Cows.

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 99

Whoa, you're listening to this six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode,

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing cohost, Christopher J. Graham, how are you doing today, buddy? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing well, I'm really good, man. I am in a wonderful chapter of life. How are you? It's a sad day and the hood household, actually, Oh my $17 pair of Amazon headphones that I've used on this podcast for the last 99 episodes was accidentally washed in the washing machine this past week. I'm still using them. Just so you know, they are still working. These things are troopers. They just don't sound the same. They're a little tinny. So today if I sound like a little bit bigger and warmer, it's because I have to lean closer to the microphone so Brian can hear me. That's true. That's right. We're a podcast for professional audio engineer.

Oh yeah. I am like the anti headphone slot and meanwhile Chris Graham, you got like six grand worth of free fun. Yes. Stay tuned for more on that so like people send Chris free stuff. I'm like ever get free stuff and it's because our listeners know that I don't give a shit. It's true. I do here. Well we need to get you some new headphones soon. Yeah, somebody to send me some decent headphones. That's what I want. Here's the thing you don't like over the ear headphones? No, I don't at all. Hate him. Interesting. Yup. See my opinion on headphones is I got to have a certain type of pair of headphones. Depending on what I'm doing. You need a certain type of headphones to like podcast this or don't mention that certain type of headphone or you'll get the gear slit alert on you? Not yet. Not yet. I'm saving up my gear slot alerts for later to talk about my gosh, all the headphones. It's going to be really great. Nice dude. Brian, what are we talking about today? Meat. Cows. If we use the, if we use the topic that we decided potentially for this episode title, it's the stupidest title on earth.

So let's explain what we're going to be talking about today because this is actually a really good topic. It is, despite what the title may or may not say, this is the title we were going to go with. If we didn't use this, then we'll cut this part out. We use the topic cows, period. Cows, period. Cows. Brian, I'm excited to break down what cows can teach us about having a successful home studio recording business. Yeah, so let's just jump right into it. Stop dancing around it. Chris Graham, we're talking about sacred cows today. The business of actually slaughtering the sacred cow. This is not a vegan friendly episode. Unfortunate cause we are going to slaughter some cows actually first before we even talk about slaughtering sacred cows. Let's a talk about what is a sacred cow and then B, what does a purple cow, because these are two things that are kind of interrelated with this episode. We needed to find these two cow terms. Well and we have to warn you guys, some of this is going to be

a little offensive. Some of it's gonna be difficult to hear when you're talking about cows. The issues are often black and white.

You always have such a dumb smug look on your face when you're teeing up a dad joke and I just wish our listeners could see how dumb you look when you're about to do one of these.

I got a lot of cow dad jokes and I'm going to work in that are utterly hilarious. I'm going to milk them for all they're worth. Oh, let me know when you're done. Well, hopefully James can edit out the bad ones and that will let the cream rise to the top.

All right. Okay, so we're done guys. I refused to do this episode. I'm quitting the podcast. We didn't quite make it to 100 episodes. It's been a good run y'all.

Uh, I'll do my best to save some more for later. I want to have more cow jokes on the tail end. Okay. Okay, then we're done. Okay. I promise. What is it? Sacred cow. A sacred cow is this idea that you can't talk about it. Society or culture or an industry all does a certain thing and it's not necessarily rational. It's not necessarily in the industry's best interest or in the individual's best interest, but it's like pho pot, you can't talk about it. It's the elephant in the room and you can't bring it up in a sacred cow. It's interesting because sacred cows and their death killing the sacred cow was the phrase is the popular. The phrase is the history of business. When you look at businesses that have become very successful, they almost all had just killed a sacred cow. Yup. They almost just did something kind of crazy and at first people were like, what?

What the hell is wrong with these guys? Oh my gosh, their product's awesome. And there's just so many examples of that. So I think a good example to start this off, just you kind of have a good grasp of what a sacred cow is, would be going back to our childhood. If you're in your late twenties or in your 30s or beyond, you remember as a kid, two things you were always told not to do. One would be don't talk to strangers and to don't get into a car with a stranger. That was what you were always told as a child. At least me. I'm not sure if it's the same for you, Chris. Totally. Okay, good. So is the same in Ohio? Two is a little weird up there. So I'd never know. Now because of the internet and all the sacred cows that have been slaughtered between my childhood and now I will pull up my phone, get a stranger to come pick me up in a car, ride with that stranger to another stranger's house that I'm renting and sleep in that stranger's house.

Crazy. That's insane. Yeah. When you think about it. So if we had not killed the sacred cows of talking to strangers, getting in strangers, cars, sleeping at strangers houses, we would never have Airbnb. We would never have Uber. We would never have a lot of the internet that we have right now that has brought a lot of benefit tests. I can get a strangers to bring food to my house at any moment. I can get a stranger to shop for my groceries if I went to. So these are all the result of killing sacred cows. And so there are a lot of sacred cows that we can kill in our own businesses in order to have a more successful business. And here's the deal. When we talk about sacred cows, these sacred cows being killed, like in Airbnb's case resulted in them being a purple cow.

Chris, do you wanna talk about what a purple cow is? Yeah. A purple cow is an idea popularized by this author Seth Godin. Seth Godins may be the number one marketing thought leader in the world. Yeah, 100% he wrote a book called purple cow. And it's this idea that if you want to make a successful product or successful company, you're successful service. You have to stand out and be a little weird. You have to surprise people in some way, shape or form. And be memorable. Just think about it. If you, we're looking into a field full of cows, they're all black and white, mostly, at least the Cal is here in the South. And if you saw a purple cow standing in the field amongst the black and white cows, it would be a remarkable thing. You would probably say, Oh, look at that purple cow. That's something that stands out. These companies like Airbnb and Uber and some of the other ones we might talk about here in the intro. If these companies would not have killed sacred cows, they would have never become purple cows, AKA unicorns, AKA multibillion dollar companies.

Well, and here's the thing. Killing the sacred cow takes courage. Industries are set up and there's gatekeepers and there's people that are entrenched and when you kill a sacred cow, you get beef.

Is that a joke or is there, that was definitely a joke. Come on. When you kill a sacred cow, you get beef, you get beef with, let me try that again. When you kill the cow, you get beef with the people that are entrenched. Oh, okay. So you were making a point in the form of a joke that no one got until now. So what Chris is trying to say with this really bad joke with a long silence that followed it, we're not gonna edit it out, is you're going to get resistance in the industry when you start killing sacred cows, you want to see what the hotel industry has done to try to stop or slow down Airbnb. You want to see what the taxi companies have done to try to stop or slow down Uber and Lyft. Not saying that there's not things that these companies have done wrong in the process, but I'm just saying that you are making a great point that there is beef between these two industries when you are killing sacred cows. Well, a good example of this that's semi-related to our topic today

is the CEO of Uber who has since been kicked out, but he's like the founding CEO when he tried to move Uber into New York city. So the story goes, his phone rang unlisted number and somebody picked up and said, Hey, you know, you've got beautiful children, a beautiful family. You should really think twice about bringing Uber to New York death threat. Now here's the crazy thing. The CEO, the founding CEO, his mom died in a freak boating accident and nobody was around except his dad just mysteriously died after his family was threatened and after he brought Uber to New York. Who knows what I'm saying?

Hopefully none of us are going to get death threats by killing sacred cows. If your business is probably not making big enough waves for that to happen, hopefully, but the point is you will encounter resistance in some way, shape, or form. A lot of it will probably be coming in the form of haters or in the form of, you know, insecurity. It's really hard to be the first person to do something, at least in your area or in your industry. And so as we're talking through these sacred cows worth killing in our businesses, it's worth considering the beef. As Chris liked to say, the beef you might run into the conflicts you might run into by trying to do this. Not all these are going to have any sort of conflicts attached with them. Some of these are just kind of off the cuff things you need to think about, but some of these might have some sort of pushback from either peers or potential customers or people that are never going to be a customer that are the loudest haters that will never pay you money so you don't even listen to them anyways, so things to keep in mind.

Yeah, and this is all fascinating to me because we talk about niching all the time. You could niche based on the services that you provide. You could niche based on the genres that you work with. There's a million different ways to niche, but the best and most powerful niches are often a little bit shocking. There's an idea of like, Whoa, that's kind of weird. I thought we weren't allowed to do that. Huh? Okay. I'm going to tell my friends about this business because it's surprising. There's so many different businesses throughout history that reflect that. And we're gonna talk a little about those different businesses.

But aside just looking at this list of businesses we have here that matches pretty much every business we have on this list.

Yeah, exactly. So we're gonna talk a little about the history of business and then we're gonna apply it to our own industry in recording arts. So one of the best examples when I was growing up, Brian, you mentioned when you were a kid, you know, mom and dad were like, don't talk to strangers, don't get in cars with strangers. When the internet first kind of came into being, I was lucky in that we had an Apple, two E computer in my house when I was six years old in like 1988 I guess it would have been. My parents were crazy forward-leaning with technology and we were one of the first families in our area to get the internet. When you start to go to school and you know, we had this awesome Macintosh computer lab at all the schools I went to. We were apparently very good schools and they would all say the same thing.

Internet's great, but whatever you do, don't put your picture on the internet. Never post your picture on the internet. And then my space came along and everyone's putting their picture on the internet and people are freaking out. And then my space blew up. And obviously Facebook, Instagram, putting your face on the internet is essentially the basis of all commerce in our country at this point. So that's a good example of a sacred cow putting your face on the internet. Let's move on to one of my favorite examples from one of my favorite people in the entire world. Elon Musk. When PayPal came out, PayPal initially was software designed to let you send money from one Palm pilot to another Palm pilot was kind of like a precursor to the iPhone. The first popular smart phone. Yeah, first popular smartphone, and it was a way to send money from one smartphone to the other, and everybody was like, that's crazy. It's not secure to send money on the internet. You should never do it. You're going to get scammed. All your money's going to get taken. Rule number two of the internet in a rule number one of the, don't put your face

on it. Rule number two, never ever buy anything on it. It's so true. It was so hard to buy or sell anything on the internet back in, I guess the nineties is when that started kind of popping up nineties yeah. I mean, I read Elon Musk's biography and he talks about this idea that everybody told them it was crazy. You can't take on the banking industry. It's the most powerful industry in the world. You can't take banking online. Well, guess what? That was a pretty cool sacred cow to kill because I'm going to guess that you guys have probably spent money on the internet in the last like 24 hours, almost guaranteed. And I would say PayPal has taken a lot of my money over the years with their little 3% nickel and dime fee. So love them or hate them. They have made waves and they have become a purple Cal, at least in their prime.

I don't know if they're really in their prime anymore, but we're not going to get into that. Next on our list is one of my favorite apps and Oh boy, here we go, and that killed this specific sacred cow of kind of talking to strangers on the internet, but dating on the internet, internet dating at say a lot less now, but it used to have a massive stigma attached to it. Now it is not uncommon to meet, you know what? Actually I saw a study recently finding your significant other on dating apps has surpassed finding your significant other in your circle of friends was no longer your circle of friends. That's the number one source of dating. It's now dating apps. Gee, Brian, it seems like you have some personal experience here. Why don't you share? Yeah, we've talked about this before. I met my wife on Tinder like four or five years ago I think is when we first swiped each other.

And so like without that I wouldn't have the wife that I have currently, which is so weird to think about, but that is a massive sacred cow that has been slaughtered in the last five years. Like even back then, it was a little weird to date someone on the internet that you've met on an app and it's still weird to just think about, but it's not weird in reality, like everyone has participated if they're single today, they have participated in internet dating in some way, shape or form. And that was a recent sacred cow. That's a fascinating sacred cow because that hits so close to home for everybody. You know, generally speaking, we all want companionship. And when I was growing up, I had an internet girlfriend when I was like 15 I think everyone had some sort of like crush they talked to in internet.

Yeah. You didn't want to tell anybody, right? Yeah. I had like a girl I met on my space way back in the day. Speaking of my space that we'd talk all the time. Same. It's a weird sacred cow of like society shifted and huge successful businesses have been built around the death of this sacred cow. So let's talk about our industry. Let's talk about the recording studio because this is the part where we're going to say some crazy stuff. We're going to talk about the history of the recording industry and then we're going to work into crazy or things and probably almost everyone's going to react and be like, that's stupid. Because that's how you react when someone says, Hey, maybe this is a sacred cow. Maybe we should kill it. 10 years ago, if you said you're going to meet your wife via internet dating, I'd have been like that stupid Boohoo would've nerd. Oh man. Now people are just like, Oh, that makes, yeah,

totally. Perhaps you would have wanted to survey the entire earth to find your perfect mate rather than the the 47 people that you know at your college or something. So let's move onto some older studio examples of sacred cows that have been killed already. Some of these are on the end of their death. Some of these have been dead for a long time, but they're still worth mentioning. And then we'll transition into some that we think some sacred cows that we've identified in studios that should be slaughtered for their beef. The first one on the list is distortion. This is a weird one Chris. Why is distortion a sacred cow that has been killed in the past and what are the results of that sacred cow being slaughtered? Well, back in the day when you're recording this song, the thing you wanted to avoid was any kind of distortion, distortion equals bad.

And then a song called you really got me, came out in 1962 by the Kings and it was one of the first songs to have distortion. And here's the thing, the guitarist, Dave Davies took a razor blade and he cut his speakers up. He specifically wanted the speakers to like get destroyed and that's, you know, doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. You know, we all know that song now, but at the time I'm sure many people heard it and are like, what is this crap? This sounds terrible. They killed a sacred cow by having guitar distortion and now many of the people made the guys listening to the show. That's how you make a living this with guitar distortion. Yeah, I mixed heavy metals so it's like I don't have a career if I don't have guitar distortion. Yeah man. But at one point in time you were a wackadoo.

Yeah. And now there are amps that are specifically created and purchased for their specific tonal qualities where their distortion, their specific type of distortion because there's different ways to achieve different distortion. That's what makes a lot of guitar ans unique now. And those are what makes some of those amps a purple cow is the way they distort in certain ways and without killing that sacred cow of distorting at all, we would not have all the different flavors of distortion that we have now. Yeah. This is a fascinating and a really good example because it's something we are all connected to. It's something we all know and love. Not everyone loves distortion. Let's be honest, not everyone loves distortion, not everybody, but to imagine that distortion was offensive and was universally thought, a bad idea by all musicians on earth. Just wrap your mind around that.

Think of the transition we've had culturally. We're going to come back to this later in the episode. This is such a good example of a purple cow. It is a purple cow, but it's also an example of a sacred cow dying. So Brian, let's move on to the next one. I've got a story for you. Okay. For the last 10 years, I've been mastering songs using speakers I bought at best buy for approximately $50 do you think I'm crazy? Yeah, yeah. Well guess what? I haven't been doing that. That's good. I'm really glad you have it. Good people pay you a lot of money to master their songs. I rest master on some very nice speakers. However, back in, I think it was the 70s somebody did that, he showed up at a studio and said, man, I bought these a buff, these Yammer hall speakers at the, at the local consumer goods store and now we're going to mix a hit record on him. He sounds shockingly like butt rock bury, but that's besides the point he does sound like, but Rothbury the speakers of which I speak are the Yamaha NS tens,

the black speakers with the white cones all back deer sled alert. Come on.

That's the gear alert. Don't talk about gear on this podcast, Chris, but think about that. It's not a studio speaker. It's a not very nice home, quote unquote bookshelf speaker. It's designed to go on bookshelves in like the middle class and lower middle-class. They're not fancy. They're not high fidelity. Their consumer like what you would buy at best buy and now they are a gold standard and studios across the world and they're being used on hit records. Since God knows when is sacred cow died. The NSX

10 using the NS 10 used to be a sacred cow that was [inaudible].

Unless of course you're not gonna use the white speakers, but now they're ubiquitous.

I wasn't around back then, so I'm curious how that kind of went down. If there was a lot of hesitancy, I'm sure someone listening now was around when those started kind of popping up here and there and I'm wondering if people were just like, it was so off the wall and weird that people started doing it without it really being a sacred cow. Or if it was like, I, I'll never have those in my studio because that's stupid.

Here's the story I heard and I'm embarrassed. I'm going to get it wrong guys, but deal with it. So here we go. We never get stories wrong. Chris, what are you talking about? What I heard was, I forget which record it was, but I think there was like a steely Dan record or something like that, but the producer came in with these speakers and brought them into the studio, threw them up on the console and then took toilet paper and scotch taped toilet paper over the tweeters because he thought the speakers were just a little too harsh and they mixed the record like that and then it became a hit record and then everyone was like, yeah man, you got to get some of these NS tens and make sure you get some Sharman Downy fresh. You need to get that particular two ply. Not reply to ply sounds better.

I don't know if that's true, but I would a hundred percent believe that because that's how every single recording engineer on earth is. They want to know the specific type of toilet paper you use to cover the tweeters. That's how they are. Cause I'm the same way. Now was it brand new toilet paper or had it been partially used? Was it one plier? Was it two ply? Was there any piece hopped up in it or would you just completely dry?

Yeah. Well and that's hilarious. Cause here's the thing, bring it home. Toilet paper on top of your tweeter with scotch tape to mix a hit record is guess what a purple cow. That's true. Super purple. You hear about that and you're like, you did what? But just one super purple cow. Super purple cow. It's crazy.

So more recently in our recording industry, sacred cow that has died is it's still kind of slowly dying, but it's mostly dead now. I'm not a hundred percent dead. Yeah. That is using plugins instead of hardware and we're not going to get into a huge debate here about this because Chris and pretty much stand pretty staunchly on the plugin side of things. Like I do have hardware, but I'm like almost all in the box here. Chris is predominantly in the box with his studio, but there's still people that are staunchly against this, so it's not fully dead yet. But it is worth mentioning that this was a sacred cow at once, that people were honestly against people using plugins and people would call you back in the day and say, do you use for first questions? Do you use hardware?

Do you use analog? Yeah, that used to happen to me all the time. My phone would ring and before they asked my rate, they would say, well, my rate was posted back then. But they would call just to ask, do you use analog or a plugins? And that was it. That was all they cared about because they thought that was how you could tell a good mastering engineer from a bad mastering engineer.

And to me, granted, the technology wasn't always there. That's kind of what's shifted out of that being a sacred cow. But similar along the way, when the technology caught up, people's attitudes were still against it, and that's when it became a sacred cow. So again, if you're just really super against using plugins in the studio, pause and consider whether or not you're on the tail end of the dying sacred cow because the last thing you want to be is the taxi industry in 10 years.

Ooh, there's a great book by Clayton Christiansen called the innovator's dilemma, and not to give you like a book summary of it, but the basic idea here is that when technology is new, that technology has haters because that technology hasn't fully developed yet. One of the things to keep in mind with plugins, and I used to ask this question to these guys that would call me in, you know, do you use it a lot? I'd be like, well, here's the question. When will plugins be as good or better than analog? And has that day already come or not? And I'm not going to answer that question on the show, but it starts to make you think about the future and the inevitable conclusion, which is someday nobody's going to think that analog is better. I don't think that day has come yet, but at some point eventually software will 100% surpass hardware.

I will say sonically, it's not 100% there, but I will say the other benefits outweigh the Sonic gain you get from hardware just because of the recall bounce times. All sorts of other reasons that I'm not going to get into pricing

when it comes to a sacred cow like this, especially if it's technology related, is the technology moves and I regret that joke. That was not funny.

That is really bad. So bad on that really bad joke. Let's move on to our next and final sacred cow that's still slowly dying. It's basically dead now and that is, I don't know how to phrase this, but the sacred cow of the home studio. We are obviously on the side of you can run a profitable home recording studio. I've done it. Chris has done it. We have a lot of our community members who are running super profitable home studios, but this was a massive sacred cow back in the day that you had to have an incredible facility in order to have an incredible business. This kind of goes along with the gear conversation, but it's more than just the gear is the commercial facility and doing incredible build outs and the multiple rooms and the large spaces and the big live rooms and a console

in the console. Yeah. Can you imagine who's the first guy to have a hit without a console? That's what I want to know is back in the day, if you didn't have the faders and all the whole nine yards like, Whoa, what's wrong with you?

So I don't know who the first person was that had in modern times that has had a hit, I guess a number one in some major genre. But I will say that I could put money on the fact that that happens more often now than ever before. Well, first of all, I don't think this is a sacred cow that's fully dead yet. I still think there are people that refuse to move out of the larger facility. I think there are certain situations where this is a real thing where you do need a large facility in order to gain certain clients like labels. I think that's the truth. Did you have some you want to add to that Chris?

I'm sure there's artists as well too that are like, wait a minute, huh? Whoa. How many square feet is your facility? Oh, I'm out. I'm out. Can't make a hit record in less than 5,000 square feet.

But I will say it's another one of those things like plugins where the benefits of having a home studio greatly outweighs the negatives associated with having a home studio. So I think we are now to the point where a home studio is as great of an option as a commercial facility overall. You know, apples to apples. But I will say the benefits you get from having a home studio or just a really, really lean commercial operation, that would almost be considered a home studio similar to what I have here in Nashville. I would say that greatly outweighs the benefits gained of having a commercial facility. There's so much baggage that comes with having a large commercial facility. It's not even worth diving down that rabbit hole at this point.

Man. I remember when I first started my business, it was the first paying client I ever had and I brought them to my house. This was in college and I brought in my house and I had him recording vocals in our closet. I had like put a bunch of foam up in the closet and one of my roommates came home. This is like over the summer, so most of our roommates were not in Athens where we live, but one of my roommates was, and he came home and he was making much noise and I was like, Hey, I'm trying to record this guy's vocals upstairs. Do you mind kind of keeping it down? And he just laughed and laughed and laughed at me. He thought it was hilarious that I thought you could record a record in a house with vocals in a closet. That's interesting. And at the time, 2003 2004 or something like that. Yeah, it was kind of hilarious. It was super, you know, like not on the up and up, but now it's completely normal. Tons of hits. Songs have been recorded in closets.

This does bring up an interesting question, which is, is the home studio sacred cow or I guess the commercial studio, sacred cow. Is it actually a sacred cow or are people just using their lack of a fancy facility? Are they just using that as an excuse for their lack of success? Like you hear this more from people that are like, I'm not successful because I don't have a large facility or I don't have nice gear and I don't know if this is as much of a sacred cow now as it is more of an excuse as to why they can't succeed. They use it as a thing holding them back from success.

That's a great question. It is really easy to explain away your lack of success by blaming your tools.

You see this in golf all the time, by the way. Oh yeah. I'm a golfer. Like somebody like he can hit the ball very far. So they go out and buy a $500 driver. What's going to happen? Not a damn thing that's going to happen because your swing is bad. And I think that's one of the reasons people are so resistant to change when it comes to sacred cows. Because when you kill a sacred cow, you're also removing their excuse for their own lack of success. That's intense man. And that goes back to what we talked about a few weeks ago in episode 96 where we talked about toxic mindsets that we have to eliminate. And one of those is the victim mentality, the victim mindset. If you are looking at your current facilities, your gear, your location, your circumstances, and saying, this is why I'm not successful, that is a victim mentality.

Oh preach. So go back and listen to that episode. So let's move on to actual sacred cows worth killing today in the average studio. These are all different areas across the board, kind of just a scattershot approach. So this is very much an advice buffet episode today. But that was probably on the longest centrals we've ever had. That's 32 minutes or so. Right? You know what? We're a long form podcast. We can do what we want. It's true. Yeah, we've earned it guys. We're 99 episodes in, we can even call this episode cows period. If we want. We have the right, we have the tools. Maybe we will, I don't know. Maybe I'll change my mind when I'm doing a final edit and even edit this part out. Otherwise it'll just say cows and people being like, what the fuck? So here's where we transition into sacred cows that we should consider as an industry whether we need them or whether we should turn them into meat.

So here's the first one that felt weird saying because I'm a vegetarian, so sorry if I offended anybody there. Here's the first one guys. We need to talk about this. We all do it. We're all a little secretive about it. We don't like to tell other people or embarrassed. We think it makes us unprofessional, but it's just so convenient. And that is using headphones like all the time. This is one that is surprisingly still a sacred cow that people will hide the fact that they mix on headphones or they won't mix on headphones out of principle and here's the situation and here's why it's a sacred cow that's worth killing is that we are a podcast for running a profitable home recording studio. That means we do have a lot of home recording studios listening to us. We do have commercial studio owners, we even have people in businesses that are not even audio listening to us, which is fine as well. But if you are a home recording studio, I would say that 9,999 out of 10,000 of you have a poorly treated space that you are currently recording in or mixing in or mastering in. You were in a poorly treated room. You do not have a professionally treated and acoustically sonically perfected room and that means you are mixing or recording or mastering in a horrible environment, potentially horrible environment at the least a lackluster

environment. And this is where we get to headphones because at the very least, if you are not regularly referencing your headphones for mixed decisions, you are missing out on a lot of opportunity for improving your overall sound mixes of masters or whatever you're trying to do. Missing out on the small details. If you're producing something or you're engineering something, Christy, everything you want to add to this sacred cow. Yeah, so my dream is to be a pirate mobile mastering engineer and a pirate, a mobile pirate mastering engineer, and it's been kind of an exciting couple of years for me on that front because a lot has happened in the death of this speakers over headphones kind of conversation. Couple things. We're going to link to them below. There's two podcast episodes I would point you guys to. One is with lid Shaw's recording studio rock stars.

He interviews Andrew Shep's, one of the arguably best engineers alive right now. That's a great interview on his podcast. Yeah, and Andrew says, I mix on headphones all the time. There's another episode on Ian shepherds, the mastering show where he interviews. I'm completely blanking on the guy's name, but he interviews a very successful mastering engineer who masters on in your monitors all the time and has mastered huge hits that we've all heard. That's fascinating. As people get brave enough to talk about the secret, you know, headphone workflow that they've been working on. Yeah. If you are mixing or mastering specifically, we'll just stick with those two things right now cause that makes the most sense for this conversation. If you're mixing and mastering on headphones and you're in the box, that actually opens up the opportunity for traveling and working. Like that's one of the biggest negatives I would say, of having a recording career is that you are always tied down to your home or your studio wherever your studio is.

You're tied down to that literally by cables, if not really cables. But you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. One of the reasons I'm so into this, I got three kids and a wife, man. What I have found is that as a dad, I'm supposed to take my kids and my wife on vacation and it's stressful for me. All. I get my whole mastering schedules that I have no work to do for a week and then I'm like on edge the whole week hoping that no one requests a revision that needs to happen fast and it's stressful and so over the past couple of years I've been trying to, while I'm at the studio, make sure I'm referencing back and forth between headphones and my fancy speakers. I've been trying to develop the skill of being able to master with headphones and I'm almost there. I'm not bad at it anymore and I'm proud of the results I get with headphones. I'll be talking a lot more about this in the future on our show because man, this is fascinating. You could potentially be a globe trotting world traveler with a pair of headphones, the phrases digital nomad and that is kind of like what you hear in the business community where someone does like, I have a social media consulting company, so they'll just travel the world doing social media and working from the laptop and seeing all these things in the world. We don't really have that luxury in the audio because of

the limitations we've talked about, but if you're a mixing or mastering engineer and you're using headphones, that's one of the benefits that might outweigh the cons that comes with mixing or mastering and headphones, but I want to state something and that goes back to my previous point of the fact that most people are mixing and mastering in an untreated, in superior room. Is that a word in superior? I don't think it is. I don't think it is either. Anyways, I like to make up words on this podcast. If you've been listening to for any amount of time, if you are in a shitty room, headphones are almost always, if you get the right pair of headphones and and you're using it in the right way, there's almost no way you're not going to have a better result using headphones at least to check your base on.

No, I'm talking not even to check. I'm talking. Maybe you'll use your room to check, but your headphones or your main thing is what I'm talking about. You can get used to anything. I will say that I've always mixed in shitty environments and I've put out great mixes in my history in really bad environments, but I will say if I would've gotten used to mixing in headphones and just found one pair of headphones, I could have done a lot better I think in my career because I would have not had to readjust every time I change rooms or move. I would not be tied down to the fact that my room has a massive hump at 130 Hertz that I always have to adjust for and it screws up my mixes. Like those are things that I have to deal with day in and day out when I'm mixing that.

If I just sucked it up and figured out how to mix with headphones, I wouldn't have to deal with that. And it's that sacred cow that's kept me from doing this my entire career. Yeah, this is interesting. I've been on a quest to solve this problem. I've never been happier with the results I've been getting and I own something like $10,000 plus worth the headphones. Trying to find like a pair that really suits me. We'll come back to that more, but this is I think one of the most interesting things for us to just say on this podcast. Look, we all do it. We're all a little embarrassed to talk about and that's, we shouldn't have to be. Headphones are awesome and there's a lot of great new technology that's coming out to help with that. Stay tuned for more on that. All right, so let's move on to our next in the list and this is more business focused.

The last one was kind of geared focused, which we don't really talk about your much on this podcast, but that is a sacred cow worth killing. Yup. Headphones specifically, not gear. Gear. Just needs to die. Paid advertising, paid advertising. We've talked about this on the past. If you go back to episode 23 gosh, that was so long ago, back in April, 2018 episode 23 why you might need to advertise your studio. That episode I think addresses it pretty well, but it's worth mentioning here still to this day. If you have to advertise your studio, that is looked at in frowned upon by a lot of people. People think that it's an admission of a lack of a quality product if you have to advertise for your studio and in some cases that is true. I would say in some cases that is indeed true and this goes back to my, I have a long like 4,000 word article about this.

While marketing is probably not your biggest problem, why most studios fail is not related to marketing. It's called why most studios failed to make it spoiler. It's not has nothing to do with marketing or something like that. Anyways, most failing studios fail not because of their lack of marketing, but because of like seven other things. There's a long list of things that come before marketing, but if you get to the point where marketing makes sense, do it. If you have people that are happy with your work, if you have people that are coming back to you, people leaving good reviews, there is a lot you can do with paid advertising that is going to speed up that word of mouth snowball to where eventually you may not need paid advertising anymore. Or if you make your business more efficient, you can take on more and more work like you have Chris and thus you can start to up the amount of leads coming in the door with paid advertising.

So this is one of those sacred cows that people like Chris have figured out. He killed this years and years ago and has made a lot of money from paid advertising while someone else is sitting on the sidelines saying, print advertising stupid. I don't do that. And I'm a successful recording engineer. Even though your schedule is not full, people are not coming to your studio. You're struggling to make ends meet and chances are it's not marketing as the issue. But if it were, you're missing out on a lot of work in a healthy, happy career just because you won't kill this one. Sacred cow.

Well, I love what you said earlier about, I forget what you said earlier. Hold on a second. It's cool. Sorry I was on a rant. I was in a role here. No, it was a great rent. Paid advertising is a funny thing because I think a lot of people feel like if I run ads, I'm admitting that I'm not good enough to go viral. I'm admitting that I built it and they didn't come.

They go back to episode number one where we kind of destroy that myth.

Yeah, and so this is a fascinating topic to me and I think a big part of this, you said something really cool earlier about how if you're getting good feedback from customers that people love what you're doing, then that's a good reason to start running ads versus I have no customers, nobody will hire me and I'm going to start running ads. I, when I look at paid advertising, it's absolutely like a turbo charger for your car, not an engine

for your [inaudible]. Put that in the quotes like that is such a good way to put it. Like it is the, what is the like little flip a switch and it's like nos. Oh, the nitrous oxide. Yeah. It's that. It's like a turbo boost to your business, but it is not the engine of your business. That is such a good way of putting it.

Yeah. You want to make sure the customers are like, Oh my gosh, you're so great. Oh my gosh, you're so great. Oh my gosh, you're so great. Now I'll run paid ads and be sure that when I experience working with these strangers that they're gonna love it. If we've talked about this a million times, if you run paid ads and you aren't great yet, you don't know how to talk to customers. What I find it's very rarely that they're not skilled enough. It's that they have no idea how to communicate with a stranger on the internet

and they also, they don't have other things in place. Like they don't have social skills. Like you said, they don't have any idea how to actually manage the leads that come in. They don't know how to approach things. They don't have their website set up their marketing funnels.

They get offended by revision requests and they get sassy over email as a result of it. Don't do that guys. Do not be sassy on email.

Now I'm sassy all the time in internet. I'll never stop again. Let's just go back. Paid advertising is a sacred cow worth killing. If you already have a somewhat successful business, if you have no clients and you're not making any money and it's like you're already struggling massively paid advertising is not the silver bullet that's going to save your business, but if you have a good business already and you are ready to turbocharge that business, paid advertising is a fantastic way to do it. If you're only just killed the cow caveat. If you're the only person on earth that offers a service, you have a completely brand new niche. Paid advertising works a lot sooner in that regard. As a matter of fact, it's one of the only ways to get a business off the ground. If no one has any idea what box to put you in, how to wrap their mind around you.

This goes back to a very interesting topic. We should probably have a separate episode on this, but that's like the idea that if you are first to market with a product, all you need to do is let people know you exist and you'll get customers. When a competitor comes in. Now you have to start talking about how you're different than the competitor and then when it's an oversaturated market, a commodity, there's like a whole other list of things you need to do in order to sell your services in a really crowded market. So that's actually a good discussion for a future episode. Totally. But yeah, paid advertising is a great way to create demand for your service if you're new. But if you are a commodity, which is like most people that are struggling right now, they haven't done anything to differentiate themselves. Then putting yourself out on the internet in advertising is not going to help your cause at all because there's no purple on your body. You're a black and white cow and no one's buying black and white cows on the internet. It's only just now striking me that we're talking about purple cows and I'm like the purple. It's my brand. It's the purple shirt. Oh, you didn't do that on purpose? I didn't. Oh, I thought that's what that was from. It might've been.

I just thought I looked good in a purple shirt. It seemed way smart five seconds ago before I knew that. Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. Now you just wear a purple shirt cause I'm from my parents. Okay. All right. Next thing on our list of sacred cows worth killing is the world of hustling, and I want to actually address this real quick. There's something interesting here. First of all, there's a myth that people believe now, which is if I work harder, my business will improve. If I just work harder, if I just work harder, if I just work harder. I tried that. Yeah. I want to say this first and foremost. Hustling is not the answer. I say happy hustling at the end of every episode and every email and someone brought that up. They said, I've been listening to Graham Cochran's podcast, which is a great podcast by the way, the Graham Cochrane show, go listen to that.

If you want more business advice. He is anti hustling and I say happy hustling. Well people don't understand that. The definition of happy hustling, someone to address it here really quick, happy hustling is the type of hustling you do that keeps you happy. It is not just hustling for the sake of hustling. It is putting the work in that makes you happy. That is happy hustling. I love this. So I am at the peak right now of the most success I've ever had in my life. This will be the best year I've ever had and last year was the best year I had and before. That was the best year ever had and it just keeps going up and up and up. And this is the least amount of hustle I've ever had and least amount I've ever had to work. I'm not putting in 16 hour days anymore like I used to when I was much younger.

I'm putting in eight 30 to maybe three to 4:00 PM Monday through Friday. I do not work weekends. That is my schedule. I don't work that much. And that's not because I'm working harder than I'm successful. It's not because I'm hustling, hustling, hustling that I'm successful. It's because I am more intentional than I've ever been on what I'm doing every single day. And it's that intentionality is what has led to my success. And I can guarantee you Graham Cochrane will say the exact same thing. It's about intentional working, not hustling. And so the reason hustling has become a sacred cow worth killing is because of people like Gary V that has swung the pendulum so far in this hustle mentality that now it said it needs to be killed to swing back the other way towards intentional, intelligent work. That is not killing yourself. It's keeping you happy, hence happy hustling.

I love that. It's funny because in our industry there's an older guard, right? You know, there's the guys that have been around before this whole digital revolution that are still, you know, hanging on and doing great. It's almost like this unspoken vibe of, you know, you've always heard work harder, work smarter, not harder unless it's an audio. And then the solution is to work harder, not smarter. You know, there's this idea that working smarter, not harder doesn't apply when it comes to the music and the creative arts. And I think that's crazy and we need to talk about that and why that's a toxic mentality. And it's poisonous for us because we start to believe, well we'll just work harder or just work harder and then the world will, you know, if you build it, they will come. It's this whole thing that's fascinating. And I'm still kind of working my own thoughts out on this.

Here's the biggest issue here though, would this sacred cow is all the people that are trying to Moonlight this audio career. Cause that's a lot of our listeners. And so the only way they can make this work at all is to work in their spare time. And so what do you say to those people where they can't just work full time on their studios yet because they're not making any money from it. They've got a wife, they got a kids, they got a family, they gotta make ends meet, they might have dead, they're trying to pay off. There's all sorts of these X factors that we can't really even think of because everyone's in a different scenario. What do you say to those people when it comes to killing the sacred cow of hustling? Well, I think this comes back to something we talk about a lot on the show and it's this idea of niching down.

We say again and again and again and again that everything, all the literature in business, all the research, all points to the fact that when you differentiate yourself from your competitors by offering something simple and something clear, I am a mastering engineer versus I am a tracking, mixing, production, writing song, writing, composition, drama, editing. I do all these things. I think some of this hustling idea makes us feel guilty to say, well I don't, I don't offer that service anymore. I just offer these three services or I just offer these two services. We feel guilty because we feel like we're not. And we feel like grandpa would be disappointed in us because we're turning down work and we're being wasteful.

So I think to kind of go along with it, you're saying there is people that are in that position where they're trying to make it work on the side. You don't have a lot of time. So you couldn't really do all those services. Well anyways, you surely don't have the time to learn all those services to be able to compete with someone that does one of those services full time. Like you're not going to compete with Chris Graham on the mastering front because he does this all day, every day. And so how can you compete with that? And someone who does editing full time and someone who does tracking full time, like you just can't compete with that. So if you have a day job, you're constantly busy. It is actually to your benefit to slim down and niche down and do something Uber specific because you want to be so specific that when someone needs that service, the person that think of is you.

Bingo. I love that. So I would say as you guys are kind of processing what we just talked about with the hustling thing, ask yourself if you're one of these guys, it's offering tons of services and you've listened to the podcast a hundred times, almost a hundred times, and if thought years ago, I know, I know, I know guys, and you're saying niche down, niche down and niche down is the reason you haven't done it, that it would make you feel guilty that you weren't hustling to not offer those services might not be true for you, but it might be true for you. And so think about that. There's something there. This idea of back to this mentality episode from yesterday, this idea of having a scarcity mentality of as two episodes go, Chris, two episodes ago, you know, I have to accept every project that comes my way, or it's like I should be ashamed of myself because that's so wasteful and that's not what somebody who hustles would do.

Yeah, and again, there's a lot of angles to this one hustling thing, so we are not going to sit on this for too much longer, but if you have that mentality forever, you're going to get burned out. And if you're trying to have a longterm career, you cannot be hustling constantly. You have to have a sustainable workload. There's a little bit to it of working smart. There's a little bit of just working in a sustainable amount, like running a race, like a in a marathon. You're not going to sprint entirely through a marathon. And I think that's what a lot of us live our lives like is this constant sprint when we should just be having a shuffle. What's the famous Australian farmer guy? He joined this like ultra marathon. He was barely running. He was just basically shuffling on the ground, barely lifting his feet up off the ground.

As these guys just took off and it was like a 24 hour race and what these guys would do in the race was they would run fast for, you know, half the day they would sleep for an hour or something like that and then they would pick up and continue on something similar to that. It was just this interesting back in the sixties or seventies that was how they ran these ultra marathons and this guy, this shuffle move is named after him. Now he won this ultra marathon because he didn't know better. He was just going his little slow pace. It was the tortoise and the hair go into the little slow pace. Never slept in the night, just ran all night long and beat everybody by pretty big margin. If you look that story up, there's a lot better retellings of the story all over the internet. James a link to it somewhere in the show notes, maybe a video, but I think that the point is if you are looking to everyone else to figure out how to live your life, you're going to be like all the other marathon runners back then who were pausing, running in an unsustainable fashion where they had to stop and sleep, where you could be the person who's not looking to your left into your right to figure out what everyone else is doing.

You're running your own race and you're running it in a very long sustainable way that allow you to be successful throughout the ages and not just a short term burst of success followed by massive crash and burn.

We you have a burnout episode. By the way, you guys might not know this, but when I was in high school, I ran track. Oh my God. Is that a joke? Because that's a really funny joke. No, I love track and cross country. I mean like you guys might have not have known. You'd say you tell a track story like every three episodes on the podcast. I don't remember. I don't know what they said. Everyone on this podcast knows you've run track in the past, Chris. Okay, well I love track and it was really, really fun. So I love track analogies and there's a great, I can't believe we didn't think of this first and foremost when we play in this episode, one of the best sacred Cal analogies ever is about this guy Fosbury and he did something called the Fosbury flop and I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong.

Yeah, that's a really good story too. Great story. So back in the day, if you were a high jumper and a high jumpers, basically there's a pole, it's sort of like parallel to the ground and they lifted up higher and higher and higher and they see who can jump over the highest pole. And what they would do is they would kind of run up and do like a scissor kick and sort of like hop over it to the side. And this one guy, crazy guy named, I think there's Dan Fosbury ran up to it at a meet one time and he went over it backwards. He like leaned over and like arched over it with his face facing up basically like you would see any high jumper now do exactly the way every high jumper you've ever seen in the Olympics does it? The first time it was done, people were like, what a moron. Oh look at that guy. He's doing it wrong. Wait, he won. Oh crap. Well I guess we should probably teach our kids how to do that too. All right. Okay, so now it's the standard that everybody uses. Everybody ever uses the Fosbury flop, but nobody ever used it until Fosbury sacred cow. And now records have been set that are ridiculously higher Heights than the old way of doing it.

Just to be fair and just for full transparency here, I think the story I told of the ultra marathon runner in Australia, that old farmer that won the ultra marathon and your story of the Fosbury flop here, I think these are probably better examples of why it pays to be a purple cow. Why it pays to not look to your left interior, right. To see what your peers are doing and to just do your own damn thing. I think it speaks more to that than it does to kill and sacred cows because they didn't even know they were killing a sacred cow. I think to kill a sacred cow, you have to be intentionally going against what everyone told you to do. So there's a little bit of both in there, but just there's a lot to take away from that story. Either way. Here's something super cool about this.

Being willing to be different, being willing to do it in a way that no one has ever done it before, despite the fact that you are mocked and belittled and spoken down to. Does that sound familiar? Hmm, that sounds a little bit like rock and roll to me Brian. I was going to say so many other things besides rock and roll, but okay, but that is, that is rock and roll. That at its essence is all rock and roll is, it's the willingness to be different and to put yourself out there and look at every successful rock band ever. For the most part, they did something super weird and new. There's a pendulum swings too far that way and that's where you become an elitist. You're spiting everyone by trying to do everything your own way, ignoring best practices. So there's definitely a balance here.

I'm not going to pretend like everything we say can be taken to the extreme and you're going to have success, but there is a balance to it to where you're not going too far either way. And I think there's probably an episode in and of itself right there. I'm just talking about finding the balance in different areas of your business in life because I think as the world becomes more and more divided, we tend to get way more polarizing in a lot of certain things, especially when you see on the internet. But we tend to go to our extremes in either way instead of finding the balance between the two. But let's not get political cause we already did that in a previous episode and we're not going to do it again. And let's get to the final part of this podcast episode. And this is the section we are going to call Chris's strange rants.

These are all the things that Chris wanted to put in this podcast that I wouldn't let him put in the podcast. We may cut this out. Maybe we'll make this a bonus episode and just throw it in the middle of the week. I don't know yet. We'll see how this section goes, the episodes over. But we're going to keep going because once you can cut the body guys off. Now if you want somehow, and Chris has had these were sacred cows worth killing. But these are more just like weird ideas that Chris had that I just could not, but we're going to talk about anyways cause some of them are fun to just talk about. So let's do it. So these are just ideas. These are not like this is what I believe. This is why we should all do. This is just Chris's brain at its finest. So let's go Chris, what's the first one on your list?

Chris has strange ideas. Part one go. Okay, they're going to start weird and get progressively better I hope. But in our industry, the common thing to do is to make a song and then if it's a good song, you make a video. One of the best ways to kill sacred cows is to say what would happen if we did the exact opposite of what's normal? Just hypothetically, what would happen. So I would pose the question, what would happen if you made a video and then you made a song. Just to clarify here, Chris is talking about from the musician's standpoint, that's one of the reasons I didn't want this on the episode because this is more for musicians. So if you're a producer, but if you're a producer, this is a part of the production process. Yeah, you put that video up on the screen or up on the projector and then the band makes music, you're scoring a video and that becomes the song. So I bring this up, not because I think it's a great idea, but because I think the idea of questioning what's the and what would

happen if we did the opposite is super fascinating. Lots of people have had lots of success by having the courage to ask what would happen if we did the opposite and I'm sure there's a million different ways that we can think of, and that's a good example. There is one interview

thing about this that is intriguing to me and that is if you have an artist in the studio that is, let's just say not a band, because I will say most bands, they'll have like a music video and they're in the video and then there might be a little story scenes cut in with it or whatever. If you're trying to work with a videographer to come up with a really cool concept that doesn't involve the actual musician in the video, this makes a lot more sense because then it's more of like a three, four minute short film. That's all. That's like a three minute short film with no dialogue in it and so you're able to partner with a videographer that just wants to create a really cool compelling story and if you let them create the story, work with them to create the story.

Even kind of direct the story in some way, shape or form of like, this is what's going to happen in this story, and then bounce ideas and then let them just do their magic on it as it really talented videographer. Then you get the at least rough edit footage back of like how this story unfolds and then you write the song with the band, all the lyrics, all the music, the movement of the song. This is where it could come out to be a really cool idea. I'm still not sold on it, but I kind of see what you're getting with here on this, Chris.

Well, for the right band, like a cigar Ross or a Jonesy Yoan Z, depending on how you pronounce that and how elitist you are, a band that's real ethereal and Spacey and reverby. It could be amazing.

But in the other side of things is if you are trying to get placements in commercials or in movie trailers or something else, you could always just take something as inspiration and write music for it. Whatever audio is over it. And just write music over a commercial for, let's just say for example an insurance commercial. That's a terrible idea. But anything that's like a cinematic or something that matches your genre, you could just pause, mute and just loop the video and write.

Yeah, turn on blue planet or you know one of those like nature documentaries. Mute it and plug in the amp dude. Like let's go. Go to crazy Chris' idea number two here buddy. Okay, here we go. So Brian, what would you say is like the average royalty that a producer gets? I have no idea. This is, I'm a metal, we don't do royalties heads in metal. So do you want the wrong person to ask here? Well let's just like hypothetically throw out like a big number. 5% right? I don't know. I don't know if that's a lot or a little. I'm so not well versed in the light royalty split world of like how many points is a lot of points for a producer to get. I'm really not either. I'm a mastering engineer, so I don't know any of these things, so they don't give us any points.

This is like one of many reasons I didn't want this on the main episode. Yeah, we're revealing our ignorance on these areas, but here's the thing. Let's say Brian, that you're a producer and then I'm a musician and the grand family band, me and my wife have written a tune and we want you to produce it, but we also, it's our baby and we want you to understand it's really important to us and we want you to make us stars. Brian, we want you to promote this. We want you to pick up the phone. We want you to call the labels. We want you to get us a deal and we're willing to give you 5% I'm not going to do it right and that seems kind of crazy that I want you to partner with me and to promote me and to freaking grind for me and I'll give you 5% or 3% or 2% that's insane.

0% chance I'll do that back in the day. That might've made sense because the producer wasn't going to be able to do too much to promote it. Best case scenario that producer lives in New York or LA and has some friends, but now a producer doesn't matter where they live, they've got the whole internet accessible to them and if they've got ownership in a song, they can be motivated to push it and promote it all over the place. I produced a song, it's so awesome. You got to hear the song, you've got to hear the song, you've got to hear the song. That is I think a possibility that in the future that's what a producer is. It's not just a guy that was like, yo, I looked up port. Let's make the bridge the course and the core is the bridge.

Get to the core of your idea here, Chris, so we can move on from this train wreck here. This middle train wreck, the point number two train wreck.

The point here is that if I really wanted a producer that was going to help me promote the song that was gonna make it his or her own, I can't give him like 3% I got to give him like 33% I think giving the producer a teeny tiny royalty is a sacred cow and I think for many musicians, not all of them, but for many musicians in many scenarios that finding a partner, finding somebody who shares equity would actually benefit the musician more in the long run because you've got an industry insider who is beaten the pavement trying to promote your work. A producer won't do that for 2%

well may attempt to destroy this really quick. Please do. First of all, there is maybe, I won't even say a percentage. I would say maybe three people are listening to this podcast out of thousands of people high that are in the position that could actually give 33% worth of value to a song royalty from an artist that is writing music worthy of pitching to people. What I'm trying to say is there's only a few people that are connected well enough to get that much value to a band who's willing to write a good enough song worth pitching. It's a really tiny, tiny number of people. Second of all, of all the people as a songwriter of all the people I could give a third or more of my royalties to my music producer is at the bottom of that list. There are so many other people in the industry that I would be willing an engineer's probably number one right now. There's so many other people in the music industry. I would rather give royalty split like a massive royalty split two in order to push my song manager or something like that. Yeah. Somebody that has real connections and real power in A&R at a label or someone that actually does like song placements for movie and talent, film and TV. Like that's where I'm willing to give up more not to the producer. No offense.

Still interesting given your and guy. Ah, I dunno if this is not my world. This is not my expertise. Again, this is a topic for a podcast that specializes in music business, not the podcast as specializes in recording industry business. Yeah, but I think it's interesting from the standpoint of having somebody motivated to work with you and for you for the longterm, not just to get paid and then move on. And I know there's a lot of guys that do this. There's guys that work on spec. I think if people did this, I think this is the norm. We would have more musicians getting ripped off than anyone else. Like that's the thing is like the musician stand to lose a lot on this. Well, but here's the thing, the musicians can't get ripped off unless the song is successful. Not necessarily. You can give up royalties and them have nothing to do with actually pushing you into the success limelight and then your song takes off and now this leach gets 33% so it's like there would be more people that that would happen to then the opposite of that.

Anything else you want to talk about this and then move onto the last Chris? Crazy idea here. Okay, let's move on to the last Chris. Crazy idea here. No other defense for that middle in there. I'd rather just move on. You might be right. I'm enjoying this. I know about you. I'm going to do one. Okay, so let's say my wife and I, the Graham family band, we've decided to release a record. Let me walk you through our business strategy of how to release this record because it's the normal business strategy. What we're going to do is we're going to take this recording that we made, this 11 songs and you know, instead of like emulating the movie industry, we're not going to do a premiere. We're not going to release the theaters first. We're not going to then release to purchase. You know, like Blu-ray iTunes, then we're not going to, several months later released to rental and then several months later we're going to release to Netflix.

We're going straight to the Netflix of audio Spotify. We're going to release direct to Spotify, like a bunch of plebs. Here's where it gets interesting. Here's my hope with my wife and I's record. We're going to put that record on there and people are going to listen to it and they're going to lack it so much that they're going to Google us and find us on Instagram and Facebook. They're going to Google Graham family band merch store and they're going to buy our tee shirts because they found us on Spotify. That's the normal business plan that is shockingly accurate for most bands I've ever worked with. Yes. Right, so that I'm not even in the crazy idea part. Let's get to the crazy idea part. That's just how the industry works, right? What if it's 11 songs and the 12th track and you've got to use your imagination.

Cause this is going to suck is, Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to the Graham family band. This is Chris Graham. I'm here with my wife. We would love for you guys to check out our Instagram. It's the Graham family band and you can check out our merge store. We've got all kinds of awesome merge@thegrahamfamilyband.com slash store. It's a pitch. It's a pitch at the end of the record. Now I know. Wait, wait, wait. I know you're cringing. I laughed so hard when you pitched this idea to me earlier because it's so preposterous when I think about it more

and more, it's intriguing and here's why. Nobody uses a call to action in an album. Nobody for good reason because it's, it's fucking cringey. It's so weird. And off the wall. This is one of those sacred, I would say is, I would almost say a sacred cow, but it's, I don't even know if it's a sacred cow cause no one's even thought to do this. Most likely. But you made one good point and that is the only person that makes it to the end of your album is a huge fan. So why not have at least some sort of call to action? Please God, not some salesman voice that Christus did there. [inaudible]

I made the point when we were talking about this earlier. Go listen to Conan O'Brien's podcast. He has some of the funniest advertisements of any podcast or that's because he takes time to write out great content. He turns his ads into content and for that people don't skip through the ads. If you think about other content when you're reading any sort of blog article, even books now have calls to actions in the book to go to a website or to go download something. Podcasts definitely have calls to action where you're calling the person to go take an action somewhere. So go download their thing or go buy this product in an ad. All these other mediums of content have some sort of call to action inserted into it. So why not music? That's the interesting thing and you can make it interesting. It doesn't have to be a cheesy weird cheeseball thing, but it could be, you can turn it into some sort of interesting fun Easter egg or something funny depending on the type of music you are or something creepy if you're a creepy metal band.

I think there's something to this that people haven't done yet. And when you think about like the way you monetize now, I'm not on the same page of you where you would like release the paid version and then put it to DVD. Like the movie industry. Cause the music industry is so much different. Most people put their songs out so that they can sell, merge and go tour. Like that's where they make their money. Yeah. But there's still the assumption people will hear my song, they'll listen and then they will have their own volition, track me down, follow me and then show up at a concert. You would almost undoubtedly have a much, much larger social following, maybe email following or a pixeled list for retargeting ads. If you send them to your website, if you had some sort of call to action in your music or your album.

It's weird. It's way off the wall. I have never seen anyone ever do this but as far as Chris's weird and wacky ideas, this is one of the more intriguing ones that I would like to see. Somebody tried to do at some point. One of the things you could do if you're at band that can get away with being kind of goofy and kind of funny is you could have your last song called follow us on Instagram at [inaudible] and then your Instagram handle. Here's the deal, like if you think about Taylor Swift, like one of the biggest artists in the world. If she put a track out that was like follow me on Instagram and like had her voice telling you to go or even wrote a song that was this. It would be crazy. There's something to this to where if she would've done that shit would blow up.

Not that she's struggling to get Instagram followers, but like if she put a call to action on a track on Spotify or wherever she might be able to get away with it. She could get away with it. Well, and here's the way this works. Anytime there's a sacred cow and like we're back to the episode now, this is good content. Thanks for sticking around. No one's listening anymore, Chris. Or either that or we've split this into a separate bonus episode. Who knows? Is like, who knows, anytime a sacred cow gets killed, there's one person brave enough or stupid enough to kill that sacred cow and then it goes viral. That's true. And then it becomes less and less effective. And this goes back to what I talked about earlier in the episode or on Tuesday when this episode came out. I don't know how I'm going to do this yet.

I'm not sure what I'm doing with the section yet, so I have to let the play that one by ear. But if you go back to what I said earlier about if you're first to market, all you need to do is let people know that you exist and people will buy your product. It's the same when you start, if you're first to market with an idea like this, you're going to have so much more success. Like think about email marketing back in the day, back in like 1999 you would have like a 95% open rate on emails because no one ever got emails and all you got was junk mail and now it's shifted the opposite direction. I never get junk mail anymore. I get like maybe two things a month. That's junk mail. The rest is like if I get a handwritten note from somebody in the mail, I'm like, Holy shit, 100% open rate right there, but emails, I have thousands of unread emails on my phone and that's because it's oversaturated.

So again, if you're the one brave enough to beat on the first wave of people trying to put calls to action in their albums, maybe you'll be the one that reached out. The benefits of being first to market with this sort of thing and then when it becomes the norm, no longer will this work. So what you're saying is if you're the first to put a call to action and album, you're a purple cow basically, and it will work until all the other cows are purple too. I think it will work no matter what. You'll probably get ridiculed, but I think even if you get ridiculed, it will still actually work. You'll get ridiculed while amassing hundreds of Instagram followers per day if you're popular, perhaps thousands. Yes. So I have a friend, he gets probably one or 2 million plays a month on Spotify and that's through like, you know, a couple hundred thousand monthly listeners or whatever.

The last I checked, he probably has eight 10 12 15,000 Instagram followers. Let's get Mikey to do a CTA track. Maybe he'll do this. So if he does something like this, like follow my Insta bro. He's like a funny enough dude where he would do something off the wall and funny Mike, he could do it. He could boost up his Instagram following by at least a few thousand pretty quickly. So let's boost up his following a little bit. Check out my buddy Mike on Spotify. Yeah, that's my buddy. It's Caribbean house. Is that what you would call it? I think I got that wrong. I might call it Caribbean house, but Caribbean house. There we go. I pronounced it wrong. This was a goofy episode, Brian, but I had a lot of fun with you. That's so true. Well, so you guys later, Chris Graham there

in his purple shirt. Brian Hood here, and my black shirt signing off. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast, 99 episodes in the books before you leave. I know this is a long episode, but this is an important thing related this episode

where we talk about purple cows setting yourself apart from the crowd. Some of us put in the work to differentiate ourselves, to stand out and become a purple cow, but there's a gaping issue. There are a lot of studios have, even if they are a purple cow, if they have crushed these sacred cows, they've destroyed them and they've differentiated themselves is they suck at marketing. They put all this time and effort and energy and money into getting their studio set up into standing out into doing something different, going against the grain and yet their studios are still struggling. I'm sure, I'm sure everyone has noticed this. Every single year the industry gets more and more and more and more saturated. Prices are going down and budgets are going down. Rates are a race to the bottom for all of these non purple Cal studios, the ones that haven't differentiated or the ones who have differentiated and haven't done anything to express this and the way they market their studios.

So if you're in this position where you're struggling, you're not getting enough clients from word of mouth to keep your calendar full, you're getting undercut from all the people in your area. You don't know how to raise your rates than one of your major problems could be that you really suck at marketing your studio. And I am a firm believer that there is absolutely not a one size fits all method for marketing your studio or marketing any business for that matter. Just like there's no one size fits all solution to producing an album or mixing a single or mastering a song. But I think the, I think the big issue comes up is when, when people don't really understand what the term marketing means. So here is the actual definition by the American marketing association. This is the definition of marketing. Quote marketing is the activity set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.

That's it. If you understand that you're done. Now, the reality is most of you probably zoned out during that definition reading. You're probably like, what the hell does that even mean? And if that is the case for you, then you're not alone. I, I read that and I'm like, what the hell does that even mean? No wonder us as creatives, we suck at marketing because it sounds boring. It sounds corporate. It sounds complicated. It sounds like it's soul sucking and probably it's a chore to implement if you're going by this definition. So I wanted to give you my own definition of what marketing actually is, how it ties into this episode, because it really does tie into this conversation about purple cow killing sacred cows becoming unique and marketing plays a huge role in this. So every single thing about marketing in my definition can come down to one word and that word is funnel.

You know the thing like you pour oil into your car or you the thing you pour coffee through your error press the little funnel thing. If you're a hipster like me, a funnel is a much easier concept to grasp. Here is the actual definition via Wikipedia for funnel. A funnel is a tube or a pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, used for guiding liquid or powder into a small opening. So here is why marketing can come down to one word funnel. At the top of your funnel is all the potential clients that are out in the world, millions of them. At the bottom of your funnel is your bank account. It contains all of the money you've earned from your clients. In every single case I've ever seen this, I don't think there's any exception to this, at least in the service industry, there is many, many, many, many more people at the top of your funnel then ever reach the bottom of your funnel.

And that's because as people go through your funnel from the top to the middle of the bottom of your funnel, at some point they leak out somewhere and they don't actually reach your bank account and the bottom of your funnel and the reason why they leak out is because your marketing sucks because you haven't done a damn thing to actually plug the holes in your funnel. So bad marketing specifically is one of the major issues I see in our community and our podcast listeners. And I wanted to figure out a way to help the community at large with this. So I thought about creating some sort of paid course for this, but that would only serve maybe 1% of people out there. Cause about historically 1% of people will buy a course or a paid product. So that's not going to help the community at large.

So instead I wanted to make a free resource that can help anyone who's interested in fixing this problem. So I just spent the last month and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this podcast probably at least two or three weeks ago is the first time I mentioned this, I spent the last month or maybe even more creating a free brand new marketing class called jumpstart your marketing. At least that's the tentative title. Maybe I'll have to change that in the future. So this, this class actually starts this week. Maybe tomorrow. I'm not sure if it will be ready by tomorrow, but sometime this week it will start and it is free for anyone in our community. And it has as of right now, nine lessons to help you plug all the leaks in each of the three major parts of your marketing funnel. So if you want that, again, it's free for anybody in our community, any listeners to our podcast, if you're listening right now, you, you can get this for free.

Just go to the six figure home studio.com/funnel that's slash F U, N, N, E L and ANet. We're going to cover the three major sections of your studios marketing funnels. We're going to plug the leaks at the top of your funnel. That's keeping people from becoming aware of your studio. We're going to plug the leaks in the middle of your funnel that are keeping people from starting conversations with you, with interest in working with you. And we're going to plug the bottom of your funnel that's keeping dollars from entering your bank account. And there are specific things you can do in all three of these areas. Also in this class, uh, I'm actually giving you examples, three real life examples, other successful studios, marketing funnels, and what they do at each of these three stages. So again, this class starts this week and this is not going to be some complicated over complicated jargon filled a marketing class that if you Googled how to market my business, that's what you're going to find.

No, this is something that's distilled down to simple, understandable terms. If you know what a funnel is, then you can complete this class without any issues at all. So again, just go to this six figure home studio.com/funnel F, U, N N, E L and you will be on the list for that free class. Next week is episode one zero zero 100 we've gone a hundred weeks now we haven't missed a week yet. This is way more consistent than thought this podcast would be a, and we're going to cover something that has been long requested on this podcast from many, many, many, many people. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but you have to tune in next week, bright and early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning for episode 100 a milestone in the six figure home studio podcast history. Until next time, thank you so much for listening to this long rant at the end of this episode and happy hustling.