Welcome to Episode 24 of the Bandhive Podcast.

Welcome to another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross, and I'm here for the first time in almost two months because we haven't recorded in a long time with Matt Hoos.

How are you today, Matt? Hey, James, I'm doing wonderful. It's a beautiful 60 degree day here in just east of Denver, Colorado, and I couldn't ask for a better morning. That's awesome. Well, man, you know, I know for the listeners. They don't understand how much I've missed talking to you because they heard you two weeks ago on episode 22. But for us, we haven't talked in like, a month and a half. Yep, it's been a while. It's a real pleasure to have you back on the show, and I actually haven't talked to Aaron in about a month.

and a half, either. So later this week I'll be recording a new episode of him, and the best news about all of this for you, the listener, is that we're finally done with the backlog of shows. This episode is being recorded on April 21st in the middle of the Cove in crisis. And it's the first episode, the first full episode we're actually going to do about the crisis. So we apologize for the delay. But we didn't want to interrupt our regular programming because, you know, all this stuff is still important for whatever happens down the road, no pun intended.

The knowledge is still knowledge that you can soak up, probably now more than ever. If you're not working right now, you have all the time in the world. Thio. Take care of your life and get things in order. And then, once that's done, listen to podcasts and educate yourself. So on that note, we're probably gonna make this a two or possibly even three parts Siri's, and we're going to cover three topics to survive the crisis with your band. The first one is staying relevant and financially viable.

The second one is education and the third one is preparation. Today we're going thio. Try to talk as much as we can about staying relevant and financially viable. Matt, I know you have some great ideas about marketing and what we can do. Thio, get through this together. Do you want to just start off with that and kind of set the framework for what people should be thinking of throughout this whole episode? Absolutely. Love Thio eso a really big thing that I kind of want to start talking about is marketing, you know, with marketing.

We've talked about it plenty of times before, and it's really what you're doing to stay relevant and stay in front of your customers eyes. There's a couple brands that I'm gonna talk about. One of them is doing this exceptionally well, and the other did it horribly with co vid. We've all seen that you know, 2020 got canceled for all musicians everywhere from you know, your little tiny guy playing acoustic guitar on a bar on Friday night up Thio the greats. You know, I've seen all sorts of tourists, shapes and sizes that have all been canceled.

This is hard for two reasons. The first reason is that not on Lee is the industry as a whole losing a ton of money 100% of its influx is now gone, but also what's gonna happen as soon as things start to reopen. Now my biggest concern with when things reopen is not that people won't be able to get shows or it's gonna be hard. My concern is that every single artist is going to try and tour, and there's only so many venues and promoters in the country. Sometimes, you know, for for those tour managers and for those booking agents that have actually booked tours before, you know the struggle that you'd love to go from.

Seattle Toe Organ Thio San Francisco Thio Sacramento Toe L. A. That's ideal, but in reality you might have to go Seattle down to San Francisco, back up to Oregon. You might have to take a day off because no venues have slot. The next day, you have to drive over toe central Oregon to try to pick up a show that you're not actually getting a guarantee for. We've all had to do those really weird Frankenstein tours. Everybody in the industry is going to be touring. And so it's gonna be up to you to make sure that you are providing a consistent content stream to your fans.

And so that's going to incentivize a promoters to be putting you on because you're you stayed relevant during Koven. And on top of that, it's really gonna set the groundwork for people coming out to your shows for picking up any new merch that you may have had designed. Um, you know, and and the music industry is the whole is hurting, but it's also affecting a lot more industries as well. Now for me, I have quite a few friends who own printing companies, and their business is almost entirely shut down not just because nobody's buying T shirts in this time, but also because 90% of their business influx came from us.

So that's kind of the cascading effect now, as an artist, there's lots of different ways that you can stay relevant. But I'm going to talk about one band that did it awesomely and then one brand that did it terribly. Now the band that did it awesome. We've talked about them before. Everybody is talking about them now. And that is the band trapped. Now for all you listeners chuckling, I'm chuckling right alongside of you because it's comical. You're talking about one band that's had one hit in 25 years, and they've quite literally been coasting off of that hit for their entire career.

All right, James, I believe you looked up well. How many streams does headstrong have? Headstrong. As of right now, just on Spotify. This is not counting any other platform has 199,377,000 and 793 streams. Their second place song has 14,531,000. So you can tell that those 14 million are just, uh, what I would call a pity. Listen, you know somebody somebody put it on to listen to headstrong, and the next song started to play, so they got the streaming royalty for that, too. Now, I'm definitely not here to talk ill on trapped in any way, shape or form, because I think that their marketing team has done something incredible.

One band that put out one hit 25 years ago should not still be being talked about today unless they have been marketing themselves perfectly. Now we also live in a society where roasting has become popular. We have the official roasts of celebrities. On TV, we have Jimmy Fallon reads mean tweets. We have JK rollings tweets. Wendy's roasts Gordon Ramsay, tearing people apart on the Internet. This is actually sought after. And so it's a very weird thing. And there's a very fine line between being a jerk and using words to cleverly shut down people that are in your face.

Now trapped hasn't been relevant forever. And for the last month, that's pretty much the only band that I've heard about. They started calling out people on social media on Twitter specifically and starting Twitter beef with all sorts of people. Initially, nobody was paying attention. But then that started to gain a little bit of traction. When guitarists like Jason Richardson got on and said, You know what? I'll challenge you to a guitar battle. And Richardson is one of the most phenomenal guitarists in the industry. And so anybody that had ever heard his music and listened to this band that had fallen off 20 years ago, it was funny to them And so then you had all these people sharing this.

And before you knew it, every band in the industry wanted to jump on the bandwagon and start roasting these guys. And it was like it was kind of funny. It was, uh, you know, for trapped. It was great marketing. And for everybody else in the industry, it was a wonderful sense of camaraderie. We all got together and everybody was chuckling and, you know, personally, I didn't get on there and roast anybody at all because I would be absolutely willing to go on tour with trapped anybody that wouldn't be is silly because the bottom line is they're part of the old music scene, which still polls, guarantees food writers all sorts of fancy stuff like that.

And so, like, I would absolutely towards them. So I don't have anything bad to say. What they did has put them in the forefront of everybody's mind. And in the last week alone they've had five million streams on headstrong. So you're talking about 1/40 of their all time streams, which means that since the day that Spotify became a thing and they put their music on, they amassed the other 195 million. But in the last week they did 1/40 of their all time streams. For a band that hasn't done anything in 25 years, that is remarkable.

The fact that you can put out a song forever ago, get online and just call a couple people out. He took some very strong stances, and I don't advocate the things that he said or how he treated people or anything like that. But I'm not entirely sure that some of that stuff wasn't premeditated because a lot of other bands ended up getting a bunch of publicity as well. I'll use M and M and M G. K as an example, M and M and M G. K had their little beef or whatever.

But what most people don't realize is that both of those songs were written and produced by the same person. All of that beef was made up. It was all fake, and all that happened is both of those artists ended up making tons and tons and tons of money, and that is where the beauty and the marketing lines is. They figured out a way to take something that everybody would talk about because it seems like high school drama and they monetized it. I don't necessarily advocate getting online, and I don't really care about telling anybody else what they are doing wrong.

That's not a good approach, you know, standing on a soapbox, saying that God hates you or that you know, it doesn't matter what your message is if you're vegan. If you're Christian, if you're atheist, if you're anti government, it doesn't matter if you're standing on a soapbox telling everybody that what they're doing is wrong. People aren't going to listen to you, period. That's never the way to change anything. Nobody went to traps tweets and said, Oh, you know what? These guys spreading this hateful message, have a good point.

I'm gonna change my opinions. No. Instead, they got on there and they started arguing. And then before you know their Twitter had, you know, tens of thousands of comments of people just, you know, challenging them to guitar ops born of Oh Cyrus made a mockery video. There have been so many bands, so many comments and so many things that have just been absolutely savage and hilarious to read the two most viral ways of spreading anything come from a comical emotion and a fearful emotion. Now, Trapped doesn't really have any ability to spread fear, but they can make something that appears funny to the viewers.

And so the funnier this thing is, the more people roll their eyes at it, the further reach it gets. Their marketing team did something that Onley massive marketing teams have done. Justin Bieber's marketing team is one of the best marketing teams on the planet, and with his bubble gum song, I don't even know what it's called. He put out a song, and it had a couple million views, and his marketing team figured out a way to put out seven other videos and increase the total number of streams on that song by 10 million views.

Now he did it with simple ways, like putting out a lyric video before he went on tour. And then he put out a music video while he was on tour, so he had built a whole bunch of hype over this song. He put up the lyric video first, so everybody knew the lyrics before his tour. So then, when he was playing, everybody was singing it. Then he put out a music video for it. Then after that, he did a tick tock remix. Then he put out on alternate video.

Then he put out a behind the scenes video. All of these things all incorporated into one single song, and they were able to take one piece of content divided into eight pieces of content and milk it for 10 times as much as he initially got from the song. These air, these air marketing strategies that are, I mean, they're next level. They're absolutely incredible. And the way that they've stayed relevant throughout all of this is truly beautiful. Now, granted, Justin Bieber is still putting out music that's consistent and relevant today.

But trapped? When's the last time trap to put out an album? Does anyone even know? I don't. But here they are. Yeah, bunch of 45 year old dudes calling kids out on Twitter and everybody knows their name, all the all the millennials, all the Gen Z kids who never listened to any of it. Guess what? You not know who trapped is. You've now probably heard headstrong because if you're in the music you've heard about the beef and you're like, What's this beef all about? That's the same way I heard about Noss.

That's the same way that I found out about it. Lives. It breathes. You know, beef is very, very, very powerful marketing tool. That's one awesome marketing thing that I've really geeked out about over this last little bit and inversely. There is another brand out there who has shot themselves in the foot during all of this. Now this is, Ah, more of a sad one, because as a band or a brand as a business in general, your goal is to put your name in front of everybody. That's really what you're doing in your building.

A brand. My goal is to take a live in Barcelona and make it a household name. Everybody knows the name Netflix. Everyone knows the name McDonald's. Everybody knows Google and Apple. How do you take a name and make it a household item? That's the goal of brand building. Well, currently we're in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The Corona Beer Company shot themselves in the foot harder than any company has ever shot themselves in the foot. When it comes to marketing due to co vid, alcohol sales have increased by 54% as of last week, it could be even higher.

Now I'm not entirely sure. As a result, all sorts of beer companies are making tons of money, except for Corona, who actually has had to close down distribution and manufacturing facilities due to the fact that nobody's buying Corona because of coronavirus. Now I ask you this. If you spend your entire career trying to put your brand the name of your brand into people's houses and then instantly the world does it, why would you buckle under pressure? Now it has a very negative connotation. Coronavirus. You share a name with something negative.

And so how do you resolve that? As far as the ignorance. You know, people thinking that coronavirus comes from Corona. You can't solve ignorance. Ignorance is forever. But what you can do is you can take something negative and spin it positive for me. I honestly thought that Corona was gonna make the biggest marketing plan in history as soon as coronavirus came out because the media effectively did for them what you work your entire life to Dio. And so why not do something like hey, for every single case of Corona beer sold will donate some of the profits toe help fight coronavirus.

For every case of Corona sold, we will pay for a test to be administered to underprivileged person or anybody. It doesn't matter. They had so many opportunities to make this awesome. Oh, Corona beer company has started purchasing Corona face masks for free distribution upon purchase of a case like, Oh, by a case of beer, get a free mask. Percentage of the profits go towards manufacturing tests. There's so many different ways that they could have taken this and spun it. And then they said, Oh, look, we have a 52% increase in sales as, ah hole in the industry and we're not getting a single piece of it, which means that some of your companies are making more than 50% because you have toe everything all evens out in the wash.

And that's one of the biggest missed opportunities in history. And my point in all of this is never miss an opportunity. That's kind of what this whole episode is gonna be about. It's like how you can take the opportunity that you've been given being strapped and locked inside of your home to come out on top to basically maximize on your potential while you're stuck in quarantine like the rest of us are. The main reason that I wanted to talk about these two brands is because you literally have, ah, brand that hasn't been relevant for years.

That jumped on an opportunity and capitalized on it. Then you have a brand that is relevant. It's a household name. Everybody knows Corona, and when they were presented with an opportunity to capitalize, they dropped it. Now, James, I know that you have actually seen some other awesome bands in the industry right now. They're really taking this opportunity to build on online following and Thio. I believe you've seen some cool merch designs as well. Would you be interested in talking about that? Yeah, definitely. Well, first of all, let me say I agree with what you're saying.

What a band or branches it to do now is so important because if you decide to say, oh, well, can't play shows can't go into the studio. Oh, well, tough whatever. That is a defeatist attitude, and that is not going to help you. You cannot look at things that way. You've got to figure it out, see what you can dio and get around it. And that's one thing that one of my favorite bands called Valley, who has done They've done a handful of live streams in the last couple weeks where they basically play a full band show as if it was an actual show just without an audience.

And they did this by renting out or making some kind of deal with their production company. So they go to the company's warehouse, set up sound and lights and do ah, mixed livestream with a full stage show, and it's amazing. The most recent one they did was for their album called Daydreams, which came out about almost 10 years ago. I think 2011 So nine years ago they played the whole album in full and then spent another hour playing their back catalog and newer songs as well. And they released a special shirt with not exactly the album art but a derivative of the album Art on it.

And they said it's on Lee available for 24 hours and then on the back is gonna be the set list that we play for this show tonight. I don't know how many they sold, but at one point they had over 1300 or maybe even 1400 people watching that live stream at one time. That is insane. This is a band who, if they're playing shows if they're headlining, they're probably going to play clubs that hold between 3 to 500 and then they do a live stream and have 1400. Now, of course, that is worldwide, but it's also a live streaming live stream doesn't really have the same appeal that a show does.

There's a lot more competition, one because everyone's live streaming and two, you're not going to a show with an audience and the excitement of being at a show. It's more like Okay, cool. We're watching a two hour music video, but it's still cool. And all of this I've tuned into a bunch of different live streams from different artists. There are only two that I've actually watched the entire thing through to completion. One was ballyhoo. The other one was my friend. Troy Mallette did a stream our venue here in Vermont.

Higher ground has been doing some really cool live streams, and they asked, Try to do one and he didn't just do a live stream from his house or anything like that. He hit up Ryan Cohen It Robot dog studio and said, Hey, I want to live stream from your studio. Can you mix it and handle the video so I could focus on playing and guess what? That's what they did and it sounded great. It was really cool. They were able to maintain social distancing because Ryan's got a nice big room so he could stand back and just set stuff up and let Troy do his thing.

And it was a really awesome stream. There's one other stream that I actually tuned into. I gotta be honest. I didn't watch the whole thing because it was a 12 hour festival, but it was really cool. And it was my friend. Thomas Gunn, who's actually a listener of the podcast, set up this festival as a benefit for the Vermont food bank, and they raised. I believe it was over $1500 over the 12 hours and every half hour they had a different artists or interview. What they would do is just have really good professional production.

Thomas Brother does live video work, so he had software to add the lower thirds and do transitions and all of that stuff, and it looked really amazing. And then they had artists just playing from home. And so it ranged from artists who we're just, you know, sitting there with a laptop webcam and MIC built in two artists who were using a mixer and had a super professional sound. And I think that was great. But what's not great is the artists who do Ah livestream on their own with bad quality because that's just gonna make people think, Well, you know what?

I'm not really going to tune in next time because it wasn't that great. If you have something like the festival behind you, that's awesome, because people are gonna say, Hey, you know, this is cool. It's part of everyone coming together. They're doing what they got to Dio. But I've seen other people that are doing a live stream every day or two with bad sound, bad video, and it's just like why? What's the point? Why should people watch. It's definitely tough, but I think right now I have tow, say, in full disclosure.

I was one of the people interviewed on the Vermont Food Bank Benefit Festival. What I said then, this was about a month ago. This is late March. The artists who do a full quality production now or the highest quality production they can. Those of the artists who will stand out as taking their music, their craft seriously. And they're the ones who are going to be able to truly seize the opportunities that this whole state home quarantine is presenting. Absolutely. I think that's a really, really good point.

I think that's fascinating about that festival. I hadn't heard about that, and that's really, really cool. I love that they, you know, that's a perfect example of somebody taking a catastrophe and creating an avenue for musicians to be the ones to help the local community. And that's super cool, especially for that money to go to a food bank, which is by itself a place that then helps other parts of the community. And so you know that that's truly a symbiotic relationship between local musicians. Even out of state musicians and a local community that speaks leaps and bounds about the integrity and the dignity of every single one of those people who interviewed, who played and then who donated, You know, to these food banks and two other people in need.

I've actually seen some really, really cool things. I kind of want to expand on what you said about the live streams you mentioned 1400 people tuning in at one time toe. Listen to Bali. Who's live stream now. Not only is that incredible, but where is everybody watching that? They're watching that on their computer. There's a single solitary bottleneck. Now, when you go play a club show, where is your merch table? Somewhere tucked in the back. How many kids at that show stopped your merch table? Every one of them?

No, Definitely not 10% of them. Maybe if you're lucky. How many times do people go up and go? I'm gonna buy a shirt. But you know what? There's six people standing at the table, so I don't wanna go up there. Or how many times do they look at your merch table? Go that emerge, guys. Not even like looking at me. I'm not gonna walk up there. I couldn't tell you how many times I've sold something to somebody just by making eye contact. And I'm not kidding about that at all.

When you are doing a live stream and you have 1400 people watching you, if you even if you have 100 people, what happens when you post a link to your online store with an exclusive T shirt? Three people see it exactly. It was like with your live stream. You can actually see who's on there. This is a way that you know exactly who is invested in your music. You can incentivize this by saying, Hey, like we're gonna do a shirt giveaway in the middle of our show as well, and it's going to go toe one of the people watching our live stream.

Oh, and that goes to this person. And if anybody else would be interested in this exclusive shirt needs to be exclusive because scarcity is what increases value. And so let's say you make 50 T shirts. You're like, this is our co vid live streaming shirt, and there's only one way to get this, and that's buying it through watching our live streams. You think that a band that has 1400 viewers at one time doesn't have 50 loyal fans now? I bet you that was 50 T shirts would get eaten up in a matter of minutes because they have a captive audience.

You have a direct channel to them. Most people have the ability to buy stuff instantly on their computer. I mean, Amazon is a very real thing in our day and age. And so the ability to buy directly from your computer screen is very simple and capitalizing on opportunity. Where you have a captive audience in a single bottleneck, everybody has to watch your set through the computer, so market to them through your computer, give them something that they want their their toe watch you. You're already satisfying one piece of their need.

Now see if you can get them to satisfy one piece of yours. Live symbiotically. Absolutely. First of all, quick update, I looked up the number of the Vermont food bank benefit that Thomas put together how much they raised. I was pretty much wrong because I said it was over 1500. It was 2475. So I was not even close. It was way higher than I thought, so that's absolutely awesome. And I just want to say, Great job Thomason, his brother and everyone else who helped put that together because that's absolutely amazing.

$2500 for the food bank. That's huge, especially right now. And then to go off what you were saying that about the element of scarcity. That's absolutely true Valley. Who did that with their shirt? They said It's only available for 24 hours on. After that, you can't order it. What's more is it was a pre order so they can print exactly as many shirts as they need, so they don't have any Overstock that goes unsold. They know. Okay, you know, out of these 1400 120 people bought the shirt. So this is how many were gonna print and each size, Because the people have put in what size they need, they are not gonna have too much stock on their hands.

What's more is even people who didn't watch the stream bought the shirt. And I know this because I bought the shirt and my fiancee who's a huge value fan but wasn't watching the stream. She was doing some other stuff. I was like, Hey, I'm gonna buy a shirt with Shipping is pretty expensive. Do you want to buy 12? And we'll split the shipping And she goes, Yeah, of course, she hadn't even seen the shirt. She comes over and like, this is it. You sure you want it? She's like, Yeah, I love that.

So two shirts sold right there and she didn't even watch this stream. Yeah, it absolutely worked. And we're both excited because neither of us has had a ballyhoo shirt before, which I mean, I was on work toward 2016 when they were on the tour. I don't know why I didn't buy one then, but I didn't. Now I finally have one, so we're both stoked. One toe. Have the super limited shirt from this show, too, because it's our first value shirt, each one of us, and three just because people enjoy giving to artists in need and ballyhoo kept pitching during the show, and it wasn't constant or spammy, but they were saying, Hey, like we have the shirt, go check it out the links in the description, and they were talking about it.

So that's another thing is so many artists are saying, Oh, virtual tip jar, please donate. Please donate. It's like, Okay, you know what some people might donate? That's great. But if you can give them something physical, something tangible in exchange for that they're going to be so much more likely to send something your way. And I have nothing against virtual tip jars like the Troy Mallette Show that I watched from the studio up here in Vermont. I tossed a couple bucks his way, but it's not the same thing.

If you keep asking for just money in exchange for playing that show, people are going to get sick of it. But if you're reminding them about a tangible product, they're not really going to care as long as you don't overdo it. And I don't want to say by any means that Troy overdid the virtual tip jar pitch like he was very good about not mentioning it too much. That's I don't want anyone to think. I'm saying he did something wrong. He absolutely didn't. He put on a great show.

My point is that if you can have a tangible product, that's better than not having a tangible product. One thing that we used to dio that worked really, really well for us when we were smaller and starting off and we didn't do it all the time. But especially when we went on tour, we would try to do it. When we had a larger crowd, we took a tip jar and said, We're going to do a giveaway. Any denomination of Bill that you have If if you don't have enough money to buy merch, that's okay.

What we want you to do is we want you to take your dollar bill out and write your name on it and then stick that dollar bill in the tip jar at the end of the show. We're gonna raffle often item, and basically we're gonna Poland into the tip jar and pull out a bill on whoever's name is on that is gonna win a free whatever. We would just say a free item, and then what we do at the end of it, we would count the money and then would be like, Oh, look, we just made an extra $30.

Well, our T shirts cost 20 bucks, and our CDs cost 10. So why don't since we made the money to cover both of those and made our profit, will raffle off two items. And everybody loves the prospect of being able to spend $1 and potentially get a shirt. And so, essentially, we would get all those loose, single dollars that nobody was actually going to do anything with any way they were gonna get lost in the laundry or thrown on the floor or spent on a chiro at the local food truck.

You were collecting all of those and putting them in your tip jar. And then you were increasing value in somebody else's life because not only were they anticipating the opportunity to win one kid when they won, they were like, I'm so excited. And then the fact that we raffle off a second item was like, Oh my gosh, this is so cool. They said they were going to raffle off one item, but they were so excited about it. They raffle off to It has worked countless times. You could do the same exact thing with streaming.

I've seen a lot of artists do it with shares and comments. If you like, share and comment this, then that enters you for a chance to win this with an audience of even 100 people. If you get 10% of that, if you get 10 of them toe like sharing comment, there's a good chance that that will bring in another 5 to 10 people. Each person has. You know, if one person buys a T shirt from you, that's 20 bucks. And if you're bringing five people in where they're forced to watch your set through the TV screen through your computer screen through your iPhone screen for your android screen, then you have a bottleneck.

You have an opportunity to capitalize on that. You have a chance to increase value in their life by raffling off an exclusive T shirt, something they can only get there. It's scarce. Maybe some people will end up one or two of them will win it, which increases demand makes people want it more because people like things to be inclusive. They wanna be, ah, part of something they don't want to stand on the outside looking in, and something as simple as a comment, and a share is no money out of their pocket.

So you know, each and every individual might not be your person that brings in your money. They might be the avenue to the person that brings in your money. So James, for example, he just used a perfect example. He watched Valley who set, talked to his friend. She did not watch the set, and she bought a shirt. That alone right there is just a testament to what you can do with online marketing what you can do from the comfort of your own home or from the comfort of a local warehouse, your production company's warehouse or whatnot.

The trick is to be constantly adapting and realizing where the money is flowing and how you can create a bridge to that money. It's all about adapting out of your current situation, figuring out who you can work with and where you can work. That's the biggest struggle with Cove. It is that we're all trapped here. I know for us in a live in Barcelona, we are in the process of doing some same things where we're getting some high quality recordings together, making some high quality videos, and we're gonna be putting those out as well.

But the goal is is that we're trying to find a way to bridge the gap from your homes to our home. All of us live in different states. Pretty much, I think two of us live in the same state. Someone are in Washington, summer in Idaho. I'm in Colorado, my guitarists, and one of my guitars is in Ohio. So we have constantly, you know, we've had so many band meetings about how we're gonna adapt what we're doing. You know, we're constantly writing music, constantly doing these videos.

And then we, you know, had this idea where we would be doing like a pig stitch type video where each one of us records our own thing. And people can watch whatever part of it they want so they can really get a more intimate feel. And drummers who are aren't necessarily interested in the vocal melodies they could watch my drummer play. There's always something to be gained, and with marketing, it's all about figuring out what and how, what can be gained and how do I gain it and the best way when you're in quarantine is to make sure that you're doing that with other people because other people are in the exact same boat is you?

I know for James and I, James and I are on different sides of the country or I'm in the middle of the country and he's over in the Northeast. That does not stop us from getting our work done. That's the same type of mentality that you have tow have when you're reaching out. And you're especially when you're marketing, because it's all about figuring out the right way to get people's attention. Absolutely. And now that I'm thinking about what you just said, I don't think we've seen each other in person since 2016.

It's been quite a few years. We were already co hosting this podcast remotely before the pandemic hit, so it shows that it's possible and all you were saying about adapting reminded me of an idea I had about a month ago when this all started and I haven't seen any band executed yet, but I would love if somebody were to try it by now. I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with Webinars. Ah, lot of those which many people have already noticed our pre recorded and they just play on a loop.

You sign up for the webinar and it plays on demand, or you give it a specific time and it's just pre recorded. Okay, whatever. I don't care if I watch a pre recorded webinar. As long as the information is good, I know there's gonna be a sales pitch at the end. Doesn't offend me. It's whatever. But putting together Ah livestream with high production value frequently is going to be very expensive. You know, it's not so expensive putting together one good quality livestream and putting it up as an evergreen webinar.

Where do you pitch your merch or a guitar lessons, or whatever it is that you can add value to people and have that up there? What's more, you can install Facebook pixel, so you can then retarget to the people who watched your webinar, which is really your live stream. In this case, you're using a webinar platform to do a live stream that people sign up for and watch, and when you pitch your product, whatever it may be, a little thing pops up in the corner saying Hey, do you want to buy this?

Here's the link because you can program that with webinar tools, depending on which ones you use. But like every webinar, you can have it pop up. You can have scarcity built in where you can say for the next two hours, show this link and then after that, show this other link saying sorry, that offer is not valid. You could only get this now like sorry, you missed out on the bonus shirt. Do you want to take a look at our other merch or by our music? That could be a potentially lucrative way for bands to do it.

I think that's genius. Thank you. I I haven't really talked about it much because I reached out some webinar platforms to find out specifically about the audio quality. Unfortunately, most webinar platforms are in mono, which is not ideal for music, and I didn't really get a response from any of them because they're all so swamped right now. So if somebody wants to take that idea and run with it, first of all, please let us know I would love to. First of all, watch it. I'd also be happy to talk to you and help you figure out how to get it set up.

But I also want to know if you find a platform that does stereo audio because that's gonna be the most important thing for a band doing a live stream as an evergreen webinar. Absolutely. That really ties into what I was saying earlier about Justin Bieber's marketing team and then them figuring out a way to squeeze another, you know, 10 million views out of one song. And that is exactly the type of thinking that you need to have in the marketing world that keeps you relevant, E I mean, if you don't, if you're gonna fall by the wayside, then you know you're gonna be like Corona Beer Company where year before you know it, you're gonna be shutting down manufacturing because you're not gonna have enough time.

You're not gonna have enough money. You're gonna be spending all of your time figuring out a way to make personal money for yourself. But if you can figure out a way to capitalize on your opportunity to make money on the Internet with exclusive T shirts with live streams, another really wonderful thing that you can do is live interviews. Different platforms make it very accessible for you to actually get in contact with your favorite artists and things like that. And as long as you as an artist are putting yourself out there, it's accessibly easy for your fans, your audience to reach you.

You know, I might get a question from a vocalist who wants to know about vocal warm ups. Or adversely, we might have a drummer who's not interested in my vocal melodies at all and just wants to know fundamental that my drummer would practice, you know, which allowed him to get his good as he is. There's different avenues that you have to explore in order to capitalize on everything. The bottom line is, it's all about connecting with your fans right now are Avenue for connecting with our fans has been relinquished and closed down indefinitely.

So you have to find a new avenue, a new platform to reach out to each and every one of these people. And then you have to have some actual way that you can monetize on it, Which is why both James and I agree that the exclusive merch idea is wonderful not to be overly sales, he about it. But the bottom line is, if you're trying to do this as a career, then you're in it for the money. You can absolutely play music for the love of it and for the necessity of money at the same time.

So don't think that you have to go back to not making a paycheck in order to make this work. What you have to do is figure out the new way to make the paycheck. Exactly. And I think being honest with people is really helpful to that's something that ballyhoo did on their stream. They said, Hey, you know, we would really appreciate it if you buy the shirt because we want to be around when this all ends so we can get back on the road. And we can only do that if you support us now by buying the shirt or donating to our PayPal.

Another thing that's wonderful about that. When you mentioned ballyhoo getting with, you know, production company and having a warehouse, they're not on Lee increasing value in your life by putting on that live stream. But they're increasing value in the lives of their production company as well, because I'm sure that they were able to throw a little bit of that money that they made to their production company. It also may be opened up the eyes of the people of the production company saying, Hey, this might actually be a way that we can utilize our warehouses when we're not needing them for different parts of the year.

And so not only does it help them adapt out of their current situation, but it also stimulates a market and stimulates thought and other people to help them adapt out of their situation as well. Yeah, I think that's a great point. They're not just supporting themselves. They're supporting the people who work with them as well. You know that production company has been hit to possibly even harder than any band because the production company works with many bands and probably local festivals or even regional festivals. So you know a band has a tour pulled out from under them.

That production company could have lost five or 10 to worse. That is really tough for them. Toe have that happened, and even if it's a production company, that only does local stuff they're still gonna lose. 10 2030 40. Who knows how many gigs? If they're doing 25 gigs a month, they could be doing even more. For all I know, I don't know anything about this company, but let's say they're doing 25 a month. Well, in a year that's gonna be let's see, Four months is 100. It's gonna be 300 gigs. That's insane. 300 gigs in a year, and that's if they only do 25 a month.

And I wouldn't be surprised if they do much more than that. So just in closing Thio touch on what you said, Matt, about the interviews and live Q and A's. That's great if I has been doing that where every couple nights one member goes up and does a Q and A for a half hour an hour so bands could do that. And obviously it's tough if you're a band who's not really made it yet. It could be tough to get that, but I've seen bands like my Friends and Infinite Signal they've done.

Kun is a few times, and at the time they had like six or 700 instagram followers, and they'd get people watching and chatting with them. And it is something that bands of pretty much any level could do, at least to a certain extent. Maybe you can't Fillon our but you can fill 10 or 15 minutes talking to some people. That's you got to do what you gotta do. We've talked to kind of, ah, a lot of negative things today. The reason that I really believe in Q and A's and things like that is because it really connects you with your fans.

It really connects you with the people that keep you doing what you're doing and that really appreciate your art form. And in a time when the entire country is undergoing a pandemic, it's heartwarming for you. For them, it increases mental health. It improves your mental health. It's a wonderful thing, and it's an opportunity for you to really develop quality relationships with a lot of people and the people that are coming to your streams. You know, we've talked about it in past episodes, having lifelong fans. When you create these avenues for those people to get in contact with you, that's really what so to speak, puts the nail in the coffin of them becoming a lifelong fan because you stepped outside of your comfort zone.

You did something new to make sure that really it was for them. And that's the beauty of it. I think that's where we should leave. This episode will have part to where we talk about education as well as preparation. I think those will probably be in one part together. But maybe this will end up being three parts. Who knows? But that will be dropping next week right here on the band. I've podcast Matt. Dude, it's been so great to talk to you again. It's been so long since I've recorded a podcast, so it's been a pleasure.

Thanks so much as always for being on the show. It's always a pleasure to be here, James. It's been great talking with you too, buddy. You stay well over there on the east side, you to stay safe. And I know you're gonna be doing some work in the garden. So good luck with that man. Will you do the same? Take care. That's it for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thank you. so much for listening. As always, it really means a lot to us. And we hope that you really have an understanding of how important it is for you as an artist to stay relevant during the ongoing crisis and after the crisis.

So there are a few things that you could do, one of which being just stay active on social media with engaging content that people want to hear. That's really the main thing. The second thing that will be talking more about next week is educating yourself and preparing yourself. So those two things well, really, it's three things really add up to creating a solid plan for yourself. Now we are going to start doing something for our listeners because we know that on the podcast, the information we give out is very general.

And while it can apply to many artists, many bands, the information isn't tailored to your specific band. So if you're interested in getting more detailed specific advice, you can head on over to Bandhive dot rocks slash coaching. There will be an application there where you can sign up for coaching with either myself with Matt or with Aaron or any combination of the three of us, and we'll each have slightly different specialties toe help you and your band further your careers during the pandemic and beyond. So thank you so much again for listening.

We hope you have a Knauss. Um, week. We'll be back next Tuesday at 6 a.m. Eastern, as always. And, of course, keep rocking.