Welcome to episode 82 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and unfortunately I do not have Matt who's with me here today, but I have Ty Christian A K A Fang von Wrathenstein from Lords of the Trident.

Hey, that's me. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. I'm it's a wonderful sunny day outside and I'm down here in a dank cave, which is exactly where I love it. I'm in the same boat. So I I feel you, but I'm glad you're doing well and it's good to have you here on the podcast. Thank you for joining us. It's great to be here. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, yeah. My pleasure. So, for those who don't know, Lords of the Trident was formed in 2000 and eight.

And you guys are self described as the most metal band on Earth? Yeah, we're the most metal band on earth. Anybody else who says otherwise, You know, we invite openly to a steel cage band on band match two bands enter. One band leaves very mad max. I've been trying to get man a war to get into a steel cage with us since the band's founding. You know what? They've never responded to my emails. I know why, because they're scared because they know they lose. But yes, we are the most metal band on Earth. Absolutely.

That is awesome. Well, can you go back in time to 2000 and eight and tell us a little bit about how Lord of the trident came about and even before that, what was your background in music? Right. Yeah. So, so you know, if you want the very dungeons and dragons version, the very fleshed out version of the bio on the website is you know, I think it basically qualifies you for college english credit because it's so long because we put so much into it. But you know, the real story is is that I was living in the dorms with my, with my best friend Hockey, who's asian metal in the band and I was in a different band at the time and we were just kind of messing around in the dorms, he's a monster guitar player and I am like marginally okay at rhythm, but you know, I feel like I'm I'm an okay singer and so we were just kind of messing around and uh ended up recording some dumb demos, which we put up on like Perrotto facebook back in the day when you had to be in a college to be on facebook, and we uh we just had fun with it, and near the end of my super senior year I did a victory lap, you know, my band was breaking up the band, I was in college, and we ended up saying, well, heck, let's just do you know, let's do this, this recording project, let's give it, let's give it a shot, you know, just do something fun over the summer, let's do a couple shows and, you know, and we're really like, AMp it up, you know, we'll have like, costumes and fire and, you know, all that sort of stuff.

Well, by the third show, we had like accidentally sold out a local venue here that had just opened. It is, yeah, it was small. It was like 100 and 100 and 20 capacity venue. But like, none of us had ever, I'd certainly hadn't done that my old band ever before. And people were like singing along, they had found the posts on facebook and they knew the lyrics for some reason, that was the wildest thing. And so, you know, after that we were all sitting in the in the green room, in the basement going like.

So I guess we keep doing this then and then Yeah, and Lords of Training has been going strong ever since 12, 13 years later. So that's kind of the beginnings. And of course, just like any band, we've had, you know, five or six drummers explode along the way. We replaced everybody in the band except for me and hockey. Um so it's down to the original two members And and in terms of background in music, like previously I've basically been in bands my whole life. I started, you know, doing garage bands when I was 14, and my grandparents actually had a, like a polka and pop band that they were in, and I I always would see their post, you know, I go over to the grandparents house, see the posters on the wall as a little kid, and that's what made me go like, oh man, I want to do that to, that looks really wild, you know, maybe not a polka band, but, you know, something cool like this, some something non accordion based, you know, we'll try that.

And so I I did uh gosh, added piano lessons since I was eight, I did singing lessons since I was 10, Around 13, I ended up, my teacher kept pushing classical on me and I'm like, no, no, I want to learn some Aerosmith or something like that, you know? So I I bought a guitar. The guitarist in my, in my little high school garageband quit. And we were a five member act and we were now a four member, but we needed another guitar. So I'm like, well, I'll learn the guitar.

I did. And we've been going, going strong ever since. So nice. It's funny that you mentioned the Germans exploding because I saw that on your Wikipedia pages, like, should I make a spinal tap preference? Oh God, and then you did it for me. So that was perfect. I told our current drummer that he is, he is forbidden to ever leave the band. Like, you know, he can't, he can't die. You can't explode. You know, it can't move away. You know, because I am sick of taking band photos.

We've done, let me tell you, we've done like five or six band promo shoots and I'm an expert at it now, but like man, I don't want to go through and edit all those graphics again. Like know what we got right now is good actually. I I will have to do that because I recently last year, over last, last year, the year before, I don't know, time has no meaning anymore. But in the last couple of years I ended up buying a half a cow online because they had a black friday sale for a half a cow.

And so I bought a half a cow and I taught myself how to how to do leatherworking and I completely remade all my leather armor that I wear on stage from, from scratch. It's a brand new set of armor. So now I gotta take photos of at least me and put them in. So the beauties of Photoshop, it's funny that you mentioned about redoing all the promo shots because a few episodes ago we had chad call on the show and he was in a band, he isn't anymore, but at the time he was the drummer and he became the singer.

And then if you watch their music video from around that time, you never see the drummers face, like there's a drummer, but he's always carefully hidden behind somebody else behind the guitar or something like that. Oh, I love it. You frame the shot so the symbol is right over his face or something like that. Exactly. So there's always that option if you need to go nuclear in the future. That's fair, That's fair. Well, so one thing that struck me about you and Lord of the trident is that you're extremely entrepreneurial and you also have a great Youtube series called Words of Thing where you go into all kinds of D. I. Y. Stuff and I highly recommend it to any Bandhive listener a link to that will be in the show notes, that Bandhive got rocks slash 82 so go check that out because Youtube playlist your L. S. R. A pain to read on a podcast with all the random characters.

Oh yeah. Oh my gosh, but the question here is, were you always so entrepreneurial or is that something that came about later in life as you grew with the band? I think what a lot of that stems from, and I think this is true for a lot of bands is that we just don't have any money, you know, and so I kept having these, you know, large grandiose ideas of doing, you know, this music video or doing this type of merch or doing, you know, x, y, and Z. And we started out going to the standard band route of like, okay, we'll get 60 shirts printed that just have our logo on them or something like that.

And then you end up, you know, a couple of weeks down the line wanting to make a new design and you're out of money, you know, and, and, and you know, nobody wants to pony up for the new design because hey, so we've still got the old design and they're not selling. And yeah, I told you putting that just a logo on the shirt was a bad idea, You know, that kind of a, you know, standard band stuff. So I, I think from day one, since we didn't have the money to operate, like most bands, we had to come up with creative solutions and figure out things like how to print your own shirts and what other kinds of merch you can make yourself, and you know, how to shoot a music video yourself, or how to do your own green screen, or how to do your own photo touch ups or, you know, stuff like that.

So yeah, and I think from the experience of being in bands for so many years, like from being, you know, from high school on, you have an opportunity to go through that cycle, the standard, you know, merch and band management cycle once or twice, and you kind of see like what works and what doesn't, and, you know, the honest truth is, most of the standard band cycle just doesn't work. You know, it doesn't it doesn't scale down to a very small band that's trying to get out of the garage, so to speak.

So, yeah, so I think that we've always, kind of been this way, there's always been that tinge of like, D. I. Y. Centric sort of a thing, and it really got amped up when I we ended up winning a battle of the bands contest a million years ago. And um one of the people that was putting on the contest, and one of the one of the prizes was essentially you get a kind of a sit down band business walkthrough with martin Atkins, who was the drummer for nine inch nails, and he's a real big proponent of D. I. Y. Kind of punk focus, D. I. Y. Band management, band, asset creation, all that sort of stuff, you know?

And so this this big, you know, white haired english guy would be like, toy, listen man, are you printing your own shuts? And I'm like, no, I don't know how to do that. Oh my God, why aren't you printing your own shirts? It is so cheap, you can make 500 shirts tomorrow, What are you doing? You bend is terrible, You have to stop being better at doing Benz and he just yell at me, sort of like an american idol, judge for hours and I'd be like, yeah, yeah, keep talking your accent rules.

Yeah, and eventually I'll just sunk in. Yeah, I've got to learn how to print my own shirt. So I do, That's amazing. And so many battle of the bands are like, here, just $500 cash, here's $1000 cash. And guess what? That cash is gone within a week. The cool thing about this one was, it was put on by a local media college Madison Media Institute and yet the prize was basically, will record an ep, like fully record it, do the artwork, do the layout, you know, do the press release for you, Because, I mean, one of the things that they wanted to do is they needed bands to kind of go through that process with the students, so the students could learn, this is how you do this, this is how you do that.

So it was beneficial for them to, but then it was super beneficial for us because we got hooked up with a bunch of a guy who was who had turned out to be our our producer for the next three records. We got hooked up with MArtin and he kind of kicked us in the but in terms of D. I. Y. Approach, so yeah, it was really, it was really beneficial. Yeah, that sounds like an amazing prize package that blows most battle of the bands, prizes out of the water.

Oh absolutely. Well, so going down the path further of entrepreneurial mindset a few years ago you guys made a power move by launching the mad with power fest that goes further down the path and then you also released Mad Power Mead at the festival. So even more branding their, what made you decide like, hey, we need to do our own festival. It was 100% spite, it was built off of spite. There was a couple of bigger metal festivals in the US that we we either played or wanted to play.

Um one of the bigger festivals that we played, I think it was, gosh, I think it was 2013 maybe was legions of metal festival and long story short, we were headlining one of the stages, the smaller stage. And the it was the last day of the festival and the venue ended up locking the doors one way and it was two stages. So people go back and forth, back and forth all the time, So we're playing. And then 15 minutes later the other band started and so people were like, Oh, I want to see which band we want to go see.

So let's go check out a couple songs from these guys. Check out a couple songs from these guys while the venue had locked the door one way, so you could leave but couldn't get back in. So we started off with a packed room and then there were three people left at the end and we're like, oh my God, I think we suck, Do we suck? I think we suck. But then we found out what, what happened and the you know the festivals like oh my God I'm so sorry we didn't tell them to do that, we'll have you back on the main stage next year and next year came and went and oh sorry we can't do it, we'll do it next year.

Oh sorry we can't do it, we'll do it next year you know 78 years later. The same same thing every year. So that was that was upsetting. And then we also got an offer to play Prog Power which is the biggest metal festival in the US for our genre. That ended the same way. It's like oh I didn't get your email that you confirmed You know he said that I have a read receipt from him that he opened my email kind of a thing you know I promise we'll do it next year.

I promise we'll do it next year. Oh, if we're going to do it, I need you to pay me $15,000 directly to me. That sort of thing happened more than once and it was one of those futurama bender moments where it's like whatever, I'll just make my own festival and it'll be cooler because it will have video games and pinball and you guys don't have video games and pinball like screw you. So yeah, we started off America's Power and the whole concept of it was to take a venue and fill it to the brim with free play arcade games, free play pinball and do all sorts of like fun arcade related extras and have a bunch of amazing power metal bands from all over the United States and sometimes all over the world come in and play and we started it small and we grew it year to year by Mad with Power Three, we sold out.

And then Madame Power Four was supposed to be last year. But obviously everything didn't happen last year. This year, Madam, Power 4. 1 is basically what's happening this year. It's that one that sold out in 80 hours. We opened up the tickets and we moved it to a really larger venue, like 405 100 capacity venue. And that just immediately sold out. So I mean, it's been doing really, really well. I was lucky that I had a number of friends who also were running or had ran festivals and I'd gone to a lot of festivals, so I was able to sort of take a lot of the best stuff that I saw happening at those festivals and also learn from a lot of the mistakes that other festivals had made in the past and try to make the whole process, you know, as painless as possible for fest goers if anybody out there wants to start a festival.

My number one advice is to start very small and like slowly build over the years, you know, and don't, don't try to do a five day festival on your first year. Yeah, don't do fire fest. Yeah, yeah. Don't do fire fast. Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. I mean 80 hours is like three and a third days. There's so many festivals that don't sell out at all. Large or small. So the fact that you sold out a relatively large for a niche genre festival in three days. That's incredible.

Yeah, I'm super happy about it. And, and because we sold out so fast, we're also now offering livestream tickets. We've got a local company that's gonna be filming the festival. We do this every year and we just kind of put out kind of the post fest, you know, like, oh, check out these three clips from so and so, but this year we're going to take that camera equipment and we're also going to, alongside filming, we're also going to do a multi camera, fully mixed live stream of the entire festival, not prerecorded 100% live and both days, the ticket for both days is only 20 bucks.

So lot of people who bought tickets, a lot of people are really interested in the live stream and I'm super excited to be, to be offering that. Well, hey, if you want to shut out the link for where to buy the livestream tickets. Yeah, Mad with power fists dot com, awesome. Yeah. And that will also be in the show notes at Bandhive got rocks slash 82. As with any links that are mentioned, they'll all be in there. So, a nice central place to go click a bunch of links and find everything related to Mad with Power and Lord of the trident.

And anything we mentioned, like maybe pinball machines will be in there for all I know before we dive deep into the main topic, which is Patreon, which we haven't even gotten close to that yet. I learned all this like these little side facts about Lord of the Trident by looking at your Wikipedia page, which is incredibly detailed, more detailed than the Wikipedia pages for many up and coming major label acts. So I was really impressed to see that as a D I. Y. Act. You guys have such a well put together Wikipedia page.

Can you tell us how that came about? Yeah. Um, I was from being sort of D I. Y management focused and all that sort of stuff. I've always been interested in trying to keep up with General tech in terms of bands and band management. And so I was looking through different availabilities for like google optimization, you know, for for people trying to find our band for trying to find Lord tried. And one of the things that I found while I was, you know, watching videos and reading stuff is that, you know, for uh bands that are loaded into, you know, such and such database and I forget exactly which one it is.

But I think if you're like a verified artist on Youtube, for example, if you search for the artist's name, google will, will pull up on the side like a side bar full of information about the band. You can try this right now, You can type in Metallica or type in, you know, I mean anything and you'll see this sidebar load up that will have pictures, it'll have youtube links and importantly, it'll have the Wikipedia page if there's one that matches. So I saw that and I'm like, well, jeez, I gotta, I gotta make a Wikipedia page about lords to try them so we can kind of flush this out.

Um, so I, I went in and made a made a page and we had, you know, we had enough external references, reviews and, and stuff like that that I could make a page and have it verified. And then from there, you know, fans have gone in and modified it and added little facts and things like that. So, it's yeah, it's been, it's great, it's it's a wonderful kind of resource that's been growing on its own. And you know, it doesn't need a whole lot of feed, feeding and watering.

I'll give it, I'll give it a little edit time and again, you know, just in case somebody changes my name to like Fang von butts or something like that. So, but you know, so it's been a really great resource for people to, you know, just kind of see the history of the band and uh yeah, I pulled some factoids. Yeah, that's great. And you know, I just searched for Lord of the trend right now to double check that. And one other thing I noticed is that at the bottom it has the people also searched for section.

So when you have that bar, I assume that is also when other people search for something related to Lords of the Trident, that's when Lords of the Trident will come up as well because you have that sidebar. Yeah, yeah. It's all sorts of really great info. That's good to know. And good to start thinking about when you're putting together things like promotion campaigns and stuff like that. It's like, oh, people are always searching for Britney slaves got to get that in there. Yeah. So I take it if anybody is in a band and they have some links that they can uses citations in a Wikipedia article, it sounds like you would absolutely recommend.

Is that right? Oh, 100%. Yeah. I mean, it's not hard to do. I think a lot of people have hang ups about things like making their own Wikipedia page. You know, it's like, oh well, you know, the fans should really do that if we're big enough man. But in reality, I mean the Wikipedia page is a lot more of a useful tool as you're growing to have. So I don't think that, I don't think anybody should have hang ups about like stuff like making their own Wikipedia pages are wearing their own shirts or anything like that.

So especially if you make excellent shirt materials, that's the problem. I wear so many lords to try and shirts all the time. And it's because like we spend a lot of time hand selecting the fabric that we're printing these shirts on. Like I specifically say, okay, I want Bella canvas 5001 C I want the ring spun cotton and then you end up with these super soft shirts and so then I end up wearing lords trying to show us all the time because all my other shirts are terrible.

They're like sandpaper. So it's like, you know, so everybody's like, oh, he's just a shill for his own band is like, dude, I just like, feel this shirt, I can't, I can't wear the shirts now, come on. Yeah, dude, it's like, it really is night and day, and I know you mentioned this in one of your words of fang videos about the shirt quality, but it's like wearing a nice good quality, thin, comfortable shirt that breathes versus a gilding shirt. It's like, no, no way, never going back.

I feel, I feel like such a you know, whenever I go up to merge tables now, I feel like such a, such a prude, you know, I'll walk up and I'll reach down and I like feel the shirt with my fingers and I'll be like, this must be gilding. I see, and I walk away. It's like, you're not judging them openly, but you're judging them. I am. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of our fans to have been like, you guys have ruined band shirts for me.

It basically said like, yeah, I mean, all I wear is large to try them shirts now, because it's tough for me to wear other things. I'm like, perfect, this system works. That's brand dedication right there. Exactly. Exactly, man, That's something that so many artists can do. And it's not that much more expensive to get good quality shirts, especially if you're printing them yourself. It's like, it's like 50 to 75 cents more per shirt if you do it yourself, and yeah, it's 100% worth it. Yeah, I will absolutely linked to both of your D. I. Y shirt printing videos in the description, because that's so important.

And I watched those and I think I told you when we were chatting on facebook, I was like, now I want to make shirts and I'm not even in the band, like I just want to make sure, because it looks so cool. It's cool and it's super simple and it's really cheap to get started. It blew my mind how easy it was to do this once I printed a couple shirts and like I figured out the process, I'm like, oh my God, I should have been doing this like from day one, this is so simple, it's dead simple, you know?

And yeah, you turn around, you print a shirt for like all of maybe $3 and then you can turn around and sell it for 15 rather than like, I don't know, buying 60 shirts and having them languish in your basement because it turns out nobody liked the teddy bear unicorn design that you came up with. Actually the teddy bear Unicorn is our number one biggest seller. It's been sold out for a long time. So that's a good thing to know. You're like, that was too specific to be well man.

I feel like we've already learned so much now it's time to get to the main topic for this episode. Now that we've learned about your history and some of the other stuff you're involved in like mad with power fest And you pitched the idea of a patreon episode. And in my mind I'm like Oh perfect timing because back on episode 77, so five weeks ago we had brian from I fight Dragons. If anyone hasn't heard that episode yet, I encourage you to, after you finish this episode, go back and listen to it.

It's lessons learned from a fan supported D. I. Y. Band and we talked extensively about how I fight Dragons uses Patreon to monetize their albums and they don't do what most people to do, just as a quick crash course in what they do, they charge people every time they release an album. So it's not monthly, it's not yearly, it's just, hey, here's our new album here, The Perks for this album. So it's Once Per Cycle, and we talked extensively about how and why they do that. But what we didn't talk about is how does the band get started on Patreon?

Which is a massive question for them. They kind of use it as an evergreen Kickstarter. They have an established audience. Most people aren't in that situation where they can be like, Hey, we're gonna get $40,000 on patreon every time we release an album. So diving into it, how did you guys get started on Patreon? And what are some of the fundamental things you've learned about growing your Patreon audience? Yeah, so, um, I've, like I said, I've always, I'm in tech, I've always been interested in technological ways to do stuff with your band and band management and all that sort of stuff.

And so when Kickstarter first came out, back in the day, you know, when Kickstarter came out, I watched what people were doing with it and I was like, oh we could, we could probably use this for our next album. But I was very, very pessimistic and I think a lot of bands are in this mindset who would give us money like this is not going to work, people don't want to throw money at some band that they've never heard of, you know, that kind of mindset. And so when I started our first Kickstarter, I set the goal level absurdly low, I said it at $700 and thinking right that it was gonna be like tooth and nail up to the last day to try to get that last 20 bucks and oh, we might have to throw in a couple of $100 of our own money and that kind of stuff to make it work.

We met the goal in 24 hours and it was like, oh, I guess crowdfunding does work real quick. Funny side story to that. One of the things when I was pitching this to the rest of the guys in the band, they were also as pessimistic as I was like, I don't know who wants to give us money. You know, we don't, we're not that big. And so I watched and listened to a bunch of stuff on how to run a successful Kickstarter. A lot of it from martin Atkins and he's like the one thing that you should do is add in a really funny stretch goal that you know, that you're not going to reach.

You know, like if we make $50,000 were all traveled to India and take a picture in front of the Taj Mahal kind of like weirdness, you know, So one of the things that I did was in my pessimistic mind, this was never going to happen. I said, Okay, if we triple our initial goal, if we get $2,100, then we're gonna do a Lord of the trident sexy calendar. We're gonna do the Men of Lords of the Trident sexy calendar and uh, we ended up finishing the campaign with $2300. So we ended up having to make a sexy calendar and to which hockey has told me that we're never doing that ever again.

I'm not allowed to do that to pitch that ever again. But you know, the longest and short of it is that a lot of bands I think are when they, when they think about this, when they think about asking people for money, they're very pessimistic because, you know, internally, you can't really see the forest from the trees, you just think of yourself as like just some random guy in their basement writing songs that maybe people kind of sort of like. But the reality of it is is if you've been a band, even a small short of time, you very likely have super fans out there and even if you don't have super fans, you have friends out there who are willing to support you just because of who you are, just because of the friendship and they want to see you succeed.

So the first hurdle, I think for most bands, in terms of getting in that Patreon mindset is getting over that fear of, you know, we're too small for this, so we're not we're not gonna make enough money, we're not gonna, nobody's gonna look at it. Kind of a thing. I talk on Patreon of some music conferences and what I say is, you know, raise your hand if you could use an extra $1000 in your band fund every month and all the hands go up and it's like, okay, keep your hands raised.

If you could use an extra $100 you know, just not 1000 but 100 and all the hands stay up. I'm like, raise your hand if you can use an extra $5 in your band fund every month. You know, all the hands stay up. It's like, yeah, we're small bands were small businesses, we could use anything, even if it's an extra dollar a month, we can use that for putting gas in the, in the tank or, or buying pizzas or something like that. And so getting out of that mindset of like, oh well such and such as making $10,000 a month, I'm never going to be there, so I shouldn't start a patreon.

I encourage people bands of all sizes of all ages, you know, in terms of how long they've been around to actually, yeah, start up your Patreon and, and let it grow with you. That's kind of like the first kind of step of getting into that Patreon mindset. So yeah, and and lessons learned, I mean there's from starting out, there's a ton, much like Kickstarter. When I started Patreon, I started it very pessimistically thinking, oh, you know, I don't think we're going to get a whole lot of money.

Um by the way, the reason that we ended up starting on Patreon is because I saw one of my favorite online comedy groups, mega 64 ended up starting up their own Patreon and their pitch was, hey, we're going to keep doing what we're doing, we're not gonna Make Mega 60 for like an exclusive thing, we're going to still put out videos all the time and they're all going to be public. But if you like what we do and you want to see us like kind of reach that next level And you want to see us be able to afford, you know, bigger and better things tossed us a buck a month or $10 a month or whatever and you can start or stop at any time and really we're just going to use this money to make mega 64 better and if you if you want to see that then yeah, it cost us a couple bucks.

And so I went I took that personally. I really like that perspective. So I took that perspective and applied it towards the trident where I said like look we're going to keep making albums, we're gonna keep playing shows. But if you want to see us do more jump on the Patreon and we'll offer some, you know, exclusive stuff that's Patreon only. And and and I did start very low. I started like with a dollar $3. 5 dollars and $10 where are like our levels and it it went wild. We we grew exponentially over the course of I don't know, you know, a couple of years, three years and we got to the point where our income and our expenditures for creating stuff for the Patreon was sort of leveling out.

So we ended up having to retool the Patreon, get rid of some prizes, add some additional prizes, and most importantly, change the prize levels in terms of what we offered. So we upped all the dollar amounts and again, pessimistic me was like, oh my God, we're going to lose so many people on the Patreon and they're going to think, oh Lord of the trans, just money grubbing and whatever. But we were very transparent about it. We told everybody like, look, you know, costs are going up, Shipping is going up.

The cost of our, you know, wonderful ring spun, gorgeous t shirts is going up and so we're going to have to charge a little bit more to just kind of keep with that. And to my surprise, absolute shock, 100% of our patrons moved over to the new tiers, There was zero complaining and actually we actually got a number of messages from people that were like, I'm so glad you did this. We always feel so bad because we're getting so much more than like we're paying in, so like I'm super happy that you've upped the pledge amounts, you know, so we can give you more money, which is like uh okay, I guess, I guess people like us alright.

But yeah, I mean there's so much, there's so many tidbits. The thing that I would say for bands that are first looking at Patreon, right, get out of that mindset of like, we can't ask people for money, we're not big enough be recognized that Patreon is a thing that will grow with you. It's not like it's not a Kickstarter, it doesn't end after 30 days, it just exists and you can grow and change it as your band grows and changes. You can add things, delete things as long as you're transparent with your fans, you can change the patreon as much as you want.

And then the third thing that people run into is like, well, I just don't I just don't know what we'd offer. I just we just don't have, you know, they look at at a Patreon like ours where we're throwing, you know, all sorts of prizes of people and they're like, we can't do that. There's no way, you know, we don't have the energy of the time or the, you know, whatever to do that. And a lot of bands think are very sort of narrow minded in this process of like what can we offer, We can only offer music or t shirts or whatever.

And the reality of it is, is a bunch of bands, even small bands, right? Have so much that they can offer potential Patreon backers. I tell people that generally there are three buckets that you want to look into merch, right? Physical or digital product. The second bucket is access. So things like hanging out things like discord access. Um maybe, you know, if you're, if you're really good at your instrument, like lessons over Skype or shout outs or video check ins or stuff like that and then the third bucket is behind the scenes content, right?

So for your higher tier Patreon backers, you can give them access to demos or show them around the green room in Norway when you're playing or you know whatever, like take a video and post it there. And those, those super fans right that you've cultivated that are at that high tier feel like they're really part of the team and they like they have the insider scoop, you know, I mean, I'm sure we would all have loved to be like, you know, hey man, did you, did you check out the new album from so and so like it's a masterpiece and then to turn around and say like, yeah, dude, I heard that three months before it was released, I've heard all the demos, I actually suggested a lyric change on this song on the third verse, which they took and they added into the song that was me.

Like if you look at the, if you look at the booklet, my name is like listed on the first page, you know, so there's so much that people can, can offer that goes well beyond physical product and music, you know I mean, and I think two people sort of put themselves into these buckets of like we're too small for this, nobody's going to care. And it's that same thing of like, you know, you have at least one super fan of your band right now, even if it's just your mom, somebody loves your band out there enough to give you five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month, or somebody just loves you enough to give you five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month.

Once you start cultivating those super fans, how cool would it be to like dive into the Patreon and and rewind the clock like three years, let's say you found, you know, for example, wouldn't it be amazing if like Iron Maiden, you got in on the ground floor of Iron Maiden, you know, back before they hit it big and you can look back, you know, three years before they're releasing, you know, such and such an album and listen to the early demos and and hear the band talk about how they're not sure if it's going to be good or if anybody is going to like it.

I think that's the draw of this for a lot of people is that, you know, they have a local band that they support or any, a regional band or even a bigger band, you know, like we fight Dragons, that when they join the Patreon, you know, they sort of start to feel like part of the team, you know, they have that insider scoop, they have that insider knowledge, you know, maybe they've got the lead singer's phone number and you can call them up, you know, I mean like what would you give to be on a first name basis with Bruce Dickinson, be able to call them up and be like, you know, yo brucie what's up?

He's just playing football in the backyard. It's a beautiful day over here in England. It's cloudy and rainy, beautiful. I mean, like, that would be amazing, right? I would ask for flying lessons. Exactly, right? Yeah, I'll take you up next time I'm going. So yeah, there's, there's so much more that you can offer. You do have super fans. And even if you don't right now, you eventually will, you know, if you're, if you're serious about growing your band, Eventually, you're going to get some crazy guy out there who's going to get a tattoo of your band and then you've got a super fan and you know, this guy's, that guy's gonna give you $15 a month, like clearly.

So. So yeah, I think there's a lot of fear involved with bands starting up patreon or uncertainty. Maybe it's a better way to say it. And the best thing to do is I mean just dive in, get your feet wet if you're making five bucks a month, that's five extra dollars a month. You've got, if you're making $0 a month, that's okay too. It doesn't cost anything to be on Patreon. So you know, try experiment, see what works and what doesn't look at the data and then, you know, change, change and adjust if you're making no money, you know, try something new, you can change your Patreon at any time.

So yeah, that's kind of a broad question to get into I think. No, I think that's great though. And before I go further I just want to say congratulations on hitting 300 patrons. Oh, thank you. Because when I did the research it was at 2 97 like I should double check this, it's been like a week and you're at 300 right now. So congrats for that, it will fluctuate too because it's you know at the beginning of every month that people get charged because we're doing a monthly thing and so you know you'll always get 10 or 20 people whose whose credit card got declined and they go oh yes sorry I gotta put in my new card kind of a thing.

So it's it's a big sign wave of like up 300 up we're under again, up 300 up we're under again. But yeah, I know it's it's it's it's been growing up until 2020 and I mean even through 2020 it's been growing quite strong for us a year to year. You know, looking back at the data and I was really surprised, really surprised when when lockdown happened and you know we were people were losing their jobs and things were very uncertain. I was expecting to take a really big hit in terms of Patreon backers and we barely lost anybody, barely lost anybody.

That was super surprising. Yeah, that's great. And I think that probably goes to show how much music means to people. It's just such a universal thing. You know, not everyone connects with the same music, but they connect with some music on some level. And that's like for a lot of people that's therapy, like this is my favorite band when I'm having a tough day, I go listen to this. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There are there are definitely some artists out there that, you know, I've gotten so much out of their music That even if I was paying him $15 a month for, you know, 20 years, I wouldn't feel like I had given enough because that's sort of art and music can be really impactful and life changing for a lot of people.

And that's why you bands out there making music get on patreon. Come on, by the way. How long his Lords of the Trident been on patreon? When did you guys launched that? I think it's been I could be wrong on this, I think it's been like four years, maybe four or five. Okay, so pretty early adopters of the platform. Yeah. Yeah. We were we were on Patreon pretty early before a lot of bands were actually doing stuff on Patreon where when it was a lot more like Youtubers and things like that.

Like I said, I mean I I really just saw what mega 64 was doing, where they were just like yo if you if you want to give us money, that's cool, if you don't that's cool too, like you don't have to. I saw that and I love that approach and I'm like, okay, so I kind of modified it towards our band. Yeah. And it's worked really. And then now there's a there's a ton of bands on Patreon and I love the fact that there are so many musical acts on Patreon that they're sort of diversifying in becoming more than just a platform for Youtubers or twitch streamers or stuff like that. Yeah.

I mean the irony there is that it was founded by a musician and musicians weren't the first people to pick up on it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it is crazy. You know, I mean when you think of like pumpkin mousse and you think that would be the first thing that he would cater towards, he'd be like, musicians get on this platform and then Youtubers are like, ooh, yeah, I think part of that might be because Jack Conte and compliments were Youtubers. Like they were musicians, but they were Youtubers.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, and they were so strong on that platform. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned in your first response here, all the different prizes and merch items and all that kind of stuff that people can get for the different tiers of being a patron. Is there any one prize or item that sticks out as the most popular among your patrons? Yeah, easily the most popular stuff is in terms of physical product, is the shirts this very much stemmed from, It was a stepping stone from printing your own shirts.

The biggest issue when you don't print your own shirts for small bands is that there are quantity limits that you have to hit. You have to do at least 60 shirts of such and such a design to make it worthwhile. Otherwise it's too expensive. When you print your own shirts, you can make two or 12 or 20 or 200 it's the same cost, you know, whether you do two or 10 or whatever. So because we were already doing that so much because we were making our shirts and we could make two or 20 or 10 or whatever.

We said when we were starting up, we'll do exclusive patreon designs, we'll do three t shirts a year, one of which we're going to sell at the merch booth, but two of which are going to be patreon only design. So the cool thing that sort of came about from that was that if you are wearing one of these Patreon shirts, a the band knows that you're a Patreon backers, so I will like laser folk. You know, if we're, if we're on tour and I'm somewhere out in California that I've never been before and some dude walks in with a Patreon shirt, I will laser focus in on this guy and I'm like, I'm gonna buy you a beer, let's talk.

And then that guy is going to be like, oh, they recognized me, they know who I am and it's going to be like an amazing experience for them and be if you see another person with a Patriot, Patriot exclusive shirt, like instantly, you know, you have something in common to talk about. You know, boom, there's your next best friend of the concert, You can go and get a beer together and talk about lords to try it. So the exclusive shirts have been great. It's also been a really, it's been a great opportunity to do like dumb inside jokes that only like super fans would really get on a shirt.

You know, sometimes you come up with these t shirt design ideas and you're like, this is so good, but only are real top tier fans would understand, I couldn't sell this at a show where people are seeing us for the first time, they'd be like, why does that shirt just say basement potatoes on it? I'm not going to buy that, but, you know, a fan to be like, oh, from, from podcast 1 63 the basement potatoes one, and I'm like, you know, so that kind of stuff, you know, it enables us to do these, these these dumb shirts that we love and our fans and our super high tier fans would love, But that, you know, we normally would never even think about printing.

So, yeah, the shirts have been really, really fantastic. I think another thing that people really enjoyed that it's not not a physical product is behind the scenes demos, right? So we are currently working on our 10th album and we are pretty much almost done recording it. We're going to finish it up by the end of june and everybody who's on the top two tiers of our Patreon has already heard completely mixed, fully fleshed out demos of the entire album. And I mean, these are these are early demos, we've re recorded and done stuff since then, it's going to sound way better when it's all done.

But essentially, these people have already heard the tracks that are coming out and they get to kind of have that badge of honor of like, oh man, you change this from the demo version so much and they have things to talk about with other fans, like, oh did you hear this and this? And this is also like our first concept album that we're ever doing. So people are already guessing at the storyline trying to put the album in order. You know, we haven't told them what the order is, It's been really, really popular.

People love getting that behind the scenes, early access, you know, demo and that kind of stuff, Beta videos and and things like that. Like behind the scenes has been really, really popular. Yeah, so that right there, you know, that's something any band can do to go back to what you're saying a few minutes ago about, you know, even bands who think they don't have content, they have content, they can put that out. Oh yeah, even if they're behind the scenes for you is just like, you take a picture of the band in the green room before you're about to go on stage, and you post that, you're like, yo, this is what the green room looks like.

Anybody could take out their phone and take a little little snippet of like, hey, we're here in the riverside bar in Omaha Nebraska, I just want to check out these cheese kurds, man. They have the craziest looking. And then, oh, here's Phil Phil, just change his bass strings for the first time in three years. How does it feel fill? It feels great. All right, cool man. You know, that you post that up on Patreon and people, people love that sort of stuff. You know, they're like, oh, I've been there.

Yeah, the cheese kurds are great, you know? Yeah. Anything that they can relate to, you know, like, ultimately that's what people want is they want to have a connection with their favorite artists and if that's a connection that they can relate to on a personal level, even better. Yeah, there's a there's a band too, I mean kind of going back into the second bucket of access, another thing that's really easy for any band to do. And there's a band that's doing this right now. Absolutely killing it, banned out of Madison here called casket robbery that I helped them set up their Patreon.

They've been really good about doing like monthly like open hangs. So they'll they'll go on discord and they'll have an area that's only, you know, if you can unlock if you're on the Patreon. And then like last night they did a virtual pizza party. So they're like yo all of our fans from across the globe, like order pizza, get it delivered, Well stream some like uh cartoons or movies or whatever and we'll just hang and chat and have a virtual pizza party together, you know, so they do stuff like that.

They do like coffee hangouts in the morning where they just, and sometimes people show up and sometimes they don't, but you can just kind of drop in if you're a fan of this band and just enjoy your coffee and just chat about anything the weather, the last album, They do that so well and that takes zero effort. Like any band could do that. Any band. Yeah, I mean, it's literally just setting up a zoom call and a way to stream it and you get to go. It's super easy. Yeah. Yeah.

That's incredible. I have one more question which you already kind of mentioned that you had to up your prices on Patreon, but have there been any other struggles with Patreon and if there were how did you overcome them? So the big struggles on Patreon, I think for a lot of creators there's a small struggle and it's more administrative struggle and it's, it's what I was talking about earlier of people's credit cards getting denied and then you feel weird about like poking them over email, like, hey, hey, your credit card was denied, Hey, could you please fix that?

One of the things that Patreon doesn't allow you to do currently is to remove people from your Patreon without like blocking them and sending them a nasty email, you know, like you've been blocked from the and, and so we have people who have had their credit cards declined for like two years who are just sitting there in limbo not receiving anything and I'd love to go in and be able to just take them out because you know, you gotta sort for them, the Excel spreadsheet when you do prizes, but anyway, that's, that's more of an administrative grape.

I think the real big problem that most people who run Patreon Deal with and we definitely deal with too is that it is a positive feedback loop of guilt money and this is a good thing, this is exactly how we've grown the patreon, but this can cause problems too. So you know, you start up your patreon and then you know a month later, boom, you're making $20 a month. So at the end of the month that money comes in and then immediately you go, oh crap, oh crap, what have I done for them lately?

Oh I gotta do something, I've gotta do something and then you go out and you create something, you make a post, you make a music video, maybe you, you know, you you put something together to offer these people that have given you money and you know oftentimes that those things will be public. You know like, oh you make another, you promised them that you'll make another Youtube video once a month at a certain level. And then people see that Youtube video and they're like, oh I gotta get on this Patreon.

So then now you're making $50 a month and then that happens, you're like, oh no, I make even more money now, I gotta make more stuff, oh crap. Uh and then you make more stuff and then the next month you're making $100 and then you're making $200 and it's this this feedback loop of like I gotta make more, I gotta make more, I gotta make more because I'm getting in this money and you get this and it gets too absurd amounts where you're making $5000 a month and you're like, oh no, like I really need to be making more stuff.

I think creators can get into that mindset because it's very easy to get into that positive feedback loop of guilt money, right, where you're like, I need to be making more stuff constantly all the time. And, and there are, you know, a lot of people have talked about Patreon burnout and I think this is an exclusive to Patreon. You know, Youtubers talk about Youtube burnout where they get big and they get bigger and bigger and then they feel like they've got to, they've got to keep creating or maybe even keep creating more in order to keep their people happy and to not lose people.

So that's, that's something that's very easy to get into. You know, at first you were just offering one t shirt a year and like a shout out and now you've got uh podcast and a weekly twitch stream and you're doing, you know, three concerts a month and you're making 50 t shirts a year and you're, you know, it ends up having having that sort of an effect, one of the ways that we combat that is once a year. Would you like a Patreon wide survey where we ask a bunch of pointed questions about, do you feel like we're doing a good enough job?

Do you feel like you're pledges is worth the money that you're spending and every year we ask them the question, okay, if we stopped doing everything on Patreon, if we, if, you know, no more shirts, no more exclusive posts, No more behind the scenes, would you pledge at the level you're pledging, would you pledge more? Would you pledge less And every year that we've done this? We've done this three years in a row. Every single year. Around 70-75% of people say they would pledge the same amount, even if we didn't give them a thing on patreon. Now.

Do I believe that? Uh, mildly, I mildly believe that, but I think, you know, It's easy for creators to see this giant lump sum of money coming in and freak out if you turn the perspective around some guy out there is giving you $5 a month And, you know, maybe really only expects one check in or one post a month or maybe he doesn't expect anything. Maybe they're just giving you the money to help support your art. And because they feel like, like we said earlier, like, they've gotten so much more out of your art than $5 a month, you know, so that that's one of the big problems that people can get into.

one of the solutions to get out of it, you know, is to recognize that even if you're making 2345 10 grand a month on Patreon, you don't always need to up your game to match that amount. And, and also I think one thing that can help out tremendously is jump on Patreon and be a patron of somebody else, especially somebody that you really admire, Like jump on and like for me it was being a patron of Mega 64. I did not care if they made a post or not. I had absolutely no care in the world, like I've gotten so much out of there so many hours of joy out of their content.

That to me like 10 bucks a month, that's absolutely nothing for what I've gotten in return. So you know, you can get out of that mindset easier if you are on both sides of the coin in terms of Patreon. Yeah, I think that's great and I know that's something that you know like you say everyone struggles with, so if people are starting a Patreon it's going to start right away as soon as they get that first patron, they're gonna say, well what do I do for content now?

It starts right there. So man, this has been amazing and I think it's been so knowledge packed and just like knowledge bombs everywhere, so thank you so much for joining us tie, I really appreciate it. Oh absolutely. And I will say, you know, to any bands out there that are, that want to go a little bit more in depth on how to set up a patreon. A I've got a whole walkthrough video on the Words of Fighting series. You can check out but be one of the things that I just openly offer is like, just hit me up, you know, email me Lords of the Trident at gmail dot com.

If you want to sit down over Skype resume or whatever and we can brainstorm for an hour and I can, you know, bring you through the whole Patreon, you know, building a Patreon from start to finish uh and and and help you set up your patriot. I'm happy to do that for free. So just hit me up Lords to try to a gmail dot com. You know, I think the more people that are that are leveraging this platform, the better off everybody is going to be. You know, it's that whole rising tide raises all all ships so feel free to hit me up if anybody out there is listening is like uh I want to know more or I don't know where to start.

Exactly Yeah well man that is super generous of you, thank you for putting that offer out there. I know that there's probably a lot of artists who are thinking about launching a Patreon and don't know where to start. So I hope they hit you up with that. Aside from that. Where can people learn more about you and Lords of the Tribe and mad with power fast you already said is mad with power fest dot com but put all your links out there where should people go? You got it?

I'm going to make it easy for everybody. The number one best place to go is just Lords of the Trident dot com. Make sure you use your most metal browser to go there. Which is probably chrome because there aren't any other browsers that are named after a metal, that's the only one that I'm aware of. If you try to use like what is it? Uh if you try to use Microsoft edge, it'll probably catch your computer on fire. Make sure you put on your strongest suit of armor that you're wearing protection that you've got your most metal browser.

Go to lourdes the trident dot com. You can also go to you know, youtube dot com slash towards the trident. We put out a lot of content over quarantine. We put out a video every week and we're going to try to keep up, you know, Probably not that but as you know, a lot of video content as much as we can, we can possibly do. Yeah, so Youtube dot com slash sort of the trident. We are on facebook facebook dot com slash or to try them on instagram twitter Snapchat, the whole shebang.

Basically if you type Lords of the Trident into google the 1st 50 pages are us and then it starts to get really weird. So just you know, that's what I recommend. But Lords the training dot com is your one stop shop for all of us. And of course if you like what you see if you go to youtube dot com slash or to try it and you're like, oh man, this handsome band full of wonderful people. I need to help support this band, go to patreon dot com slash orders to try and just pledge a buck and you get you get so much for just a dollar.

All right, well amazing. Again, tie, thank you so much for joining us. Super appreciated. I'm looking forward to this episode dropping because I think it's gonna be super useful to a ton of people so I really appreciate it. And I hope you have an awesome rest of your day. Thank you for having me. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm Yeah, that does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening and of course, big thanks to Ty christian Ak Fang von Wrathenstein from Lord of the Trident for hanging out and sharing his knowledge and advice with all of us today.

Much appreciated and man, so many great things to learn. Not only did they not take no for an answer with the festival, that was just kind of saying yeah, yeah, next year, next year and then they went and launch their own festival. Like that's huge, that is the entrepreneurial spirit that artists need to really make a go of a career in music. You know, if somebody tells, you know, okay, whatever, get back up and try again and if everyone tells, you know, make it happen on your own, that is incredible.

And of course, when it comes to Patreon, tie has so much knowledge to share. I hope that if you are considering starting a Patreon, which everyone should consider, do reach out to tie and take him up on his offer of helping you go through some strategies for Patreon because that is incredibly generous. I would think that he would charge 1602 100 bucks or some amount of money for that and he's giving it away for free. So please go hit him up for that. That's huge. If you miss the contact info in the episode, it will be on our show notes page at Bandhive dot rocks slash 82.

Aside from that, if you have any questions, please feel free to use our Bandhive Community on facebook as a resource, ask whatever music industry related questions you have there and you will get an answer from myself or somebody else in the community and most likely multiple people who are members of the group. If you're not already there, just head on over to facebook and search for banned Hive, make sure you find the group, not just the facebook page and join us. We are happy to welcome you with Arms Wide Open.

I'm making a create reference because I didn't make a band plan the whole time. But there it is with Arms Wide Open or if you want to do it the easy way, just go to Bandhive dot rocks slash group and that will automatically redirect you to our facebook community. That's all for this week. We will be back next week with another brand new episode, Tuesday at six a.m. Eastern time. Until then, I hope you all have an awesome week. Stay safe. And of course, as always, keep rockin.