming in the last three months, they have done over 22 billion in revenue just from streaming. Yes, in the last three months, which breaks down to a little over a million dollars per hour.

It's pretty ridiculous because I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic and no one's making money, but they are. What does that say about the industry that we're in right now? I mean, beyond the obvious that we're not getting paid enough as artists - what it says is that streaming is extremely profitable and we as artists need to continue to take stands into getting our rates raised as far as what we get paid for the streams, but more importantly, we need to start taking the streaming platform seriously, and we need to start thinking about how we can up our streams and up our followers on these platforms so that we can benefit from this type of usership.

So what does that mean for you? Does that mean that you have to sort of leave these old 1970’s archaic ideas of what the record label industry is all about and how you release art? I think so, I think it's time for us to start thinking about a regularly scheduled programming of releasing music, and it doesn't mean that you have to abandon some of those things that you like so much, like albums, for example, you can still release an album in a year, but maybe think about making each one of those songs count and release them individually throughout the entire calendar year. Say your album's twelve songs long, release it one song per month, and then at the end of that, let it amalgamate into an album that you're proud of, it gives a chance for each one of your songs to be consumed by the people that love your art, because let's face it, when we release an album these days, people go and listen to the first song or two, and then they click on to the next thing, even if they're your friends in some cases, so doesn't it make sense for us to just make sure each one of those songs are heard by making in an individual event for each one of those songs?

Coupled with a little bit of learning about how the Spotify platforms work and all the other streaming platforms work, you might be surprised what you're able to accomplish, and by accomplish - I do mean, how many people see your songs.

Leave comments down below with content you’d like me to talk about, I always love hearing from you. So until next time, I'm Sweet Deat!

Nashville is in Trouble.

Did you hear the news? Nashville is in real trouble. I'll tell you all about it right now.

You know what's coming up, that's the artist of the day, right before we get into the meat of everything, so Let's go... Today's artists that I love, that I think you should know about, if you don't already know about them, is a man and a wonderful songwriter, guitar player, his name is Blake Mills. Blake Mills has recently produced a whole bunch of records for people, but my personal favorite is his own artistic works. Blake produced some really awesome records and worked with some really amazing artists such as the Alabama Shakes, and also John Legend, for example, but I love Blake's artistic works personally as my favorite way, he's contributed to the music world, his album Hiho has been one of my favorite albums for quite some time, he has kind of a weird quirky voice, and his songs are really intricate from a guitar perspective, but also he really holds his own as a songwriter and his lyrical taste, I think are really awesome.

Let's get to Nashville and how they're in a hill of... Well, folks, it's not looking good for Nashville.

Unfortunately, this Covid-19 pandemic has really done a number on the local scene there, and not to mention all the tornados and everything else, it's been rolling through Nashville in the last six months, it's obvious to say that every industry has had its core shaken from this pandemic, but I still think a lot of law makers, and if you follow this channel, you would know how I feel about this, that a lot of the law makers don't really understand what's going on in the music industry, and it's really starting to show its effects. Some recent statistics that are talking about the Nashville ecosystem and where the clubs might be heading, and it's not pretty.

Fifteen independent music venues has experienced over a 90% loss in revenue since March.

Of the venues, I just mentioned, they have about six weeks left before they're gonna have to close their doors, so it shakes down to about 15% will be done in about a month, and the remaining percentage will be done in about six weeks. In about 13 weeks, all but one independent music venue is likely to be closed forever, as we know, artists make a living because CD’s have been basically deemed not desirable anymore by the general public and by streaming, touring is kind of all musicians have left, and if there's no venues for people to tour in, then where are the musicians gonna make their money to the layman, most people believe music is gonna come back, but the truth is without music venues and artists to come together, it's going to make the whole process hard for artist to continue to make money. So if one part of the wheel is broken, it's just not gonna work.

So how big of a problem is this for Nashville?

Well, I'll tell you, it's a 98 billion per year. Average problem. That's a lot of money. Music Venues, as you know, were the first to close and will be the last one to open, not supporting the ecosystem would be a huge mistake and relieve lots and lots of people without work also, you gotta think about the hospitality industry and this whole thing... I mean, they have to be suffering to... People used to travel to Nashville all the time, just like any other city. So if you're thinking about just one thing here and not really taking it seriously, what you're doing is you're affecting a whole bunch of other industries that are tied into music, so if you ever think about the arts just making a rebound and coming back on its own and it'll be fine, you might wanna start thinking a little differently because this is a web that will not be untangled any time soon. But don't worry, I'll keep you up to date on what's going on in Nashville and all across the country right here.

Until next time, I'm sweet deep. And I hope that you have a great day. Support your local artists. We all need you right now.

Bandcamp and Spotify, Two Different Roads for the Digital Music Future

The future of digital music is wide open.

No joke, we all know that, but there's two different providers that are taking two different avenues and it's worth talking about.

So let's get to the artist of the day! This band is called Reptile Room, and they are really cool, if you're fan of ambient guitar noises and a singer that can really sing her tail off, this might be the band for you. They've been playing a lot of the local clubs here in Atlanta and around the circuit and I recently sort of found out about them, really digging them, so I think you should check them out.

We've got a lot to talk about today, so let's get to it. Bandcamp and Spotify, two different roads and a wide open in future.

Two different companies, two different ideologies of what the future might be like, and the two different public perceptions of these two companies. Couldn't be any farther apart. Spotify is all about playlists, Bandcamp is still about the album, Spotify as payment system is highly frowned upon and very cryptic; In Bandcamp, you get to choose how much you wanna get paid, Spotify requires you to work with a specific distributor network, Bandcamp is open to everyone. Spotify is revenue comes from ads and data mining, Bandcamp just simply offers a revenue share and collects no information about you at all - and by you, I mean the consumer and also the provider of art. Spotify is worth 54 billion. Bandcamp is privately owned and has been in the black on the book since 2012 as it's reported, and it continues to grow every day. So who's doing it right? Is one better than the other? Does everyone have to be a certain way? It seems like Bandcamp is doing it opposite to basically every other streaming service there is, and yet every year they seem to increase in the overall value. The perception of these two companies couldn't be any different, and it really shows in the connection between the artist and the platform.

Spotify continues to deny that artists are unhappy with their service as far as payouts are concerned, but I think if you ask any artist aside from a major one that gets a billion streams a year, you're probably gonna hear some discussion in the amount that they pay out per stream. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, you've got somebody like Bandcamp who continues to do these artcentric Fridays to help out artists during this hard time of Covid by literally saying they're waving all of their fees for an entire day to encourage the market to come to Bandcamp and spend money and directly support musicians. <usicians on these days get 100% of the proceeds. Bandcamp waves their fee 100%. What's interesting to me is that Bandcamp doesn't really consider themselves a streaming service, and that is kind of an interesting take because most people these days that are in that type of business would consider themselves a streaming service. There's just something about Bandcamp is just so different than everybody else, and somehow they're surviving in this whole market, and it really makes me wonder, can both coexist or will eventually one be overcome by the other? Obviously, right now, Spotify has the marketing dollars, and they have the overall strength in market.

All of this to say, it seems that the game has changed for us musicians.

We used to take three years to build a piece of art to put out, it seems like the world is forcing us to put out more and more art because the medium is being squashed by the internet, and if you're not putting out things all the time, you're very easily forgotten. I think that would sort of not apply to sort of what I would call the legacy artists, which are people that have been around pre-streaming that were already massive bands that could wait two to three years to put out material, but it just seems like these days... That's where the world is. What do you think about all this? Do you like Spotify? I mean, they have a huge market share of listeners and the chance of being heard is pretty large every day, there seems to be a lot more training on how to use the platform as an artist to get yourself more listeners and to find more fans of your music, or do you prefer Bandcamp, where they seem to have a little bit slower model as it pertains to encouraging albums and also the revenue sharing with the platform is a lot more transparent. I'd be interested in knowing what you think about both of these platforms and which one you choose if you're an artist, if you're just a listener, which one do you use... I would imagine you probably use Spotify more than Bandcamp, but you might have a encountered band camp over the last several years or so, from going to check out things that your favorite artists had put out. One is more demonized than the other, but both are succeeding and it will be very, very interesting to see who kinda comes out on top in the next three to five years.

Give your opinion in the comments below, I'd love to know about it! Until next time, I'm sweet tea and I'll see you out there in the world, one of these days.

R.I.P Google Play, You’re Terminated

Rest in peace. Google play. What does it mean for the rest of streaming and what are the next steps? I'll tell you.

You know what's coming up next? That's the artist of the day. Are you ready? Great, let's do it. The artist of the day today is my friend Prisca, with their catchy pop songs and sultry voice. She's a sure fire win for anyone's playlist. So you need to go check out Prisca. She just recently released a live performance video and audio captured. I think if you're a fan of Adele, you'll probably dig Prisca.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. On to the main event. And that's right, folks, Google Play is shutting down in December. Everyone knew that this was coming for the last couple of months, but recently they sort of released a timeline in their slow and rabble of the platform, it kind of signals to me that Spotify in a lot of other people are winning this war and they kinda wanna invest more in YouTube, and sort of the things that YouTube does to try and double down their efforts in that department, they're trying to encourage people to move all their stuff from Google Play over to YouTube music. However, it seems as though the tools that they've developed to sort of make that transition happen are not very good, and it seems it's not really being accepted that well on the internet.

But before we go any further, let's talk about the timeline and what you could expect.

In late August they'll shut down preorders and they'll also stop the ability for you to upload and download music on the platform. In September, they'll stop the whole streaming platform for New Zealand and also for South Africa. In October, the entire platform will shut down and will cease to exist, but they will give you until December to get all of your information off of there, and after that, it just gets deleted. So why am I talking about Google Play Music fallow question? It's just another signal to me that Spotify and all of these other streaming platforms are really taking up all the market share, and we need to be aware that this is sort of the new future and the long term future, that streaming is here to stay.

This be a red flag for me in investing in any sort of platform like Google or connected to Google.

At least, as it pertains to Music. They've obviously showed that they're behind the curve on this and they're going ahead and surrendering their platform, whereas Apple music sort of revolutionized their platform, it just shows that Google's main interest is not really in streaming service type stuff, and I would probably put my money somewhere else, where should you put your money that's a great question. It talks about who pays the most, so giving your money to say, YouTube, not a good idea because they pay the absolute worst, but giving your money to somebody like Napster or title guarantees the artist at least one cent per play, which is a far better pay out over the long term, if you think about it... Because let's face it, it's all about getting that artist paid, if you're going to experience their art, it's about making sure the artist is getting something back for all that time spent creating that piece of art and also giving you the chance to experience it and for it to enhance your life.

I would appreciate your comments very much. Until next time, I'm Sweet Deat!

Streaming Platforms Score a Win Against Musicians… Again.

So back on March 19th, it was documented that all of these streaming platforms came together and decided to challenge this whole CRB movement of getting songwriters 44% more on their royalties.

But first, a little history, the Copyright Reality Board or CRB, is a panel of three judges appointed by the Library of Congress to oversee royalties back in early 2018, they voted two to one to uptick the amount of money that is to be distributed to songwriters. So once this decision was made, the board gave a onemonth long appeal process window to just hear the voices of concerns from the opposing parties like Spotify and Pandora, and of course, they all express their concerns or really dislikes because they don't wanna pay us any more money, the National Music Publishers Association President even came out and said, the fact that you're even going to fight this or to even express your concerns with the idea of paying songwriters more as effectively declaring war on the people that provide you content of which you make money every single day.

So fast forward to right now, recently, after all of the people on the board for the CRB heard the appeals from Pandora and Spotify and others, and now it seems like they are walking back some of their decisions that they made back in 2018, not all the details are out yet, but when they are, you know, I'm gonna talk about it. Since Coronavirus hit, it seems as though the Board is very interested in listening to the labels and also the streaming platforms about the 44% mechanical royalty hike, as in they're interested in negotiating this I'm sure somewhere in all of this legislation, they're saying, Oh, we can't afford this, this will put us out of business, how much money do you need before you have enough... The people that are out there that are creating all this content that you're profiting from should be getting paid more, but it looks like they are going to play hard ball and they're going to force this on down the road using their lawyers to essentially make streaming less profitable for musicians and more profitable for the people who own the streaming platform, which by the way, don't own the music at all.

While I believe it's very important that everybody gets compensated for their work, streaming platforms provide an amazing opportunity for people to connect with fans across the world that we didn't used to have, and they should be financially compensated for that.

It shouldn't be criminal rates and the musicians should be able to profit from that in some kind of way, and it seems like the threshold for profiting off of a piece of art, it takes a very long time to make, and it's very expensive to make just seems a little too far removed, just my opinion.

So if you'd like to know more about this particular topic, I hope to hear from you in the comments below. I'll talk to you later!

New York says NO to Ticket Sales

New York is in the center of attention again in the music industry, and not for a good reason.

Alright, alright. So in case you didn't know, at the beginning of all this, covid nonsense, New York instituted a ticketing ban, and that band basically said that if you are a music venue or a comedy venue or anything that requires selling tickets, you are no longer allowed to do that for the safety of the people that may come... And in the beginning, I think everybody was down with that, we didn't know where this Covid thing was going, and here we are pretty much six months in now, and we still don't know where it's going, but the difference is the opinions and the overall feeling of this particular virus is slowly evolving in a lot of people's minds and musicians are not really being taken care of by the government so much to speak right now, so in line of all this, they started having ticketed events again, of course, safely distanced like a restaurant or something. In response to this a couple of days ago, New York reminded everyone, the ticket band is still in play, and they threaten to take away anybody's liquor license who didn't follow the law, so the New York state government officials are really holding strong on this and they're strongly advising against all these concerts and comedy events and whatever, not happening with this friendly reminder from the New York government about how things are to be limited during this time, now musicians are starting to really feel the hurt, especially since PUA is currently not being distributed.

The artist community obviously took action and immediately owners started speaking out of club saying, This is totally not fair because you're letting restaurants come in and open and spacing people six feet apart, and they're able to come in and buy a dinner and they're being served by people with the plate and everything, and you're just letting people move like that, whereas music club or a comedy club could be operating under the same sort of restrictions and people can still sell tickets and people can still make money and as artists and... So the artist community is left with... Where are we going with this and what are we doing? It's just yet another example of government not really understanding how the function of art works in our society from an execution standpoint, and quite frankly, it's a broken record and it's been happening for decades and decades now, people on Capitol Hill and people in our local governments don't understand the complexities of an artist career, I don't necessarily know how fast we're able to turn their minds around.

But I will say this, that the musician community in New York is always resilient and they took action.

In just two days, they had massed just under 8000 e-signatures calling for a stop to this particular piece of legislation, and again, simply saying it's unfair that you're letting some restaurants open and not these clubs who are not serving food, but simply showing up and entertaining people, the united entertainment industry professionals, which is a new sort of union that started up in New York, they are taking this on head on and considering legal action and actually kind of threatening it, saying that you can't continue to operate under these conditions where one side is taken care of while the other is not in the side that we're talking about here, not being taken care of is in fact musicians and artists, so while I understand, it's important that we all stay safe and it's really important that we do what's in our best interest to stay safe, if you're going to open up things for a restaurant, you have to open things up for a music club. It's just the way it should happen. One should not be treated really much different than the other, they both serve food, they both serve alcohol. The only difference is one plays music or one gives comedy and one doesn't, and you sit right across from your friends less than six feet apart and have a conversation with them, so I don't understand why a music club couldn't just space chair a six feet apart and have people show up and enjoy in a time where they so desperately need it.

Again, I'm Sweet Deat, thank you so much for coming by and checking out the channel, and I hope you learn something and I hope to see you again soon, please comment down below and let me know what you think of this law. Should it be enforced?

How Many Streams Does it Take to Make $1?

How many streams does it take to make a buck?. I'll tell you right now.

What's up, everybody? I'm Jacob Deaton. Make yourself at home. We're all here together, hanging out, having a good time, and we're glad you're here if this channel, we talk about everything from finance and business and music and guitar lessons and all kinds of things in between for you every Monday and Thursday.

But before we do, we always highlight our artist a day because I'm all about promoting other people's music as well as my own. So let's get to it! Today, I wanna talk about a band called the Battlefield Collective, they are an acoustic duo group based in the Marietta, Georgia area, and they are some of my favorite people. Stephanie and Evan are not only Life Partners, but they are awesome. Together as musicians, and Stephanie has probably one of my favorite voices that I've ever seen or heard in my life, they are constantly doing live streams from their Facebook feed as well as other places. They're so, so great and they're honestly some of the best people I know. So check them out.

And now for the topic, we're all been waiting for, how much are we getting ripped off?

The Music Modernization Act back in 2018 really did some amazing things for the industry, it really locked in people getting paid that was back owed money from agencies and record labels for a very long time, and it's totally worth a read, but now we're two years later, and I'm just wondering, is anybody else still feeling screwed? Thank you, I'm so glad I'm not the only one. I feel like with the way the world is going and how fast technology is moving and how fast the industry is changing faster than it's ever changed before, I can imagine how hard it is for lawmakers to keep up with this. So let's play a game. I'm gonna say How many streams it takes to make a dollar, and you're gonna try and guess which streaming service it is.

Let's start with the worst performing one of all time, coming in at 1,449 streams to make a single dollar...

Your answer... Well, I can't hear you, but the answer is YouTube, YouTube is by far the worst. So why am I here? That's right, because YouTube is one of the most dominant places for people to find out about music and music videos and stuff, in fact, YouTube's Top 10 Most performing videos are all music videos.

Did you know that in coming in next at 752 streams before you make a dollar is...

Yeah, Pandora. Can you believe it? People still listen to Pandora on one point of time, I had a channel on Pandora, and I think it's still there, somebody put my album up there and you can stream it, Jacob Deaton, if you've searched for that... I don't know. Anyway, horrible payouts per dollar.

So the last two are by far the worst, and all the rest of them that I'm gonna mention now are platforms that are a lot closer in intervals, so here we go, at 249 streams.

Who do you think it is? The correct answer is Amazon. Come on Bezos. You already have enough money. What are you doing here? Amazon just made a huge jump recently in upping their quality of stream to where they're basically just under title as far as the type of quality you can experience from streaming, they're also doing it in half the price, which is obviously a real job at titles margin, which is usually right around 30 for their premium service, in summary, Amazon offers the second best quality of streaming, I think that's available currently on the market today, behind title, but they cost half as much because they're Amazon and they're massive, and they can do that. Anyway, let's keep going on.

Next up at 229 streams.

Who is it? It's the evil company, Spotify, from all the press they get and all the negative press they get at that you think they'd be at the worst, but they're actually not... Amazon, Pandora and YouTube are all worse. Significantly with Pandora and YouTube. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about Spotify. What about you? Great, let's move on.

And coming in at 147 streams, Google Play Music.

So Google Play has been in the game for a while. A lot of people use them. A lot of people like them. But that is where they stand. They stand at 147, it's not a bad number comparatively to their competitors, but who is better than Google Play? Who's left the suspense grows. Move on.

And coming in with the bronze medal here at a super cool and smooth 136 streams.

Who do you think it is? That's right, you probably guessed at Apple Music, remember when Apple was like, We're paying more than everybody else, isn't this great... Shouldn't you want to be with us because we're paying the artist more, You're still charging like 136 streams before you give anybody a buck... Well, significantly better than a lot of the other people, like YouTube and Pandora. It's still a lot. So let's talk about this. We've already mentioned YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, Apple music, Google Play. Who else is left?

Well, I'm so glad you asked. Coming in at 80 streams, and personally, my music streaming provider Title

Have you heard of Title? Jay-Z owns it. It's pretty cool. Pretty awesome, they offer the highest available streaming quality that's on the market today that I know of, but it does cost a premium... Their streaming service is $30 a month. And while I realize that's probably a lot for most people, I really enjoy listening to the masters of these files. For example, I was listening to wish you were here from Pink for the other day, and I literally jumped out of my chair when I had headphones on. At the beginning, when you heard the guitar player just come in with that real famous lick. So literally in preparation for that guitar like to be played, he goes, and it literally scared the crap out of me, but I've never heard that before in my life until I had super high quality audio and headphones, and it was an amazing thing to just hear something that obviously left in the track that should have been taken out probably... Anyway, the point is, Title is really awesome, and it's not Amazon, or it's not Google, or it's not Pandora or YouTube, and they actually end up paying more than a cent per plate to musicians, which by far is a better situation for musicians... That's it. Title is an amazing company, and I think that you should really check them out, and they're a little bit more expensive, I know, but the listening experience for you audio files out there is far greater and you'll be surprised when you have on headphones, what you'll hear, even still title is still not the highest paying streaming service.

Napster.

Like the one that Metallica hated and made a big deal about and said They're ruining everything, even though they're kind of... Right, that they did in some kind of ways that is it... Napster actually pays the most out of everybody, they pay 1 per 53 streams, so if your music is not on Napster and you believe in streaming, you better get to it, I don't know what their user base is compared to the other platforms, which... That's actually probably a really good video I should do in... Napster definitely pays the most per stream, and for that, we thank you, Napster.

So there you have it, folks. The mystery has been revealed!

So until next time, I'm Sweet Deat!

42 Ways to Make Money as a Musician

What if I told you there are 42 different ways for you to make money as a musician, would you believe me?

I'll prove it to you. Let's do it. But before that, It's time for that artist of the day. So let's get to it. Today's, artist of the day is Colonel Bruce Hampton, and I have no idea how I'm going to explain this. For those that you that know Colonel Bruce, you already know exactly what I'm about to say, and you could probably say in a thousand different ways that I'm gonna say it, but Colonel Bruce was somebody that was just 100% a unique human being that unfortunately is no longer with us. But the time that was spent here, he did amazing things for amazing musicians. Colonel Bruce's legacy goes far beyond what most people's careers would probably ever get to, as far as things that he accomplished. He had a band that played the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1970 that featured lead Seaplane and Jimmy Hendrix, to name a few. But also Bruce was somehow somewhat of a mentor to lots of great musicians and artists along the way, Bruce's ability to simply give musicians freedom and permission to play whatever they felt like on his stage gave artists a chance to really grow and become themselves while they played his music, in his band, his reach goes beyond generations, we're talking musicians that are in their fifties and sixties, all the way down to musicians that are in their twenties and thirties. You don’t see may people like that, who are sort of like a baseball coach who takes in all of these different types of musicians, and then after time in his band, go on to do amazing things. Definitely worth checking out from his catalog is the Aquarium Rescue Unit and their records were absolutely. groundbreaking from a genre perspective, mixing rock and roll music with traditional folk instruments like the mandolin VAT and height was probably captured best by doing all of the very famous horrors in the 90’s. It's weird, it's crazy, but somehow it's refreshing and also inspiring. So if you're listening up there in the sky somewhere, Bruce, we love you and we miss you.

So let's figure out how to make money as a musician. 42 different ways. Let's talk about it.

I was fumbling around on Facebook the other day, and I ran across this article, and it really kinda set me back for a minute and made me realize all the different ways that I'm currently not seeking to make money as a musician, and it made me immediately realize that I needed to share this and get a little bit more in depth with it and let people know about the opportunities that exist that maybe aren't top of mind. Side note, sorry for whoever I saw this from on Facebook that I can't give credit for sharing it with me, I don't remember, and that was like weeks ago and... I'm sorry, I can't remember.

So the article breaks down 42 different ways for a musician to make money into a few different categories, they are songwriter and composer, revenue, performer and recording artist, revenue performer, session musician, revenue, knowledge of craft, teaching and producing brand related revenue. And number six, fan corporate and foundation revenue. So if I were to go through each and every single one of these 42, it would take a long time, and I would rather just pick a few and explore these topics may be the ones that aren't so common. But - if you want the full list, here it is!

Let's start with the songwriter and composer revenue category.

So if you're a song writer and you write songs for a living and you perform, and maybe you're a singer also, and you're constantly trying to figure out how to get your songs to either be bought by someone else, or you're trying to figure out how to just get them hurt in general, this is a category for you, but in this category, there were a couple of things that stood out, I thought was really cool. How about ringtone revenue? Have you ever thought of that you can put your music into ringtones and then upload them to the sites, and when people use them, you make money. It seems like everybody has Logic these days, so making a ring tone should be pretty easy. It's also a really cool way to kinda get your music out there if you are a composer. The next one I thought was really cool in this category was Lyric display, which is basically talks about uploading your lyrics to sites that host lyrics. You may not know this, but online Lyric site to pay publishers the rights to have those lyrics printed on their website, and in turn, those publishers would then pay you. How about sheet music sales? When's the last time you thought about putting your music to sheet music, if you're not capable of doing that, maybe even just simple core charts would help, but if you can't do that either, it might be worth taking your song to somebody that does transcription services. You might pay a onetime fee, but after you do that, that's literally online forever, and if you're a career musician and you know you're gonna be doing this for a very long time, that's a really sound investment. Say it takes a couple of times for you to sell that in order to recoup the payment for you having somebody transcribe it and put it in sheet music, but the rest of the years of you playing music is all profit. That one I thought was really cool. Also, I think there's something to be said for commissions, which is another category that's in this particular subcategory; the commission is really cool because you're able to get up front money to basically write or compose a song, whether it's instrumental or with lyrics that matches up with a particular person's agenda or need, making yourself available for commissions, maybe through simple ad copy on your website or even a targeted ad like on Facebook or something, could yield a really big result, and by result, I mean money.

Moving on performance and artist revenue.

There's not much new news in this particular section, I would say most of the things that I see are very typical, such as retail sales, digital sales, royalties for performance, etcetera. But one thing that always slips my brain is the neighboring rights royalties - that just means if somebody that's on foreign soil from where you are decides to record your song, if that's a way that you get your money for them recording the song. Also in this section, they talk about things related to the film industry, like the film musicians secondary market fund, or the sound recording special payments, fun. These things are really cool to know that they exist, and that if you're somebody that's writing and recording music and you're an artist or a part of a band or something, you need to know about these... Let's go ahead and move on to the next one. How about performer session musician revenue? These are all very cut and dry talking about studio work, live work, etcetera - the one thing to notice in this section is a nonfeatured artists payments, so if you're part of AFM or SAG, you qualify for this particular benefit of getting royalties, just generally speaking, for playing on the track. I think that's something that most people don't realize, and I could be missing out on some money also, this speaks to how active your AFM or SAG chapter is as far as their organization and such, which... We will not get into that. Let's go to the next section.

This next section is called knowledge of craft.

So teaching or producing, and obviously the first two are teacher and producer, and I think we all know what that means, there's always academia and those are always really cool to get, but those are highly competitive Master Class lecture type scenarios. And you might wanna think about starting from the ground up with master classes and things of that nature, through your own social media live streaming format, you could easily set up a Zoom call or any of those types of things. If you don't have a lot of gear and you can charge a very honest fee for the production value provided and you can teach and tell people about what you do, you might be surprised how many people wanna support you in your endeavor, and if you spend time advertising it like you would do a show or a concert, you might be surprised again, who might show up?

Brand related material.

So yes, we're talking about tshirts, we're talking about even YouTube stuff that you put out and maybe people find you here, and that somehow becomes money that can come from ads if you reach a certain platform, which yet I have not... But that's not really the main reason why I'm here anyway. Let's face it, if I really wanted a lot of money, maybe I'd go be a lawyer or something. But there is plenty and plenty of money to be made as a musician and ad revenue just one way. Also, I have merchandise links in my comments section, for example. So anything that you put out on YouTube, you can also do that. So I've got product listings of all my camera equipment and my lights and such, but then I also have links to my own personal like tshirt store and merchandise store that has bags and coffee cups and those type of things. Also, some people make money from endorsements, so if you're endorsed with the guitar company or an emerging stream company or something that you seek out and you think you like their product and you'd want to endorse them, sometimes people will give you money for that, or even free stuff that you would normally have to pay for, ultimately, that's money saved, which is also earned!

Finally, fan corporate and foundation type funding.

So obviously, there are crowdfunding sites out there that you can still work with that are still popular to use, kickstarter, etcetera, there's also sponsorship opportunities for people, like if you think a brand really lines up with your mission and of your goals as an artist, or just your social causes, you can reach out to these companies and show them a history of what you've been doing and how it relates to their brand, you'd be surprised how many people might say yes to you and giving in some form or kind that would really help you out with maybe expenses or just in free stuff, the idea here is just to be creative and just to come up with ways that you can seek sponsorship for what you do, sponsorship is something that is required to think outside of the box, because whenever you're bringing this to somebody, it's really important that they know that you have their best interests at heart as well. The best way to get a sponsorship is to have a friendship first. Another way for you to get funding in this subgroup is called grants, and I think we all know what they are, but often I feel like we don't really look out into the world to see what is available. My friend Steven Wood, who is an unbelievable composer, but he's also a nature activist, he finds grants like this all the time where they'll take them and pay for him to go into these deep wilderness places, and he'll compose music on something very simple, like a handheld piano or something, and then he'll take that music back, score it, turn it into a piece, and then have it performed for a particular organization, for example. It's creative thinking like that, and these times that takes your ideas to where you are right now to a whole another level so be creative and just take a look and do some Google searching and see what you can find out on the internet, you might be surprised what fits you. So that was a lot. Go to this website down below, click on it, read through everything and figure out some things that you're not doing right now that could be making you money.

It's a wonderful time to be alive, and the internet is vast and 25 years old, and you could be taking advantage of it with your creativity. So check it out! And until next time, I'm Sweet Deat.

Trump vs. Neil Young, and What You Can Learn from It

Well, people... Can you believe it? Trump finally found his way into the music business, and this is a really great lesson for everyone to learn, so you wanna know about it.

So today we're gonna talk about Donald Trump and Neil Young and how Donald Trump's campaign totally screwed up and using one of his songs without asking Neil Young’s permission.

But before we do, my returning readers know, this is the time we talk about the artists of the day and just a few quick moments. Today's artists of the day is Kenosha Kid, all the way from Athens, Georgia. This band has been putting out crazy sonic adventures in record form for decades, the mastermind behind it all is Dan Metals, a friend of mine that really does some interesting things, including a really awesome place for people to find help if they are feeling suicidal called Nuisance, that's based in Athens, where he lives and resides. My first introduction to Kenosha kid came with a record called Fahrenheit that was released back in 2009, and one of their more recent releases Missing Pieces is definitely one of my favorite records they've done to date, so do yourself a favor and check it out!

So with that, let's get on to the fight of the ages, Neil Young versus Donald Trump. In case you didn't hear, recently, Neil Young has filed a suit against the Donald Trump campaign for using one of his songs, Rockin in the Free World as a part of his whole presentation. I guess he was having a rally somewhere and he played Rockin in the Free World, and Neil was not having it at all. In addition to Rockin in the Free World being a part of the suit, he's also including a song that was used called Devil's Sidewalk. In the suit Neil describes the use of his songs as a use of divisive, unAmerican campaign that's based in hate and ignorance, the suit was followed back on August 4th, and we're still awaiting a Trump response, but the real kicker here for us music business folks is because that's what I like to talk about, is that he did not obtain the rightful permission to use these songs, every venue pays a BMI or ASCAP performance license so that music can be played in their room, I'm sure that the Trump campaign thought that that was enough coverage for them to start using people's songs without asking permission and unfortunately, in this particular case, the artist has a real problem with that.

Neil Young is claiming that Donald Trump has been using these songs without his permission at many of his events over the past year or so, and in a suit, he's asking for $750 up to $150,000 per instance that his songs was used without being asked, events such as these usually require a third party license for people to use their music, but also the Trump campaign really messed up because this was a live video event, and whenever you have a live video event that requires a syncline to be obtained for the usage of these songs to be performed on live TV, even if they applied for all the correct licenses, they have to go then to the Neil Young camp and say, Hey, Donald Trump wants to use these songs for your campaign, and Neil Young then has the right to say, no. You can't marry plan. Obviously, I think it's safe to say that the Trump campaign is probably going to have to pay up, and this is probably a slam dunk of a case from the legal perspective of the Neil Young camp.

But what's the lesson here? The truth is, You shouldn't be using anyone else's music without having a license these days with live streams, for example, it's really crazy because the laws are so far behind where we are as a society, and I could also see why a campaign thinking that a venue had a blanket coverage of being able to play songs over speakers would be enough, but when you're dealing with a figure as controversial as Trump, you think you'd wanna maybe take an extra step to see who would let you use their songs... Right, obviously, these fines are just a drop in the bucket for probably somebody like Donald Trump, but still... That's gotta suck, right?

So far, no word from the Trump camp as reported by Billboard, but I'm sure that something will come up this pretty soon, and when it does... I'll keep you up to date.

Spotify Changed the Game, and it’s Here to Stay

Thank you so much for coming by the blog today!

The artist of the day is Little Rituals, their latest record out is so cool, and if you're really into low-fi sort of rock and roll, psych rock type stuff, I think you'll really dig what they're up to. Steven burns is an awesome song writer and even better human being, and he also has some of my favorite musicians playing on the record that are all Atlanta based, so you need to check out Little Rituals

So with that, let's get to this whole Spotify foot-in-mouth nonsense.

Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek released some really interesting comments recently, he said Musicians releasing music every three to four years no longer will be a viable way of staying constant and in front of fans in the marketplace. This was immediately met with a whole lot of blowback from artists talking about the value of art. From the musician perspective, it's a little bit of a slap in the face because you're basically diluting what musicians and artists would call art, and basically understanding that there's a new word for this and it's called content, and content should be put out in Daniel's terms, all the time, he also said that he talked to many artists and all of those artists basically said that they were very happy with the way Spotify pays artists currently, which we as artists can recogonize as BS. I'm sorry, but any world that I live in that requires 229 streams to be played for me to make a single dollar off of something that I spent thousands and thousands of dollars making, and not to mention the amount of man hours it takes... That's completely ridiculous. We all work really, really hard at what we do, and we spend countless hours, some would say 10,000 hours in some respects of just mastering our craft and becoming the best at what we can be for someone to dilute that down to just, hey, you gotta do more and you gotta do better. I can understand why musicians kinda got pissed off about that one.

Ek did say something that I really wanna focus on in this video though, he talks about the continuous engagement aspect of the modern day artist and sort of how that’s become the expectation because essentially his company and others have created this expectation. I get sit here and voice my concerns about the fact that Spotify is worth 50 billion and they're paying people less than pennies on the dollar for their hard work. The real finger to point here is that the pros, meaning performing rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP and CASA, they basically were presented this opportunity to partner with Spotify in the very beginning, and they did, and they all bought in to Spotify at a percentage. So Spotify comes to them, offers them a great deal, sees the future of what music business is likely to be, and the pros all bought in on it, what I don't currently know is if they still own their stake and Spotify or after a certain amount of time, they relinquish their stake, but the truth of the matter is, is that they didn't really have any other answers when Spotify came along and they took the path of least resistance as it pertains to this problem of making music in the music business, when CDs were basically becoming extinct.

So first things first, if you wanna point the finger at anybody, point the finger at your pro.

Secondly, let's talk about this whole idea about releasing music.

Musicians are historically traditionalist, it's sort of the way we've always done business, we as artists continually think of art as being our soul energy in the universe, and literally what makes us go as people. So whenever you have this conversation about how to release music and how things are changing really fast, and how some business man came in and scooped up and took a whole bunch of the market share and left you with pennies, it gets really personal really fast, but ultimately, we're all... And I think we all need to just take a step back and realize that the game has changed every time somebody comes along and changes the game, it requires a whole lot of industry shift and... This is no different. I love albums, I can sit down and listen to albums the entire day, every day of my life, albums have influenced my life so deeply that it's literally about all I wanna talk about, but the truth is, albums are nearly extinct to the public at large today, when you release a body of work because the internet is so large and so vast and so open for everyone to be a part of your release is likely forgotten about after about two weeks, unless you have really deep pockets to push it... I mean, think about it, think about your friends who release music, whenever you see that, you're like, Oh wow, they released the song or they released an album this week... I'm gonna check that out. So you check it out, maybe it's good, maybe you listen to it one or two times, and then there's a fall off, and most people don't go back and listen to that until it's maybe brought up in conversation with somebody else because you're constantly being inundated with music, the internet has 100% leveled the playing field and everybody can get their information out there, so what do you do? There's plenty of marketing videos out there to help you with that, but I don't wanna get too far off a topic here, the point is the game has changed, if you are going to release a ten song album, wouldn't it be more advantageous for you to release each and every single one of those songs as a single and then communicable, add them together at the end of the process to present a full album, the days of just releasing 10 songs at once, or even five songs at once is over, and if you're creative, trying to get people to listen to that is even harder than ever, the traditional publicity sources, like critics or blogs, reviews are getting hammered every single day with thousands of inquiries asking people to review their music, and we kinda wonder sometimes why they get crabby and why they say things that they do.

I think it's time for us to think about using our music as only one particular funnel of many funnels that we can create to find people that are interested in what we do.

Ultimately, people support us because they have a connection with us, the things that we say, things that we write, the things that we play, and it's really important that we all find a way to connect with those people and think about other ways of doing that and also other ways to monetize, because we know this evolution of getting paid per stream, what we're currently getting paid right now is gonna take forever to evolve, and there's already been settlements with this currently that required a certain level that were passed by Congress, but we all know that it's not enough. So it's time we get creative and we start thinking about some other ways to make money, that does not mean abandon your music career. I know we're in a pandemic right now, eventually live music will come back, eventually, people will have more money to spend again, and they'll wanna go to a live concert, but it's time for us to start thinking more creatively about monetization of our music. Doesn't have to come just from actually consuming the product alone, it can come from merch sales, if you come from instructional courses or personalized groups that you create, maybe like a fee, like say like a Patreon or something where people can experience you on a more personal level, it's gonna require us to move, because if we just dig our heels in the ground and just continue to insist that the 1970s are here and they're gone now, but we want them back... It's the genie out of the bottle. Spotify is here to stay. What are you gonna do? How are you going to evolve to keep your music career profitable and one that you enjoy.

I'm really anxious to hear what you have to say, and I'm looking forward to engaging with you in the comments below. So until next time, I'm sweet. Take care of yourself. Stay safe out there, and I look forward to chatting with you soon.

21st Century Musician Episode 4: How to Make Money as a Musician During a Pandemic

Hello Everyone!  It's Sweet Deat! 

If it's your first time here, thank you so much for coming. I do appreciate your click and you making it this far into the blog. We talk about all kinds of good things here for the musician and the general creative music, business, finance strategy, and, uh, everything to do with current events. As the title indicates, today we're going to talk about how to make money during COVID-19, and I'm really looking forward to sharing all this stuff with you. But before we do that, everybody knows when you come here, you always learn about an artist that you need to check out, and today is no different. So let's get to the artist of the day.

Today's artist of the day is not Taylor Swift.

It's actually a band from right here in Atlanta, where I'm based (they play at The Earl all the time.) The name of the band is Slow Parade. This year, Slow Parade released a new record called Hi-Fi LowLife. And it's, uh, led by my friend, Matthew Hendrick. I first got to know Matthew in a singer songwriter sort of get together that I was holding at my own home at one point, where I would invite all sorts of different writers over and we would all share a song and then kind of critique what everybody was doing and talk about what the song meant or felt to them. His song was so deep and impactful that I think several people in the room were almost moved to tears, we were dumbfounded at how much of a poet he was. So if you like really clever lyrics mixed with some indie rock and roll, Slow Parade is definitely a band for you ready to make some money.

How to make money during a pandemic.

It's really hard because all the gigs are gone and you can only teach online if you're a working musician and some of us had teaching jobs and some of us didn't. So the people who didn't have teaching jobs just don't have a job anymore. How in the world are you going to make money? Well, I'm going to preface this entire conversation with this might mean you have to get out of your comfort zone just a little bit. So with that piece, let's get on to number one.

Merch.

Yes. I'm talking about t-shirts, coffee, mugs, bags, all kinds of things. So check out - it's not crazy. If you've got a logo for your brand already, just go to teespring.com and set up a free account. teespring.com is what they call a “print-to-order-store” - so they don't actually ship you anything that you have to then reship and sell. They actually just print it and then send it directly to the person that wants to buy it. Their margins end up coming up close to 50%, but it's literally money that you didn't have to spend to set up something about yourself that you could then sell to people that like you and want to support you during this pandemic. And I know what you're saying, you may be just a side man, musician like myself, that nobody really knows.

And maybe you don't write music primarily and you just show up and play the gig and go home. Right? Well, it doesn't matter whether you have a brand or not. I'm sure that if you sat down with a pen and paper for like 15 minutes, you could think of something that would be cool to put on a tee shirt that would represent you as a human being, whether you know it or not, there's lots of people out there that are a fan of you and what you do on your instrument. So don't be afraid. Take the step out of the comfort zone and just write down some funny, stupid sayings and put them on a tee shirt. You'll be surprised who might buy it and the money you might make. But remember, there's more than just t-shirts at teespring.com. There's things like coffee mugs, there's tote bags, leggings, even face masks. Iin the description below, I'm going to leave a link to my own personal story that has some of my branding and also just stupid things that I thought of that I thought would be cool on a tee shirt. Check it out, give it a look and just kind of see how you might fit into that equation and start your free account like, yesterday. On to number two...

Online courses.

Now you play music, right? You've probably even taught a lesson at some point about what you do. As you know, there are thousands and thousands of guitar teachers online, but they always seem to make money, right? Human connection is what seals the deal between the consumer and the product. You creating a product such as learning how to play guitar online, and then giving that away for people to check out is a way for people to connect with you. And if they feel through your introduction video that you would be a good fit for them, they're going to buy your course. So take time either with a nice camera or just an iPhone camera and make a course, show people what you do and what you like to do and make it really personal. You'll be surprised who might buy it and support you.

Live streams.

Now, before you get crazy about live streams, let me just say, I know there was a rise for live streams in the very beginning of this pandemic, and everybody was throwing out crazy money for people. And since then, it's kind of tapered off.The reason why it's tapered off is not because people don't have interest in giving money, it's that people are not willing to pay money for an average product anymore. What do I mean by average product? I mean, just like a thrown together in your bedroom, not produced, not well lit, not good sound type of live stream. People want production value and they also want a theme or something they can get excited about. Not just you sitting on your bed, playing your favorite song.

There was a time in the beginning where people were new to this and they were willing to give that money, but now that time is over. And if you want to make livestream money, you've got to step it up in the link below. I'm going to provide some platforms that provide this sort of presentation that you need such as like a waiting room, like as if you're waiting for a zoom call to be led into a call, but it looks nice. It feels good. Even maybe has some countdowns, et cetera. You want to put on a concert, put on a show for these people and you can do that with not really a lot of money with just some good creative lighting and some good creative audio. And honestly, even if you don't have like a big budget to go out and blow out on those kinds of things, it's actually really easy just to create that sort of mystery and also presentation in just taking a couple short steps.

The biggest step is just not giving it away for free. If you tell people, if they buy a ticket and you sign up online and you present this concert to someone it's going to make them feel like it's, they're a little bit more special and you're not just openly broadcast into the world, you'll be surprised how many people might want to buy a ticket from you just to show their appreciation for your art and what you do. And for my instrumentalists out there, I'm talking to you to put on a concert. If you're a drummer, put on a concert, get some light beats and some loops and stuff like that and show them what you've got. There's no shame in not having all the pieces of the puzzle. If you're a rhythm section instrument to put on some kind of creative concert when putting it on, maybe think about having tiered systems.

So maybe a VIP ticket gets you into the platform, 30 minutes early, where you can hang out with them exclusively as if they were at a show early, maybe print some flyers of the show. Maybe just like you had a real show like in person somewhere and sign it and mail it to them for costs. Now I say all this, and it's not because I don't like the casual livestream. I'm actually a really big fan of it. And here's why if you do casual livestreams and you make it more about just getting to know the audience and sort of pulling them as to what they might want to hear from you, or just checking in on people and seeing how they're doing, they feel that engagement and they want to then go and buy your ticketed concert live stream. So I'm not just dogging the casual ones because I think they serve a lot of purpose too.

To recap: merch sales, online courses, and live streams. There's no excuse you can't figure out a way to make a little bit scratch in this pandemic. And while we all hope that it goes away really soon, these are things that you can do right now and start making a little bit of money! I hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!

Facebook vs. Youtube and the Fight for Music Videos

What's up people? There's a war going on between YouTube and Facebook. Do you wanna know what's going on? I'll tell you about it right now, let's go.

It's time for the artist of the day. I may have already featured them, but if I didn't already, I'm gonna do it now, and if I already have... Oh, well, you're just gonna hear it again, The New Forever is a project by George Cakes, as well as my good friend Jonah Smith, who I know at featured before the tract. It really grabbed me the most... The first time I heard the EP was the first song, Bad Goodbye. And you could check it out on every streaming service that there is on the face of the earth, so anyway, check him out.

Let's talk about Facebook versus YouTube.

Facebook has started something very interesting in the last few weeks, they are unveiling their brand new music video program, this new program is going to provide a lot of incentives for creatives to exclusively release their content on their platform rather than say YouTube's, it's definitely a boost for Facebook Watch as they hope to lure bigger audiences in, and it's definitely a direct shot at YouTube who owns roughly over 50% of the market share in this particular avenue. This brand new feature is asking people who have artist pages to switch over to this new platform by August first, the idea is that whenever you upload something to your hub or maybe you say you have a record label that distributes like a video or something, it will automatically sync to your Facebook page. This whole move is basically moved around Facebook trying to strike better distribution deals than currently what YouTube has to offer, which means better payouts for you and me, there's been rumblings that Facebook has been looking to negotiate better deals for a while, because a lot of people within the industry are unhappy with how YouTube's payouts are going, music videos are essential to YouTube's audience, actually, according to this article, which I will have linked in the comics below, it's actually the top 10 videos it's ever been viewed on YouTube. All of them are music videos. All this says to me is it a competitive market, is a good market, if people are out doing themselves and paying slightly more each time, it's just going to result in more money coming back to artist and less to people that don't deserve it.

Obviously, a lot of people put the same content on both Facebook and YouTube, so you might ask “why is this even a big deal to begin with?” Well, I'm so glad you did. That first 24 to 48 hours to up to seven days is absolutely crucial, and anyone knowing the business would know that that exclusive moment of releasing that material is totally worth fighting for, just think of a major artist releasing a brand new music video, like Justin Bieber or something, he drops a video and everybody goes to Facebook to look at it, instead of YouTube, that will get people fighting over how much they're willing to pay artists to basically bring their content to them specifically first, I wouldn't be surprised. Long term, if you start seeing even more social networks competing for exclusivity with artists because they know that their views are so huge, which basically means advertisers wanting to get their hands on having their product before and after the videos that are being released, which makes the artists work then even more valuable. So far, I haven't read anything online at Facebook has printed themselves saying that what the New Deal is, but saying that they're already going to start this program, which means they have a deal in place, and it's only a matter of time before we figure out what it is depending on what kind of deal this is and how far better it is than say, YouTube deal, this could be a monumental shift in where people prioritize placing their content. As I said before, competition in the marketplace is a good thing, and I love the fact that these social networks are now really trying to fight with each other about who has the better deal, so the artist prioritized their platform better. It's a winwin for us. As more information is released on this, I will definitely let you know.

If you'd like to leave a comment below, tell me, got a topic you want me to cover, tell me if you’re having a good day, tell me.

But until next time, I'm Sweet Deat, thanks for stopping by and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Save Our Stages and the Facts You Need to Know

What's up everybody? Save Our stages has finally hit Congress and they're taking it seriously. What's next? And what's it all about?

So before we dive into it, I always give an artist to the day, so let's talk about that. The artist of the day today is Cicada Rhythm, this awesome trio comes from Athens, Georgia, and their folk rock Americana sort of vibe really cuts through a lot of the noise in that world to me, these days. Andrea is an accomplished upright bass player graduating from Juilliard, as I understand, and David is an awesome blues rock guitar player, and their songwriting abilities together as a tandem really makes for a unique sound. My buddy Collin Agnew also plays drums and percussion in the band and also sings, so between the three of them, there's a lot going on and a lot of really rich threepart harmonies. One of my personal favorite songs that they've done over the years is called Dirty Hounds, that little clip in the beginning, it's like the little intro guitar riff that Dave plays before the song kicks in that particular music video of that song is really cool too, because they have some really nice aerial shots of their dog chasing them around through a big field... It's pretty cool.

The National Independent Venue Association are the ones responsible behind this whole movement.

Now, this particular organization makes up about 2000 different independent music venues, so these are not massive clubs, we're talking about... These are smaller venues. If you go to their website you'll find that their roster list of supporting artists is pretty ridiculous, basically every artist from the last 20 years or so, or even longer than that, longer than I've been alive. Everybody's on this list is basically what I'm trying to get at, we all know how important small music venues are. Some of my most favorite memories have been in a small room listening to a band just before they become something bigger, one of my favorite memories of this is a band called Snarky Puppy who came through a venue that I used to play regularly on Tuesdays with a bunch of friends in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was her first time there, and they had a offday on their tour and they wanted to just sit in at the jam session. I'll never forget the looks around the bar, as soon as they started playing their first note, realizing that this was a serious band that just happened to have a night off and wanted to play, they completely blew the doors off of the club and immediately became a sensation in Atlanta, by the time they had finished playing two or three more shows in Atlanta, they were selling out a 1200-seat Room once or twice every time they came to town, so obviously small rooms are important for growth for musicians. I just think it's really cool that artists are coming back and supporting these small venues and not necessarily forgetting about them, even though they're having really great careers and making lots of money.

Now with the effects of Covid 19 limiting attendees in a particular music venue, and then sometimes limited to them by less than half or more, it's really hard for anybody to make a living right now playing music, so it's very important that the US get on board with this and see the importance of art and music in our culture and figure out some sort of way to benefit these venues so that they're open... When all this is over, so far, saveourstages.com has sent over a million emails to 538 congressman, which equals 538 million emails requesting them to act now, the quote that seems to get thrown around a whole lot as if this continues another six months or even just a few more months, probably 90% of these businesses are not going to be able to afford to stay open and they're going to have to close, that would be detrimental to the process of musicians having a chance to craft their art.

This movement is asking for 10 billion.

So let's talk about where that 10 billion might go. The idea is that this would go to people like live venue operators, promoters, producers and talent representatives, it directs the SBA to basically give up to 45% of one's Gross from 2019 as a grant. It also gives the SBA to further give grants in the future to make sure that we don't have to keep coming back and asking for more money, and there are regulations as to how this money is to be spent, people who receive this money have to use it on things that has happened to their business based on covid-related deficiencies, so they could use the grants for things like rent, utilities, mortgage obligations, procurement payments to contractors, regular maintenance, administrative costs, taxes, operating leases, that's important, and capital expenditures that go with the local guidelines. The great thing about all of this is that it's not actually going to people like Live Nation and some of these other larger conglomerate is actually going to small business music venues, which is really cool. The reason why this bill is important is 'cause right now, PPP Loans, I don't think have been extended yet, and the money is running low, the longer that we sit in this Covid situation, the harder it's gonna be on our small music venues, and we gotta do something about it, this has just hit congresses floor, so be on the look out, follow the hashtag, Save Our stages, and make sure you stay in the note or just subscribe right here and like the video, I'll continue to give updates as it comes out, because this is probably one of the biggest pieces of legislation for the small musician or the small stage that has been in Congress, his hands and some time.

So until next time, I'm Sweet Deat!

How Would Andrew Yang’s Four-Day Work Week Affect Musicians?

Hey everybody, it's Sweet Deat, thanks so much for reading!

So Andrew Yang this week said something really interesting regarding the four-day work week or the three-day weekend, either way you wanna look at it, it got me thinking. What would that be like for a musician and how would that impact our economics? But before we go into it as my returning subscribers would know, we always highlight the artist that day, so let's do it.

Today's artist of the day is someone that is not a stranger in the jazz community, his name in his Kurt Rosenwinkel. He just recently released a trio record, but what I really wanna talk about is the video he just released on YouTube that is unbelievable. The song is called Under It All, and it is composed of what he calls the hardcore orchestra, which is, I guess a bunch of musicians, strings and brass and everything in between, that he sort of pieced together into one of those performance videos that you're seeing going around viral over the internet. And so they're all playing at home and recording themselves at home, but it's a really beautiful video, and the song is unbelievable to begin with, and it's been out for decades now, but this particular version of the song is just like super powerful and Kurt is just literally playing his tail off. I think you'll really dig it, even if you're not a jazz guitar fan, there's something there for everyone, there's a strong melody for somebody to sing along to, and honestly, I've probably played it 150 times now. Yes, I am unashamedly a super fan.

So let's talk about that three-day weekend.

A few weeks ago, Andrew Yang came out with a quote saying that from people's mental health sake, they should move to a four-day work week rather than a five-day work week. Obviously, that would then move our weekends to being three days long instead of two days long, and citing that it's really good for mental health and a myriad of other reasons such as productivity in the workplace, etcetera. That's really crazy to even think about. To begin with, 40% of an increase by any standard is amazing, this idea of a four-day work week is nothing new, and only recently has this been revisited and sort of gotten a lot more traction with the current state of the coronavirus. And everybody's mental health being a little bit weak, Yang also has an opinion that if it's a four-day a work week commitment, then you might be able to entice more people all come into the workforce or maybe fit people schedule better based on their own limitations at home, some major companies here in America are already switching to a remote first workplace. People like Twitter, square, Coinbase, just to name a few. So as more and more businesses pick up on this idea, I started to wonder what would that do to the musician entertainment community?

First off, when do people consume entertainment?

Usually it's on the weekends, that's the reason why Friday and Saturday nights are always the artist busiest time of the week, adding an extra day to your work week in the high paying part of your week could really do an amazing thing for the entertainment community. dream with me here for just one second or a few minutes, if it was a four-day work week... Say, Monday through Thursday, Thursday would then become the new Friday. Friday would become just like Saturday, and Sunday will always be Sunday.Hypothetically, this could be a huge win for the musician and artist community, and it would jump start this economy of which currently musicians and artists are getting left out in the cold. So I crunched a few numbers and I thought this would just be fun to share, so here goes, let's say the average performing musician, and that... I mean, by somebody who just plays gigs for a living.

Let's say that musician makes 450 on a Friday and a Saturday night... Usually on a Friday, there's a patio gig or something, if you're just a working musician and maybe that pays like 150 bucks, and then maybe you probably like a wedding or a private event or just a higher profile gig in general, and that pays 300 bucks on a Saturday, that 450 times four equals 1800 a month. Now, that's not a lot to think about, but when you add it up over, say, an entire week's worth of income, so maybe you have a Sunday gig, or maybe you have a teaching job during the week, or maybe you pick up some random gigs during the week, as well, it all kinda adds it to being a decent living, but still the crux of your income is that Friday and Saturday... So if we were to add an extra weekend day and make Friday like Saturday and Thursday like Friday, you could potentially add another 1200 a month just from adding that extra day of the week, people need to be entertained when they're at work, they're not being entertained, the reason why a Friday and Saturdays are the way they are for the entertainment industry is because that's when people want to be entertained, they're not at work. They don't have to wake up the next day and go to work. So that turned your Thursday night into the 150 night, the Friday and the Saturday night, both into 300 nights, which equals... That's right, 750 per week. Which doesn't include your Sundays or anything from Monday through Wednesday.

What's your grand total from three nights of quality work time?

That's right, 3000 in one month. Now, I know I'm being a little wishful thinking for the second weekend day being 300, but just dream with me here, that's huge. The potential upside from adding this extra day really benefits the entertainment community, and I think it's something that Corporate America should maybe think about, if it's statistically starting to benefit everyone to stay at home and work and their productivity is rising, that gives corporations that extra chance to save money on all of their overhead expenses with commercial properties and stuff, where they've had that traditionally, how all these people in one place to work, to pass those savings on down to the musician who usually entertains when people are off would be a great trade and would really jumpstart this musician community, while it's very obvious that this probably isn't going to happen in widespread fashion any time soon, it is really nice to think about, isn't it? And ultimately, if we're benefiting mental health, isn't that a win?

Thank you so much, and until next time, I'm Sweet Deat. Can't wait to talk to you again soon.

2020: The Lost Year in the Arts (or is it?)

Is 2020 a complete loss? That depends on how you define it.

I always take a moment to highlight an artist or creative that I think is really cool that you should know about if you don't already know about them. Today's artist is a visual artist, and her name is Hannah Pearman, you can find her on Instagram under Hannah and the Cosmos. I love Hannah's art so much that I bought almost every piece from her ocean series that she did several years ago, and in basically every room you can find a piece of her artwork in my home. Even after all these years of having her artwork in my home, I still somehow find myself lost in it, I'll randomly see a piece of the painting that I never really noticed before, and I'll end up staring at it for a few moments in realizing I'm so lucky to have this. Please check out Hannah and the Cosmos on Instagram and become one of her followers and become immediately amazed at what she creates.

And now for the topic at hand, 2020 in the lost year in the arts.

It's summer 2020. Did you really expect that this would be going on as long as it has? Yes, I'm talking about the pandemic for a moment. I gotta say, I didn't... In the beginning, I thought that this might be done by the summer, and that all the hysteria would be over and that maybe we would be back to normal, starting to play gigs, but definitely ready to go by the fall. Right. Well, not the case any more. Folks, it's quite evident that this is here to stay for a while, which means likely fall of 2020, as we know, it takes time to rebook tours and reschedule gigs even if they're oneoffs, and right now with the way things are in the financial world as it pertains to clubs and music venues and festivals, both small and large, there's no money, and it doesn't like this is gonna get remedied any time soon. Well, the PA benefits be extended for the end of the year for all of us artist and musician types, how are clubs going to pay rent if they can't open up and have shows, will the PPP loans continue to be replenished so that these type of venues and festivals can continue to get the funding they need to stay afloat until they're able to open, whenever that is?

Or whatever the new normal is in the future, where does this leave you... How will your 2020 be defined?

When you look back at it after this year, will it be defined by you accepting the unemployment benefits and just sitting around and waiting for you when you get the all clear to start back up as business as usual, or are you one of these people that are really taking this opportunity to take the next step in your career as best you can provide at the times? That's precisely what I wanna talk about today. The people that are really out there working hard on their craft right now and really putting in the time and the hours are gonna come out of this a whole another level higher than what they were when they went into this pandemic. I think if I had to make a bet on just about anything would be that when we come out of this pandemic, the bar will actually be higher for what is required of all of us. I'm talking about if you're a musician, your musicianship, your ability to play your instrument on a high level, all the other intangibles like social media presence and those type of things, the truth is, we can't expect things to be the same when we come out of this, and if you're sitting around and not really making big strides on yourself and investing in yourself two times three times four times more than you ever have before, you're gonna get left behind when this is all over. The reason why I bring these things up is because I think it's important for all of us to realize this in the creative world, there's gonna be a real need for what we do when we get out of all of this. And if we spend our time wisely preparing for the future, we're going to reap the rewards.

I know many of us have been talking to all of our friends that maybe aren't doing so well with this pandemic and being in isolation and not really having a good mental head space or their hearts broken because they can't see their favorite people. And if you're one of those people that are going out and doing those things. It's really important that you continue to do those things. If you haven't done that, please pick up the phone and call somebody, it could be someone that you don't have a relationship with, really, that's just in your phone and maybe you've worked with a couple of times, they'll be really appreciate it. You called and reached out.

Well, it becomes the byproduct of really focusing in on who you are as an artist right now and doubling your time into it, tripling your time into it. The fringe benefit becomes that you keep your mind busy and you keep your heart full of producing art that you love. Which is funny, that is, to buy product because ultimately keeping your head strong right now and your mental game focused on the future as well as your heart satisfied and creating art in the moment that we have, that's just totally void of regular finances and stuff, it's going to keep you going through this whole entire pandemic, so I don't know who needs to hear that out there, but there's somebody out there that needs to I ask the question again, what will your 2020 be defined as? Will it be a year that is totally lost and totally void of any sort of advancement, your life or career, or will you choose to rise up, become a better version of yourself and do the work that's required to make tomorrow.

I would be really interested in knowing what you're doing currently to make sure that your head is screwed on straight and that your heart is full of your art.

That you are putting in the work that's required to advance every day post in the comments below and tell me what you're doing because, Hey, I could use some advice and also other people that watch this video could probably use that advice too, it's important that we check on each other, love on each other and create... To our minds and our hearts. explode right now. So that we stay on track for the future. Don't wait, do it now, this will end one day, and you'll look back at 2020 and realize that this was the start of something great. See, don't you feel great already? Awesome. Call someone and tell them that you love them today. Until next time, I'm Sweet Deat.