Ari Herstand:
Until you understand what your goals are and what your ultimate why is, then you really have no idea what you should be doing. So that's step one is, "What are my interests? What are my goals, six-month, one-year, and five-year goals?" And then once you set those up, identify if they're authentically you, or if they're goals that other people are throwing at you. And if these goals actually resonate with you and you feel at peace with them, then you can reverse engineer them. Then you figure out, "Okay, how do I achieve these goals?" And then you start to put it in the work.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry, with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry, and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. I'm super excited to be here today with Ari Herstand. Ari is a musician, songwriter, author, actor, and a blogger based in LA. He's been called the poster child of the DIY musician by Forbes, a pretty cool statement. He's the author of a bestselling book, How to Make It in the New Music Business: Practical Tips on Building a Loyal Following and Making a Living As a Musician. He also has a podcast called The New Music Business, which is awesome and I definitely recommend checking out. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about just the state of the music business right now and where we're heading, and talk a little bit about like release strategies and some of the common challenges and the common opportunities that Ari is seeing nowadays.
So, Ari, thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Ari Herstand:
Totally. It's great to be here. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Oh yeah. One thing I'd love to start with is, for anyone that's listening to this right now who hasn't connected with you before, could you just share a little bit about who you are and how you got started with Ari's Take and everything you've accomplished to this point?

Ari Herstand:
Sure. Yeah. So I've been a musician my whole life. I actually went to college initially, I went to the University of Minnesota to be a high school band director, and I was studying classical trumpet there. And I realized very early that year that I didn't want to be a high school music teacher. And I started performing around the University of Minnesota coffee houses and doing solo acoustic shows for the first time ever. In high school, I was in a ska band and did that whole thing, and I was in jazz band, and choir, and musicals, and all that stuff. But that first year of college, I started playing out solo shows and I felt like I found my calling, like something awoke in me that first performance that I had that was unlike anything I had felt before, and I realized that I wanted to pursue a performing singer songwriter career.
So I told my parents I was dropping out college to become a rock star, and that didn't really jive with them. So we compromised and we found a music industry school in the Twin Cities where I transferred to and studied music, business and songwriting. It was just an associate's program, I was in and out in three semesters. This was around 2005 or so, just to give a little lay of the landscape, at that point, the music industry was in free fall. This was post Napster, iTunes had just launched, Facebook was just still with colleges, MySpace was starting to pop right then, pre-YouTube, pre-Twitter, pre obviously Instagram.

Everything I learned in that music business education was the history of how the music industry used to work. We read Donald [Parson's 00:03:48] book, and that was like, "Oh, first thing you do is you get a record deal." I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool." They're like, "Yeah, you can't have a music career unless you have a record deal or a manager and a booking agent and a publisher." I'm like, "Okay." So I finished school and I was like, "All right. Well, I was taught in my music business education that I need a record deal to have a music career." So I'm like, "Where's my record deal? I'm ready to start my music career. Where's my deal?"

That was the thing that was so funny to me, it was like, they didn't teach you how to get a deal, they just said you need one to start a music career. So I was like, "All right, well, this... " They taught us how to negotiate one. It was like, "Oh, I know that when I get offered my deal on page 74, I'm going to want to strike that controlled composition clause." It's like, "Great. I know how to negotiate a record deal, but where's my deal?" So I realized I had two options, I could continue to just sit around and wait and hope that some deal was magically going to appear in my lap because nobody told me how to get one, or I could just do what I love doing, which was performing music and playing and just figuring out how to potentially turn that into a career.

So I chose the latter. And over the years, I, without a label, without a manager, without a booking agent, I was in the Twin Cities still, and I started selling out venues all around the Midwest. I was drawing 800 people or so to my Minneapolis shows, hometown shows. I was getting songs placed on TV shows and commercials. I was charting in the Top 10 on iTunes. I was doing the thing. I was making a living playing music and having some pretty decent success without much support at all from the industry at large. And after a while, people started asking me, "How are you doing all this without a manager, without a label?" And I would get back to them, and then word spread, "If you have a question about the music business, go ask Ari."

My inbox got flooded and I eventually didn't have time to get back to everybody, but I was taking note of all the most frequently asked questions, and I started the blog, started Ari's Take on 2012. And basically, everything I was learning, I would put up on the blog. And this was because I just wanted to share the information with the musician community out there. I don't believe in competition in the music industry, I believe that a rising tide lifts all ships. And if I knew something or learned something or got like taken advantage by a club promoter, then I'm like, "Hey, don't work with this person. This is what happened. Guess what? You should do this, don't do this."

Or when I got my song placed on One-Tree Hill, I'm like, "Hey, here's how I got my song placed on a TV show, and you should try these tactics too." There's enough money and fans and success to go around for everybody, I didn't want to hoard that information and be like, "Ha-ha, I figured it out. Good luck, suckers." And so I just put up everything I learned on Ari's Take. And it took off, I think, because there really wasn't anything else out there like it, there wasn't another musician writing about how they were making a music career work or just giving advice to other people on what they were learning.

The only advice columns for DIY musicians at the time were written by companies looking to gain customers. So you had to read those articles with a skeptical eye like, "Is this accurate or they want me to pay them money for something or another?" I wasn't charging. I didn't start Ari's Take as a business venture, I literally just started it to share the information, and for the first three years. I didn't make any money on it. That wasn't the goal. There was no advertising, there was no like sign up for this or that or buy this or that, it was literally just to help the music community while I ran my own career. But then I got offered, because the blog took off, I got offered writing gigs for Music Connection magazine, American Songwriter, Digital Music News, [inaudible 00:07:38], CD Baby, TuneCore.

I was just like writing now for these publications, which now gave me access to talk to anyone in the music industry that I wanted. Before, I was just some musician with a blog and no one in the industry cared about me or would sit down with me. But now, I had an digitalmusicnews.com email, and they would sit down with me. So I started interviewing hundreds of people, movers and shakers of the industry, top to bottom, left to right. And I gathered all that information. And now it wasn't just my experiences I was sharing. Now, when I would sit down with these people, I'm like, "Well, I'm the only DIY musician that has access to this person at this label or this management company, or this music supervisor, or this person at Spotify or anyone."

So I felt this immense responsibility to ask them the questions that all musicians have. I was like, "All right, well, I guess it's my duty now to ask them the questions that musicians have and no one gets to ask them." So I would then write about that. I took all that information, and then musicians came to me. They were like, "Hey, I read all your blog posts. It's great. But what is out there that can help me connect the dots? I want a book, what book should I read?" And I read all the music business books out there, like I mentioned, Parson's book which people unfortunately still call the industry Bible, except it's 30 years old and the industry has changed a little bit in 30 years, but everyone still turns to that as like, "That's the book you should read."

Which I'm like, "No, that's not the book you should read, unless you're already a superstar, then yes, you can read that book." I'm like, "I've read all the music business books out there, and unfortunately, none of them are talking about what's happening right now." With my hundreds of interviews I was doing, I was learning all these amazing stories about how all these artists were making a living, a really good living in music doing it their own way. And so I'm like, "All right, well, I feel I have to write this book because there's literally no one else out there that is in my position, who's a working musician, has that musician empathy. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not going to be talking at you in legalese like all these other books. And I've access to interview anybody I want, and I have a platform."

So that's why I wrote How To Make It In The New Music Business. And then it grew from there. And I'm trying to keep that updated every three years or so as the industry changes. And then yeah, the podcast came out because all these interviews that I was conducting with people were private, and I'm like, "Man, I should have just hit record because these interviews are great." So that's why we launched the podcast so people could just get that glimpse into the play-by-play of how these experts were speaking. So, yeah, that's a long way. I don't even remember the question, but that's how I got started.

Michael Walker:
That's fantastic, man. That's so cool. And it's just another reminder of... It seems like a lot of your journey, you didn't start out thinking like, "Oh, I want to build this business." It was really just about providing value and being of service and taking what you're already doing and documenting it and sharing it. It seems like that's something I see reflected all the time, is that, the people who end up with platforms, the people who end up accomplishing things like what you've accomplished, tend to have this mindset where there's folks on like, "How can I be of the most service?" And what you said too, in terms of like, isn't that same like the crazy piece of just being human in 2021 in terms of, things are changing so quickly, something that was written 30 years ago...
30 years in the grand scheme of things is really not very much time at all, but then it's like next 10 years, every three years, things are changing so quickly.

Ari Herstand:
30 years ago there was no internet, let alone Spotify or YouTube or Instagram or TikTok? Things in music seem to change so drastically and just keeping up is daunting in and of itself.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, dude, it's insane. Yeah. The analogy that I always think of in terms of that idea of keeping current is that, it feels like a lot of people, we're all surfers and it's like we're trying to catch a wave that's already passed like 30 years ago, like you're talking about, and you can spend a lot of time and energy. Just because something worked for someone 30 years ago trying to catch this old wave. But if you're smart and you pay attention to people like you and just see, what's the lay of land right now? And look behind you a little bit, just look ahead and be like, "Yeah, what are the cresting waves that are coming up? What's happening?" You feel what's happening and you swim along with it, then you can get this boost of momentum where you just happen to catch it.

And I know for Paradise Fears, a big part of that boost for us and catching the wave was when YouTube first came out and we had a strategy on YouTube, we got about 24 million streams. And a big piece of that was just that we were swimming along with the current at that time, but it may or may not be the best strategy of people nowadays. So I think it's really, really important to have your finger on the pulse and be connected to communities like what you're doing. At the time of recording this, there's clearly some massive things that are happening with like the pandemic and people being stuck at home, not being able to rely on live shows. 

And also, part of longer-term, a bigger movement is just like the internet in general and being able to leverage these tools, to be able to connect with people. What do you see like right now, some of the biggest opportunities or biggest challenges that artists are struggling with right now, and now that we can't necessarily rely on live shows, what would you recommend for people to be able to continue to have a successful music career?

Ari Herstand:
Yeah, I think it just goes along with... In general, in the new music business, it is a very exciting time. I feel like we are in this Renaissance era in the history of the music industry where artists now do not have to give up ownership and control to the labels like they did before, they don't have to give up all the rights. They don't even have to give up really many of them to succeed these days. And the industry is evolving that way. That being said, because there isn't one clear pathway to success and one clear way to make a music career happen like there was 30 years ago, 30 years ago, you could write the book on it and say, "Hey, do this X, Y, and Z, and boom, you're either successful if you sell boatloads of records or you're a failure if you don't sell boatloads of records." That was it.

And now, it's like, all right, there isn't just one way to make music happen anymore, there are 100 ways to make the music happen now, and it's based on, what are your interests? What are your strengths? Like you said, Paradise Fears caught the YouTube wave. That was great because you guys gravitated towards that, and at the time, YouTube was something that resonated with you and your audience and something that you took to. There's always these trends and these themes and everything. I've heard people throughout the year saying, especially during that, mid-2010s or so like, "Oh, you've got to do the YouTube thing. Look at all these bands that succeed on YouTube."

I had a lot of my friends were YouTuber, they were the YouTube stars of the 2010s, '11, '12, '13, '14, that kind of thing. And I'm like, "Oh, let me team up with them and I'll see how they're doing it or whatever." And I did some collabs with these YouTubers and I realized what it took, and I'm like, "Wow, I hate this, I don't want to do this." If this is what a music career is, I don't want to have it," because it was almost a full-time job of them creating these YouTube videos, these cover videos and like recording and finding the space and doing that. I'm like, "Man, I really don't like this at all." And that's the beautiful thing, I could have a career without actually looking and focusing on YouTube. And that's the thing.

So where we're at right now, there, isn't just one way to make a music career happen, there are 100 ways to make a music career habit. That can be inspiring and exciting, but also daunting and scary because no one's saying, "You have to do this." Because if someone told me like, "Oh, you have to do this, do this." And then I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. That's great. I don't have to think, I just do what they tell me to do." But if you don't know what someone's strengths or interests are, then you don't know how to advise them. When anyone comes to me and says like, "What should I do?" Whether we're talking about pandemic era, live touring era, any era in the last couple of years, just like, "What do I do?"
I'll tell them, "I have absolutely no idea what you should do, because I don't know what your strengths are, I don't know what your music sounds like, I don't know what interests you, I don't know what you love, what you hate. There is no answer to that." So if anybody says, "This is what you should do, get on TikTok." You're like, "No, you have no idea what you're talking about." Because maybe you're targeting 45-year-olds, don't go on TikTok if that's your fan base. So if someone's like, "Oh, you got to be on TikTok." It's like, "Well, no, you don't know what my music sounds like, you don't what know my interests are, you don't know anything about me." That's not the answer for everybody, it's not a catchall.
And so I think like where we're at now , it's important to understand the landscape. So like yes, live streaming has exploded over the last year. I just have the VP of music at Twitch on The New Music Business on my podcast, and he revealed this incredible statistic. He said that musicians who are making over $50,000 on Twitch are doing so from just 183 fans, that's crazy. 183, 183 fans for the musicians that are making over $50,000 a year on Twitch. So now I know everyone who's listening to this is like, "Oh my God, I've got to start a Twitch account." I was like, "Maybe." But let me break that down what that actually means. The people who are successful on Twitch, they don't just go on Twitch once and like do a live stream for 43 minutes and it's like, "Wait, only seven people showed up? Man, this sucks. I don't understand."

The thing is like, you have to figure out what you want to do, make a goal for that, and then pursue that goal full in, all in. You can't give up after the first try. No one's successful on Twitch after one stream. The people who are successful on Twitch, it doesn't start really connecting for them after like the 10th or 15th or 20th live stream, and then you're like, "Oh, I get how this is going?" They become a member of the Twitch community, they start interacting with other Twitch streamers. They spend a lot of their time, not actually streaming, but enjoying others and becoming a member of that community and getting to know the etiquette and how people are communicating on the platform.
And that's the thing. It's the same with TikTok. It's like, "Yeah, okay. If you want to grow on TikTok, all right, it's not going to happen for you after the first, second, fifth, 10th, 15th TikTok post you make, but it might happen after the 50th. Now, do you have that tenacity?" That's why I say it's important to set goals. If your goal is, "In six months, I want to have a million likes on TikTok." That's very feasible. You could absolutely do that. But then you have to spend a good amount of your time figuring out how you're going to do that. You want to reverse engineer that. But once you set a goal, before you actually start pursuing that goal, ask yourself why, "Why do I want this?"

Because I think we're in this era right now where everybody is saying, "I should do this." There's a lot of shoulds. "Oh, I should do this because people are saying it's important," but like really get to the why, the core of your why. Because there's a lot of vanity metrics out there right now, likes on TikTok, followers on TikTok, monthly listeners on Spotify, streams on Spotify, views on YouTube, like watchers on Twitch. But what is your ultimate goal? And I think you don't just want to set a six-month goal, you'll also want to set a five-year goal. Is your ultimate goal to be TikTok famous? TikTok is probably going to die in five years or at least it's going to be less relevant than it... It definitely will be less relevant than it is right now. That's just the trend of how social media platforms work. We've seen this over the last 15 years.

But what is your ultimate goal? I would imagine your ultimate goal is to have a long-term successful music career. That's probably the ultimate goal. So then you break that down. It's like, "Okay, now, why do I want TikTok viewers? Or why do I want Twitch streamers?" It's like, "Okay, well maybe I want a fan base. I want to make money from my music." Okay, cool. Well, there's many different ways to make money from your music if that's your goal. But then you should be really like, "Well, what do I love about it? Do I love performing? Do I love making videos? Do I love recording? Do I love making goofy little 30-second TikTok things? Does that resonate with me? What do I love to do? What are my strengths? Am I good at video editing? Am I good at recording? Am I good at performing? What are my strengths? What do I want? What do I love?"

There's a lot of musicians I know who they don't want to perform, they don't want to play live, and honestly, they don't even want to build a fan base necessarily. That's not what their interests are. And they make really good livings doing behind the scenes work, whether they're producers or engineers or write for sync, or their composers. That's okay too. So there isn't really just one way to do it. And when anyone says, "Oh my gosh, TikTok is hot right now, you should be TikTok. All the labels are signing TikTok stars or Twitch. You make $50,000 from 183 people. I should do Twitch."
Maybe, maybe you should, but until you understand what your goals are and what your ultimate why is, then you really have no idea what you should be doing. So that's step one, is what are my interests? What are my goals, six-month, one-year five-year goals." And then once you set those up, identify if they're authentically you or if they're goals that other people are throwing at you.  And if these goals actually resonate with you and you feel at peace with them, then you can reverse engineer them. Then you figure out, "Okay, how do I achieve these goals?" And then you start to put it in the work.

Michael Walker:
Oh, what's up guys. So quick intermission from the podcast. I can tell you about an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public, that we normally reserve for our $5,000 clients that we work personally. This is a presentation called Six Steps to Explode Your Fanbase and Make a Profit With Your Music Online. And specifically, we're going to walk through how to build a paid traffic and automated funnel, that's going to allow you to grow your fan base online, and the system is designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music.

We've invested over $130,000 in the past year to test out different traffic sources and different offers, and really see what's working best right now for musicians. And so I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. And so if that's something you're interested in, in the description, there should be a little link that you can click on to go get that.
The other thing I wanted to mention is, if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating a new podcast is if people click subscribe, then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear, and so that'll help us reach a lot more people. So if you're getting value from this and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you clicking the subscribe button. All right, let's get back to the podcast.

So good, dude. I feel like you're dropping two truth bombs on the podcast right now, I'm looking for cover. A couple of things that popped up. I'm a geek for analogies. So whenever I hear things like this, analogies pop out. And a couple of the ones that really stuck out to me about what you just shared is, one thing I really appreciate about you is how you're acknowledging that there's not necessarily like a one-size-fits all approach because we're all different and we have different interests, different goals, different values. And it's sort of like, if you went to a doctor's office and then you walk in and immediately they're like, "Here's your medicine," and you didn't have a chance to be like, "I'm hurting in this way," or they didn't like diagnose the problem, then you wouldn't trust the doctor, right?
So you shouldn't trust anyone who just without listening to where you're at, is trying to diagnose where you're at.

Ari Herstand:
I love that analogy. That's a great one. That's really good. Yes. Perfect.

Michael Walker:
Another analogy that popped up, and I think this is so relevant, and so important when you talked about setting goals. And once you set the goals, also checking in with yourself, "Why do I have this goal? Is this my goal? Is this what I should be doing? Is this is what people are talking about?" The analogy that came up was, and this goes along with the ability like, once you have a goal to stick with it, because it's unlikely that the first time that you start going for it, you're just going to hit the goal. It's kind of like if you're going to shoot a basketball for the first time and the goal is the hoop and you're going to throw the basketball at the hoop, it's unlikely that you're going to throw it and just the first shot, swish, it just swishes.

It takes time. And as long as you have that goal... If you don't have a goal, then you might be throwing the basketball around in any direction, you're never going to... But if you have a goal, that's good, you can aim for it. And if you miss a little bit to the right or you miss a little bit to the left, you have a feedback mechanism to determine, are you on the right track or not?

Ari Herstand:
That's brilliant. And also sometimes, the first time that anybody throws a basketball at a hoop, they make it, and it's luck. And so there is definitely some luck in there with all of this. Like Ari's Take launched to Ari's Take a couple months ago because we were like, "All right, let's... " I was very resistant to it, but my 21-year-old operations coordinator, she's like, "We should really... " I'm like, "You know what, you tell me what to do, we'll try this out. If the community, the Ari's Take community is on there and they can find value through this, then I'm happy to try this out." And I'm like, "You lead this. You can lead this project." So we had four followers and the second TikTok, we posted got 100,000 views.
So like that's also luck, a the algorithm took it and did a certain thing there. We haven't had 100,000 since, so it's like, yes, we learned from that and we learned from all of this, and it's like a constant learning process as you're posting these videos. But that also happens sometimes. And I see this, and unfortunately, I see it with music, an artist very early on in the career catches a trend or one of their friends pops and brings them along and pops them in their video and then they catch a little wave over here. There's certain things that happen quickly for people, but they don't really know why it's happening and they haven't studied it, and they just think, "Oh, that's how you throw the ball at the hoop." Even though there's no technique, they might've punted it at the hoop with their foot and it somehow made it in the basket, but they would not be able to replicate that again.

And if they would shoot it 100 more times, they're going to miss every time, but they think that this is the way to do it because the first time they tried, they were successful. And so that's that's another thing, continuing along that analogy, you're not going to go to the NBA because you punted the ball in the hoop your first try ever, you need to build up that technique and actually understand why things work the way they work.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. We're going places with these analogies though.

Ari Herstand:
I love them. I love them.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So just getting off a conversation with the VP of music at Twitch is awesome. I guess I'm curious, obviously right now there's a ton of movements towards live streaming and there's a lot of people doing live streaming, and like you acknowledged, it's not necessarily for everyone. It depends on your goals and your values, but I'm curious on digging into what? 180 or so people that led to a sustainable music business on Twitch. What does that look like? Or what tips do you have for people, let's say that they were interested in experimenting more with live streaming and maybe on Twitch or they're just looking to start doing that, but they've never done a live stream before?

Ari Herstand:
Sure. What I've learned from not just chatting with the head of music at Twitch, but also we have a course on live streaming for Ari's Take Academy and there's people that are experimenting with this all day, every day. Full disclosure, I'm not a Twitch streamer, so this is not from me doing it, learning it, but this is from what I've gathered from the hundreds of people that are in our orbit doing it. And also what I've studied and learned from this, but the most successful streamers on Twitch do it multiple hours a week and multiple streams a week. So a good starting point is pick three days a week and block out two to three hours for those three days a week. And this is a really good place to start.

Now, some streams are going to go better than others, sometimes at the two hour mark, you're going to get a raid from someone else's stream, and there's going to be 200 people that pop into your stream at that point because somebody rated you and then you're like, "Wow, I'm going to continue this for another hour." Or some streams you're at the hour and a half mark and it's like, "Man, I'm not feeling it. No one is really here. No one's connecting." And then you just stop at the hour and a half, and that's fine too. But the thing is with Twitch, live streaming in general, and this is what I learned from Clare Means, who's our instructor for the live streaming course.

And she was the number one musician on Periscope. When Periscope was a thing, that's how she built up this live streaming audience. And now she has since started streaming on Twitch, and Facebook, and YouTube, and Instagram. But the thing is that you start to build up these diehard fans who will actually in the end pay you lots of money. That's that thousand true fans concept of, if you can get 1,000 fans to pay you $100 dollars a year by whatever means, you can make a very sustainable living just from those 1,000 people. But it doesn't need to be 1,000, it could be 183 people paying you $500, $1,000, $300. And that's what we're seeing is like, yes, there are a ton of monetization opportunities on Twitch directly through their systems, like with bits is how you tip, or subs like subscriptions.

Each subscription ranges from five to $25, and you make 50% of that, but there's also people that are run Patreons or Kickstarters their Twitch. The numbers that had a music at Twitch told me were actually direct money just through the Twitch platform. So that doesn't include the alternative monetization possibilities. But like Claire told me, that her fans, one of them sent her a $3,000 gaming computer because her computer was glitching during a stream. They were like, "Hey, I want to help you out." And they literally just sent her a $3,000 gaming computer and others center, all this other gear, a great microphone, or they pooled their money together. Her top five fans pulled their money together to get her other kinds of equipment or to buy this and that.

You start to build this relationship, and it's like these fans, these supporters, they feel like they're not just a fan, but they're your friend, they're on your team, they're part of your community. So that's how this has happened. And I think it's very surprising to a lot of people because we have now been trained in the last five years in the streaming era that it takes millions of people to earn a living in music, which that is not necessarily the case. It's definitely not the case for everyone. You don't need millions of people to earn a living on Spotify, yeah, you need millions of streams to make thousands of dollars. That's how it is.

But Spotify is not the music and is not the entirety of what a music career can look like. That's one component, and one very powerful aspect of the music industry, the one that has talked about the most, but that's not the only way. So I think we have been obsessed with these macro numbers, these like millions, you need millions of streams here and millions there and nobody perks up and lets you have a million this or that, but it's just like, I'm actually more interested in the 183 number from Twitch with $50,000 versus 3 million streams on Spotify because one dude at Spotify liked your song and they put it in a playlist. That's not as interesting to me because that happens left and right, and it's cool, you got 3 million streams this month because literally one person at Spotify liked your song and popped it on the playlist.
But what happens in two months when that person takes your song off the playlist? Now, you're back down to zero streams, still like live by the playlist, die by the playlist. And that's not really a way to build a sustainable career either. We're in this era where there are people who have millions and millions of streams who can't sell 50 tickets to their hometown show. What does that tell you? Those aren't fans, that means they don't have any fans, they have followers, they have listeners. And that's this weird era we're in right now, where there are listeners. You can have a ton of listeners, passive listeners who have no idea who you are, they just like this playlist that your song is on. And you might have a ton of followers, but followers are not fan, listeners are not fans.

Followers want to be entertained for free, fans support you financially. Followers want to be entertained for free, fans support you financially. So if you have a million followers, that means nothing to me unless they're all paying you money for something or another, whether it's a ticket, whether it's a merchant item, whether it's a Kickstarter, Patreon, whether it's investing in your NFT, whatever it is, those are not fans if they're just passively following you on whatever platform. And it's really important to put that in perspective.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. I appreciate you sharing that because I think the tendency is to focus too much on vanity metrics and thinks, "Oh, yeah." There's also ways to game the system where you can pay for essentially fake people and make your numbers go up, but then the engagement is out of whack, and also you're not creating value for people when you do that. So long term, it's going to crumble. 

Ari Herstand:
That's a good point, and that's why when you bring up inflating your numbers, inflating your streams, getting bots to stream your music or follow you or anything like that, it's important before you do anything to check yourself and say, "What are my goals and why am I doing this?" Because if you say like, "Oh, I need millions of streams, so I'm going to get that by any means necessary, including buying bots to listen to my music or follow me or anything, knowing that that's going to potentially get me booted from Spotify, or that's just going to inflate my numbers, but hurt the algorithm. And these aren't real people, these are just bots. Why am I doing this?"
And if you really break it down and it's just like, "I guess I don't know why. I think I need a million streams." But why do you need a million streams? "Oh, because people will take notice." "Who? Who's going to take notice? "People." "Well, what people? Do you even know what people you're trying to take notice of you?" It's like, "Oh, well, manager." "Which manager?" "The manager of a band that can help me." "Which manager? What's their name?" And like, "Do you realize that this manager can see through these bot-inflated streams and they're not going touch you with a 10 foot pole if they realize that you bought these streams?"

It's like, "Well, I guess a label will." "No, a label won't, they see through these numbers too." So if you really break down why you're doing this and for whom, and then you can actually name those people if that's what you're trying to do, then you're going to actually check yourself and be like, "Wait a minute, maybe this isn't the smartest pathway forward." Again, I keep coming back to, what are your goals? What are your ultimate goals? What is the six-month goal? Does buying these playlist inclusions actually help get you closer to that six-month goal that you set up? And if not, then you really shouldn't do it, you should never buy playlist inclusion, period.
That's against Spotify terms. That's going to get you booted from Spotify, just a full stop right there, and just to the disclaimer. But yes, I think if you keep checking yourself and saying, "Is this in line with my six-month goal? Is this in line with my one-year goal?" Then you'll actually have a much clear pathway forward and know how to determine what to do next with your career.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. And one thing that really stuck out about what you're talking about with Twitch and across different channels, it seems like one of the ways that we can provide value as a musician, and commonly like the role that an artist plays is building a community, like music communities, they bring people together of different races, of different ages, and we connect through the music. And it's very like a tribal experience. And so it seems like any way you cut it, you might be able to gain the system short term by inflating your numbers, but then eventually, especially people who are managers, they can see through that. Eventually, you're built on a straw house and it's going to come crumbling down. But if you can focus on really building a community, that's one thing with Twitch.
With Twitch, I thought you mentioned and passing that, I think I've heard this word before, but I don't fully understand it, but I'd be interested in hearing exactly what it means, but these Twitch raids, do you raid other people's Twitch streams?

Ari Herstand:
Yeah. You bring up a great point about community, and at the end of the day, I think fandom of certain artists come more so from the community and the tribe that they are a part of, it's not just the music. There's a whole identity that is part of being a fan of a certain artist, and what that entails, and what that means. And some of that fandom and identity you can see illustrated at a concert when you show up. I'll never forget when I went to a Marshmallow Concert a few years back, and my friend was on the management team for Marshmallow working under MO. And she got us tickets to the show. I happened to be passing through San Francisco, I just posted like, "Hey, any concerts happening tonight in San Francisco? I'd love to go see something."

And she's like, "Hey, I manage Marshmallow, yeah, I'll get you on list, get you tickets, whatever." Like, "Okay, cool." I went to Marshmallow show, and not only was I the oldest one in there by 10 years, and I'm not that old, but everyone in there was in this like festival wear. And we were in an indoor club in the winter, we're talking, the guys were in tank tops and shorts and had Camelbacks, and the girls were in bikinis and had paint all over them. I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, there is a fandom here. There's an identity, there's a community." And everybody got the memo. Everybody knew, this is what you do when you go to a Marshmallow Concert. I grew up in the jam community. I love going to jam band concerts, and there was a whole identity and community there.

So, that's what you want to ultimately create, is you want to create this fandom that has an identity and community where the people... And it's across the board, it's not just what the superstars. You go to a folk concert, that's an also on an identity. My friend's dad is a very well-respected blue's musician. He's now in his, I think, late 60s or early 70s, I went to his concert. There was 250 people there that are diehard fans. And I'm like, "Yeah, there's a definite identity and community here with this audience as well." And so, that's what you ultimately would like to create if you want to build a career where you're building that community and fan base.

So getting back to your question about raids on Twitch specifically, what a raid is, is just when, if I'm doing a Twitch stream right now, and I have, let's say 50 people watching my Twitch and they're like, "Hey, I'm about to finish this, but I'm seeing the other streams that are happening right now. And Michael Walker, he's got a stream. I think this one, I can't quite see what's going on, but he's got some really cool lights behind him. Let's go check it out. So let's go raid Michael's stream right now. All right guys, three, two, one, let's go." It's basically like that, then I bring all of my people who are watching me live over to your stream, and then you see, Twitch's term is the raid. So you see like we're raiding you and it pops up on the screen.

That's the thing about Twitch is everything's gamified in there, and so it just feels very gamified. And so it's like, "Raid." And then you get on the raid train and all of this stuff. So there's a lot of these gamification aspects of Twitch and a lot of these terms that you learn as you do more often, but that's a fun little thing that happens and can help you build up on that.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. I love that idea, kind of bees cross-pollinating and it just seems like it's a community, it's a community builder, it's like cross-pollination, it's really cool. One question, I love what you just brought up about community and about identity and building a tribe, and I'm curious, in terms of that process, that process of building a tribe and building a community, and an identity, how much of it do you think comes by being intentional and figuring out... Do you think it comes from being intentional and saying, "Okay, I want to build this community. I want these kinds of people in my community"? Versus just putting out music and being yourself and seeing who you naturally resonate with or naturally attract? What are your thoughts around that process of building a community and building an identity?

Ari Herstand:
It goes many ways. I'll give an example. When I was at the University of Minnesota walking around campus, I saw these posters around the light poles saying that Matisyahu was coming town. And it was promoted by Hillel, which is the Jewish campus organization. Most campuses have a Hillel house, it's just like the campus of Jews have this thing. So I was like, "Oh, this is interesting, and it's reggae, and I like reggae and I listen to the music." I'm like, "All right, this looks good." I went to the Matisyahu concert, and it was at a club where I saw a lot of bands, probably an 800 cap club or something like that. And it was amazing the stark difference of the audience that made it up.
Half the audience were like hippies, jam band crowd, reggae lovers, and half the audience were buttoned up Jews. And it was so funny because I'm like, "I'm both." But I was one of the very few ones who were both, but it was such a stark interesting differences, like okay, because they teamed up with this Jewish organization, they're like, "Okay, you're going to get that audience because they're helping promote it, but then also, the kind of music that you make is reggae and you're targeting that community too and the jam community, you're going to get that audience too." And so that's a conscious decision that you can make who you want to target and who you want to help promote your shows or your music, or who you want to partner with.

The partnerships that you do oftentimes even artists at a small scale, we'll get offered a little partnership, do like an Instagram thing or something or another, but you really want to think of yourself as like, "Is it worth to partner with this organization? Do I want this organization's fan base to be in my orbit?" Because that's the thing, it's not always just about what your music sounds like, because if you are a big LGBTQ advocate and you're big in that community, you're going to get people from that community who just want to come and be a part of this community event that happens to revolve around a concert. And you may have people there may not even like care about your music that much, yeah, they dig your music, but they're almost more there for the social component, just like I noticed in this Matisyahu concert.
But if you think about any concert that you've ever been to, yes, there are some people who are diehard fans, but then they rally up their whole crew. And there's always people there who've never even heard a single song or this artist, and they're like, "I'm just there here for the social component because I want the hang." So there's always that, but if you want to build this up on your own, it's really important to think about, "Okay, who can I target?" It's like, all right, if you are Jewish, you could target the Jewish organizations. If you are part of the LGBTQ community, you can target those organizations in that community to get them there. If you're part of an activist community, if you're part of...

It's like this massive Venn diagram with like 30 circles that every artist, every band has, and it's like, "Okay, what communities could we tap into, do we want to tap into? And then we can promote and target them directly." We specialize in running ads on Instagram and Facebook and that kind of stuff, and oftentimes, some of our students who are running these ads, they realize that it's actually, they find more success targeting an organization or targeting an interest that has nothing to do with the genre of music necessarily. For instance, this one guy who's this neoclassical musician, composer or artist, it's contemporary, but it's cool. For a while, he was just targeting other kinds of neoclassical artists and stuff like that. And then one day he's like, "You know what, let me just start and get ballet. Let's just see."

Ballet is kind of this Venn diagram cross-pollination, but he's like, "I think people in the ballet community would dig this music." And sure enough, a few days later, the New York City Ballet got in touch with them and asked to license five of his songs. And then because of that, also because he was targeting ballet, all of these people who loved ballet were now getting into his music, and then he started getting added to all these ballet playlist and these neoclassical playlists and all of this. So it was like, you can think outside the box a little bit, but then yes, you also need to be careful about who you're targeting, because... I'm a huge Dave Matthews band fan and it is no secret, and I grew up admiring and going to all the DMB shows and I started drums because of Carter Beauford, and I started acoustic guitar because of Dave.

And my friend group in high school was obsessed, we're music nerds. We were complete music geeks. And we geeked out on the Dave Matthews Band because of the musicality, and because of the intricacies, and the fusion, and the jazz, and all of that. I could go toe with any acoustic guitar player, I would have Dave offs with people like trading back and forth, Dave-offs. These are not simple songs to play on guitar, he had a very distinct style. So we are music geeks, and this is why we love them. And we were in our own little bubble and only when I got to college and I realized that it wasn't cool to like Dave Matthews Band and that their reputation was broey frat boys and sorority girls, and it was douche bag who love the Dave Matthews.

I had no idea and I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'm not a frat boy. I'm not douche bag. Wait, I don't understand this." They had gone caught up in that community, whereas in the mid '90s, when they broke out, because they were opening for fish and they were part of the jam community. And then right around the late '90s, early 2000s, it started to shift from the jam band community to the frat boy community, because for this and that, they started playing more college parties. And in that scene, that's when the community also shifted. And so there was this repulsion to the Dave Matthews Band by people, not part of this community that was outside of it. And that was the reputation.
So yes, you want to be careful about which communities you do target and who you're a part of. And sometimes, it will happen that you just have no say. I remember the Beastie Boys similarly saying in an interview, one of them, I don't remember which, but was saying, early on in their career, they were touring with some of the most respected hip hop artists in the scene. And then they had one hit, they got their hit on the radio, and then they started to see their crowd shift from hip hop fans to, his words were like, douche bags. And what he was saying, he's like, "Man, I started to hate our fans."

And you got to be careful because at that point, they weren't doing any of their targets, it was all the label. And the labels intentions were, "How do we get more dollars by any means necessary? It doesn't really matter how we're getting this money, let's just get this money." And so the label does not have the band's best interest in mind. The label has their own best interests in mind like, how do we make money? And so they're like, "Well, we will take any partnership. We'll put their music everywhere. We're going to target everything. And we're going to just make sure that we make money from this."
And the band was like, "Yo, this is not the reputation we want. The crowd that's here, it's like, yeah, we're happy we sold tickets, but this fan base is..." It didn't represent them at all, and it got away from them. So you do have to be careful about that.

Michael Walker:
That's so interesting. Of course, another analogy of that that comes to mind is, it really relates to what you described with how... It sounds like sometimes it's not even about just targeting people you think are the exact right fit, but it's about finding people who are complimentary and like targeting interests of like ballet. And it's like if you're going to play a chord on the piano and you're only playing the exact same note, then it's kind of doh, it's the exact same note. But if you add these harmonic notes and these chords, then it creates a richer experience. And it sounds like that's one of the ways you can think about creating these audiences and having good tour packages, finding where do those complimentary notes so they harmonize together.

Ari Herstand:
And you've got to be careful because occasionally that tritone might fall in there and you're not really thrilled about that tritone.

Michael Walker:
Exactly. Yeah. It sounds like you might end up playing a chord that you weren't intending to, but it is interesting, it's like-

Ari Herstand:
That you hate.

Michael Walker:
Like the resonance of what harmonizes with it. It's super interesting.

Ari Herstand:
Totally. Totally.

Michael Walker:
All right. Well, hey Ari, it's been awesome talking with you. I really appreciate you taking the time to be here, it's been a fun conversation. I feel like we've gone a lot of different places, and I've enjoyed where we've gone and the analogies. I feel like the analogies usually they're on like, on a scale of one to 10, maybe like a four. During this conversation, I say that we both brought it up to like a 12, for sure. Anytime we can do that.

Ari Herstand:
You're a master of the analogies, I love that. I'm going to start hitting you, shooting you messages and be like, "All right, can you come up with an analogy for this concept is great." This is great. I love it. I'm going to steal some of them.

Michael Walker:
Anytime, man. I'll be your analogy man.

Ari Herstand:
Amazing. Thank you.

Michael Walker:
For anyone who is listening or watching this right now and wants to learn more from you and some of the different courses that you offer, what would be the best place for them to check out more?

Ari Herstand:
Yeah. Aristake.com is the hub for everything we do. The academy, we only open enrollment a couple of times a year. So depending on when you're listening to this, enrollment may be open or not, but I would just encourage to sign up on the email list at aristake.com. I send out all the blog articles I write or any of the information that I learn about, that's where all the info goes is to the email list at aristake.com.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Awesome. One thing we do always, we'll put all the information in the show notes, so you can click on it and go there. And if anyone's following this podcast and you don't follow Ari, then you absolutely should because he's stocking with a lot of really cool people, and he's one of the people I think that he has been here for the longest, has really built a tribe, built a community, and is focusing on it from the point of view of the artists. And so, I would highly recommend that anyone who's listening to this who isn't currently a part of Ari's community, go check it out.

Ari Herstand:
Thank you so much.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of episode. Make sure to check out the show notes, to learn more about the guest today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit Subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music career to the next level. It's time to be a modern musician now. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.