Welcome to Episode 67 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross, and I'm here with Matt Hoos, the frontman of Alive in Barcelona, who is distracting me by holding his incredibly cute puppy named Dargöl.

How are you doing today, Matt? You know I'm doing pretty great. I'm sitting here cuddle in my pup, recording a podcast. It hasn't started to snow yet, so it's like I've got my cup of coffee. I'm, like, all set for the morning. That sounds great, man. I really miss the days of having a puppy And don't get me wrong. I love my dog. He's almost 17. But there's just something about a puppy just looking at me like, uh, they're almost pitiful. Yeah, I know. You told me the story a couple minutes ago of how you got him.

But if you want to tell the listeners, you have the stage, my friend. Absolutely. We took a trip up to North Idaho to see some friends and my band mates and whatnot. While we were up there, my best friend's wife happened to pick up a new puppy, and they had one left in the litter that it was an up flitter. So anybody that really loved dogs and wanted a dog had the opportunity to go get one. And so this was the last one, and my son really loved his sister.

And so we went and picked him up, and he ended up just being the perfect little edition. So he's pretty good dog. Yeah, he looks really great to ride back through a snowstorm, though, so he's happy to be back in the house. So I bet, Well, it's awesome that you guys have another addition to the family, and he looks like he's going to be a great pup for you guys. I can only hope. Yeah, fingers grass, man. Well, as much as I would love to spend 45 minutes talking about dogs and puppies and all that, unfortunately, that's not what we're here to do, and instead we're going to talk about the music business and specifically today we're going to cover the topic of Oh my God, he's just walking to the back of the room and I can't focus.

And for the record, this is staying in the podcast because I just love dogs and that needs to be known anyway. Today we are going to be talking about setting your budget for your next release. This is a big topic, and I'm kind of surprised we haven't really done an episode on it before. We've touched on it here and there. But we haven't dedicated a full episode to this because it is incredibly important to have that budget in place before you start the process of recording and releasing any material so that you can understand how you can best allocate the funds and resources that are available to you.

The biggest issue I see is that way too many artists spend all the money they have on recording and mixing, and then they forget marketing. They might even forget mastering, who knows? But that does happen quite frequently. The main issue, though, is forgetting marketing when you are going into your process of producing a new release, whether it's a single or an EP an album, the general idea is that half of your budget should go towards the production and half of your budget should go to marketing. So if you had $2000 for an album, which is incredibly low, I'll get to that next.

Only 1000 is available for recording and mixing and mastering, and the other 1000 should be set aside for marketing. But if you have $2000 and that's your total budget for the entire project from start to finish, your album probably just became an EP. Now I know there's going to be pushed back there from artists who are saying no, I have all these songs. I want to do an album. Well, first of all, I think about what we said in Episode 57 which was all about quality over quantity. Back on that episode, Matt, you shared an example about four years strong without going too far into details.

Since we already talked about it just a couple of weeks ago, do you want to give, like a 10,000 ft view of what that was. Absolutely, they put out a record that they had some songs on there that were just pure gold, and then they ran out of the budget and their label said We need a full album. They only had the budget for a high quality EP. And so on their full length album, they had 10 11 songs, and only about five or six of them had the proper budget for mixing, mastering and engineering.

And so when the final product came out, they ended up having a whole lot of bad press. Just because continuity wise, If you listen to the album cover to cover, you can just instantly here when the quality drops off generally for me, even when I go back and listen to those old albums, that's pretty much where I stopped listening to it and not because I don't have an appreciation for the other songs, but simply because the quality changes halfway through the album. Had they just put out an EP, they would have been golden, but obviously they were in a contract that didn't allow them to do that or inversely had they budgeted a little bit more money, then you know, they could have carried out an entire album cycle with the same producer, the same engineers.

And in the end, the product would have been much, much better. Yeah, exactly. So this is why if you don't have a large budget, you shouldn't do an album. You should do an EP or maybe even just a single. If you have $500 you're not going to get an EP for $500. There's no way you'd be lucky to get a well produced and recorded single for $500. It's doable, but it's not going to be amazing. It is absolutely going to be better than if you do an EP for $500. There's no question about that now, keeping in mind that we're starting off with this example of $2000.

1000 for the production, 1000 for marketing. Let's say you do an EP for $1000 again. Not going to be great, but which is better having a really bad album where you paid $200 a song for the production and then you don't have anything for marketing or you have not quite so bad e. P. With, like three or four songs where you paid 2 50 to 300 per song and then spend $1000 on marketing. You have the choice between an album that you've recorded and no one knows about, or an e p that potentially thousands of people are streaming.

You tell me what's better? I would love to hear from listeners here. What do you think is better? Head on over to our Facebook group at Band, I've got rocks slash group that will take you there directly or to search for banned hive on Facebook. And look for the discussion thread for this episode and let us know. Now again, realistically speaking, $2000 is not a huge budget. It's not even a big budget. It's a minuscule budget. Think about it this way. If you're a four piece band, that's $500 per person.

And if you spend two years working on this album, that's less than a dollar a day. During those two years, you can set aside more than that. I have faith in you. I have confidence in you that you can spend more for something that is maybe not your life's work, but the sum of two years of your life going into this album that's worth more than $500. Let's bump your budget up to $5000 from 2000, which is still not a huge budget. It sounds like a lot, but it's not.

That's $1250 per member. If you're a four piece, as far as your budgets go, that's basically a drop in the bucket for a full release. If that's all you can scrape together, that's still only a dollar 71 per day for two years, which, if you're earning $15 an hour, that's 83 hours of work in two years. That's literally two extra weeks worth of shifts that you can pick up so you have the option of taking less time off. Or if you have paid vacation, that's great. By all means. Take that.

But ultimately, if you have the kind of job where you can pick up extra hours, if you're serving tables or something like that, that's great. Pick up some extra shifts, get some tips. Do that. If you have gig work. If you're doing lift uber task rabbit up work any of that kind of stuff, take on some extra projects, take on some extra clients. You can find a way to do this and get together that money so you can have a realistic album or EP budget. If you're truly passionate about your music, you will be able to do that now.

The other thing is that there's chances. And when I say chances, I mean quite realistically that you can cut down in non essential areas of your life to help bolster that. So you don't have to put in two weeks extra work you can cut down on non essential things. Like with covid. A lot of people aren't going out to bars or clubs anymore, Okay? So make sure that money that you're saving by not going out all the time is money that you're setting aside for your band or post pandemic.

Say, hey, you know what? Instead of getting three drinks at the bar, I'm going to get to and I'm going to save that money. Every single night I go to the bar, and that way I can set that towards my recording fund. If you can get more than $5000. That's great, and I honestly recommend it because $5000 is not a large budget for an E p at all. But for the purposes of this episode, we're going to work with $5000 because it's a nice round number that is easy to do mental gymnastics with to do the math, and that's gonna be split to 2500 for production and 2500 for marketing.

We're not factoring in the cost of physical media like CDs and vinyl, because those would come out of your merch budget and don't necessarily relate to your production or marketing budget. And you also have to consider that a lot of vans aren't doing those these days at all. So to keep it simple, if you're just gonna do a streaming release, we're not going to talk about those numbers. So, Matt, I think at this point I'll hand it off to you and have you jump in and start talking about budgeting the recording process. Excellent.

Yeah, so you know, with recording musicians and we're all guilty of this. We write these songs and we're like, man this is gonna be great. You pour your heart and soul into a song, you maybe even take a lot of extra time to make sure each and every note is exactly how you want it. And then you go to the studio and you're like, Oh, well, I want to do this for as cheap as possible. I want to cut down on recording costs. I want to cut down on mixing costs.

I want to cut down on mastering costs. This is not the area to cut down on costs when you're at a part in your career where you have to bring other professionals in to make your product better money talks and business is business. If you're gonna be working with somebody who's actually taken the time to perfect their craft, that costs money. If you're gonna be working with these people coming in with a small budget, you're already shooting yourself in the foot. If you try to record mix and master a song for $250 so we're gonna go back to that $5000 figure.

We're going to assume that half of it goes towards marketing and half of it goes towards the actual production. And if you want to record a full length album, let's say 10 songs. That's $250 per song. You are not going to get a great song, honestly, for 250 bucks like you, probably just tracking it. Even still, that's like pretty good. I can't even think of the last time. We only paid $250 for even just tracking the very first single that we as a band ever recorded. And this was as the persevering promise.

Like forever ago. We paid $1000 for that song just for that one single. Now, obviously, if you're doing more at a time, you're gonna end up getting discounts and things like that. And there's We've talked about an episodes past where you can compartmentalize things. You can have one person to tracking a different engineer, you know, doing, mixing and mastering. But the point is, all of these people are going to cost money. If you have $250 per song, you're not going to get a great product. 250 bucks isn't even really enough for a mix for a lot of producers like you're looking at a mid level producer and you'll probably still get a good product.

But it's not going to be Brad Blackwell. It's not going to be Joey Sturgis. It cost us $10,000 just to re master our album, and that was just a re master. So there's a small point of reference for you. The higher your budget goes, the better years product's gonna sound and it's you know, as long as you're working with a producer who you know is credible and engineers who know what they're doing, you're going to get something you know better than you could have imagined. But remember to set the bar high, because if you do what four year strong did and you set the bar high and you run out of your budget and then you're like, Well, crap, I only have, like, four songs and we're out of money.

Then what do you do? Do you leave the studio? Do you leave the creative environment to go back to work to try to make more money? You know, it's always better to over budget and to make sure you have a surplus of money because things never, ever, ever go according to plan. When you're in the studio, there's always mishaps. There's always extra time between like Oh, maybe you want a different guitar tone. Maybe you gotta change heads. There's so many different things some producers charge by the hour.

Some charge by the song. It's very important to make sure that you've got all of your ducks in a row when you're going in and doing this. If you're up in your budget, say to like $500 per song now you're gonna be really starting to get into the realm of like, professionals. You know, these are going to be the guys where it's like, Yeah, $500 per song. That makes sense. You know you can go get a 10 track album, probably for less than $5000 just because you're gonna be doing all 10 songs.

But it's important to remember that when you set out to budget this, the more money that you have, the more flexible you're going to be, the more options you will have. So we talked about in Episode 57 why quality over quantity is incredibly important and It's not always true. You get your quality from your quantity. But the real focus is, as we like to say, Start with high quality and then kind of figure out where you can cut things out. If you find your budget dipping under $500 per song, it's pretty much a good idea to revisit your priorities, maybe release fewer songs instead of saying, Hey, I'm gonna put out a 10 song album.

Well, if you can record six songs that are incredible and four songs that are just okay, don't record the four songs. Don't release the four songs You're going to shoot yourself in the foot You're gonna four years strong And I'm saying that as somebody who loves for years strong, I could put their albums on. Repeat with the exception of that album, because the change in production it's tough. So when you go into the studio or when you're preparing to go into the studio and you're calling producers, you're trying to get ideas of how much it's gonna cost and how you're gonna do your budget.

There's some important questions that you need to keep in the forefront of your mind. Earlier on. I mentioned that some producers are hourly and summer by the song. So this is recording cost. Are you paying a project rate? Where you paying an hourly rate? If you're paying an hourly rate, what is the estimated amount of time for the project? Are you well practiced? Do you know every single note in that song? Perfectly. Have you played it so many times that you physically can't get it wrong? Amateurs practice until they get it right.

Professionals practice until they cannot get it wrong. Either way, you must be prepared. You need to knock it out quickly. And in the end, you're producers happy because he's like, Wow, I didn't have to sit here and track this one guitar part 75 times. And then on top of that, once you hear it, so many blasted times you get to the end of it. You're like, I hate this guitar part, like I've been playing it so many times or you get to the end. You're like, Man, I hate this guitar tone.

Now when you're not practicing, you're not prepared. It's costing you more money. It taxes on your love of your own music. If you're not practiced, then by the time you get to releasing your product, you're going to hate it because you'll have played it so many times that you're just sick of it. We played with Alien Ant Farm one time, and their lead singer was literally just miserable every time they had to play their one hit smooth criminal the cover. They shot themselves in the foot. They released a cover as their very first single ever, and consequently that's the only song anybody ever wants to hear from them.

And he's been playing it for 10, 15 years now, and it's the only song people want to hear, so he's miserable of it. Now they're well practiced. It sounds good live, but it was one of those things where it's just like after a long period of time, these things get taxing on you. So you want to make sure that like you're well practiced, you're in love with your music and you tackle it head on mixing. You can always do this with the same person who tracks your album. You can do it with someone else.

Sometimes it's nice to have fresh ears on things like this. You get one person to the recording, the tracking. You get another person to do mixing or mastering. Or you can even separate those as well. One question you need to keep in mind when you're going into the studio. Is Is this the engineer that we're going to be mastering and mixing with? Or if not, you need to make sure that you've stayed in contact with whatever engineer you're working with and you have their quote. Cost needs to always be at the forefront of your mind, and sometimes you can get a hole in house deal.

Maybe one guy does everything, and that's going to be cheaper. That's where you're gonna get your $500 per song or your $250 per song. It's generally going to be all in house. Generally, once you start to go to different people, it's like this guy might track for $300 a song or this guy's gonna mix each song for $500 or whatever, and you're gonna need to basically write down all these figures and get all these variables and put them in a spreadsheet, and then that will help you really get to your bottom dollar and figure out exactly what it is that you need.

Once you've kind of got a basic outline, it's like you have your recording costs. You're mixing costs. You're mastering costs. Now there are a couple other hidden costs and things like that, you know, which we'll get to later. If you need studio musicians, you know that's an extra cost. If you have features on your album, sometimes people charge for that. If you have travel expenses, that's another one. So if you need to travel to your studio, those are things that are related to the album. But that's not money that you're handing to your producer, so we'll talk about those things later.

But basically you need to be having good conversations with your engineers. You both need to have a very clear outline of what you're tackling. How many songs like Are You Just re amping? Things have already done the tracking and they just need to re and stuff. Are you doing fresh tracking? Are you coming in with demos? Are you not coming in with demos? Every single one of these factors is going to contribute to how much time you're spending in the studio and ultimately, how much it's going to cost when you're recording your full length album.

Yeah, absolutely. And even for the people who work on a project rate, whether that's mixing or mastering or even recording, there will be limits in place. So, for example, when I do mixing, I'm somewhere north of 2 50. It all depends on the project. I'm not going to say an exact number, but north of 2 50 and I'll be the first to admit I'm a good engineer, but I'm not great. I'm not amazing. If you want amazing, I can point you to people. But it's going to be a lot more than what I charge when I do a mixing project, I say you've got three revisions.

I will send you a rough mix to make sure that our visions are aligned for the song. Once you approve that, I will make some little tweaks and give you the first mix, and from that point you can request revisions three times 99% of the time. Everybody's happy with two revisions, sometimes three. But after that, if somebody wants another revision, I say, Okay, look, you know what? I can't do more revisions on this unless you know if it's something that was my fault. Obviously, I'll do a revision.

No problem, because that's my fault. But if it's just another change that you thought of or you went and showed the song to, you know, your boyfriend or girlfriend or whoever and they said, Oh, well, actually, you know what? I think the vocalist should come up. It's like Okay, well, you could have showed them the first mix and told me back then. But you wait until you've used up all three divisions and now you tell me, Well, I'm sorry. That's not my fault. I've spent a bunch of time on this already.

Now that you have new changes that's going to cost you extra, and then I move over to an hourly rate, and that's what a lot of engineers do for recording. A lot of engineers will say, Hey, I will record these 10 songs and it'll cost this much as long as we don't go over eight days in the studio or five days in the studio or whatever limit that they set for that project because otherwise people could go in and say, Well, we're gonna do 10 songs, but it's gonna take us three days to do every single song And a project that the engineer thought was going to take a week takes a month.

And that's why engineers who have been burned in the past most likely we'll have these limits in place. And so understanding all these elements of the deal is very important. But just to break things down in general, I would say that 80% of your production budget should go to your producer tracking engineer and mixing engineer. And then the remaining 20% will go to mastering. And that's, you know, assuming that the mastering engineer is not also the mixing engineer, and it's not also the recording engineer. Yeah, it's definitely important to keep at the forefront of your mind that hidden costs in the music industry are hourly costs.

If you're changing strings while you have studio musicians in the studio, you're paying them an hourly rate. It's incredibly important to know exactly what you're doing. A lot of people will literally storyboard. They will get a white board and they will write every one of their tracks down what parts they have recorded for them, and they will literally make a grid, and they will go through it piece by piece to make sure that every single duck is in a row. All of the I's are dotted. All of the T s are crossed because if they don't, you could literally take a $50,000 album and turn it into $100,000 album really, really quickly if you're not prepared. Absolutely.

And this goes back to the episode you mentioned earlier Matt number 16, which is how you can save thousands on your next album. And in that episode we covered these things. Exactly. And so if you want to listen to that, that's at Band. I've got Rocks slash 16, and the other episode map that you mentioned about quality over quantity can be found at Band. I've got rocks slash 57. That's 57 both great episodes to listen back, and we've got a couple more episode references here. As we shift over to the marketing side of things.

Realistically, there are tons of different ways that you can market your music. Some of them will be more successful than others. But there's no rule about how to do this, because it really depends on who you are and what your music is. You know, if a rock band or let's say, a punk band went and advertised in an E. D M magazine, that's not going to work, most likely, I mean, maybe it would. Maybe if Skrillex advertised his rock band from first to last in an E. D. M magazine.

Maybe that would work because there's crossover just like a f I their side project black, all black, all of a their side project Black Audio, which is E. D. M. Or maybe not E D M. But like electronica, they have a lot of crossover with rock fans who like a F I. And they're like, Oh, I'll check out black audio And that's people who might not even like electronica. They like black audio, but like I said, there's a lot of different ways to do it. Not all of them are going to be right.

Not all of them are gonna be wrong. You're going to have to use good old trial and error to see what works for you. Before we jump into this, I want to shout out another episode. Matt, This is actually the first episode that you did on the podcast after your intro episode. It's episode number eight, which you can find at Band. I've got rocks slash eight, and it's called digital marketing for bands in the roaring 20 twenties. So diving into digital marketing do you want to take over, man?

Yeah, I always like marketing. What is marketing? Marketing is testing. You're taking your product and you're figuring out what markets it works it now. Like you were saying, James, you know, if you're a rock band and you're going to market your product to an E. D M crowd, well, that's probably not your market. And so you need to re evaluate where you are. Marketing. That's all marketing is. Is testing these different markets to see if your product works there and, like you were saying, there's all sorts of ways that you can do it.

You can start with the most basic paid advertisements. OK, we've all been on Facebook. We've all been on YouTube. We've all been on all sorts of sites that have little pop up ads that either on screen ads or their your own video ad. These are all things paid for by people people trying to market their products to you while you're watching, said video. Or while you're scrolling on your Facebook feed, use paid advertisements. If you're not using paid advertisements, then you're not getting the metrics that you need for basically reinvesting and retargeting.

If you don't know who your number one fans are, you need to advertise so that you can start finding them. So obviously, if you're playing shows like every day and you see the same people every day, you can very easily identify those. But how do you identify those online? We've talked about pixel and how to use pixel in the past and how you can literally set up a pixel on your websites so that you can see the people who are coming to visit your website. You can see what products they're coming in looking at, and then you can use a paid advertisement to advertise directly to those people, and you can advertise the products that they were looking at.

Maybe you just have a CD, okay? And they're like I want the C D. But I don't have money for it now. Well, maybe in two weeks. It's black Friday and you're gonna do a bundle deal. So now you saw that, like 10 people came to your website. They looked at your album and you're selling it for 10 bucks. Well, now you have a bundle deal That's a T shirt and a CD for $20. Well, now, maybe those people who are on the fence about it before now they can get more value for their money.

And then you can basically use a paid advertisement to push your music to the people who are already visiting you. And voila! Then everybody's happy. You know, you're starting to develop good quality relationships with the people who are already looking for your products, and on top of that, you're creating a better value. Add for them because they're going to get more for their dollar. So paid advertisement is really, really, really powerful, and you can purchase ads all over the place. Whatever magazine is your favorite like to press, you can purchase ad space in there, you can purchase a centerfold in there.

It costs money, but money talks That's how the business world works. You go look at some magazine. An all time low is on the cover that was paid for now. Granted, they might be able to receive a cheaper deal than somebody else because that ad being on the front of the magazine might also end up bringing in some revenue for that business. And that's the benefit of getting larger and larger and larger is that more avenues and more opportunities will be available to you. But it's most important to know that everybody pays for anything.

When you hear a song on the radio, there is at least a minimum of $100,000 behind it minimum. You cannot get your music on mainstream radio for less than 100 grand. Now you can get it on college radio. You can get it on substations. You can get it on affiliate stations. There's other ways around that. But I mean, I'm talking like top 40 when you hear Taylor Swift when you hear Drake when you hear Justin Bieber like these songs are all $100,000 plus songs, and so when people are like Oh, man, this person made millions of dollars on this album.

It's like, Yes, so what? Do you have any idea how much money they paid out in order to be able to have that opportunity? The weekend paid over a million dollars for the production set up at the halftime show this year over a million dollars for production. That's what came out of his pocket, not including what his label paid, not including what the NFL paid. There are so many factors that go into these things, and the more money that gets pumped into something, the better it gets.

And that's just how it works. So keep in mind that this is why we say we don't cut corners when it comes to paying money for these things because you need a high quality product and you need to market it well. If your product sucks, then no one will buy it. And if your product cannot be found, then no one will buy it. These are literally the two most important things in getting your product to market. One other thing that can go into your marketing budget, photos, videos, small clips of you and just things that you're doing in the studio.

This is, like, really, really important because this is extra content that, like keeps people in the loop. It keeps those true die hard fans actively engaged as your audience. You know that people are like, Man, I really want to hear what's going on in the studio with Alive in Barcelona right now. If we actually have studio updates, then they can, and it doesn't have to be super in depth or super incredible or anything like that. And a lot of the time you don't necessarily want to be releasing those videos like while you're in the studio.

But you do want to be gathering that content so like it might be a good idea in your budget to have, like a videographer or a photographer or somebody that comes in who is like their whole job is just to generate content for you. And then when you actually get around to your release cycle and when you're recording an album, you don't necessarily know when it's gonna come out still, so that's why you don't want to rush to get those videos out. But if you have that content, then when it comes time for your actual album cycle to start.

Then you could actually start putting out some of these videos. And you can really be like, Wow, this is, you know, you're building this anticipation for your release. All of that is kind of wrapped up into bringing other people on the outside in You can also, you know, pick your song to bloggers Spotify playlists, YouTubers, influencers of any kind. Tiktokers influencers are influencers because they interact with their audience. And so being able to interact with these people, for the most part, is not that difficult. And if you're pushing your music to them and you're being respectful, nice trying to develop quality relationships with them, as these are people that you work with potentially.

So just like you would want to be nice to your producer, just like you would want to be nice to the person taking photos and editing your material. You also want to be nice to the people that can potentially grow your audience and grow your fan base larger than you could have imagined. In short, there's no wrong way to advertise. There's no wrong way to market, but it all starts with having a budget if you're going, I'm going to put $10 into Facebook marketing for my album. Exactly.

That's literally laughable. Now, if you're gonna put $10 a day into your Facebook marketing now, you're actually going to see some real growth. And on top of that, like if any of you guys haven't dabbled and paid advertisements, you need to start instantly. You need to figure out how they work. You need to figure out what happens if I put $10 pumped in at over the course of an hour in the U. S. Okay, what happens if I put $10 over the course of an hour in the UK and you should be able to look at those metrics and see which one is different?

See which one is more beneficial. And if you actually have analytics setup, you actually have your pixel set up on your website like you're supposed to. You'll actually be able to return to these things and say, Hey, look, I paid $10 in both of these places for an hour long campaign in the United States. It got me 50 listeners in the UK It got me 500 listeners Where are you going? To put your money. Next, you're going to go back to the UK and for good reason. So without this data that you get from marketing, if you don't have that, you don't know where to go.

When you hear about giant companies pouring tons and tons of money into marketing, like some of the time that marketing falls flat on its face. But that is an operating cost that is the cost of doing business. If you don't market, then your product isn't in the market. If your product isn't in the market, then people can't buy it. When you go to Safeway, they have to have a product in the store for you to purchase it. This is the same concept. So start with paid advertisements, reach out to people, reach out to bloggers, reach out to videographers.

Maybe you actually have had somebody in your inbox that you didn't even realize from a few months ago. That was like, Hey, I really like your music. I'd like to write a little piece on it for the my college radio station. Utilize that every single person who's interested in your project bring them in and then, on top of that, the people who aren't interested necessarily and working for your project for free start paying them, get people involved. When you get people involved, the marketing process becomes much, much better.

If I have $10,000 for an album and then I also want another $10,000 for marketing. Whatever your budget is, 50% of it at least should go towards marketing just like we say, like 50% of your time in the studio is going to go towards vocals. Well, 50% of your money is going to go towards marketing if you have these dreams of grandeur, and you're saying we're gonna record 10 songs blah, blah, blah this it's going to cost this much money, and you get in there and things are taken longer than expected. Be willing to trim the fat call the hurt.

You have to be able to make those hard decisions in your business because otherwise you're gonna end up being talked about by two random guys on a podcast saying, Don't before you're strong and it's absolutely true. Yeah, I think the main thing here is that it can be overwhelming to drop so much money into one release. But if you think about everything that goes into it, it's absolutely worth it. So you don't become four year strong and I to love for years strong, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

And ironically, we keep mentioning for years strong. They also had something good that kind of happened to them because they already had some good groundwork laid before they released that album. They had press. When that album came out, they didn't pay for the press. The press was bad press. The headline of the article was, It must suck to be four years strong right now, and that was because set your goals, put out an album, and this person was basically saying, Set your goals did what four years strong does and they did it better.

Well, the reason they said that is because four years strong production quality wasn't that good. And then what did four years strong do? The next album that they put out cover to cover was perfect production, and it was the best album they ever put out, and so they almost had a little bit of a fire lit underneath them to incentivize them, sounding better because they ended up having a lot of bad press. They wrote a song called It Must Suck to Before Your Strong right Now, and their lyrics in the chorus are Don't fix it if it hasn't broken yet.

Don't regret it if it hasn't happened yet, and that's what they were saying back to these people who were critiquing their music. But you know what? That critique was really powerful for them because they put a product to market that was not complete. They cut corners, and then they got a bunch of backlash for it. Now that could have been the end of their career. But they learned from it, and they decided that they were never again going to put out an album that was not polished and perfect.

And because the second you're putting out a product that's not perfect, that's your reputation that's on the line. You're either marketing your product, your marketing, your reputation, so make sure that it's a quality product that you're putting out because people listen to that. I mean, they're listening to you. They equate you with your product and so if you want people to go back and buy more. Well, you got to make sure it's quality. Yeah, Sounds like that was a giant reality check for them. And the reality checks message was, Hey, you need to set your goals.

Oh, that was awful. I love it. Mm. That does it for this episode of the band, I've podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening this week as well as every week. I just created a calculator that shows you exactly how many streams you would need on all of the most popular platforms, whether it's Spotify, apple music or any of the plethora of other platforms out there to equal one sale of a physical copy. Be that CD vinyl, whatever. You plug in your numbers for what it costs to produce those physical copies and how much you plan on selling them for and how many songs are on that album, and it will do the math for you and tell you how many streams you need.

So if you want to check that out, head on over to Bandhive dot rocks slash calculator, and you can see exactly how many streams you need. I think it's really cool tool to show that. Yes, Spotify needs to pay more, but they're not the worst. There are plenty of other services that pay even less than Spotify, and there's one who might surprise you as being the literal worst. Go check it out Bandhive dot rocks slash calculator. We'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m.

Eastern and I am looking forward to this one because it's all about finding the right people to work on your next studio release. So it kind of goes hand in hand with this one that was all about budgeting for a release. Until then, we hope you have an awesome week. Stay safe and, of course, as always, keep rocking.