[00:00:00] James: Welcome to episode 194 of the Bandhive Podcast it is time for another episode of the Bandhive Podcast. My name is James Cross, and I help independent artists tour smart. This week, I have a very special guest on the show, Tyler Johnson of Don't Blink Music Group. How's it going today, Tyler?

[00:00:17] Tyler: doing well, man. How about yourself?

[00:00:19] James: Glad to hear that. I'm having a great day. It's July 5th here, so we just celebrated America's independence here in the States. I'm not a big July 4th guy, but my friend's band did a Warped Tour cover set, so that was really fun.

[00:00:30] James: I went and checked that out for the festivities the other night. That said, you're up in Canada, so happy belated Canada Day. And for anyone who's listening, this episode drops on August 15th. So enjoy the time capsule of us talking about events that happened a month and a half ago.

[00:00:45] Tyler: Yeah, everybody that I basically communicate with in the music industry is also in the States, so like yesterday was kind of like an off day for me too, which was pretty nice.

[00:00:53] James: Yeah, I did like a half day. I had another podcast interview, with Elijah of Father Before Me. So [00:01:00] if you haven't heard that one yet, jump back a week. That's episode 193. It was all about setting healthy habits, which is… so important, especially for a lot of us in the music industry.

[00:01:09] James: I'm sure you can relate Tyler, like, we're kind of our own bosses, so that means we have to do the things we don't want to do.

[00:01:15] Tyler: Absolutely, I feel like in this industry you have to be super self directed. I'm also in grad school full time So you have to be super self directed there. I think that kind of carried over into my music industry mentality as well, so being able to set certain boundaries is definitely Essential when you're balancing multiple things let alone in the music industry.

[00:01:34] Tyler: So definitely relate to that

[00:01:35] James: it's just in life, so important too. Like if you don't have boundaries and healthy habits in your life, just going to stagnate. And that's. No fun. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about influencer marketing and what you did with one of your clients called In Shallows.

[00:01:51] James: They are a metalcore band out of Keene, New Hampshire, which is just down the road from me. Really. It's like an hour and a half, two hours. But before we get into that, can you share a little bit [00:02:00] about your background, how you got into the music business and do you play music yourself or you're just an industry guy like I was for so long?

[00:02:06] James: Mm

[00:02:06] Tyler: Yeah, no, just an industry guy. I dabbled in, you know, playing some different instruments for a while when I was growing up, but nothing really stuck. I have a bass guitar now that I play maybe four times a year which was a great gift at the time. Just wish I had more time to dedicate to it, but I'm just a hardcore music fan turned into somebody who wanted to be integrated into the music industry.

[00:02:27] Tyler: When I started my Ph. D. actually in 2019, this company Scene Daddy, which is, they were basically just a meme page at the time, they were looking for somebody to come in and help write news and review type articles, so my fiancée actually sent it to me. She's like, hey, you should do this, and I applied, ended up getting the position, and I think within like, three months, I had written half the content on the entire site.

[00:02:50] James: So you went hard.

[00:02:51] Tyler: I went very hard. Yeah, so the owner of scene daddy basically was like, all right What else can we get you to do? So he moved me into the managing editor role So we [00:03:00] brought on some more people to kind of oversee and then at this time we Had a lot of bands reaching out to us trying to help them promote their music and stuff So he moved me into kind of managing the business side of Scene Daddy.

[00:03:12] Tyler: So working with all these different clients, helping to promote their music. And then he was ready to pretty much tour full time. This was pre COVID. So he had moved me into basically the president. So we kind of split the company where I was running everything. And he was just kind of almost acting as a silent partner, which is not really the case now because of all the COVID stuff, of course, that we all endured for…

[00:03:33] Tyler: Three years. heh. I know. Pretty crazy to be honest. So yeah, that's, pretty much how I got my start. And then at that time, I was starting to work with a bunch of different bands that I was going to. forming really strong connections with and One of those bands was promise game who so the vocalist of promise game is colin reached out to me?

[00:03:52] Tyler: After we ran a campaign for them and was like hey, man, i'd like to start kind of this side project being able to offer like [00:04:00] booking Marketing press type services. This is something you might be interested in because I had a decent amount of experience at the time it was like right in the middle of summer last year And I was like, yeah, love to do that we had kind of formed this almost like marketplace of services the bands that come to us for like getting their music featured on like youtube channels different social influencers as well as like scene daddy stuff.

[00:04:24] Tyler: So that was through scene daddy. So then we were trying to Kind of make almost like a complimentary business where we could feed Clients into that sort of pipeline that we had already established And yeah, he was super down for it. So we started about a year ago. We've been growing like crazy ever since I think Colin is booking a hundred plus shows for I don't know 10 to 15 different bands now, we just brought on two booking assistants growing super quick, but yeah, I mostly manage the press side of things but that was my introduction into everything Yeah,

[00:04:54] James: no, appreciate it. And yeah, I was looking at the Don't Blink site the other day, which for anyone who wants to check it out is [00:05:00] don'tblinkmg. com and quite the roster there, some great bands Hostile Array, who was on the show about a month ago at the time of this airing. Let me actually pull up that episode number for anyone who wants to check it out.

[00:05:11] James: we connected through them. Saving Vice, who was on the show twice, actually. Once, I want to say back in like March or April. We recorded in March, but I think it aired in April. Let's see. Brendan Fry. That is 189, and that aired on July 11th. So if you want to go check that episode out, you can head on over to bandhive.

[00:05:31] James: rocks slash 189. That's the number 189. And also, I should mention, anything that we talk about in this episode, any artists or tools, anything like that, will all be linked in the show notes for this episode at bandhive. rocks slash 194. That's 194. anything else we mention will be right there, and you don't have to type every single thing in, you just type in the one thing and find everything else.

[00:05:53] Tyler: Nice and convenient, I love

[00:05:55] James: exactly. so, for In Shallows, which is the band we're gonna talk about today, they'll [00:06:00] be linked there as well, of course. Can you give us a little bit of background about them? You know, I already said they're a Metalcore act out of Keen, but who are they? What is this band? And, and, and. Why did you decide to do an influencer marketing campaign with their music?

[00:06:14] Tyler: In Shallows, I had known for a while because, Robbie, who's in Saving Vice, I was working with Saving Vice he actually helped with the production and recording of their first EP, which I think came out in 2021, so I've been familiar with them for a while, and they were, looking to drop this new single, Venom, they reached out to Robbie, said, do you know anybody, Robbie was obviously working with me at the time, so they came with me.

[00:06:39] Tyler: To me, it was like, hey is there anything that we can do to, um, help push this song? And I was like, Oh, absolutely. They sent it over to me. First of all, they had written a phenomenal track. This style of metalcore is 100%. You know, it speaks to my heart and soul. I'm a heavy music lover. So I was like, yes, absolutely down to help you guys out in any [00:07:00] way that I possibly can.

[00:07:01] Tyler: So they came to me just with my, for my basic kind of press packages. So for the Don't Blink, I basically run the press side of things. So we have both per campaign and kind of ongoing press contact type services. So for certain artists, I'm just acting as their ongoing publicist for anything they do.

[00:07:17] Tyler: So if people want to come to a show or anything, they can reach out to me. I can help them. Get sorted that way plus covering any of their music, but we also have the per campaign stuff So within shallows they came to me like hey help us out with this new single. I said, absolutely basically I had written a full press release for the track, pitched out to a bunch of different media outlets.

[00:07:36] Tyler: We got some good coverage in terms of press. They had a big premiere on Lamgoat, which was pretty awesome for them because that's like their perfect audience, really. Couple other big new theory media always does really well for us a couple of other ones But I also said to them, you know, it might be good to try to get your music exposed on the social influencer side of things so lot of what I've been doing through seen daddy is prioritizing these [00:08:00] viral marketing strategies because Press just straight up isn't the thing that it used to be back in the day, like before, you know, a feature on alternative press could pretty much make or break your release, but nowadays it really doesn't, no shade to all press or anything, but like, it's more of like a standard at this rate, but the stuff that's really going to take you over the edge are these, being big on social media.

[00:08:20] Tyler: That's just, kind of the society we live in at this point. So we got some good press, for them at the base, but then I was like, hey We should definitely explore these other strategies. So we got them set up with Matt bevin who is really big on tiktok and instagram just prioritizes really heavy music features just like breakdowns, whatever he's just generally funny and charismatic.

[00:08:40] Tyler: So like I love going to him for like anything feature related I was like, hey, I have this track. I think it would do really good with your audience he's like, yeah, definitely down so I think at the time that we reached out to him the track had been out for about a week He got some good engagement a couple thousand streams Monthly listeners has gone up a little bit, but it was pretty much right after Within a [00:09:00] week or so after Matt's feature, not that much, like three days to a week after Matt posted his feature, it blew up on TikTok and Instagram.

[00:09:08] Tyler: I think it had like 500, 000 views on both outlets by themselves.

[00:09:14] Tyler: And they just started to pick up right away. So they went up to like 30, 000 monthly listeners within like three weeks, almost 100, 000 streams. And I checked the stats this morning. It's almost at 150, 000 streams. They've got up over 50, 000 monthly listeners and Ask them for some of like the background stats just to talk about for today and they really triggered the spotify algorithm with us Which is pretty much the goal So, you the features brought in the extra attention and then it got added to release radar discover weekly and that brought in an extra 60 000 streams or like 50 000 streams, I think So, yeah, that's kind of been the strategy that we were looking to do.

[00:09:49] Tyler: We had done some other campaigns up to this point, smaller ones, that didn't achieve quite this level of results. They've done well, but not quite this high, but I was like, this really shows that this can [00:10:00] work. So it was, it was super cool to see for them.

[00:10:02] James: Yeah, I pulled the numbers when I was doing research for the episode. And I think, aside from the play counts, which that's fantastic, 144, 000 right now, which was 142, 000 Monday, two days ago when I did it, so basically a thousand plays a day, saw recently some stats about the amount of music on Spotify, and don't quote me on this, but something like 60% of music on Spotify never reaches a thousand plays.

[00:10:29] James: so if you're getting 144, 000, you're already in like the top 5 to 10%. That's just fantastic.

[00:10:35] Tyler: spotify is so over saturated The music industry as a whole is so over saturated So trying all these different strategies just to get a hint of attention You have to do everything you can in order to get even just grasp of that

[00:10:47] James: Agreed. And think the cool thing with that though, is if you hit a thousand, you know, you're in the top 40%, that's actually pretty good, like top 40% of all the music in the world, you see 10 musicians in a room, you're better than half of them.

[00:10:59] Tyler: gonna start [00:11:00] putting that on our press summaries. Better than half of all music on

[00:11:04] James: I love it.

[00:11:05] James: think the really interesting thing for Enceladus too was. When we were talking about planning out this episode you mentioned that before this they had a thousand monthly listeners now They have 53, 000 monthly listeners.

[00:11:17] Tyler: I was so surprised last year They put out a cover of Hollywood's bleeding and then it was two years ago from their like last original music Which was that EP? so I kind of went into this campaign like we got to manage expectations because I feel like we're gonna have to Kind of earn back a lot of the fans that may have been around from before see what we can do to gain some new ones, but people are loving this song it's performing crazy.

[00:11:40] Tyler: Well, and i've just been pushing them Lately like hey guys now that we've got 50 000 monthly listeners. We gotta follow this up. Let's go. Where's the next material?

[00:11:49] James: Absolutely, I'm just looking at their Spotify page The plays from venom are overlapping onto Hollywood's bleeding and the other songs they have like Hollywood's bleeding has [00:12:00] 30, 000 939 place almost 31, 000 I would wager that at least 000 of those have come in the last month.

[00:12:05] Tyler: I should have checked that before cuz can't really comment on that But it would be interesting if there is some like carryover I imagine there would be you know, people that listen to the track start listening to the other stuff the band has put out That's the goal anyways

[00:12:17] James: Exactly. And especially, you know, with only a thousand monthly listeners before, the odds are pretty good that most of those plays are relatively

[00:12:24] Tyler: heard those songs. Yeah for

[00:12:26] James: So probably 15, 000 is like a conservative estimate. It's just really great to see that, hey, it is trickling over to those other songs. that's Really a fantastic way to do it.

[00:12:37] James: And ultimately that just results in, 0038 cents per uh, Or sorry, no, no, 38. Yeah, it's 38 cents. It's 0038 dollars. So 38 cents, three plays is a penny, give or take. the number changes every quarter, but that's like the average that it's been historically.

[00:12:54] Tyler: yeah, not great in terms of optics in terms of money that you can make from Spotify But the [00:13:00] exposure is great. They've got a lot of new fans currently Interested in them, which is the main goal

[00:13:06] James: Exactly, and to be entirely honest, this is unrelated to the episode at hand, but honestly? I would rather take that 3 tenths of a penny from Spotify and have that trickle in over the years than have somebody spend 10 on a CD that I had to pay 6 to get made and 2 to get shipped and then I see 2 one time.

[00:13:27] James: And, if they hate it, they will never buy another CD from my band. Whereas with Spotify, they can listen to a song and be like, oh man, this sucks, I hate it. And then two years later you put something out that's new Oh, you know what? I'll check it out again. Oh my god, I love this.

[00:13:41] Tyler: The way that I look at it is, as far as I'm aware, it was never meant to be a platform to pay artists for their music. It was meant to be more of a social platform to get your music out there.

[00:13:50] Tyler: It just so happened that all of society gravitated towards listening to music on these services so I guess you kind of have to take that with a grain of salt but It wasn't meant to be like the [00:14:00] way that you're supposed to make the most amount of money from your music It was just a way to interact with your fans, which I think is doing exactly that for what it's worth It's just now we have to try to bring the revenue up if possible

[00:14:11] James: Yeah, I agree. And really, the only way to do that is to increase prices, which I would gladly pay more for Spotify. But a lot of people who are just casual listeners probably

[00:14:20] Tyler: Yep

[00:14:20] James: go

[00:14:21] Tyler: one thing that I will always pay for in life, and it's music. I need to have a constant access to music, or I just can't get anything done, so… Yeah, Spotify, I will always pay for.

[00:14:32] James: It's so worth it, yeah. one other thing before we get back to our actual topic. I think a lot of people see this artist say, I got a million plays and I got… 500. It's like, yeah, but how much did your label walk away with? that's just because you're on a bad deal with your label. that's not Spotify's fault. That's kinda your lawyer's fault.

[00:14:50] Tyler: It's a lot of the bigger artists that are sharing those sort of things where it's we assume it's kind of baked into their record label contract There's always this ongoing debate of staying independent so you can [00:15:00] retain 100 of your music Versus going with the exposure that a label can bring you It's always kind of a toss up, but i've heard more negative things about signing bad record deals than positives

[00:15:11] James: Oh yeah.

[00:15:12] James: And just like, looking at our scene, victory records. Whew.

[00:15:15] Tyler: Yeah, not a great example.

[00:15:17] James: Yeah. Even the indie labels will get you if you're not careful. This is my

[00:15:21] Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

[00:15:23] James: Yeah. But anyway, I wanted to jump back into In Shallows and talking about some of the numbers behind Venom. So you already mentioned that you had videos that were getting half a million views on TikTok and Instagram.

[00:15:34] James: That's absolutely fantastic. Did you focus mainly on larger influencers, or did you also go after smaller influencers, like micro influencers?

[00:15:44] Tyler: so I connected them with Matt and then another, influencer that I've been connected with, through Scene Daddy, I've kind of made this. list of influencers I can kind of go to for different genres of music. I can't remember the other one that I went to at this time because we're, fairly confident that it was Mats that really, like, [00:16:00] performed super well.

[00:16:00] Tyler: So shout out to Mat. But yeah, no, so we will also reach out to some of the, the smaller influencers because at the end of the day, like, even if This campaign didn't do what it did for In Shallows. What it did give you is content to share, which in today's, necessity of content creation bands nowadays have to be 50% musician, 50% social content creator just to get attention.

[00:16:26] Tyler: So having these even small influencers creating content that you can share on your own socials? Huge advantage. we have a lot of YouTube Reactor partners that we can reach out to and be like, Hey, even if you only get a couple hundred views on your video, can you still react so that we can get it out, on the socials, share that on our own end, like, stuff like that.

[00:16:44] Tyler: So there's definitely some, benefit in doing that. It's just like with the bigger ones, you tend to have a higher potential of these viral success stories, I guess.

[00:16:53] James: Yeah, absolutely. you need that cornerstone of the foundation to launch it.

[00:16:57] Tyler: It's also going to the people that are in the [00:17:00] right genre too. So certain people are just like elder emo content where it makes sense to have just like, post hardcore pop punky type style versus, you know, the influencers that are really big into the heavier music, like Orion Reacts is somebody we go to a lot, but he's mostly just like really heavy music, breakdowns galore, and that's what does well with his audience, so, going to the right people with the right stuff is also important.

[00:17:22] James: It's all about finding that niche and just focusing on that, like laser focus, being like, this is what we do.

[00:17:29] James: So, as part of the press campaign for Venom. Did you also pitch to playlists?

[00:17:34] Tyler: A little bit. We haven't, prioritized a lot of playlisting. Like, we have a lot of good partners that have good, reputable playlists that have done really well for people. It's just that when it comes to playlisting, there's also a lot of bad playlists that if you get on the wrong one, and it's like botted or something like that, then you have the potential to get kind of like your artist profile.

[00:17:56] Tyler: It doesn't look good, essentially. So we haven't [00:18:00] put so much emphasis on that, but I have some good connections that I know run good playlists that get a good amount of streams. So we do that not as like a main, Pitching, but it's still a part of it for sure.

[00:18:12] James: Yeah, okay. And then, we talked a little bit about blogs. You had the Lamgo premiere also on New Fury. Similar thing here. Were you reaching out to other blogs as well, or was it just like, Hey, we're gonna go after these two big ones. We know they're gonna love it. Let's see what we can do with these two big ones.

[00:18:29] Tyler: I have a full list of like, Many, many outlets, I couldn't tell you what the number is at this point, blogs, even big social channels, like a Scene Daddy type platform that can share content, even a little bit of like online radio, like Adobe Radio, Rock Rage Radio, stuff like that, and then podcasts, you know, like yourself, State of the Scene Podcast, we love those guys, we were partnered with them for a while, so yeah, it's, Basically, a custom press release that gets written about the track, the band, anything they may have coming up, shows, [00:19:00] whatever, that gets pitched out to our entire list of, media contacts, and then it's just following up with the people that we think would be the best fit, but it does go out to everybody in case people want to cover it, so, I think we had like 10 to 15 different placements, it's just, I tend to remember the ones that were bigger.

[00:19:17] James: you remember the big wins, and the small wins are important, but they're not necessarily the ones you remember.

[00:19:22] Tyler: And like I said, like with the press stuff, or the, kind of the blog outlet, it's not those stuff that's going to make or break the campaign. It's still important because I like to think that there's still a lot of Decision makers in the music industry that look towards those sort of things like oh, they're still talked about in lamb goaters He'll talked about on different blogs or getting reviews Just securing those sort of things to have quotes to put in your next press release is still important to have Where we've put a lot of Priority and like building if that makes sense

[00:19:49] James: absolutely. the way I like to put it is, they're all tools on your belt, but if you use just a screwdriver, you can't do anything. If you use just a hammer, you can't do anything. You have to use all the tools that you need for the [00:20:00] job. let's say you're building a cabinet, you're gonna need a screw gun, you're gonna need a planer, you're gonna need a sander, you're gonna need a paintbrush to put some finish on it, like all that stuff.

[00:20:09] James: And if you don't have that, then you're not going to go anywhere.

[00:20:12] Tyler: Absolutely, and they just kind of feed into each other, like, influencers we're reaching out to may look at, you know, the press stuff that we've already been able to secure for them, and be like, Oh, well, they're getting talked about here, maybe I should, react to the song, or I should include it in my content, it's definitely like a feed forward mechanism, which means we try to do a little bit of everything. exactly how you put it.

[00:20:32] James: what about paid ads? Were there any paid ads being run for this song, you know, Instagram story ads or something like that?

[00:20:39] Tyler: As far as I'm aware, there was no direct paid advertising. There were some, like, features that we did pay for, which I guess is like a sense of, paid advertisement, but not in the sense of like, A straight up Facebook or Instagram ad directing you to Spotify. It was more of like a, Hey, can you react to our content?

[00:20:58] Tyler: We'd be willing to give [00:21:00] you X amount of dollars.

[00:21:01] James: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:21:03] Tyler: there, there was some paid stuff, but not like a direct advertising. I checked in with the band. I was like, Hey, are you guys running anything on your end? Because these stats are crazy. And they're like, no. I was like,

[00:21:13] James: That's

[00:21:13] Tyler: whatever. Yeah.

[00:21:15] James: I'm glad I asked that just makes it all the more impressive that like this worked without paying Facebook Instagram, whatever Twitter ads, tiktok ads, because all the time. I see like an ad pops up. It's like listening to our latest single and you know, how often I listen to it almost never just like, there's this ad and I'm, you know, probably listening to music already. And then going from Instagram to Spotify is always a pain because it opens up in the Instagram browser where it doesn't keep you signed in. So like the whole thing is just a pain. And I'm much more likely if somebody that I follow says, Hey, I have new music coming out, pre save it.

[00:21:48] James: I'll go pre save it. And then when it drops, I'll listen. But it's just like an ad saying, go listen right now. It's like, no, I'm, doing stuff right now. I don't have three minutes. Even if that doing stuff is just scrolling [00:22:00] through looking for inspiration for content or something.

[00:22:02] Tyler: There is, obviously, benefit to doing the ads in certain Situations like we've run Instagram ad campaigns and they've done very well bringing, you know attraction to different clients through scene daddy We haven't done any through don't blink at this point.

[00:22:16] Tyler: This was like our first big big campaign that we ever really did So not a whole lot of examples through don't blink But through scene daddy who definitely does some advertising and it can be good and it can be bad like there's definitely wins and losses

[00:22:29] James: absolutely. Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm not entirely against ads. I think there's a very good place for them, especially if you can like retarget people who visited your merch store

[00:22:37] Tyler: That's the big thing

[00:22:38] James: Hey, come back. You left this in your cart. Buy something

[00:22:41] Tyler: If you're doing ads properly, then it's worth it. Like we, we used to, I, so I was also involved with Push Digital Marketing. More on the back end side of things. So, Push is run by Adam from Dropout Kings. And I connected with him through Scene Daddy a while ago. So he had brought me on to do some like client [00:23:00] onboarding stuff for them.

[00:23:01] Tyler: But they were huge proponents of Gets. The Facebook pixel set up immediately for your band, because if you start doing any sort of advertising, you're going to track all that data through the Facebook pixel. And then the retargeting is really where ads become effective. So you run like the initial ads to get the data.

[00:23:19] Tyler: And then once you have the data, then you can target like crazy. And I've definitely seen it from their end. So if you're doing ads properly, Yes, if you're just doing random Facebook boosts, you're probably not using your money effectively.

[00:23:32] James: And especially boosts are not effective. it's not a good option. It's the option that Facebook sells to people who are clueless.

[00:23:39] Tyler: it's because it's easy it's so easy to do you're inclined to spend the money on it But it's not gonna give you the sort of long term Results that you're looking for. So you really have to Go to somebody who knows what they're doing and there's a lot of people out there. So

[00:23:51] James: Yeah, it's the ROI isn't there if you just boost

[00:23:53] James: now obviously I'm not going to ask you specifics for what this campaign costs for In Shallows. But in [00:24:00] general, keeping in mind as of, July, prices may change in the future when people listen to this episode. If somebody were to reach out to you for a basic campaign, can you give us a ballpark estimate of what it might cost?

[00:24:11] Tyler: Yeah, for sure. For anybody that's interested, reach out to me uh, tj. dontblink on uh, my socials. A little plug there. for, like, our basic press campaigns, we're in the 300 to 400 range just for, like, a one off campaign. That's just basic, creating the press release, blasting it out to the list of contacts that we've established at this point, following up for, you know, the month before.

[00:24:35] Tyler: Month or two afterwards, making sure we try to get as much out of that as possible from that campaign. And then we do, as I mentioned at the beginning, more of the ongoing, publicist services, which kind of varies depending how long you want to work with me. So if anybody's interested, definitely reach out to me or just go direct to the Don't Blink website.

[00:24:52] Tyler: And then I think In Shallows put roughly an extra… I don't want to get the number wrong. So I want to say it was around [00:25:00] two to four hundred again It kind of like almost doubling what they came to me for in terms of like extra stuff that we did I think it was on the lower end of that. It wasn't as much as I thought it was going to be So yeah, no, I think it was like a pretty reasonably priced campaign given the results that they were able to achieve so Yeah, once we posted the results from that campaign, I had, four or five different brands reaching out to me, they're like, Give me the In Shallows package.

[00:25:22] Tyler: I was like, okay, here we go.

[00:25:24] James: Yeah, well, I'd love to do a follow up in the future to see how it went for those bands as well, because I think that might be something that would be really curious to see if this, it's basically a case study. We're looking at one band and hey, we got these amazing results. And even if the results aren't this fantastic, if it's even like a third of that, that would be such a good option for every single band out there to do.

[00:25:47] James: Now, depending on the genre, maybe not, if you're doing… classical music. I don't know if it would work.

[00:25:52] James: But if you're doing anything in the, like, alt scene, I think it would be a wise decision to at least try it. Especially, bands will go and [00:26:00] spend five to ten thousand dollars on recording, but they won't drop a thousand dollars on marketing.

[00:26:03] James: And I'm just like, guys, what are you doing?

[00:26:06] Tyler: 100%. I look at it the same way. It's like, you gotta put in the same amount of effort as making the music. And to actually like selling it because you can't just rely on people to come and be like, oh wow, this is really good I'm so glad I stumbled upon this

[00:26:18] James: exactly. It's not Field of Dreams.

[00:26:20] Tyler: Right, yeah for sure

[00:26:21] James: what it comes down to. It's, just not, that's not how it works.

[00:26:23] Tyler: I can guarantee, like, these sort of results aren't going to happen exactly like this again because, it's not gonna be the same type of song.

[00:26:31] Tyler: It's not gonna be the same sort of, like, viral moment that we can create a content piece around. It's not even the same genre that we can go to the same people. So, like, It's kind of going into being like manage your expectations, but look at what we can achieve like there is the massive potential here So we may as well explore.

[00:26:48] Tyler: It's kind of how we look at

[00:26:49] James: It's, it's within the realm of possibility.

[00:26:51] James: could happen, probably won't, but you never know. and I think that's

[00:26:55] Tyler: happen and we're hoping it'll happen again Yep

[00:26:57] James: Yeah, and the whole music industry is all about [00:27:00] testing. there's an old saying, it's the rule of ten. For every ten albums a major label would put out, one would be successful.

[00:27:06] James: Or recoup,

[00:27:07] Tyler: that just goes back to what we were talking about before, of just this market being so oversaturated, you have to put as much as you can into just getting any bit of that attention, and in this case it absolutely worked out.

[00:27:17] James: agreed. And I think it also illustrates the importance of, hey, if you do something and it doesn't blow up. Don't give up. if even the major labels drop ten albums and only one of those ten is successful from a commercial standpoint, if you're an indie band and you drop an album and it doesn't get the traction you wanted, try another one.

[00:27:38] James: But change something up. Like, don't just do the same thing again. You have to make those changes and just keep testing to see what works with your ideal audience.

[00:27:47] Tyler: Yeah, definitely agree. There's a lot more examples of things not working in the music industry than working, obviously, because there's… Yeah, I mean, even if you look at modern festival lineups, it's always basically the same bands, and they're [00:28:00] getting attention for, a certain reason, because they're the ones that created something that people are really interested in, but for every example of those people that are headlining those festivals, There's thousands of other bands that aren't I don't know if that's like a pessimistic outlook, Hopefully it's more keep trying because the potential is there If you find the right niche the right sound things can work out.

[00:28:22] Tyler: 100

[00:28:25] James: No, it's, totally agree with that. And the other thing is, if you keep your expectations low, then when something goes amazingly well, you're stoked. But if you expect, Oh, this is going to be the song that blows us up. We're going to be headlining Coachella next year.

[00:28:37] James: It's like, no, that's not going to happen. and then you get, you know, 100, 000 plays on it, and you're disappointed. It's like, 100, 000 plays would be fantastic.

[00:28:46] Tyler: Hey, we're in the top 40% of all artists.

[00:28:48] James: Yeah. really what it comes down to. Managing expectations. So that way you can take the wins, even if they're not massive wins. Which I would [00:29:00] call 100, 000 plays a pretty massive win. But it's not massive compared to headlining Coachella.

[00:29:04] Tyler: obviously, yeah.

[00:29:05] James: know, you set your goals in moderation, you're going to have a much better time, and you're going to be much more fulfilled personally, in my opinion.

[00:29:13] Tyler: Yeah, I definitely agree like I went into the in shallows campaign like let's just see what we can do with this Like the song is great. It has the potential i'm, just not sure like how much we're really going to achieve with this and then It was huge and now it's like their biggest song by far on spotify.

[00:29:30] Tyler: It's like tripled or four times the streams of the next closest song which is obviously huge so no managing expectations is important, but

[00:29:38] James: so important.

[00:29:39] James: so kind of wrap things up here. I wanna reiterate, don't blink mg.com is the Don't Blink site. You're also on Instagram at Don't. Blink MG in shallows is in shallows.com I believe they're also at in shallows everywhere. looked around and I was stupid and forgot to write it down,

[00:29:57] Tyler: it's at in shallows I'm pretty sure. for I think every [00:30:00] social platform. I think one of them is at I Shallows. but yeah. If you look up in shallows, you should be able to find them

[00:30:05] James: Perfect, yeah. it's always nice when the bands have the handle for their name instead of like, Incello's Official, Incello's Band. speaking of somebody who's in a band that has official at the end, I'm just like, Great.

[00:30:19] Tyler: I always like, whenever we're posting something, we have to guess where it's like, okay, band is like the band name. At band or official or their location like New Hampshire or something like that

[00:30:29] James: Yeah. Incello's NH. Like, Great, now if you want to find the band you have to know where they're from. What if you don't remember or you never knew?

[00:30:37] James: All right. Well Tyler man, thank you so much for coming on the show before I let you go Do you have any parting thoughts whether it's about what we talked about today anything else you want our audience to know about?

[00:30:45] James: let me just give you the floor anything you want to say.

[00:30:47] Tyler: Yeah, I think that We've pretty much conveyed you know, these sort of marketing strategies have huge potential as something we're prioritizing. If there's any artists out there that are looking to get involved with a company [00:31:00] that can act as pretty much just like an offshoot of their team.

[00:31:03] Tyler: Like we just try to fill gaps wherever is needed. So if you need a booking agent that can come and be a tour manager for you, but also create. Show flyers. You know, Colin is the guy. So come reach out to us if you're tired of pitching to press outlets and getting new traction or just don't know who to reach out to.

[00:31:20] Tyler: Come talk to me. In any case, you can submit a request through our website, which I know we've plugged a couple of times. Thank you so much for having me on. It was a great opportunity to kind of get our name out there a little more and talk about some of the things that we're involved in and talk about in shallows.

[00:31:34] Tyler: You've had this huge success. So thank you so much.

[00:31:36] James: Oh my pleasure I love nerding out about this. So thank you so much Tyler, and I hope you have a great rest of your day

[00:31:41] Tyler: You as well.