They get a litty called me broadcast a lot from Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the ball Alert Show.
I though by the name for I go over to the name you know, bat, the.
World famous Kingpin, the world famous Royce Monroe is.
In the building.
What they do.
Somebody got a book out. I got a book out, man.
February twenty fifth, drop is yay, yo, you are your own industry. Because you gotta realize you don't get you merging man.
It says on the back how to adjoin the Illuminati. What you have to do.
I'm just all right sacrifice before before you get into these heated conversations.
I wanted to first give you both my flowers.
Kingpin, Uh, you already know I love you, Love you to death, love your family, love your wife. One of the biggest unknown superheroes that are known behind the scenes. If you need your uh, if you need help getting monetized, if you need help doing anything, He's an army Swiss knife. I've learned from him all the time. I just wanted to tell you that I.
Love you, brother, think you very much. People need to hear that because they were like, man, what happened to the podcast? Like people grow back on the radio doing the ball and they're taking over the airwaves doing something special. Wendy just went and got the eye surgery. She's building the incubator programs. She's doing something special, and we're doing something special as well. So I appreciate the flowers.
Thank you.
It's important for the people to know that we still communicate. We talk almost every week still and we still continue.
To and the glue behind the scenes for Generation Now.
People may not even know that Generation Now, which is a DJ drama lake Don Cannon ran label the GM who Now has a book out on the way.
Amazon. It's in the street, it's in the trunk, it's everywhere.
You feel me your knowledge on the industry. You've been in the industry me and you've been in.
The trenches together, floors, all types of ship on the road.
You know what they say, if you want to if you want to keep a secret, put it in a book.
For sure.
This is like, this is the secret revealed.
It really is, because it's it's unlike things like you know, books that just give you a bunch of random information. This is literally a guide to where once you finish the sixteen chapters, you're ready to have money received, like you're loving to have your furnishing company. You're ready to implement a roll out of marketing strategy like whatever it takes, because you are your own industry.
Okay, thank you for saying that. That is the perfect segue.
King PANDAM starting with you, sir, Sorry to get you riled up some early in the episode. What are some things that frustrates you that artists do with their rollout?
Eighty seven percent of all music on Spotify is not monetized because it doesn't have a thousand streams. That's three streams a day. Eighty seven percent of the one hundred and thirty five thousand records totally released every day, right, eighty seven percent of that music is not monetized. But the money that's collected is forty seven million dollars worth of revenue. So the number one pet peeve that most artists overdo is overlook the business of music in exchange
for the stardom of popularity. And I think their desire whether you're an influencer, a DJ company owner. I was just thinking on the way over here, like can you really be a record label owner if you don't have a staff, like Can you really own a record label if you don't have people that know what it is?
We were talking about it before the camera came on actionables, and you can have a bunch of people that know the technical side of the music industry, but how many of them know how to put that into real world situations. How many people are going to graduate this year with a degree in music business but don't know how to merge profiles, don't know how to do a catalog, or that don't know how to do publishing.
Stop right there, I want to tag you back in.
Come on.
The best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing ever happened to me. I got a job at Warner Records. I love the knowledge that I gained from it. I hated it only from the I hated it because I didn't get there sooner. I wish I did that in my early twenties.
I could have.
Evolved a lot differently, right because I'm already Ferrari when I get there, But I'm in the beginner type of job description. And back to Y'm gonna take you back in. I realized a record label runs with the staff. So if you're trying to put out a song, any type of music, you need a.
Staff, a team, and the staff has a staff. There's a department here, there's a department there. That department has a boss. That department has a boss. That department boss talks to that department's boss.
They have a meeting on Thursday. That department has a department boss. That department has a boss.
They talk on Wednesday, talks on Monday.
Real infrastructure, right for something that might not work, for something that the time doesn't work.
But no, it's what it is. Strategic Now, whether it works is based on consumer consumption.
Here we go right, you know.
And on the flip side of that, I say, a lot of the people that are in position to help navigate some of these treacherous waters for these artists are are not versed or not prepared or equipped, should I say, to do a great job for these artists. We just did an episode on the Uncut game podcast Shameless Plug, and we did the.
First two times for OG.
In our first two episodes, one of them we did an audit. It was round Rolling Loud weekend when it was like we're gonna drop this, let's just do it. So one of the first two episodes We did an audit on Jello because he had an amazing, rolling loud performance and premiered some new music, so I wanted to see how that turned out for him. And then we did an audit on Asap Rocky, which is a powerhouses.
You know, Flock was a legend in hip hop right now, Ben it got the baddest woman in the game everything, And I wanted to compare some of those guys moments, and you guys would have been underwhelmed. You guys would have been super unimpressed with the way that the things were handled for them in particular. And I say them because one is a megastar athlete that has crossed over
the thresholds climb to the top of the mountain. He just got certified gold on his single right the Tweaker just went I shot the Hoty grow up and posting that up. The song with Glorilla was going crazy. The can you please? Right with Black Pack Radio, it's actually replaced the Tweaker on radio right now and Mike showing everything else, so it's doing what it's supposed to do. But where was the information? Where is the pre save links, where is the where's all the calls? To action. Where's
the merchandise? Where's then you look at Asap Rocky And when he'd had his amazing Rolling Loud performance fill from a helicopter, the links in his bio were all broken. We didn't buy the album. You couldn't pre order anything like ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children and women of all shapes and sizes were bleeding pennies. We're bleeding pennies and we don't understand because nobody around you bothered to look at the link in your bio and say, hey, hey, flock,
oh this link is broken. Bro, this don't take you nowhere before you go hang out of the helicopter. And what about the merchandise? He wore a shirt that he had on Rolling Loud two years prior, So I'm not trying to nitpick at him. I'm just saying the teams around some of these artists are not doing a good enough job of executing at a high level, and that's because most of them don't understand the business of music.
A lot of opportunities, a lot of missed opportunities, and believe it or not, in the music business, you're not gonna make every shot shooting get back on defense, shooting, get back on defense. That's why you have a team around you. Some of those people are the center. Some of those people are the power forward. Some of those people is their job to fight underneath the rim, to get the rebound, to give it back to you so you could take another high percentage shot, right, Because that's
what it is. It's lowing yourself and your limitation. So if what artists can or can't do, my brother, I'm sure they need to get this book because sixteen chapters. If they do a chapter a week, that's four months. That's research. That's less than a school semester.
The thing about it though, even in describing the team, there's your business team and then there's your team team. So a lot of times a lot of artists until they hit like the independent status of like say like how Whiskey's independent right now, they don't have their team. They have their appointed people from the team that they're signed to, right So the personal integrity sometimes is missing
in the mission. Because for the money that you're talking about missing the label of pick it up, it doesn't change their salary, so it doesn't influence their bottom line. So that's another reason it's important for an artist to become their own industry.
Basically, now, rouis what is your biggest pet peeve in the industry?
Lack of education.
It's the same reason why I wrote the book, because everybody engages in all the fun stuff to making the music. They're coming out here, getting attention, buying shiny stuff and all that good stuff, but no one knows what they're doing. They just they record the song and want to put out the art. They're not understanding that the producer, the writers, everybody needs to be compensated.
The point system is and all that stuff.
Everything like your attorney sometimes is more important or as important as your engineer, because they're both guiding the product and the direction of the value of the monetary result.
It's important. So education has been the biggest area opportun I see.
Now, what is the what do y'all feel like? What breaks records nowadays? Because I hear some people sayd DJ still break records, and then I just seeing an interview where uh Nardo Wicks said that TikTok breaks records.
Now it's a combination, in my opinion, of social currency and the actual industry. So you need the DJ and you need the streamer. The streamer is gonna it's going to tune you in with the person, and then the DJ is going to tune you in with the music because a lot of times the artist is not the vehicle that's carrying the music. Like even with Jello, it's like, yeah, he got his notoriety or whatnot, But because of that notoriety,
it puts certain eyes on a record. So when you think about that record, you're thinking about just the moment that you're hearing.
And it helps. His brothers are both NBA stars.
To me, it goes back to where it was prior to like digital music. It's like, if you were a celebrity, they did the whole gamut with you. You got endorsements, you put out a record, you did everything, even if he was like a football star or or whatever the case was. So in today's time, it's like the industry shifting back to who has social currency and who can we put a product out through.
Nothing in this business works alone, So there's no one thing that it takes to break a record. Breaking a record is a variety of things. It starts off organically in your neighborhood, the DJs locally in your city, have a hot record, and they're the ones to tell you, hey man, you got to get this to so and so,
and they personally take it. I've seen you Ferrari. I've seen a lot of the different DJs take records locally, bring them in and be like, we have to help this record grow, and then that record travels to other pds and mds. Then the radio promoter gets involved and then all the bells and whistles and the machine starts to roll. Make no mistake about it that when a record breaks and it gets over to it had a lot of organic buzz. The artists have failed to work
for the fans. They think they work for the label, so they don't want to create content because they think it's lame. You're working for your fans and unless you're a good point. Engagement is what leads to monetization activity. You have to be productive. I have to engage and post on social media in order to trigger some of those monetizations. Breaking news right today, YouTube announced that they were unrolling rolling out the dubbing feature for all YouTube
paid partner programs. That means that just because you have a little check mark on your page, you don't get that feature. You have to have the benchmark ten thousand subscribers, are a thousand subscribers, three thousand watch hours. And then once you become a monetized partner with them, now you can have your podcast in forty languages or whatever it is. These are all the different things that are available to
you once you monetize. Most artists will never monetize. The bigger the artists, the lazier they are with it, because they've gotten fat and successful off of being manipulated and taken advantage of. So why disrupt the system. I still get my little change. And then you got the people that sit in there and say, oh, I live in a car. Things are going bad for me. Things are bad for everybody right now. This economy, tariffs, tariffs got the economy jammed up.
Baby, Everything about everything is bad everything.
How as an artist do you think you're gonna sell what you don't own in a climate when everything that you're creating you're training a computer to do for you. You're logging on the chat GPT and you're giving it your ideas and you're asking it to come up with the best plan possible. And then two weeks later, an io platform pops up. What happens when you train one AI, it trains other ais. And you don't own these properties, these ideas, these sounds that you're uploading to these platforms.
You're doing yourself a disservice because you're bleeding pennies at artists revenue solutions. That was the thing we prided ourselves with. We wanted to help artists earn revenue from their art. And that's what most people in this business. They know how they can make money, not how the artist makes money.
I want to ask a question, Rry Royce, do you think that streamers are becoming bigger than rappers?
I'm not gonna say for sure, they're more profitable and more influential than rappers. I don't think they're replacing rappers to a certain degree because organically, you know.
I think so, Why do you think that?
The reason why I think that is because it kind of stems from what king Pin said. The streamers are more relatable. These big artists are not relatable. They're not interacting with fans. They don't even want to talk to fans. They don't even they don't even want to have a conversation.
With a fast streamer is talking to people. But see the thing, people make them big. We've taken rappers and we don't deem them as artists. We deem them as rappers, right, and so that's the problem right there. Everything that you're describing with being relatable, so on and so forth. These are just qualities that we have to instill in the artists because developments missing, that doesn't happen. So now a generation.
Now, something we pride ourselves on is that we get our acts ready for.
Some y'all do.
Y'all do build y'all artists from the ground up. When you look at the all the artists that have.
Recently came for directions, but everybody is a superstar. But at the same time, it's it's the humbleness. It's like he says, it's like they're lazy to a certain degree because you don't understand that you're you're always learning. As soon as you get in the d we're back at day one. Whatever however long you was working to get to this deal Erase all that time that you think you've already put in, because now it's time to put
in this new time. Like we first signed an artist, you put them in the studio for six months to a year, so you can get whatever's in you out, so now we can focus on making the musion.
So why would the artists get the money They ready to lead the label.
Because they think they have it figured out, They think they have the solution to it. They think that because they're the goose that lays the golden eggs, that they deserve to get fed something different before they lay the golden egg. No, you're going to get put in another pen and you're gonna get fed more crap and keep laying golden eggs. The day you can't lay golden eggs, you will be replaced with another goose that could lay gold.
What people forget is that brand association is what leads to growth. Right, So as soon as you disassociate yourself from this brand that's already established at a certain level, you're gonna see a gradual decline in how notable all your little moves are because they gonna keep doing the same type of moves. But you don't you take the fame with you. But you gotta get the fame first until you million dollar superstar person.
It's like it could a always fall.
Through one thousand streams, is what you need to monetize on Spotify. One thousand subscribers is what you need to monetize on YouTube, and that should be your barometer. Fifty sixty Hoodies sixty fifty five dollars. Hoodies makes you as much money as a platinum record will in royalties. Not having your business together is costing you more than anything else that you could be spending or investing in your
money in right now. Not having your business together, not having access to the stuff that you need, prohibits you from doing the things that you want to do so that you can see the most out of it. Until that happens, anybody that has their business together will do better than any artist that is put in front of a microphone streamer or not.
All right, so we run a long time, Okay, but I want you both to ask answer this last question before we go. I want you to look at the camera and give an artist advice on what should they do with their advance money?
Who that's camera right there?
You go first?
Really, okay? With your advanced money.
One, understand that this money is set to survive you potentially for one to three years. One to three years, So take that money, budget it out to where you're paying yourself a salary to live on for those one to three years. Because until it happens for you in a real way where there's a demand for you to do shows, so on and so forth, or you land some other type of promotional deal, this is gonna be the money that you have to live off of. This is the only money we owe you based on the
contract that you signed. Again, the only money we owe you based on the contract you signed. Doesn't mean we don't help, but at the same time, budget your money.
Go see a lawyer, in an accountant. Anything else that anybody tells you to do aside from that information there is irrelevant. Go see a lawyer, Go see account and make sure that you're you're set up and you're ready to make money, and that you have all of the things that you need as a business. So, if you're interested in running ads, you're gonna need a bank account, You're gonna need an LLC, You're gonna need an information You're gonna need a Google
Ads account, You're gonna need a Meta ads account. You're gonna need a TikTok ads account. If you want to run ads, if you want somebody else to run ads for you so they can collect all the little preaks and benefits of it. Then, so be it. Go see a lawyer, go see an account. They're gonna be the two best bets for your initial expenditure with your you know, obviously, go to artripsul dot com and get you an audit for free so we can tell you what you need to do with your money.
Now.
Listen, that's great advice for the artist that's not associated with the major label and the major label system, that same advice will disrupt all those teams that Ray.
Was talking about.
When you're not affiliated with a major imprint, definitely take that route to make sure you collect are your coins when you sign that deal. We're focused on all that because that's also a part of the recoup when you sign with death Row.
Come on, anything you got going on, give me some shout outs whatever you got going man.
Of course you are my business partner. Tony ak I am the connect. Please don't call me O G my wife, Nikki, yourself, Rariy Hey, Wendy a double R the grade who's helping us with The Uncut Game podcast available every Wednesday. New audio drops on Thursdays, and video for That episode drops the following Wednesday. So aside from that art Rensoul dot Com, Uncut Game podcast, and stay tuned for the Art Artist Academy. We're getting ready to do a sixteen week course. We gotta talk after the episode.
We're doing a.
Sixteen week course and we got some other stuff that we're gonna have some people come in into a school type setting and learn over a couple of days the business of music. And it's all because of people like my business partner Tony. Of course we are ourgm A distribution and organic music destroy That's what.
I got for you, O man. I want to be a part of some of that. Royce Munroe big shouts to Generation Now, the Big Three, DJ Don Cannon, DJ Drama and Lake Cheezy. If you don't know, Cash rules everything, Ki Cash new project will be available on all your streaming platforms. Shouts out Willie Joe, shouts out TC, shouts out Trey McKayla, the entire staff shouts out to all the interns. And if you don't know, please know that you are your own industry. And by the way, it's online everywhere.
And by the way, uh baul Alert is managed by Generation.
Listen, don't get it. Don't get it? Best?
Are you all? You want to drop that lit?
Because I wanted to be a mystery, but yeah it is big g n if you need to get here anywhere that relates to these two.
Royce, I'm calling me.
Everybody that's waiting a response. I promise you I'm gonna respond.
Your time is coming, yes, sir,