How To Profit From A Rising Trend In The Music Industry

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 63

The six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts, Brian and Chris.

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I'm your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my purple shirted beautiful bald cohost, Chris Graham. Hey Chris. How ya doing man. You total nerd out today. I hung some bookshelves in my office in a home studio lessons.com central and I'm really excited about it. I've never really had a nice bookshelf before. Everyone is literally yawning right now. Chris Bode. Um, yeah. Sorry guys. All right Brian. How are you doing? I'm fine. It's cool. Are you getting super jacked for your Bachelor Party? Where you, myself and many people I don't know, but who are apparently super good friends with you. I'll go out to yosemite. We just booked flights for this. This is fun and I just found out what if we're actually doing and apparently we're going to yosemite state park in America. National Park. No State Park Bachelor party. Oh, you're right. Sorry.

That's national park in the middle of winter, so we got to get snow chains and our tires. We're going to hike 12 miles in the snow. It's going to be a grueling self discovery of a Bachelor Party and I've got all my friends with me so it's going to cost me, including Chris Grant, the one and only actually winter NAM is only the second time we've really ever been around each other in person. This is true, which is weird, so to nams are the two times we've been around each other and then the third time will be my bachelor party. Fourth being my wedding. It's weird as well as we know each other. We've not really spent much time together. This is true. It's weird. I feel like we're way closer than we actually are. At least physically. Well, it's. Yeah, I'm nervous about that because I'm not a very touchy person, but I feel like I'm going to have to hug.

He a real big when I see it three times this winter. This is a podcast about business, not about my bachelor party, not about my wedding night. About your bookshelves. This is about how to run a successful business and one of the biggest things about running a successful business is seeing changes in the industry before they've really taken hold so that you can take advantage of them before everyone else does, and that's the big thing about trends is there's a bell curve that comes with trends. When something starts to take hold, there is a gradual increase and then it peaks out and then that's the point of saturation and the effectively starts to decrease and if you jump in too late you are going to get the last little remaining bits of the benefit of that trend and so we're going to hopefully bring up something that we've kind of noticed this year as being more and more of a trend that hopefully our listeners can start taking advantage of before it becomes over saturated. Chris, do you want to kind of talk about what we have started to notice or do you want to preface this before we actually talk about what that thing is? Yeah. Well, let me kind of put my prophecy hat on. As we predict tectonic shifts in the music industry, I'm going to make a prediction here. We're going to talk about this and I think what Brian and I have to say is right on the money. We are already beginning to a shift

and this impacts our industry. If you are a mixing engineer, mastering engineer, a studio owner, a producer, a session musician, fill in the blank. If you are in the music industry, this shift will dramatically affect you were working on getting some people to come on the show to interview that are, you know, ground zero in the shifts. So stay tuned for more episodes about this in the future. But here's the shift that Brian and see over the past hundred years, our industry revolved around, and Brian, you brought this up earlier, what we would call a waterfall sequence of events. So a band would come in, they would work on a record for a long time and then that record would release and then they'd switch from recording production product making mode to promoting mode and hit the road and they'd promote that record and try to sell it.

As everybody listening probably knows, if you're over the age of seven, something dramatic happened about two decades ago where suddenly you couldn't make one good song and have 10 other mediocre songs and sell that for $20 anymore. All the sudden if you had a good song, a good song would sell, but nobody was willing to pay you $20 for your album. So this has dramatically changed things. So there was sort of a golden age. There was home studio world plus people still bought cds in the early two thousands where people could make a lot of money as a touring band, especially solo musicians. They were killing it. Now the big transition that we see and that we're continuing to see is I would call this decade the decade of Youtube. Youtube has had a crazy influence on just about every industry. It's the second largest search engine on earth, only surpassed by Google, and here's the thing, Google owns youtube, which is crazy to think about.

Yeah, the first and second largest search engine. So what? But what's happening, Chris? You won't tell us you're stalling. Sorry. That got a little verbiage there. So what's happening, we are seeing is bands are figuring out that if you want to grow, you have to consistently release content. Whether that means weekly, monthly, but certainly not yearly, which was the previous sort of like album cycle model. There are definitely still bands that are going to do this and in the future that are going to get away with it. Bands like coldplay in 21 pilots and you know, giant established bands, it's still going to work for them. They're following is so big and they're so memorable that it's not going to matter, but for up and coming bands, the way that they're going to build an audience, the way that they're going to maintain engagement and stay top of mind with their audience is by regularly releasing content.

But Chris, how does this affect my studio? Well, I'm glad you asked Brian. So the big thing when I was producing records, you know, a decade or two ago, well not quite to that makes me sound much older than I am. So when people were producing records, you would go head down in the studio and you'd bust your butt for a month, for two months, for three months at a time and you'd work and work and work and work and work. Here's the thing, that's how the business ran, but it wasn't how the business grew. The Beatles knocked out like their first record and I think like a few days, like they went in, recorded, got out, they came in and prepped. They came in prepared. They came and practiced, they recorded it mostly live and then they released the record quickly and got it on the streets quickly.

So you'd finish a record back in the day. It would get printed that day or the next day and it'd be in stores the day after that. Now even though we can release so much faster than that, the normal thing to do is this waterfall method of like, Hey, I'm going to work and working, working, working, working, working, working, rick waterfall. We released an album and then we're going to work and work and work and work behind the scenes. No feedback from fans, no engagement with fans, no new content, the pitch from fans, other than like who goes will move the store and I'm on instagram and I'm not adding any value to my content at all. It's kind of crazy to me what bands are starting to see, and there's a couple groups that I see that are doing this really, really well is they're starting to release an irregular schedule and for us as podcasters and hopefully future youtubers here. The thing that we've noticed with our podcast is it grows a ton because we release every single week on Tuesday at 6:00 AM, right? That consistency makes it easy to build a relationship with us. Bands aren't doing that yet, but they're just starting to. And here's our prediction. A year, two, three years from now, almost all bands will be consistently releasing music on a fast schedule and getting feedback from their fans and building engagement with their fans and building their followers, count their subscribers, et cetera.

So to kind of piggyback on what you just said, Chris, I think in a really important point is because of this shift in the future. If you can establish yourself now as an audio engineer or a producer or a mixer, someone who is taking on this sort of work on a regular basis. You're actually seeking out these sorts of clients. You're going to set yourself up to be the go to studio in the future. As this type of trim takes on. And I noticed someone in our facebook community recently complaining about a lot of his work now tends to be bands coming to him to want to record live and he was wanting to know should he try to seek out some other type of work that kind of work he wanted? Or should he accept what the market is giving him? What the market is saying is there.

And a lot of the community was telling him to just nurture that except what the market's telling you that is there. And then actually build upon that by adding video services to what you do. And that is exactly what he should be doing. As far as I can tell, I can, I don't know his business specifically, but that's what this episode is about, is embracing the change in the music industry and not trying to shut it for something that you think is quote unquote more preferable. If you can be the person that is well established in this sort of niche where you are doing regular recordings with bands. Not only does that create recurring revenue, it allows you to monetize in a number of ways, not just with the recording but also by adding video and I can tell you right now if you knew how to work protools, it's not that hard to learn how to work a video editing software as well leased to a minimal level.

And Chris you said you saw a couple of bands that you see doing this pretty well. Go ahead and talk about those bands and the videos will be in our show notes. The two bands that Christmas specifically talking about, but if you watch those videos in our show notes, which you can get to by going to the six figure home studio.com/ 63 slash 63. Those videos are simple as can be. It's just one camera, one shot, no editing. It's as simple as possible, and so that takes the burden off having to be some master videographer. The whole thing about it is putting good content out consistently. It doesn't have to be perfect. And Chris with his youtube channel is talking about Pewdiepie. The youtuber, Pewdiepie love him or hate him. He's one of the biggest youtubers of all time. He's got almost a 100 million subscribers and his videos he put out every single day, puts out a new video and they're not that good. They're not that high quality as far as from a fidelity standpoint, from a fidelity standpoint. He just doesn't give a shit about anything as far as fidelity. What he cares about is this content. And again, I'm not gonna debate, uh, whether or not you think is contents good, what matters is it as popular? Because he's consistent with it and that's sort of the trend we see here. So Chris, what are those bands you were talking about?

Yeah, so these bands, full disclosure, I'm obsessed with two of these bands. I think they're probably my favorite bands around right now. The first is this band Pamplemousse. They've been around for awhile, for about 10 years or so, and they came to fame. They were really viral, uh, in like before 2010. And they would do these like really edited loop based videos. Jack Conti that bleed. Yeah. I would do all the instruments and his wife would sing and I'm embarrassed that I can't remember her name, but she's fantastic. And they would make these videos and release them regularly. What they do now, problem is totally changed. Pamplemousse is a really tight live band who records every month and release this content at least every week. They have another project that the same band members with other people that they bring in called scary pockets and they do funk covers of popular songs.

Really Damn awesome. Fun covers like their name is scary pockets. The pockets are scary. The pockets and the music are so good and by doing this they're building a consistent following, and here's the thing, one of the lead guys in both of these bands, his name is Jack [inaudible]. Jack Conti is the CEO of Patrion. This is a really, really forward leaning visionary in our industry right now who is trying to help the world become a better place because here's the thing, if a band releases content consistently, they can then get patrion supporters who can then sponsor their creation of this content. Now, here's where this is really important for us as audio engineers, mixing engineers, mastering engineers, studio engineers, et Cetera, is that if the shift happens, if we see that bands are like, holy crap, if we consistently release content, we can say, hey, person watching this youtube video, please subscribe because we drop videos every Thursday.

There's a reason to ask for subscribers when you're consistently dropping content, so that's a big deal. There's another band called postmodern jukebox that does like 1930, [inaudible], 19 twenties, almost like big band jazz covers of pop songs. Absolutely incredible. It did all about that bass. These bands are consistently releasing content and they're building their subscribers at a rapid pace as a result of that, which allows them to do a couple things. It allows them to, one, have subscribers to get supporters that pay monthly to support you, which is enormous, and three, it allows them to build a huge fan base so they can tour like crazy. It's a massive tour promoting tool. So Brian, let's talk about what can we do in the audio industry to support this change that's happening, to capitalize off it and to generally be a part of this next revolution in music?

Yeah, that's an awesome question and I think there's several ways we could probably do this. I think one of the biggest ways is to first understand and notice this trend around you and look for people that are doing this and then be able to help develop bands that you already work with to transition early on because the earlier you can help these bands transition, that is not only adding value to these artists because they're able to take hold of a new trend and help it grow their own position. As an artist, but that also helps you as a business because now these clients you already have these relationships you already have. They're turning from once a year customers into once a month. Customers. Woo. Let that sink in. If you could take a customer that's coming to you once a year and transfer them into a customer that's coming once a month, that increases their lifetime customer value to you and at the very least, it helps even out your income to where you have recurring income every single month.

And I think that's honestly one of the biggest benefits with this is just helping bands along the way and we're going to have people on the podcast in the future that help us talk about how to actually nurture bands or help develop bands after you work with them. But this is one of just many, many ways that you can help do that. And the more success you can help the bands you work with get the more you're gonna get from it because other bands are going to notice these bands and want to come work with you as well. And this is a potential viral effect because every single video and single you do every month, or if you do three or four songs in a two or three day period, and those come out once a week, every week, those are all little calling cards with their name.

There's a little business cards for you with hopefully your linking your name in the description of the youtube video. And again, those are all sources of referrals for you. Yeah. So I want you guys to kind of imagine you are a producer, you're a studio, whatever. And your typical way that you do business is you go to shows, you meet bands, you're messaging them online, and when it comes down to it, you're pitching the band on an album that's the make or break moment for you. When you send a proposal and you say, yeah man, two k for me to do your album, or it'd be okay to do your album, or it'd be 50 k to do your album. That pitch is intense for a couple reasons. One, if you fail, it sucks to. The band has to finance it in a huge amount of money really fast and also bands are notoriously bad at saving money.

Just. Oh yeah. No, it's no surprise to anyone in the world. Yeah. Bands are notoriously bad. Honestly, one of the biggest benefits of this is it's a monthly thing. They just have to come up with a much, much smaller monthly payment instead of a huge chunk at the end of the year, which they probably won't be able to save up. Yeah, so let's imagine bob and Joe, Bob and Joe are both producers. They both own a home studio. They're both very talented, equally talented. Let's say bob is pitching albums to bands for Bob. He loves that big payday. He loves getting that check with, you know, four digits in it, in the mail, five digits in it, in the mail, a loves that. The Problem Bob has is that Bob's business is inconsistent. They'll have a $10,000 a month and then we'll make no money the next month and then we'll have a $15,000 month and then they'll lose $2,000 a month after that.

And we talked about this in great detail in episode 58, the three roads to six figures, or we start talking about different business models. This is one of the discussions we have. Yeah. So Bob's got this traditional business. He's pitching albums on huge projects. Who's the other guy? Joe? Is that what I said? His name was called him Joe. It's fine. Let's call him Joe. Joe has seen the writing on the wall. You've seen that if you want to be successful as a band, you have to be an influencer. You have to have instagram followers, you have to have youtube subscribers. You can't just be like, Hey, I released a record everybody and then it goes viral because everyone's sharing it and they have no social media presence at all. That doesn't work anymore. So what Joe has started doing is he's transitioned away from pitching albums and when joe meets a band, he says, Oh man, you guys are awesome.

I tell you what, you know, typically an album would be, let's just throw it around number 10, k with me. Pretty expensive album. It'd be a 10 k with me, or what we could do is if you guys can raise $1,200 a month, we're going to have let's say three days in the studio where we're going to come out. We're going to finish four songs. We're going to track them live, so we're going to go take after take after take. I've got a guy that has a really nice dslr camera. We've got all the lights is going to come in and he's going to do one seamless shot of the entire band performing live, and then we're going to take the best take. I'm going to mix that. We're going to sync it with the video and you're going to release a youtube video every Friday, so we're going to make a bunch of songs upfront, so we'll record for two months in a row, so three days, first months, three days the second month, and then on that third month you're going to start releasing those songs one at a time for a week and you're going to keep paying me $1,200 and we're going to keep doing this forever.

Now that gets interesting for a couple reasons. The band's raising $1,200 is a lot different than the band raising $10,000 and in a situation like that they also get stuck on a treadmill and I think this is a good treadmill for the band to get stuck on, but that band, once they start releasing music regularly and they start seeing their subscribers tick up, they start seeing all the shares that they get where people are excited to reengage with them. Yeah, it's Tuesday. My favorite band releases a song on Tuesday when that starts to happen, that band's going to get addicted and that band is going to come back to you again and again and again and again, and then all the sudden another band comes to you to Joe, excuse me, and Joe pitches the band on the same thing. Now Joe's got six months of his month booked for the foreseeable future every month.

He doesn't have to go out looking for new bands. If he has three bands doing this, he's getting about 3,500 to $4,000 a month roughly. Right? Consistently though. Right? And what Joe probably does as he finds somebody who does wedding photography, know Joe doesn't even have to have a videographer. You get your own camera. From what I've seen in these videos that you've shown me, Chris like that I've been finding on here of the examples that will be linked in our show notes. It's a tripod camera. It's sitting in one place. It's not even moving. It's one shot. And just go buy a camera, go by 300 hundred dollar camera and a lighting system that costs another two, 300 bucks. You're done. That's your gear. Yeah. And so there's a lot of interesting ways you could do this if you don't have a nice facility to do this.

And you can do it at someone's house. And here's the thing I know initially is audio engineers were like, Ooh, Aah. I don't want to do that. I want to do it in a real studio. That intimacy of, Hey, this is a bunch of us sitting around a family room and there's a fire going in the fireplace and there's a bleeding, the whole nine yards. That intimacy is what people crave on Youtube. I was watching a video last night on Youtube with this, I forget the name of the girl, but they're sitting around a fire on a beach and they're all playing and singing and it was gorgeous. It was so beautiful, but it was beautiful because it was like, oh, I want to be there with them. Oh, that's. So that was engaging. It was sort of this like you wanted to be there with them as opposed to this like music videos from the nineties where it was like everything's perfect and now the next video from corn bullet holes in special effects been anybody that's all well and good, but a band that's releasing a video each week where they've lowered the bar for the production value, but they've raised the intimacy of the product is really, really, really interesting and depending on what genre you're doing, what your gear situation is, you may have an option to go do remote recording for this sort of thing where you can go on location somewhere.

If you look at. There's a really fun video with Sylvia massy where she goes and records a band inside of a nuclear silo and it's the craziest sounding effect. I don't where I saw that, but a lot of you have probably seen that and it's awesome. Might've seen it somewhere on this thing called the Inter webs something called Internet. Oh yeah. So that brings up a great point. If you don't have a space, you could do it in a family room because the issue here is intimacy. You're not going for fidelity. You're going for subscribers and subscribers don't subscribe for fidelity. They subscribe for intimacy. They want to have this youtube channel be a part of their lives. If you don't have a room but you've got a little bit of gear and a little bit of knowhow, you can do all sorts of funky stuff like we're going to record in the woods or we're going to record in a field and we only record outside, or we only record in abandoned buildings.

There's all sorts of stuff you can do that totally works on Youtube and that avoids you having to have a big rent payment on some huge studio. Really, if you just summed all of this up, I think it's just to let 2019 be the year of consistent content. Yes, and that means different mediums. It means regular content and that means recurring income. If you can get the right type of clients, and I think that's a huge shift. We've mentioned it a few times at the podcast and passing. We've mentioned this elusive recurring revenue thing, but I don't think we've really had a full episode really breaking down of how you could capture that and I think this is a really, really good way to capture that. You don't need 50 clients. You don't need to find 50 clients in a year or in your case, Chris, 50 clients in a week.

You just need to find a handful of clients who see this vision that you have who are willing to come consistently to your studio and record regularly and incorporate some sort of visual element with that which adds to the perceived value that they're getting. If they go try to price out a music video, it's going to be four grand, five grand, 10 grand. In some cases they're going to try to price out entire album. It's going to be five grand, 10 grand, 20 grand depending on who they go with. If they can come to you and they get a live video, a live recording that's well mixed, the video is well lit, the camera quality is pretty good. Then that's a much easier pitch to get your thousand to $2,000 a month or whatever it takes. Instead of trying to get that five to $10,000, $20,000 number, and again, all of these numbers are interchangeable.

It depends on your situation. Don't try to take these numbers. We give you as the definite guide of what you should charge because for some people it's gonna. Be Like, oh, I could never get that much, and for some of you it's like, oh, I would never work for that little, but what's important is that you get the grasp of understanding what we're trying to say here because if you can take advantage of this sort of change in the industry, this sort of shift early on and you can position yourself, well, you're going to be set up for success as this catches on. Only drop a little wisdom nugget here. This is an idea I just had. I liked her wisdom nuggets and I liked that word trading back and forth and talking a lot each. Yeah, because it gives the other person a lot to think about.

Exactly. So let's say you're Bob, you know you're used to this. I reached out to a band. I nurture them. I go to their shows. I'm trying to build up rapport with them. I'm trying to land them as a huge multi thousand dollar project. That's hard no matter what industry you're in, getting people to spend thousands of dollars, it's difficult and if you invest 20 hours and trying to convince the band to work with you and that falls through, you just lost 20 hours. Congratulations. What's so interesting about this pitch to make reoccuring scheduled content is how easy it is to begin to pitch that to the band. So a lot of bands don't know this change is coming yet and we have an opportunity as audio people to be harbinger's to bring it, to help the future become the now and this is super cool. So let's say there's a band.

Joe's got a band that he wants to work with. This band is still in waterfall mode. Let's make that a word. They're still in waterfall release mode and every year they release a project, they decided the next producer they're going to work with, they save up their money to take out loans. They were crap. Jobs have enough money. They make the record, they've completely disconnected with their audience online and the process. They have no feedback or whether the fans like it at all. So what Joe starts doing, he's trying to go after bands who have not bought into the consistent content model yet, and he's sharing with them online, you know, facebook messenger, instagram, whatever, dude, have you seen this video from Xyz band? Boom Dude, have you seen this video? They kind of remind me of you a little bit. Do the drummer in this video looks just like your drummer.

Boom. They start having that dialogue and all of a sudden the bands like, oh my gosh, this band is amazing. Dude. I've watched all their videos. Cool, man. That's so awesome. Do you know how that band has gotten so popular? They've consistently released alive recording every week. Maybe you should do that with me. There's this easy pitch where all the sudden rather than doing the Bob thing and pitching an album that's super expensive that you make once a year that's make or break it. Your job as an audio person, as a recording studio owner, as a producer, fill in the blank, is now to convince bands to jump on the consistent content bandwagon. If you can do that, you only need a couple of clients to make a pretty good living right now. Here's the interesting thing. No more editing. There's still editing. There's not as much editing.

Not nearly as much. Yeah. There's way less editing. There's way less payment issues because you know, hey, you're going to pay me consistently and if you didn't pay me for last month, yes, what? You're not going to have any content to release next month because I won't work with you until you pay me. All the sudden all these problems in our industry start to evaporate. Evaporate. That's a great word. That's what I was looking for there. They start to turn into mist and disappear because there's a consistency there and it becomes about relationship. It becomes about building that relationship with the band and there's a couple things you can do at this point that band can get unpatriotic. You could pitch them that, hey, I want to be like the invisible member of the band and I will share in the Patriot on spoils. By the way, explain to our listeners what Patrion is because this can be a huge part of making this work with your clients.

If you can connect them with patrion because that can help them pay for the actual monthly recordings that they are now paying you for. Yeah, so patrion is a crowdfunding website, but it's a little different than say kickstarter, a go fund me kickstarter or go fund me is a waterfall platform, raise a bunch of money, make something awesome, release it, and then go promote it and then don't make anything for awhile. Patrons. Totally the opposite. Patrion is your consistently making content. If you support the content I'm consistently making you go to Patrion and you pledge to have a certain dollar amount automatically charged to your credit card. So imagine if one of your bands that you're trying to work with or that you were with converge to the consistent content model and they have 10,000 fans who suddenly begin supporting them for $2 a month or $3 a month or $4 a month or per youtube video.

I tell you right now, I actually support one youtube channel, primitive technology. Oh, they're the best. I love them. I know. It's so good. I give that dude three bucks a video that you released it, so every time a new video comes out, three bucks gets taken out of my account so you can tie it to how many videos that release some more videos and put out the more they get from you, but it's just one of those things that you can tie that pledge to either a monthly thing or a per video thing if it's tied to youtube. Just so you know. Well, so let's talk about. I brought up before the way recording used to work and I know for many of you us in the audio industry are very resistant to change. That's sort of our culture. The thing to keep in mind here is this isn't really a new thing.

This is an old thing. People release records really fast for decades before we finally were like, you know what we should do? We should work on a record for like six months and then we'll release it. That wasn't a thing up until fairly recently in history, so this is really going back to an older model and in my opinion, more magical model. Something magic happens when you get a live band and it's about chemistry rather than the quality of the editing. Make sense? Some of you are so mad right now. I apologize for that, but there is a magic to a live band and if your job is the audio engineer is to facilitate and capture rather than to create. Let me say that again. If your job is the audio engineer is to facilitate and capture that magic rather than to create it from thin air using middy and quantification and guilty.

Guilty. Yeah. Ditto. Also guilty because here's the thing, when you're trying to create it, there's a certain type of insanity that creeps in and every single person listening knows what I'm talking about here. So much truth to that. Yeah. This like, well, I'm going to move the hi hats just a little bit. One millisecond backwards and Oh, you know, let. Let's move all the snare hits four milliseconds into the future and create a little bit more of a shuffle. Okay. Oh, out there it is. There's the magic when you're sitting there trying to do alchemy. Alchemy is this fake science of creating gold from other things that it's not a thing. At least not in any large scale, but people have been trying to do it for millennia when you're trying to create gold with a mouse. That's hard, man, and that leads to all sorts of mental health issues.

Capturing magic is a good, wholesome, awesome, amazing thing. I think he's trying to wrap this episode up. I think we've kind of explored the idea of this trend and how it could potentially unfold over the next year or two and how you can potentially capture part of the market for your own gain. Is there anything that you wanna add to this, Chris, as we wrap up here? Yeah. I guess one last thing. I think a lot of us would say, well you guys talk about niching down and this sounds like I'd have to become good at video stuff as well. Yes and no. There's a point there for sure. This is kind of its own niche. If I'm being honest. This is what we just talked about is kind of its own niche. It is its own niche, but here's the thing you can keep in mind is that video, especially if you're using the same space to record all these bands, video is something where you can create a system set and forget.

It's like very templatable. Yes, very templatable. Mostly videos about lighting. It's about lighting and a decent camera. Yeah. If you watch Chris and I, if you've ever seen it, our clips on youtube or on facebook from this podcast, we both just use basic $100 or less webcams, minds of legit tech up. My webcam is $159. Brian. Oh, you got the four k one. Either way it's a cheap webcam and the video quality is great because we both have good lighting. Yup. Bingo. So if you invest in the lighting, you invest in the camera. If you really want to go nuts, you know there's all sorts of mirrorless and Dslr. My suggestion, I spent way too much time researching cameras when I was looking to buy one before, which the camera I rarely even use. Just to be honest with you, I use this logitech infinitely more than my expensive camera.

Just pick one and go on. You're not a videographer, your recording engineer or a mixer or whatever you're doing. You have a recording studio or home studio. You're not a videographer, so just pick one and move on because that's the least important thing you'll decide on in this entire process. So last thought here, if this is interesting to you, check out the show notes from this episode. Check out the videos from scary pockets. Check out the videos from Pamplemousse, check out the videos from postmodern jukebox. There are many other bands that are beginning to experiment with this, but watch these videos and look at how simple they are. It's a bunch of microphones and a cool looking room with great lighting and it's single camera. Those projects are getting way, way more views, way, way more streams, and they're making a dent and you can be a part of that.

So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I want to mention something that I think is important. Note about this trend that we've talked about today. We really put a lot of focus into the video side of this and while that is a good way to add additional perceived value and real value to your clients, don't get too stuck on the video thing. I think really the core of this episode was more about the regular release schedule and the recurring revenue potential that comes along with that. So if you find yourself thinking, Oh God, I

don't want to do video, or Oh God, my clients would never do video pause and consider why that might be, and maybe you are ignoring something that could be a great fit for what you do, but if not, if it really isn't a good fit for you, if it's really not a good fit for your clients. If you really don't want to get into video, still listened to this episode, keeping an open mind that may be pitching your clients on regular releases instead of the waterfall model where you just work, work, work, work, work, work, work for weeks, and then release and then tour instead of that model, see if it makes more sense to work with your clients on a more consistent release schedule and that is going to help even out your income a lot as well as keep you from having to constantly go out and find new clients because if you have people that are coming back to you monthly or once every quarter, you don't have to continually go out and find new clients.

You just find your handful of people, your little tribe, you work to build those people up and develop those artists and then together you can all reap the rewards. Longterm. Next week's episode, Chris and I will be discussing scoreboards. What the hell does that mean? Well, think about this. If anyone has ever watched any sporting event of any kind ever, you've probably seen some sort of situation where it all comes down to the end of the game. The clock is ticking, the score is tied, and each team or each participant starts to ramp up their efforts in order to win the game, and it always makes for great tv, always makes for great spectating. But what if you were to hide the scores from those teams the entire game? They had no idea what the score was. Do you think you would see that same effort from those participants throughout the game?

Especially at the end when the game is on the line, I can almost guarantee you that you will not see the same level of gameplay if there is no score on the scoreboard. So when it comes to your business, next week we're going to talk about setting up a scoreboard for you to compete against yourself so you know where you stand every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year compared to that same period last year, and we're going to talk about multiple things. Attract not just your income. There's other things to talk about as well in this, so that episode will be coming out next Tuesday, right in early 6:00 AM. Until next time, thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.