How To Get More Clients Via Passive Referrals, And Why You’re Not Getting Credited For Your Work

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one Oh five

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

six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted but actually wearing a gray sweatshirt and is cold, a massive headphone slut. Christopher Jay Graham, how are you doing today man? I've got a bone to pick with you, Brian Hood, you were just talking about crack head phone to pick

a bone to pick. Yes.

Yeah. I talk crowded by headphones cause I don't care about headphones, man.

Why

there the do? We've talked about this so many times in the podcast and we're not going to get into it today because no one gives a shit and if they've already, if they do give a shit then they've already heard this before. I just don't, I just don't care. It is not a thing that affects my life. I listen to and to fix you. Normal normal iPhone headphones, 95% of the time. The other 5% is when I'm on this podcast, on my $17, like Amazon headphones. So you're just, it doesn't, it doesn't matter to me.

I'm going to recruit our audience. We're going to get you addicted to high quality headphones.

We've already done a call to our audience. You were like trying to get people to send me free headphones and I'm just, and I never got them.

Can cannot it? Okay. I'm working on it. Stay tuned on that. Brian, how are you today sir?

I'm doing good, man. We preplanned our show out and we were like, what can I talk about that's new in my life that I should share with the audience today? And I realized nothing. Nothing at all, man. Fascinating. Yeah. I'm not a, I'm not a very interesting person

despite what you may think. That's pretty funny. Yeah. What about she might dude? Well, uh, it was my oldest son's birthday, uh, earlier this week. He turned nine and uh, we had a blast, but one of the things we did that was so cool as we went to the Apple store and we took a coding class together. What? And it was so fun and we, we bought him this little robot. It's got a Sphero and you can like write this really simple computer code to program this little ball to like roll around and follow instructions. Nerd stuff we get.

I mean that's super dirty, but I'll be honest, I would have been totally into that like as a young child. Yeah, he's, what was he nine you said

he just turned nine. Yeah. Yeah. It was a blast. That's pretty sick, man. Indeed. Well, I saw something the other day that I wanted to talk to you about. I shared it in the six figure home studio community. It was a YouTube video that was an interview with this guy. Phineas Phineas is the brother of Billie Eilish and he produced all of Billie Eilish, his songs. If you didn't know who she is, she's like the hottest thing in pop music right now. She's 17

I hadn't, I've heard you mentioned her name multiple times is like an example and then you're like, do you know that it hasn't? Like I have no, I have no idea who that is. And you're like, she's the biggest thing on radio. And I was like, well that makes perfect sense cause I don't listen to the radio and I haven't had a, when I put there, like when I first bought my Honda pilot in 2010 I put a, I took the radio out, we put a like a CD player, Bluetooth, whatever in. And I've, I have not had a radio in my car since, so I couldn't listen to the radio if I wanted to. Not that I even want to. That's amazing. Well let's talk about Billy here real quick. So there were two videos. One of them was Phineas, just to stop you here, there was a pointed this, right?

Yes, totally. Totally. 100% this goes, I think this goes with our episode data is I'm attempting to do a graceful segue from banter into our actual episode. I cannot wait to hear this graceful band turning. Just for the record here, this is week two of unedited episodes from Chris and Brian. So if we talk over each other or flip or flab, say weird stuff or say weird shit like clever flab, it doesn't get edited out because James is out of the countries in Germany right now and he's off the grid or podcast editor. So instead of hiring someone else to take over for a couple of weeks, we're just like, you know what, this is a good exercise and we've got this again from a, from from Graham Cochrane cause he does all of his podcasts in one take on edited. Unbelievable. And we're like, man, can you imagine if we get to where we can do long form content like that without editing it?

Like that is such a good place to be. So this is us flexing our, our muscles in that, in that area that we're not very good at because we can always, it's like if you know, you can just let someone edit it out, you mess up a lot if you know, you cannot edit it at all. That's when things get interesting and exactly. We have to make it work. I think that we should have a new sound effect on our podcast and it should be, um, some sort of like the sound of the new word being born because you tend to invent new words like on every episode. So if it's like a new phrase or new word, James should edit in like a new, no, to me the, the birthing of a new word sounds much more violent and like that's the sound. Well, let me talk about Billie Eilish a little more.

Okay. Okay. Go. I saw two videos about her. They were absolutely amazing and blew my mind. One was Phineas walking through like the studio that they recorded all of Billy songs in. Billy's got like almost a billion streams on her most popular song right now. Just on one song on Spotify, it was like 800 million on Spotify than 600 million on YouTube. Insanity. Yeah. So she's at a billion cross-platform. Yeah. So that's just one song. Yeah. So cross-platform over 1.5 billion just from those super duper popular. And one of the things that was fascinating that Phineas kind of walked through his process with his sister is their studio. No offense, Phineas is awful. If it is, it is trash in the best way. So bad. Almost no one listening

to this podcast has a worst studio.

Yeah. From a, like I commented on the, uh, on the, on the Facebook thread by, by the way, if you're not in our Facebook community, you can see this video. We recently posted it and um, actually has a ton. This episode comes out, maybe it won't be so recent, but you can search through our free Facebook community. Just go to the show notes of this episode and you'll see the link to our Facebook community. Yeah. Uh, anyways, with that, uh, I commented on that video. This is possibly, I love how this is set up. In the worst possible acoustic configuration. And yet it doesn't matter because the end, the end product is the only thing that matters though. Yeah.

So he really just sort of made it up acoustically. Like it's like a weird desk that they looks like they found in the trash and put like really cheap, you know, little monitors like in cubby holes. Yeah. Cubbyholes he's like the shelf. That was awesome.

But it was like every computer desk you ever, ever saw and like [inaudible]

nineties. Yeah. And so somebody wrote something on the, on that post and then about like this is a great excuse killer. And it really is like, it's the biggest song on the radio and it was recorded. Like you could buy everything that they used on Craigslist for like under 50 bucks probably. Like it was, I'm making that up. But anyways, so let me get to the point. There was another video that popped up on my YouTube stream cause I watched that video about Billie Eilish and it was an interview with Billie Eilish and Howard stern and Howard stern was talking to Billy and Billy's brother Phineas. And they said something fascinating. They said when they came out with bad guy and there was one other song I forget, which it was the two biggest hits that everybody that knew Billy and you know, Phineas and all that. Nobody thought that anyone would like that song. It was too weird. It was too outlandish. And even Billy's mom who's like the consummate promoter of her children's music was like, ah, I don't, I don't think anyone will like this. I don't think people are cool enough to like this song was the phrase smash hit. But it is the weirdest, strangest, most bizarre song of all time. And it is fascinating to me

the, if you go actually go listen to it now, cause I definitely never heard this song.

You should listen to it. It is so bizarre. But what's interesting about that is the weird music is having a moment though and it's been having a moment for a while. So like Lord as another good example of like, uh, the a, we could be wrong,

Chris [inaudible] that doesn't get edited. Usually we pitch correct you man, you do. Oh, thank you so much. No, we don't. But there's, yeah, all

these weird songs. Bonnie Vera's another perfect example. He's selling out stadiums and it's super avant garde, bizarre music. And there's this transition from people. I think that there's stages in music history where you look at like the 1950s and the early sixties, and there was a lot of in the studio about like, well, we need to make something people will love and then music would get weird for a little bit. Um, pet sounds, beach boys, uh, you know, Sergeant pepper with the Beatles, like some really weird records came out and weird music got popular. That was sort of self-indulgent. It was artists making music for their own sake. We're in a stage of weird music right now. If you're weird and making music just for your own personal pleasure. Those are the songs that seem to be kind of taking off. Not so much the, like, we're going to make Brittany Spears style pop that's designed to be infectious. Like, so this is kind of interesting stuff. We're going to circle back to this because here's, here's one of the, Oh crap, there goes my graceful transition. We're going to talk about something that I know very little about today, but it's, it's an episode that we need as a community. It's an episode that I need a, it's an episode. I'm sure that Brian needs, we need to talk about credits.

Let me just go ahead and clarify to our listeners. The only thing that, that Billie Eilish conversation refers back to is the fact that we're going to use him as an example. And the on the credits thing. So, uh, we're talking about specifically referrals. Um, and there's two types of referrals and we're going to focus on one of the two types of referrals. There's active referrals and there's passive referrals. And if you've been, if you are part of my marketing email course that I did for free, uh, earlier this month or last month, depending on this episode comes out, then you know what I'm talking about when I say active versus passive referrals, active referrals are anytime you work with a client, if you did a great job and you built a good relationship with them, they're going to actively refer you to all of their friends and colleagues or bands they tour with or anyone looking for the services that you provide.

If you did a great job and that's an active referral where someone is actively going out of the way to refer someone to you, those are fantastic. But then the second type is a passive referral and this is the type of referral that most people don't really think through. And that is when someone sees your name on something accredit somewhere and then goes out of their way to find you and then ask for a quote and hopefully ultimately hire you. And this is actually a really powerful form of referrals that most people do not do anything to foster. And that's the bulk of this episode. We're gonna talk about how to get credited for all your work or at least how to try to get credited for all your work. So, um, most people right now, did you have something to add to that, Chris? Usually we have hand motions for this, but again, we're, this is an edited podcast, so we're just gonna we're just gonna like slog through this episode from a grace, grace perspective.

Yeah. Well, I, I want to skip to just bring us something we're going to bring up again at the end of this podcast, but I know for some of you you're thinking like, Oh, credit to cares like there even, you can't even really get them in Spotify or tidal and no one's going to see them. Here's what I would say to you. Yes it is. I'm going to cuss here. You know, you guys know I don't, I love doing it in real 11. I don't like doing no beeps here. [inaudible] be careful what you say. Oh, there's no beeps. Okay. Credits are a shit storm right now. We all know it. It's really hard to get credited. And even if you do, that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna show up in the places that it should and it's a whole nightmare. But here's the thing, it's not going to be like that forever. There's going to be massive shifts and continually be massive shifts, perhaps even acts of Congress and this stuff is going to get fixed and not getting credits now means you definitely aren't going to get them five years from now for work, for work that you did in the past. So I think the best strategy, and this is I'm speaking, I'm preaching to myself today cause I need to be better at this much better at this, is that getting credits today translates to getting credits listed maybe a couple of years from now.

You know what? I want to ask you something. Did you mean shit storm or shit show? Because I think credits are a shit show right now. Agree to disagree shit. What does the shitstorm what does shitstorm even shitstorm need to mean? Sounds like a, like a, a lot of things are happening. Like there's a lot of credits anyways. We're not gonna argue about this right now.

I say it's a shit show. That'd be, that'd be a shit show if we did

or would it be a shitstorm Chris? Hmm. Good, good. I think you're right. Let's move on. Yes. So before we actually talk about how to get credited for all your work, let's talk about why this matters. And this is, this is pretty obvious, but how else are people going to find out about your studio if it's not for a few things? It's all, it all comes back to marketing, but it's going to be either people referring you via word of mouth, which is a huge part for a lot of businesses. But that's a hard one to get started. There's paid advertising, which Chris has done a lot of in the past and has kind of gotten the way out of lately or this other way, which is passive referrals. And that is something that unless you put work into it intentionally, this will never be a large Avenue for you.

And if you could just think about, um, let's really quick go back to Billy Ellis right now. She has one point belly Eilish whatever man. She has 1.6 billion streams for that bad guy or bad boy or bald guy or whatever the song is. And uh, if, if I think I did the math right, if 0.001% of people even looked at credits, that's still 16,000 people looking at the credits for that song, in which case those are probably 16,000 at least a good percentage of those are gonna be qualified leads who are looking for some sort of recording or editing. They're intentionally looking up credits. I don't know what the percentages are, but you really, really want to be credited for things because of this passive, uh, because of the fact that the passive referrals can compound and multiply. So like if you are, what's his name, Phineas, that's the producer on these tracks. Or brother, if you are Phineas, besides the fact that you get free publicity just being her brother and you'd probably get YouTube videos, you'd probably get more attention than the average producer. If you can produce more and more artists over time who are getting billions of streams on songs in their, that is

so much passive word of passive referral work coming into your door. So do not underestimate this. And even if you are at the place where marketing is not your weak point, top of funnel is not your weak point. Getting eyeballs on your website is not the weak point. Even if that's the case, you can always use more, uh, more word, getting the word out about just so you can use more. Uh, what's the word I'm looking for here? More referrals. You can always use more referrals. Here's the thing that's interesting about this, getting credits is kind of like owning real estate. Once you own that real estate, you've got renters in it or you know, it's building in value. It's a, it's an asset that improves for you in the background. It's kind of not that different from like a retirement fund. If you are building up your credits, you're building up your footprint on the internet and that's going to mean future traffic to your website.

It's an asset. It's an asset. Credits are an asset and I think that there needs to be a shift in our end of the industry that where we don't tolerate not being credited as audio engineers. Yeah. This, this will only work if we come together as a community and demand that we are credited for our work. Yes. So let's talk about now how to try to get credited for all your work and the little a parentheses there. The try to, that's the key to this entire thing because I'm going to say this, 99% of our listeners right now don't even try to get credited. They do not do anything to intentionally try to get credited. And I'm going to ask you this, Chris, how have your last just say a hundred projects, how many did you actually ask to be credited on specifically?

Say that a little louder in case you couldn't hear that. Can you say it one more time? One more time? I didn't ask for any credit. None. What about the last thousand projects? Couple a couple. Yeah. So like you're like Batten zero, zero two right now. Already bad. Yeah. This is, this is an area that I need to improve. Uh, and, and it kinda feels good. It's weird like, you know, you know when you were like a little kid and you told a lie and then you confess to your mom and then you feel better about it, it's sort of like that. Like, Hey, thousands of audio engineers. I, I'm awful at this, but let's all get better. It kind of feels good. Yeah. It feels good to get off your chest, but at the same time, unless you're a, like a little angel, like me, I never lied when I was young, so I don't know how to relate to you Chris.

Uh, that's a lie. Uh, so let's talk about this. Most people never ask, and I think this is Anne. I'm just as bad at this. Like I've, I've definitely gone out of my way to ask to be credited on some of my past work, but this is not something I do all the time. [inaudible] let me throw something in for our non audio engineer listeners. It's come to our attention because the lots of people have reached out and been like, I'm not an audio, but I listen to his podcast because it applies to my business as well. I know some of you, if you're still listening and

that's you, you might be thinking, well how does this apply to me? Well, it does credits. It's not just a music thing. If it's something where you can get your name on projects, whether that's uh, geez, fill in the blank. Help me out here Brian. Like what are ways for non audio when just this is, this is something that we talked about before the episode, but this, this whole topic comes from something my wife said to me the other day. She was, she was, she does, uh, she does social media management for female, for like female entrepreneurs. And like that's her niche. And, uh, so she's doing social media and she tags the photographers personal account for a photo she puts up and hope, am I giving too much information here? But she'll, she probably won't kill me. She tags the PR, the personal Instagram of this photographer and the photographer came back and just like, can you tag the tech?

My business Instagram just like really short and Curt like didn't ask her say please or anything. Just as like tag my tag my business Instagram and, and my wife is like, why are, and this isn't the first time she's had like a run in with photographers who are like kind of being mean about their credits and just like, why are, why are photographers like this about their, uh, their credits? And I was like, thinking about it and I'm thinking it's probably because the ones that aren't like this aren't getting work. That's the only thing I can think about if, if all photographers are S kinda snood ish about getting the proper credit on the, getting the proper tag, uh, to the proper Instagram. It's probably because you found that photographer on Instagram because they're so diligent about getting credited properly on the right Instagram. And the ones who aren't like that, the ones who don't go out of the way to ask are probably not getting enough work and that's why you didn't hire those people.

And there's, there's definitely going to be like this great photographers like our wedding photographer Steph Sorensen, like, or I think that's her last name. Anyways, we tagged her and she was super nice about it and she's super cool and like there was no like curtness about it or rudeness about the way she asked and, but you know, so there's always exceptions. And I would, I would say if you're any sort of business and you're trying to get credit for your work, especially creative work, that's the specific thing here. Like if, if I sell you a car, I don't need you to post on that Facebook post when you post your new car that you bought it from a national motors or whatever. But your car, your brand new car probably has some little sticker on the back that says, you know, yes it does. It has, it has the dealerships thing on the front tag actually.

So I could remove that if I wanted it. It's just more work than I care to. So there's obviously there's ways you can do that. But this just, this goes back to the photographer thing. This whole stemming of this episode is the lifeblood of that photographer or of a lot of photographers, his Instagram or social media and making sure they get tagged properly on all of their work is the way they get, uh, they, they get a huge chunk of their work. It's passive referrals and there's no difference here. It's just going, it's going to look a little different because is something that there's no, there's no central place. Instagram is an image driven platform and and so it makes sense as a photographer that if you post my image that I have rights to, even though it's your face on it, I took the photo, I have rights to it through some, I don't know how it all works to be honest with you with the photography world, but they always have credit on Instagram and it makes sense. But there's no like Instagram for audio. And so when does it make sense to do this? In audio it's a little convoluted. And even on YouTube you don't see producers or mixers or mastering engineers credited on YouTube descriptions. You only see, you only see the videographer and we're going to talk about why that is. But Chris, he has something to add here.

Yeah. Well you know, let's bring this back to the car thing. It hasn't always been the norm that when you buy a car that they put like at least here in Ohio, they'll put a license plate holder around your license plate that says the dealer's name, you know, Reichard or whatever. Um, you know Bob, there's a guy, there's a guy here in Columbus whose name I think is Bob raper. And uh, for some reason he didn't change his name before deciding to put his name on the back of everyone's car that he sold what? Yeah, whatever. Good call. He's still doing all right. Clearly. But, but here's the thing. At some point in history, someone said, Hey, let's put our name on every car that we sold that we sell. And I'm sure people were like, that's crazy. We can't do that. But he did it or she did it and it became culture.

Now it's the norm that when you buy a car that the dealer's name is somewhere on that car, whether it's a sticker or they're, it's like, uh, I bought a car one time and it had like a, it was like a little emblem on plastic. I've seen that. An emblem. Yeah. Or, or it could just be like a license plate frame or something like that. But it became culture in photography. The culture is that you demand your credit in audio. It's not the culture yet. Oof. This isn't an audio thing. This is an audio culture thing. Does that make sense guys? Yeah. We have not come together as a community and made it normal and the only reason it's not normal, it's because we haven't made it normal. Yup. It's just a culture thing. So everything we're talking about here, there's the opportunity for this to become culture, but it's something where if all of us are like, Oh yeah, you know, I'll, you know, do whatever free revisions and I'll let you speak to me. You know, in a rude and disrespectful way. If all audio engineers do that, then it becomes culture.

That makes sense. Yep. So I think the, the gist of it is this, if you want to change the culture, if you want to at least change this in your own business, you have to make it part of your system. Yeah. Chris, if, if you have a quote form on your site, which is you move to a quote based system for your mastery studio, and I just hit you up through a Facebook message and say, Hey Chris, how much would you charge for six songs? And go to the goal form. Yeah. Right. You're going to send me to the quote for me cause that's part of your system. Now the second you start making exceptions to every other person, now your system no longer works. Yup. And now the expectation is I don't have to fill that out crystal. Just tell me if I text him and, and that doesn't work.

And that may not be the perfect example, but you kind of get the point here. You have to create a system that someone needs to follow or that you follow every time. At the very least that leads to a repeatable outcome. If you think about McDonald's, lover ma love them or hate them. If I get a big Mac in Athens, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, Reno, Nevada, God forbid on there or Seattle, the big Mac is mostly going to taste the same because they follow a system that has been sent down from corporate to that specific location on this is how we make this thing. And the only reason it's consistent from location to location to location, you know, obviously there's differences and different things like there's going to be lower quality here and there's going to be a worst service there, but the overall, I can expect this level of service, this flavor from this specific product at McDonald's because of their system and in your business you can't be expected to get credited for passive referrals on all of your past work if you do not have a system to make it. So yeah, it's not just going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen on every project, even with a system. But with this you're going to have a much, much better chance of success. Chris, if you would have least just said, Hey, can y'all credit me on this? As Chris Graham mastering on your last hundred projects, you would still have a good percentage of those that came through. If that was the only thing you did was all you did was ask. So first step is at least ask, but then creating an actual system. Yeah,

to follow. Well, it bums me out because a lot of the customers that I've had, customers, clients that I've had that have done well, you know, I've had a couple of records that have, uh, you know, either hit number one on billboard or gotten close, um, specifically. Uh, there's two projects. One was in, uh, was in gospel and one was an R and, B, if I had credits on those, when people are listening to those records, if they're like, wow, I love how this sounds, I wonder who mastered this. If they click that link and saw my name on Spotify, that's going to create traffic to my website and it bums me out that now the only way to fix that is for me to work on my followup game and check in with all these people. That's a lot of work. What I'm going to do guys on, on my system from here on out is as I send out proposals, when someone asks for a quote, I'm just going to put a line in the proposal that, you know, it's like, Hey, you know, free revisions within 30 days satisfaction guaranteed, uh, blah blah blah.

Here's the price. And one of the line items on there is uh, credited as master by Chris Graham for Chris, grandmaster.com or something like that. So just putting that on my quote form alone so that there's a basis for that conversation in the future or, uh, one the things that I could do is when I send masters that we've got this really awesome system and I send a link and the link takes you to a page that has all the information you could possibly need, how to fill out a revision form, how to download the masters, uh, how to listen to the masters, which basically means listen to high and low volume at more than, you know, at least like three to five speaker systems. There's a lot of different stuff on there that you need at that point. You know what if I need DDP, what if I need MP3, yada, yada, yada. There's all all sorts of questions that can happen at that stage. Having just a section on there that's like credits would be so much better than what I currently have and I've been totally hands off on this. Just sort of hoping that the world will do what it's supposed to do for me and that's the wrong way for me to look at this. And I think it's the wrong way for us to look at this. And I think that's

in anything man, like in a marriage, if all you do is just coast and expect the other person to do all the work, you're probably not gonna have a very good marriage with your, with the way you eat. If all you do is coast through life, eating with whatever comes your way, stopping and McDonald's for big Macs, you're probably not going to have a very healthy body if in your business, if you just coast and hope that they credit you, you're not going to get very many credits. So you talk to a lot of this stuff that's in this outline already, but I'm going to go back through this system that I'm, that I wanted to chat about on making this part of your system so that you are getting credit. So first thing is make it part of your quote terms. When you send a proposal out, whether it's just an email that just says, Hey, this is the price, it includes this and, uh, I expect to be credited as this, this and this.

There's better ways to word that, but that's the gist of it. Or if you have a proposal, just put it in your proposal terms. Our expectations are we're going to do three sets of revisions, we're going to do this, and we expect to be credited as Brian Hood at four or five, six recordings, uh, for mixing and mastering. If you're putting it in ahead of time, then if they have a problem with it, which, spoiler alert people, people don't have a problem with this, they just never get asked this. That's the only reason people don't credit you is you just never asked. But if they had a problem with it for some, for some reason, they can bring it up ahead of time instead of last second dropping a bomb on you, the saying, Hey, we're not going to do this or you last second asking to be credited and now they're in an awkward place after the whole project's done and you just didn't set expectations ahead of time. So yeah, putting it as early as possible in the process sets expectations so that when this conversation comes up again via the next step, we're going to talk about, it's not a surprise.

Yeah. And I think to kind of bring this song, like let's say you're a mix engineer and you have a proposed, you have quote based system, which we recommend that everybody does for the most part, almost everybody. And once somebody submits a quote, you would send back a proposal and in that proposal you would specify, it's like a tiny, tiny thing at the very bottom that would say, you know, credited to so-and-so. Me. If someone ever came back and said, Oh, we'd love to work with you. But section B, line seven says that you want credited for your work, that's gonna be a problem run. Yeah, run as fast as you can or say, Hey, no problem. That costs more. Yup. If they don't want to credit you, it should cost more. That's called ghost work. You know, it can be goes producing or ghost writing or ghost mixing.

Hilarious story I saw on Facebook this past week, somebody made a post about somebody who is a ghost producer and goes producers like, Hey, I'll help you with your music, but you don't need to credit me. I'll make songs for you, but you don't have to credit me. And this person was a fairly successful ghost producer and there were two artists, we'll call them artists and artists, B and artists and artists that you wanted to do a CoLab together. But, and they didn't tell each other that they also wanted to have that CoLab ghost produced. So their section of the song, they wanted ghost produce. So there's this famous ghost producer. He gets reached out to by artists a and artist a says, Hey, could you ghost produce my section of this CoLab with artists? B goes, Patricia says, yeah, no problem. You know, a little while later, uh, goes producer gets another email this time from artists B, unbeknownst to artists, a says, Hey, I'm doing a CoLab with artists.

A could you ghost produce it? So I know this sounds so crazy. What happened is the ghost producer collaborated with himself or herself to to do this. But it's a set. I guess. Here's my point. I'm tripping all over myself. Here. Go Susie. This is a tough story to tell, but it's tough story. It's still your better job. You're doing a better job than what you told me earlier. So basically this, this, these two artists hired the same ghost producer to collaborate on the track. Yeah, so let me bring this, this home for everybody else who's not an audio that's listening. There's this same concept in virtually every industry on earth. It's called white labeling. So let's say I am a grocery store and I'm like, wow, these Cheerio's are really good a from, what is it? General mills. I wonder if general mills would be willing to make us our own brand of Cheerio's and not tell anyone that they're the ones manufacturing it and we'll call it a grocery story owes, you know, or something, something ridiculous like that.

You would contact general mills and say, Hey, we want to do a white label Cheerio's product. And general mills would be like, yeah, no problem. And they'd give you a price for it is a totally normal thing in virtually every industry where there's a separate deal to do something white label, which means you get no credit. Your company's name isn't anywhere on the final product. We do that here in our, in the music and audio industry as well. However, usually it's just because of incompetence. I was going to say we do it by accident. Yes. For every single one of these projects that you failed to get credit for, you're essentially getting unpaid ghost a ghost work. Yes, exactly. Yup. So I don't like that there's a, what's that? I don't, I don't, I don't like that that I'm doing. Yeah.

Ghost mastering. F that nervous. This is a good kick in my pants too, man. Like I'm not diligent about this either. So let's, let's go, let's go back on this system. Making this part of your system again cause you get off on a night. Nice rabbit hole and yeah, rabbit hole, err rabbit hole and rabbit trail. What does it rabbit hole? I believe rabbit hole is to Feis. Okay, that's fine. Suffices. Is that a new word? Suffice? Doesn't matter. I don't know. Uh, no, that's a real word. You went down a long rabbit hole and I couldn't stop you cause this is an unedited episode. So, uh, usually I would just stop you mid story and be like, no Chris, get back on story. Um, so step one was to make this part of your quote terms of your proposal terms is early in the project as possible.

Just communicating that you want to be credited for your work because this is how you get clients, people are understanding of this. This is why photographers are, have no problems getting credit for their work. Second step is to make sure they have multiple reminders and make this friendly. But as you're starting to wrap up the project, make sure they understand that you're going to be credited when they released the song in this way, shape or form. So if it's YouTube credits or if it's a, their initial posts on Facebook or if it's making sure that the data gets into Spotify correctly or the label is making sure that you're getting credited on all that platforms, like all credits or whatever you are making sure that this is communicated before it gets crunch time so things don't slip through the cracks. So giving multiple reminders along the way.

And this can be as easy as what you said, Chris, where you're just adding, uh, adding to your template that they get. So they're getting, if they're reading through this, uh, email template you send out when you send them mixes or when you send the final masters that they understand that this is part of the process and that there's no surprises here still because they are, they've been reminded all along the way and make sure, here's the other thing, I didn't put this in my outline, but make sure they understand how important this is to you. If they don't understand that this is your livelihood, this is how you find your clients or your, how your clients find you, then they're probably not gonna remember to do this because it wasn't really, it wasn't really communicated how important this was. This has probably happened in your marriage, Chris.

Cause we've only been married like seven months, eight months. And this has already happened in our marriage. But like one of us gets mad because the other didn't communicate how important something was to them. And so expectations weren't met because, and if, if you know, my spouse, my wife would not, if she would have known how important something was to me, she would have remembered to do something for me or vice versa. I'm sure this has happened to you. We talked about that in a previous episode of, I forget which one it was, but ah, is what we do in our house expectations in advance and it solves so much. Yeah. Yeah. So that was actually, uh, right around my honeymoon time. Yeah. It's actually, it might've been the episode we did on my honeymoon. Yeah, it was your first, your first one back. Yep. So if we look at, I'm looking at their bat in our, in our backlog here. Usually we have a big pause here while I look this up and then James, his edits the pause out. But we're going to do this live. Well, you keep looking at that. I'm going to talk in the meantime, this is convicting for me because I'm thinking about our conversation here and like, well how much work would it take for me to set an expectation in advance by

including that in the proposal, I've got about a dozen proposals I have to send out right after we finish doing this episode, uh, for mastering work. And it will take me about a minute to add that to my proposal template. So I'm going to do that. And then on the back end when I send emails, uh, you know, letting people know, Hey, I've got a new file ready for you to check out. It'll take me another minute to write. And by the way, if you, you know, don't forget to credit me when you release this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like one sentence, like put, give me an idea of how much work that is free. How long would that take you to take me a minute or two. Yeah. But that's because I'm heavily systemized. I get to do art all day and I don't have to worry about all the other crap because I took the time to build the systems for this. But I just want to say like,

it's hard to measure this. It's really, really is hard to measure like how effective this is. But for your last a hundred projects that you did, had the system already been in place, you probably would have gotten a handful of, of mastering gigs from this one system that takes you one minute to him.

[inaudible] going back today. Let me, let me add, let me add something in here. Um, I would have definitely gotten more projects because all the time there's this one record I worked on the hit number one on the gospel charts by this artist artists, uh, Jermaine Dolly and he had this really, really, really popular song in the, in the gospel world and all the time, for whatever reason, I get reached out to by a lot of gospel artists for my favorite projects to work on, favorite types of projects. And I'll always mention that song to them when we're having a conversation. Like, Oh no way you did that. And it's like, Oh crap, I'm sure it's not

sign. Yeah, that's a good sign that you should have been credited for your work. And I know they didn't do it out of out of anything other than the fact that you didn't ask for it and you didn't. My fault and give you didn't communicate expectations on how important that is for you. What was the thing called? E? L E?

Yeah, E I a expectations in advance.

So you're communicating expectations in advance. We talked about that on episode 73 the struggle of running a successful studio at home with your family. So anybody, it's a good episode. That was done back in April, April 2nd was that episode. Yeah. If you have a family and you're trying to run a studio, that's like a, that's like a must listen. That was a,

yeah. Let me, let me completely agree with that. If you have a family, if you are married, whatever, if you've got kids and you're trying to do this business, that episode at some of our best content for you. Yup.

So that was basically Chris and parting his knowledge on me as I started my new family with my wife on my honeymoon. I'm still, remember I was in Genoa, Italy, laying in bed at the hotel with my stupid little like mobile recording rig laying on my back with the Mike on my stomach because I didn't want to hold up the microphone and I didn't really talk much that episode cause you're just giving me your wisdom bombs the entire time. Yeah, that was a fun episode for me cause I didn't have to do anything and I was on my honeymoon. It was fun. So let's, let's move on down this checklist now. So we've got

making it a part of your early

conversation. So your proposal or your quote form or your quote terms, ah, give multiple friendly reminders along the way. So there's no IX expectation here or there's no false. And then finally set a reminder to check for credit after this is done. Because at the end of all this, I can't tell, I can't tell you man how many times there's like, this is probably a good practice whether you're looking for credits or not, but just to see how the songs are doing. [inaudible] you know, after the song comes out, right. It released even a year later because there's so many times where we've seen songs, they have like millions of views on YouTube or plays on Spotify and we had no idea that artists did that well and to top it off or, and also not credited for those songs. Dude,

funny story. I was on Spotify the other day and maybe like the third project I ever produced. Um, I was like thinking about this guy and I pulled it up and I found it on Spotify and his top songs are the songs I produced for him when he was 17 that's crazy. And there's still getting tons and tons of monthly listens. Like, geez, is it 15 years later? I was like, what? Oh my gosh, that's so crazy. Why are people still listening to this? But yeah, super weird yet

I think in this thing that just shows the compounding effect, that's 15 years of passive referral work you could have gotten from that one client. And again, not all your clients are going to send you passive referrals like some, if they get a thousand streams, you're probably never see a paid client from passive referrals on some of these small gigs you get. But you never know which one's going to be the next Billie Eilish is that her name with 1.6 billion views on?

Well, and another good example of that, uh, is I went to college with this guy named Adam Torres. Unbelievable singer songwriter, just absolutely brilliant guy. He made a record while we were in college and like nothing really happened with it. You know, he sold some records but it didn't blow up and it was 10 years later when it got picked up by some blog and the record exploded. Weird. His 10 year old record went like viral and way after the fact. And he started touring his 10 year old record because they know how to play these songs anymore. Yeah. Like he, it was this whole thing and it was amazing to me that that uh, an amazing lesson of music that just because you made it and it didn't blow up doesn't mean that years and years later it's not going to explode. There's plenty of people in art over the past millennia who were totally unsuccessful during life and then they died and then their art got really, really popular.

Yup. So one little final step here. This is completely optional. I would probably say this is probably not a good idea, but Chris made a mention of this as we talked about this before the episode. But you can, if you want set a consequence for not getting credit for your work and you, you said this, I'll, I'll just try to quote you as best I can. You said in your proposal you were talking about putting this, this price that I'm giving you is for credited work credit is Chris Graham mastering. If for some reason you you want this to be a ghost mastering product, our project where I get credited, let me know and I can give you a separate quote that basically insinuates that if they pay you for this saying they're going to give you credit and then they don't, that's insinuating that you're gonna go collect the remaining balance if they don't credit you on this and I don't necessarily, I think this is probably a bad way to end the project.

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily do that, but I do like the fact that you have in there like, Hey guys, you signed the proposal that this was for a credited project and I don't see credits for this. Is there some reason why this happened? It was just mistake. Let me know. There's a friendly way to go at that conversation without having to go try to quote, collect your money. So I do like having that, there is some sort of agreement in the proposal that they're going to credit you in certain ways and that they've stated that they have no problem with that. So that at the end of the project, when you've done your reminder to check in and you see that you weren't credited for that release, they did that. They should have no problems going back and fixing that mistake again. You got to take a look at this from the client's perspective.

Once they're done with you, their mind shifts out of the mastering mode, mixing mode out of the producing mode. Yeah. Now they're like, we gotta get these songs out. We've got to get streamed on this. We need to do a tour. We need to get shows booked. When you get merchant made, we needed to get on podcasts. Do a musician get on podcasts? I imagine they do. Yeah. Well, it's a super emotional time. I get it. You know, they released a record and it's, it's kind of the most emotionally intimate thing you can possibly do because you know, if you post a picture of yourself doing duck lips or something and you're trying to look pretty on Instagram, whether people think you're pretty or not is a lot less intense with than it is with music. With music. It's like, here's like a glimpse into my soul.

Let me know what you think. It's so intense. So these musicians, like they're really, really, most of them are freaking out. Kimberly stay. Yeah. All that to say they don't, they, they're not thinking about your, your one credit you asked for six months ago and they said they would give you, they're thinking about all the other checklist of things they have to do and so if it slips through the cracks, it's not because they don't want to credit you. It's not because they're being mean to you and just going against what they said they do. It's because they have so much on their mind. And this goes back to the very beginning, which is saying how to try to get credited for all your work. If you want to get credited for all your work, just do half ass efforts of trying. And that just means asking.

You could skip everything else we talked about in this podcast and if all you did was when you send the final mix of the final masters or the final files or right before they're about to release your music, you say, Hey, can you give me a credit for this just so I can try to get more work off this project? If that's all you did, you would probably have a lot of success with this, but hopefully the system, I like the systemized approach more because it's more consistent and much better for a longterm approach. Immediately after we're done recording, I'm going to update some of my systems. One of the things that's interesting about this too is what a musician wants from all of us in the audio, you know, field is they want us to help them promote their music. They want us to share it with our friends, family. They want us

to post it on social media and back to this culture conversation. Why would we do that if we're not credited? I don't know where I'm going with this, but there's, there's, there's a, there's a, there's an issue here and it's, you don't get credit for this, but I want you to promote it. We need to fix this as an industry and it will get fixed someday, someday. Every single song that you go to listen to is going to have every credit of every person that worked on it. This is inevitable.

I've heard things saying that Spotify will be releasing like technical credits on albums now instead of just the producer, they'll have mixing engineer, mastering engineer, maybe editors and stuff, title or he does that and this is, this is the interesting thing also is like when you're on YouTube, the norm is at the end of a music video, you're always going to see the director of the video or the videographer or the, the agency that handled that music video at the end of a movie, you're gonna S if you want to see the after credit scene in a Marvel movie, you're going to sit through 16 minutes of thousands of names that were all involved with that movie.

Again, culture. That's the culture in the movie industry. It's just not our culture in the it industry, but thousands of us are, all our audio engineers are listening to this right now and if we start moving in this direction, we can change the culture. Yup.

So anything else you want to add to this, Chris, as we wrap this episode up? It's time we've hit our, we've hit our wall here on a podcast and time.

It is indeed. So let's kind of just circle back to Billie Eilish. So her song, bad guy, uh, which bald guy? It's bald, bald guy. Which that's about you. Which I love. I hope not. That'd be really weird. But I love that song. But when I pull it up in Spotify, it doesn't say who makes it. It doesn't say who mastered. It doesn't say you edit. It doesn't say anything other than like who produced it and who the and who the performers are. That's a weird world. There's a almost a billion streams on that song. I guarantee you there were other cooks in the kitchen on that. And it breaks my heart for those guys. And girls that worked in that project and didn't get credit for it. I'm not saying it's Billy's fault, it's probably Spotify I's fault or it's their label's fault. But this is something that is intolerable in our industry and it's, it's something that needs to change. Yup. I agree. Go check out Billie Eilish. She's amazing.

Brian. I'm not listening to listen to her. No, she's so fantastically weird. Nope, I refuse. You're a bad guy. Brian

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Speaking of hit songs, if you're unaware, uh, at 11:00 AM today, the time this episode goes out, we will be doing an ask me anything, a Q and a with Seth Mosley, our guests on episode one Oh four, he's going to be live in our Facebook community@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash community answering your question. So I don't know where else are you going to have a chance to sit down and ask questions live with someone at his, someone that has 25 number one singles, someone that has producer of the year award, songwriter of the year award, someone that has a seven figure seven not six figures, seven figure audio business. Someone that has a team of like 10 people that are on his staff right now. I don't know, he seems to have this whole audio thing figured out. So if you want to be a part of that, he'd be live in our Facebook group today at 11:00 AM uh, in, in case you are not there.

He'll also be live. Him and I are doing a songwriting webinar tomorrow. Uh, he's leading it. I'm just there asking questions and hanging out. But it's a webinar called the hit song formula and he's going to walk you through his formula that he uses to write songs. So if you are a producer or you are recording bands or you have people that you are interacting with on their music, giving advice and trying to trim the fat so to speak, this is going to be a training that you want to be a part of. This is something I, I ignored for way too long. I ignored songwriting for way too long in my career. It definitely hurt my career. If you got the email from me, uh, this past week, uh, where I talk about this, this was something that affected my career and it's kind of a dark spot on my career in the past, not being a good song that are not taking this sort of stuff seriously.

So if you're serious about your career as a producer, as a songwriter or whatever you want to come to this training, and guess what? Spotify has a credit slot for songwriters, unlike mixing engineers and mastering engineers, uh, and recording engineers. So if you are trying to get yet another credit spot which ties into this episode today, go to songwriting, training.com it is song writing, training.com. That is our unique link to that webinar. And you can sign up and we will be alive tomorrow at 10:00 AM central standard time for that songwriting training. So that's tomorrow, Wednesday, November 13th at 10:00 AM central standard time. Now I've got to go catch a flight. I'm heading out of town for the weekend next week. We have an amazing interview coming. I'm not gonna tell you much about it, but it's someone that has worked with some of the biggest bands in the industry, someone doing this at a massively high level, and someone that understands branding better than anyone else I've ever met. So that will be coming to you next Tuesday, bright and early at 6:00 AM until next time. Thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.