[00:00:00] Welcome to episode 135 of the Bandhive Podcast. It is time for the episode of the band type podcast. My name is James Cross and I help independent artists tour smart. This week on the show. I'm not gonna talk about all my amazing Alaskan vacation. If you wanna find out about that, you can follow me on Instagram. That is at mad rock X V X, all one word, all that good stuff, no underscored or anything like that. And I have some posts up there for my trip to Alaska, but now it's good to be back and uh, recording slightly short notice this episode drops in just under two weeks. And on this one, I'm gonna talk about that one friend who posts all the absolutely cringy whiny.

Woe is me content on their Facebook page or Instagram or whatever it is, but typically in my opinion, it happens on Facebook. And I guess to a certain extent, Twitter, but you can't really put a long rant on there unless you break it into multiple tweets. So mainly Facebook and you know what, it's awful when a person's entire [00:01:00] feed is just constant negativity, how on earth would anyone react to that?

Except with more negativity? I see this over and over again. I'll see somebody's life just falling apart and I feel bad for them, but then they get in this rut because they got some attention and then that's all they start posting and it goes on for months and eventually I have to unfollow them or unfriend them because I'm sick of seeing it and it gets me down and I don't want to be in a negative mindset.

Now I can empathize when people are having something bad happen in their life. So I'm not saying don't share that don't share when something's getting you down. It happens. But if every single thing you post or every other post you make is nothing but whining and woe is me. You're gonna become known as that whiny person or that complainer.

And the last thing you want to do for your brand as an up and coming artist is have that reputation, whether it's on your [00:02:00] personal page or your artist page. So now just imagine you look at a band page and they complain about how CD sales don't make any money.

Well, it's been about two decades since independent artists made money on CDs. It's time to move on A lot of those same artists, I've said, why don't you sell merch, you know, make shirts or something like that? And they say, oh, well, we don't have money for that.

We're gonna do CDs instead. You can make more money on merch and you can make it cheaper than CDs. Maybe not per unit, but you can get 50 shirts for, you know, like $300 and then sell them for $20 each. So. A thousand dollars. That's a $700 profit. If you sell them all, okay. Now a CD. If you want to get a good price, you have to buy at least a thousand, typically at a dollar per.

So you're gonna be looking at a thousand dollars. You need to sell a lot of CDs to break even. With shirts, you have a better profit [00:03:00] margin, especially once you factor in all the money you spend on recording in good CD that people will actually wanna buy. And the design and the artwork, the liner notes, all that kind of.

a CD costs essentially, a lot more, even though your per unit price is lower, somebody else, they might wh about how pop stars get all the attention instead of local bands and how their friends won't support them. But they'll support X, Y, Z pop star. If they don't even know well, you know what, what they're not mentioning is maybe their music's not that good.

I'm all for supporting local and independent artists, but I'm not gonna go outta my way to listen, to, or give money to someone. If I don't actually enjoy their music. There are probably hundreds of bands that I've bought merch from who aren't massive bands. They're not signed to major labels. I just liked what they do, but that was the key I liked.

I enjoyed their show. And yet we have local artists complaining on [00:04:00] social media about, oh, you know, instead of giving money to Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, you should give money to us cuz we need it. It's like, okay. Do something that impresses me and I will happily give you my money. That's just how it is.

A few examples, I know I say Troy Millette on the show all the time, but Troy Millette. I funded his GoFundMe to get him down to south by Southwest a few months ago? There are many other artists who are locals, who I've bought merch from another one. They're not local to me, but they are a local band in Portugal.

I bought a shirt from them and I told them they're not charging enough. I gave them more money than they asked for. Cuz they only wanted $5 for a t-shirt. I said no way. That's way too low. I'm gonna give you more money because I actually like their music. So shout out to Zebra, Libra and Troy Millette and all the other bands that I can't think of right now.

There's a bunch for making me care about their music. And feeling like I want to invest in this project, whether it was Troy's situation, where he needed some help [00:05:00] last minute with transportation or a Zebra Libra, who just said, Hey, we're doing our first merch run. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.

The artists who complain on social media are not the ones who get good opportunities because no one wants to be around that constant negativity. Think back to when you had that friend who just whined on Facebook or whatever platform constantly, you probably got sick of seeing that, right? You probably thought, man, I don't wanna hang out with that person.

Like, they're just always whining. So either you kind of drifted apart or maybe you consciously cut them out of your life by removing them from your newsfeed. But either way, if you see a band who does the same thing. You're not gonna enjoy that band as much either. I have an example of this. I can't remember their name, but there was a really talented band in San Diego that would busk in Balboa park.

That was one of their like part-time things. And then they also had music for sale. They were professional musicians. [00:06:00] That's what they did for a living full time. And they decided that they were gonna tour around Europe, busking. and they ran into some trouble over there in Europe.

And I empathized with them until they made a post blaming their fans for the legal trouble that they got themselves into. They were literally saying that because they ran into trouble with the police. Their fans were at fault for not supporting them to get them out of the, whatever trouble they were in.

how on earth is that? Your fan's fault? That's just awful. You think so little of your fans that you are blaming, the very people who would support you. If you said nicely, Hey, we have a bit of a problem. Could you help us? But instead, their first reaction was to say, Hey, this is your fault.

You guys suck. How on earth would that be a good move? I instantly, after taking screenshots, unfollowed that band. I didn't wanna see that. And personally, it's ridiculous that anyone thinks like that[00:07:00] it makes you look bad. It really does, but it can also be a massive time suck or distraction. if this band had spent, who knows how much time doing things for their business, instead of wasting time complaining about how their fans are terrible people.

They would've gotten a lot further. Maybe they would've gotten outta those legal troubles. Maybe not. I don't know. It wasn't anything big. They had like some fines that they wanted people to clear up for them. That's all it was. But still blaming your fans for not paying the fines that you got. That's like getting a parking ticket and asking a random stranger to pay for your parking ticket because they parked next to.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I see a ton of bands that are local, they're regional, they're up and coming and they're on the road to success. Whatever you may define success as they're doing the exact work that the complainers don't want to do. [00:08:00] Artists complain about things being difficult and yeah, it's incredibly difficult.

But the difference between artists who make it in the music industry and artists who don't make it is the ones that have a positive mindset and say, this is what we have to do and we're gonna get it done.

look at it this way, the world is not against you. Your mindset is. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, chances are, you're not a whir, but it's safe to say that you do know one. So do me a favor and keep an eye on that whir that you know, and see how their music career progresses. While you do that, use yourself or another hardworking artist in the region who doesn't complain about every little thing and compare that with the complain. In two to three years, I think you're gonna be light years ahead of the complainer. Now, a lot of independent artists go through really difficult times, but I've got two examples here.

One is back in 2016, my friends in [00:09:00] Stellar Corpses had their trailer stolen on tour. All their gear in it gone. It was awful, but they pressed ahead and made the absolute best that they could out of a terrible situation And they played some amazing shows. I saw them on that tour, I think three or four days after it happened. And it happened to be Dusty's birthday, their singer. So we made him a vegan birthday cake cuz he was vegan and we're like, yo, we gotta cheer up somehow. So he showed up with the cake and, you know, you could tell, they were kind of bummed about what had happened, but they weren't letting that get them down.

They even had a member quit the band because she couldn't handle what happened, but they pressed on without her and said, you know what, we're gonna get through this. And they played an absolutely amazing show. Another artist much more recently this month or last month fellow Vermonters, Saving Vice, had a tour pulled out from under them by a rapper named Lil Xan. Now you might have seen this in the news. They were on tour with Lil [00:10:00] Xan, Dropout Kings, and one or two other acts I believe. they drove out to Texas for the start of the tour and their transmission died in their van.

And then the day of the first show, or the day before the first show, I can't remember exactly Lil Xan announced that he wasn't gonna do

And then he blamed the bands, the opening bands for not having all of his hotels and logistics set up. Now, if you've never done a larger tour like this, it's not typical. And I've never actually heard of this for the opening bands to book hotels and transportation for the headlining act, the headlining act will take care of themselves.

Sometimes they'll take care of the openers too, in exchange for payment, but typically the headliner takes care of themselves and the openers handled their own situation. The fact that he's blaming the openers for not getting that stuff set up for him. Just ridiculous. I don't know what he's thinking.

Nonetheless. The band while they did post about everything that went [00:11:00] wrong, they tried their hardest to stay positive Saving Vice did not give up. They didn't run home crying like the one member of Stellar Corpses did. And again, that's not shade to Stellar Corpses at all.

They handled it as a whole really well, cuz they kept playing, but Saving Vice, stuck it out through two transmission changes because the first transmission in their van, that was the replacement. Was faulty. So they had to get it replaced again and they made it happen. They're back on the road now to finish out the Xanless tour.

Now I'm really excited because in a future episode, we're gonna have Robbie and Tyler from Saving Vice on the show to talk about this whole ordeal.

I should also mention that back on episode 110, we had Emilio Menze of Dark Ride on the show and he used to be Stellar Corpses' guitarist. He's not the one that ran home crying. don't worry, emilio is chill, but in episode, 110, we talked with Emilio about the simple formula to growing [00:12:00] your fan.

So, if you wanna check that out, you can go to bandhive.rocks/ 100 zero. Those are the numbers. 100 zero. Not spelled out again. That's bandhive.rocks/110. And you can hear from Emilio about how he grew his new band dark ride. And they're in a very niche genre, which is horror punk. But. In that genre, they have quickly become one of the premier acts.

So I highly recommend checking that out. Especially if you have a sound that's not so typical, not so mainstream. Now it'll still be helpful for you if you do have a more mainstream sound, but especially if you don't go check out episode one, 10 with a Emilio now getting back to Robbie and Tyler.

In the meantime before we drop that episode with them, just keep this in mind. No one wants to work with complainers because complainers don't put in the work and their mindset is holding them back the world. Isn't holding them back. The industry isn't holding them back. Their own mindset of [00:13:00] everyone is against me is what is causing everyone to be against them.

Now that's just the tip of the iceberg. And to be fair. Just not posting complaints on social media, isn't gonna change your life. You actually have to change your mindset. So you don't think that everything is against you because even if you don't verbalize it, if you have that mindset, then you're still not gonna go do anything.

You're not gonna put in the effort. Not posting all this stuff on social media, not complaining, or if you have bad news of shared, trying to keep it positive, like Saving Vice did. That is certainly a great start in the right direction. So I'm really looking forward to chatting with Saving Vice in the future because they handled this situation as well as anyone I've ever seen.

So I want to dig in on that and learn more about what was going through their heads while this was all going on. They did some really cool live streams and stuff on Facebook. so if you wanna check those out, if you want to get a little bit of the uh, the dirt before we have them on the show, feel free to go do that.

But the [00:14:00] main thing is be positive. And remember the show must go on. Don't just give up unless there's like a global pandemic. You are unstoppable, just make the shows happen and do what you gotta do.

That does it for this episode of the Bandhive Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. I really appreciate it. And I hope that this episode. Will either inspire you to keep being a positive person who remembers that you control your own destiny.

Like, and I don't mean destiny. Like this is what you do in life. You control what happens to you to a certain extent, bad things happen to everyone, but how you perceive those bad things will greatly shape your future. So keep that in mind. If you have anything, you wanna talk about your experiences as an artist what's went wrong and how being positive has given you new opportunities. Please let me know. And in fact, I should say, let us know, because in the Bandhive Facebook community, we have a weekly thread for every single episode, [00:15:00] and you can find that by going to bandhive.rocks/group, which will send you to Facebook again, that's band.

hi.rocks/group, or by searching for Bandhive, all one word on Facebook. Go find that group and then find the post for this episode and we can discuss. What you feel you've done. Right. and what mistakes other people, you know, have made. And maybe, you know, obviously don't throw anyone under the bus, but share some thoughts you've had about this, because I truly believe that if you handle situations the right way more and more opportunities will come to you.

Thanks again for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast app and we'll be back next Tuesday at 6:00 AM Eastern with another brand new episode of the Bandhive podcast until then I hope you have a great week, stay safe. And of course, as always keep rocking.