Jared Christianson:
If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why?

Michael Walker:
Probably that you are enough.

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 they can reach the right people and generate 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.

Jared Christianson:
Let's kick things off. So welcome podcast listeners. It's a super special event today. We're celebrating a hundred episodes of the Modern Musician Podcast. So this is officially episode number 101. Can I get a yeah cam?

Michael Walker:
Yeah! Woo!

Michael Walker:
I think that that was legit, probably the longest yeah cam I've ever done. And I want to take a real quick moment to just shout out and acknowledge you, Jared and Ari for absolutely crushing it with pulling together the podcast and Music Mentor. I distinctly remember when you guys started bringing up this idea of creating a podcast. And at the time, this was right when I was kind of transitioning from building Modern Musician and kind of wearing all these different hats and doing everything on my own, and we started to build this amazing team. And you and Ari are two of the greatest human beings that I know and started talking about this idea of a podcast. And it was one of the first times that I sort let go of my baby, Modern Musician, and let the ball in your guys' court.

Michael Walker:
And the two of you turned around, did an amazing launch for the podcast, hit number two on Apple Podcasts right out of the gate. And I was like, "Wow, I need to let you guys do more stuff more often." I need to let go of Modern Musician, because clearly our team is incredible. And you guys in particular have really stepped up and done such an incredible job with the podcast. So I hugely appreciate you, Jared and Ari, and shout out. So the two of you specifically and our team in general, and I want to share... I'm sorry. I'm like totally rambling here. But this is important.

Michael Walker:
At the songwriting retreat, it's great timing that this happened actually, but there was probably six or seven people that recognized me and recognized Modern Musician. And one of them, in particular, when I introduced myself, well, she freaked out a little. She was like, "Oh my gosh! Michael Walker from the Modern Musician podcast?" And she had never seen my face, except for the sideways photo of the piano notes. And she has been listening to the podcast for a long time now. And so she recognized my voice. And that was just a really cool moment. They were like, "Man, the podcast has really touched a lot of people. And I think it helped a lot of people." And really, you're responsible for that, so thank you, Jared, and thank you, Ari.

Jared Christianson:
Dude, thank you, man. That makes me so happy that you're having real life interactions, because I know we have an audience. I know people are listening every week. And we've not missed a week of the podcast since we started. So we've released a new episode every single Monday since we started this thing. And you're a great host. I think you do a killer job at teasing out the valuable things that all of our guests have. And so today's super exciting for me, or fun, because I get to play podcast host and you get to play podcast guest. And it's super awesome. So let me do a formal introduction of you here.

Jared Christianson:
So I'm super excited, because today I'm here with one of the most awesome human beings I know. He's a dedicated father of three, a truly gifted entrepreneur, an insanely talented musician and my personal mentor over the last five years. He's on a mission to help music artists on a mass scale, the Neo in the music industry matrix, bringing artists the tools, community and coaching to transform how they can make an impact on their fans and make a living doing what they love most. So Michael Walker, welcome to the Modern Musician Podcast.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Woo! That's so awesome. It's great, too, because I feel like, honestly, the role could be totally reversed right now. I could be interviewing you and it would be an incredible podcast. But it'll be fun to kind of take a step back and just be a guest on the podcast today.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, man, it's super fun. So for folks who are watching or listening right now and might not know your whole story, can you just give us a brief history on your background and how you got to where you are today with Modern Musician?

Michael Walker:
So I started touring full time out of high school. And I realized really quickly that it wasn't enough to just book the shows on tour, but you actually had to get people to come out to the shows. And I remember that first tour playing a lot of shows for just the bartender in the back of the room and empty shows. And at the time, we were living in our van, sleeping in Walmart parking lots. And we would go into Walmart and get a big stack of flour tortillas, a big jar of peanut butter, and breakfast, lunch and dinner was peanut butter tortillas each day. My parents would call me, "So how are things going with the band?" Like, "It's awesome. It's great." But we were basically the definition of starving artists at that time.

Michael Walker:
And what changed everything around and took us from that point to selling 24,000 CDs in about six months, and really it was probably the number one thing that when I look at my life personally and I think out of everything that I've done in my entire life... And I'm relatively young. I'm 30 years old. But out of everything that I've done in my life, the number one most transformative experiences was an idea that our lead singer had that we've come to call tour hacking. And tour hacking, in a nutshell, we noticed that our favorite bands, All Time Low, Mini Parade, Blink-182, they had millions of fans. And we grew up listening to their music and idolizing them. And for their shows, they would go on tour and well, before their shows when they were on tour, they would've thousands of fans or waiting in line sometimes the entire day to go see them.

Michael Walker:
And so we thought, what if we walk up to these people and introduce ourselves and share some of our music? And I was a super shy, awkward kid, so that didn't come naturally me at all. I remember shaking and stuttering as I walked up to people. But what we found was that the people that we were connecting with were really receptive to it, because they're the fans who actually go out to shows and get up off their butts to support music and they actually care. And so we sold 24,000 CDs in about six months doing that. And because of that, one of the bands that we were tour hacking on, All Time Low, which is our idols... I'm pretty sure the first song that we ever covered as a band was Dear Maria, Count Me In by All Time Low. They heard about what we were doing. And they gave us the opportunity to open for them on their next tour. So that was a dream come true.

Michael Walker:
And that really kind of snowballed into a career where we got to tour and connect with a lot of our favorite bands. And eventually, we released an album that hit number two on iTunes. We had about 24 million streams. And we toured worldwide. And honestly, my dream for my whole life was to be able to do what we did. And it felt very validating. Because at the beginning, I think most of us as musicians have kind of had the same experience at the beginning where it's just your friends and family and it seems like no one really cares. And we got picked on. We got made fun of. They called us Paradise Queers, at least some people did in high school, because that was a super original insult back then. So a lot of my ego or a lot of my identity I think was wrapped up on touring full time. And we did that for about 10 years.

Michael Walker:
And so about five years ago when I started thinking about starting a family and becoming a dad, I was gone most of the year on tour and not really living a lifestyle that was conducive to me being the kind of father and husband that I wanted to be. And so that was sort of a rock bottom moment in my life. I'm really grateful that this was one of my rock bottom moments, because I know there's people had to go through a lot harder than this. But for me, I was at the end of touring full time where my identity and everything I was proud of was sort of lost. And I was like, "Who am I anymore? And what am I going to do now if I want to support my family and without traveling?" Am I going to have to go back to college? Am I going to have to get a "real job?" And I felt like a failure of a husband and a father, because I couldn't provide for my kids at that time. And I didn't know who I was anymore.

Michael Walker:
And luckily, stumbled upon a few mentors in the online education and entrepreneurship space. One of them was named Jeff Walker. And we had the same last name, but we're not related. But anyways, he has a program where he teaches entrepreneurs how to coach and help people by creating courses and programs and teach experience, teach from knowledge. And so he helped me to create Modern Musician and a business where I was coaching, helping other artists do what we had done with Paradise Fears. And honestly, a lot of the stuff that we teach now didn't even really exist when we were touring full time with Paradise Fears. Things like lookalike audiences, and Facebook, and Instagram ads, and funnels, and digital marketing, a lot of things that we've discovered in the last five years, growing together as Modern Musician and growing with our artists and our community and kind of keeping on the cutting edge of what's new.

Michael Walker:
But Modern Musician has grown more quickly than I could have imagined. And now, we have a team of over 35 musicians who are some of the greatest human beings that I know, super intelligent, just caring, empathetic people and also super talented musicians themselves, which is awesome. Jared, you just got off of a very successful tour. And your band's killing it. Our entire team is made up of incredible musicians. So it's been really, really humbling. And I guess it was probably about two years ago that we won the Two Comma Club Award from ClickFunnels for hitting seven figures in a single year with Modern Musician. And it's continued to grow really, really quickly.

Michael Walker:
And now, there's over a hundred thousand musicians in our community that we're serving. And we were able to create software and education that kind of goes along with it and a lot of really cool stuff. I could go down an even deeper rabbit hole, but I've already kind of taken things, so I'm going to pull myself off here before we go any deeper.

Jared Christianson:
We'll get there. But some of the stuff I want to talk about, for sure. Yeah, man, I love that Modern Musician is made up of all musicians. I don't think there's a company out there that's really a hundred percent all active musicians. And I think that really makes it different, because we're coaching, we're providing tools and training for musicians, but it's coming from not a place of a manager or a music industry expert. It's coming from people who are actually doing it and implementing these same kind of methodologies. And so it really helps it grow and evolve like nothing else.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. That's one of our core values at Modern Musician, is to lead by example and sort of walk the walk. And it definitely helps that everyone's a musician and we learn so much through trying things out ourselves and failing and learning from our mistakes and seeing what are our frustrations. And so it's definitely been a really cool process to be able to create things that we're both excited to share with other people, but also we're using ourselves and we're able to iterate on.

Jared Christianson:
So to kind of dig into more of what we can talk about today, I felt like we could start with the state of the music industry and some general questions. One of the questions that you ask a lot on the podcast is, what are you seeing as some of the most common challenges or mistakes that artists are making today in the music industry landscape?

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. So I think one of the biggest challenges is that nowadays there's so many talented musicians where really the biggest problem now isn't that their music's not good enough or that they're not talented enough. It's just that it's easier than ever to make music in home studio and in high-quality music. Easier than ever to distribute it without a record label, put it on Spotify, Just for Kids, Apple Music, any of the distributors. And it only takes a couple of button clicks. Therefore, there's so much music and so much information online just in general. It's exponential. It's something like, it's doubling every year. And so I think the biggest challenge that I see now is just that it feels more difficult to cut through the noise and get your music heard.

Michael Walker:
And also, kind of connected to that, I think that when it comes to releasing music, for a lot of artists that we've worked with, especially if you're earlier on and you haven't really built an established audience yet, it's really easy to drag our feet or keep waiting for the right moment, the right time, spend a ton of time and energy trying to plan out our releases when the bottom line is that before you build an audience, no one really cares that much yet about the music until you put in the legwork to actually build an audience, build a community. And so it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg situation. But for most artists, what I would recommend is rather than waiting to release an album or waiting to release all their music in a big public way, take one of their songs, one of their demos, or one of their recordings and start running traffic to it. Start actually doing digital marketing to grow your audience.

Michael Walker:
Get 1,000, 5,000 thousand fans on your email list, on your text message list before you actually release the song publicly. Because then when you have that week long window of opportunity, when you first release the songs, you actually have people who are excited to hear it and listen, rather than putting it out. And if you don't have an audience, then you're practically guaranteed that nothing's really going to happen when you first put it out. If your songs are logs to start a fire and the fire represents your fan base, then no matter how good your music is, no matter how big the logs are, if all you do is drop them in a fire pit and there's not a fire going, then nothing's going to happen. You need to generate the flames. You need to generate the audience. And if you already have a fire going, you already have an audience, then great can drop logs into the existing audience.

Michael Walker:
And that's why you'll see sometimes people that have a huge audience already, who are famous from TV or film, or they just have an audience for some reason, they already have a bit of a fire going. So it's easier for them to drop logs in the fire pit. But there are ways that you can, even if you're starting with a twig or branch, there's ways that you can start that fire before you'd spend a ton of time and ton of energy and tens of thousands of dollars working on a release strategy and PR and publicity to really kind of build that initial connection.

Jared Christianson:
I totally agree. And what would you say is the quickest, easiest and most affordable kind of way to get started getting that initial flame or to spark that fire? If you've got really good songs, you've got the logs in place, what would you say is the number one best way to go about doing that?

Michael Walker:
That's such a good question. So there's three different types of strategies that we'd recommend. And these are things that are certainly true for you as a musician, but it's really true for any business, because really what we're talking about is driving traffic. And we're talking about lead generation. And there's three different types of traffic, organic, paid traffic and affiliate traffic are kind of three of the main ones. So for you as a musician, I think that probably the fastest, most affordable way to quickly grow and get the fire started, like gasoline on the fire, is going tour hacking.

Michael Walker:
I think that if you have the guts and the willingness to walk up to fans who are going out to shows and just do it from a place of looking to connect with them and build relationships in an audience, and get some clips of your songs, those people that watch shows, they are the people that actually care enough to get up off their butts and go attend a show and spend money to be there. And they're the people who are most likely to be supportive of your music, too. It's like Newton's laws of motion. An object in motion tends to remain in motion. And so if your goal is to build an engaged audience, people who actually care and go out to shows, then you want to connect with people who are already doing that, that you don't have to convince to support you. But the people who already get that kind of value. So I think that's probably the fastest and the cheapest way to do that.

Michael Walker:
And we've had artists that went from scratch to making $11,000 in a single month with two guys in the band by going out and going tour hacking. So that's probably one of the fastest ways to do it. It certainly isn't easy, mostly because it's absolutely terrifying to walk up to strangers like that. And there's something biologically that happens when you're getting ready to do it. There's a ton of fear. And everything inside of you is telling you, "Do not walk up to this person. If you do this, you will die. If you walk up to this person, you are going to die. This is a terrible idea." And it logically makes sense.

Michael Walker:
But I've heard that this is sort of carried over from when we used to live in tribes. And if we got rejected, then we actually might get ostracized, and we actually could die. And so this is just sort of an outdated fear, because clearly, you're not going to die if someone rejects you in line for a show. But it feels like it. So take it with a grain of salt. I think that that's probably the best, fastest way to truly connect with people who care and to spark the fire.

Michael Walker:
The second strategy is what we call paid traffic. And if you have a budget, then that's probably the fastest, easiest, most successful way to do it, as long as you're setting it up in the right way. I think sometimes paid traffic gets a bad rap, for good reason, at the same time, because a lot of times when people hear paid traffic, they hear, "Oh, you're going to buy fake followers or fake likes." And that certainly is the case for a lot of different paid traffic campaigns. If you're paying to artificially boost your Spotify stream count or to artificially buy a hundred thousand Instagram followers, then most of those aren't real people who are actually going to come out to shows, and purchase things from you, and engage with you.

Michael Walker:
And ultimately, with paid traffic, the only two numbers that matter are, what's your cost per acquisition? So how much are you paying to acquire a fan? So if you brought in 10,000 fans for $20,000, it doesn't mean that you paid $2 per fan. It was essentially a $2 cost per acquisition. And so if you wanted to reach a hundred thousand fans, you're like, "Okay, cool. I just need to pay $200,000 at $2 per fan." But that's just one number in the equation. The other number is your value per acquisition. So if it costs you a dollar to reach a new fan, how much are you earning per fan that you bring in?

Michael Walker:
Another big mistake that I see a lot of times is that as artists we might not necessarily think about what are we actually offering and providing value. And we might just have a $10 merch bundle. But if that's all you have, then your value per acquisition is going to be really, really low, because only a certain percentage of people that join your community are actually going to buy something from you. So you might be paying a dollar per fan, but making 10 cents per fan. So the math doesn't work.

Michael Walker:
So all that being said, I think that paid traffic is one of the best things to learn how to do, because it really is a system. It's math. And I was the weird kid in high school that liked math. So I really like this type of process, because it also gives you the freedom to essentially free up your time. With tour hacking, you have to walk up to every single person individually. Where with these paid traffic campaigns and what we call virtual tour hacking... And Jared, you know this more than almost anyone. Jared is our head at Modern Musician when it comes to running paid traffic and running these virtual tour hacking campaigns. But basically, you can create an automatic flow. And we used to do this through ManyChat and now we've basically built it into our own street team software, but you can create an automated messenger flow that basically makes it so that... It you imagine...

Michael Walker:
We used to joke about this with Paradise Fears, that what if we hired people just off the street to approach fans waiting in lines for shows, because there was only six of us. But what if we had a hundred people that were approaching, if for ll the lines at the shows and we had a homeless person on the side of the street that we requested, "Come do this..." But obviously, when there's only six of you doing this in line, you have a ceiling. You can't reach that amount of people. And with the pay traffic campaigns, with messenger flows and automation, you can reach thousands of people simultaneously. And we have artists who are in their 70s and 80s and are getting thousands of messages per day for new fans. And they couldn't do that if they were relying on tour hacking or posting organically on social media.

Michael Walker:
They have the system that every single day they don't have to do anything, they just wake up and boom, they're getting hundreds or thousands of messages, which is amazing. So I'm a big fan of paid traffic, but the clear downside is that you have to pay money to reach those people. So if you do it, then you want to make sure you have a good system set up so that you put in a dollar and make it profitable so you get more than a dollar out. So that's paid traffic. And we have our one fan challenge. And we walk you through, basically, start to finish how you can launch one of those campaigns for yourself.

Michael Walker:
The third strategy that we recommend is what we call hyper networking. And hyper networking is, I mean, it's huge. If you already have a preexisting relationship or contact with an artist that already has a major fan base, the analogy is that it's kind of like putting your logs next to another fire that's already going. It's one of the fastest ways to light your own fire as well. And you hear it all the time from artists who went from obscurity to all of a sudden blowing up, because they got the right feature, the right collaboration. And it is possible to get those types of opportunities. But generally, in terms of getting the best ROI for your time and for your investment, usually what we recommend is using either tour hacking or virtual tour hacking to build up an audience of your own first, maybe 5,000, 10,000 fans in your community. Because once you have the fire going, then usually, when you're hyper networking and you're-

Jared Christianson:
Going, then usually when you're hyper networking and you're collaborating with other artists, you're doing things like going on tour with a bigger artist or doing a co-write together or doing a video together. These are things where generally there's a win-win, right? And if you're looking to tour with a bigger artist, the number one thing that is going to help you do that is, can you sell tickets to the show? Can you bring people out to the show? And so if you don't have a fire going on your own, then it's going to be really difficult to get responses from artists that are much, much, much bigger than you, because usually there'd be a win-win. It needs to be like a, it's kind of like bees cross pollinating, right? It's great when it's a win-win for both parties, but if you don't have anything to contribute or offer in the form of putting your fires together, then usually what I would recommend is focusing on one of the other strategies first, build an audience, and then you're going to have much more leverage so that you can actually connect and partner with other artists.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, totally. I love it. The tour hacking the in person tour hacking. That's how my band got started, was we didn't call it tour hacking, but we were doing essentially the same thing. A lot of the times we were selling tickets for our next show in line, at the show with all the premium fans, all the people that already spend money and already go to shows and buy merch, we were talking to them and that was literally how we started our fire to begin with. So if you have-

Jared Christianson:
That's so cool.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. If you have the guts or just being in a scene and making connections, it's huge.

Jared Christianson:
A hundred percent. Yeah. I think that's another piece to it, as well, is what you just mentioned about just being in the scene or just showing up and connecting with people. If you make a point to attend shows for similar artists to you that are either bigger than you or around your same size and support them and go out to their shows and connect with everyone there, then actually you are building those relationships. You can kind of do it naturally. And there is something about being in-person and just seeing someone's face as you connect with them. I feel like you learn more through a single interaction with someone face-to-face for 20 minutes than you might learn from 500 email messages that you hear from someone because you have this back and forth, real experience connecting with them. And so it is a really great way to get things started.

Michael Walker:
And then we just got through a pandemic and we're on pretty much the other side, so we see shows happening all the time. So the last two years we only had virtual tour hacking. And I would say the same thing is that, I tell people it's kind of like a smart billboard. You're basically putting your music on a billboard and you can target the exact kind of fans who already that kind of music. And that ad runs all the time while you sleep. So it's an organic post that just lives forever and breathes, until you turn it off. But it's basically just getting smarter and getting in front of people all the time without you having to keep posting. So digital marketing, learning how to run these campaigns, I would say is one of the number one tools that artists have that they didn't have before in the MySpace days and just a few years ago. We have that now.

Jared Christianson:
A hundred percent. And one thing that's really nice about that specific kind of campaign that we're talking about too with virtual tour hacking is that, it really applies a lot of the same fundamentals from tour hacking when it comes to connecting with people and having a conversation back and forth. Where I think that the reason that tour hacking, or at least one of the reasons it works so well was because you are having a back and forth conversation. It's not necessarily just a one way thing where you're shouting a megaphone, you're saying, "Hey, here's listen to my music", but you're actually connecting with them. And you're asking them questions to get to know them, which really opens people up. And it's how, as humans, we've learned to connect with other people.

Jared Christianson:
So I think that's super powerful and I love the way you just put it with the billboard, but it's a smart AI billboard that literally shows up. It just pops up exactly where your fans are likely to go hang out. It is pretty amazing how those systems work and how the more data that comes in the smarter that the machine gets.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah. So when you're driving traffic and you're having these conversations, like you said, the ultimate goal is to put in a dollar and make $2 back, right? And so you have to have offers and something that you introduced me to a long time ago, is the concept of the value ladder. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the value ladder and what it is and why it's important that artists have one?

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. Yeah. So we'll see if I can talk about it and demonstrate this without geeking out and showing a spreadsheet on it. But basically what we talked about, when it comes to paid traffic especially, but really this same thing operates no matter what type of traffic you're running is, how much does it cost you overall to bring in a new fan? How much are you earning overall per fan you bring in? Those are the two heartbeats of your business, of you as a musician, is those. And really any business, how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? And how much are you earning per customer? And that's how you can serve. It's like it's breathing in and breathing out. If you don't have a way to generate revenue in sales with your music, you don't have a way to breathe in. You can only breathe out for so long until you need oxygen. You need to be able to breathe. And if you don't, then you're going to suffocate and you will not be able to continue making music. And so this is one thing I see sometimes is people feel, I don't know guilty about that process of breathing in. And a lot of times it comes from not fully appreciating that's just a part of the process. And that's actually how you can serve greater, is through both.

Michael Walker:
So to talk through the value ladder idea, when we're talking about those two numbers, cost per acquisition and value per acquisition. So in this example, let's say that it costs you a dollar per fan to bring in a new fan to your community. So you spent $10,000 and you brought in exactly 10,000 fans onto your email list. Awesome, okay. It cost you a dollar per fan.

Michael Walker:
So let's first imagine that you didn't have anything to offer or even better, let's say that you have just your streams. So you have 10,000 fans that have joined your email list. And let's say that those people are streaming on average, all those 10,000 people, you're getting 10,000 streams per month. So gosh, let me do the math real quick. So 10,000 streams per month times, I know it's roughly four, three to five-thousand dollars for a million streams. So if you divide that by what a hundred, is that right?

Jared Christianson:
You're the math guy here.

Michael Walker:
So I'm pulling up my computer, the computers are the math wizards, for sure. Someday we'll have the brain interfaces. We'll all just pull this up immediately. So let's see. So if we wanted 10,000, then that would mean that if you get about, let's say that you're saying you're actually making $5,000 for million streams, which is probably actually going to be a bit less than that.

Michael Walker:
That would mean for 10,000 people, you're getting like $50 from streams. So you spent $10,000 to reach this 10,000 people. So your cost per acquisition is a dollar per fan. Your value per acquisition is a few pennies per fan. So if that's all you have, then it's no wonder that you don't have a sustainable career because you have nothing really to offer your fans aside from the streams, which is a very, very low economic value to your business.

Michael Walker:
And so the value ladder is basically this idea of having a few different price points of different things that you can offer to your fan at different levels because out of 10,000 fans, it's very, very likely that you have quite a few people, it's usually about one in 500 is the target that we recommend aiming for. Which would mean about, let's say between 10 to 20 fans out of those 10,000, that would actually purchase a high ticket offer from you.

Michael Walker:
So something that's either like a thousand dollars, three-thousand, even five-thousand dollars for a single offer, at the high end of your value ladder. And we're only talking about 10 to 20 people, but having that in your value ladder means that you're generating some serious revenue from those 10 to 20 people, and that can help to support and kind of fuel, it's that oxygen in breath, for the rest of your music. It allows you to continue to create music and to kind of fund everyone else who is just listening to music and streaming it.

Michael Walker:
So I kind of skipped the gun there just went directly to that, to the high ticket offer. But ultimately what we found is that usually the high end of the market is actually where the greatest price margins are. And that's where people tend to generate the most revenue, especially if you're kind of starting out and you don't have millions of fans yet, then you're not going to make a lot of revenue from streams, but it's a lot easier to bring in one, $5,000 sale than it is to bring in a million streams.

Michael Walker:
And if you spend $5,000 and you bring in one, $5,000 sale, then that's paid for your entire $5,000 in ad spend. And then you also have the benefit of having spent $5,000 and bring in 5,000 people into your Street Team, for example.

Michael Walker:
So let me kind of zoom back a little bit and go through the value ladder a little bit more. And hopefully this will click even without the spreadsheet to look at the numbers as we're breaking it down. So let's use round numbers. So we started out 10,000 fans, you spent $10,000. That means that it's about a dollar cost per acquisition. And just with streams, then you're making a few pennies. So in terms of imagine a teeter totter scale and your cost per acquisition is all the way down. And the value per acquisition is all the way up because there's not enough weight on the value per acquisition to scale it out. Ideally, you want the value per acquisition to be at the bottom and cost proposition to be up.

Michael Walker:
So now let's imagine that on the right side of the Teeter totter, the side, that is the value per fan. You add in a $10, low ticket merch item, and we might call this your starter pack. So it might be a CD and a few deliverables for your fans, or maybe it's an NFT, whatever it is. Just imagine it's $10. So when you add that offer onto the equation, a certain percentage of people are going to take you up on that offer. So just for this example, just to keep the numbers nice and clean, let's say that it's 10% of people that join your Street Team, or that join your email list, that get the $10 starter pack. So that would mean that out of those 10,000 people, a thousand people would gotten the starter pack.

Michael Walker:
And if you multiply a thousand times 10, that means that you made $10,000 from that initial starter pack. And so in that equation now, just from adding that one additional offer without anything to offer, you're spending a lot of money. You spent $10,000 and you only made $50 back, but, you add in another offer. And now for the exact same investment, now the balance is even, right? It's $10,000 that you spent about $10,000. And so now it's balanced. And now anything else that you add onto the scale, it's going to tip it towards being profitable.

Michael Walker:
So now let's imagine, again just using round numbers to make this easy, but let's imagine that you had a hundred dollars offer for a VIP bundle and it included a VIP pass to three of your next live shows. And I've seen some of these VIP passes go for four or five hundred dollars for a single ticket.

Michael Walker:
So a lot of times they'll see artists undervalue themselves, because they feel like they need to be famous before they offer a VIP ticket, for example. Or they feel, I don't know, weird. They feel like it's somehow egotistical to have a VIP ticket, when it's almost the exact opposite. It's like, by offering these, you can actually provide a ton of extra value. And there are people who, even if you only have 50 or a hundred people that come out to a show, I guarantee you that you're going to have a good chunk of those people who want the VIP experience. And even if they got to meet you after the show regardless, for free, there's sort of a element of they may or may not get to meet you and they have to wait in line for everyone else. And a lot of people are actually going to upgrade and get the VIP pass just for a guaranteed ability to connect with you and have a meet and greet and take a picture with you and get maybe early access to the show or things like that.

Michael Walker:
So in this example, let's say it's a hundred dollars and it's one in a hundred people who join your email list, get this. So that would mean that for those 10,000 people that joined your email list, that you made another $10,000 just from offering that additional VIP bundle. And so now the teeter totter flipped considerably, and now you're earning about $2 per fan that joins your community.

Michael Walker:
So there's a couple of different price points in the value ladder that we could talk about. But I think hopefully that kind of demonstrates what I'm talking about in terms of the teeter totter.

Michael Walker:
And here's the last thing to note, is that generally what's going to happen, and this is just part of the game with paid traffic, is that once you have a profitable campaign, so let's say that you brought in 10,000 fans into your Street Team and you paid $10,000 to reach those people. So it was a dollar cost per acquisition per fan. And now you're like, "man, this is so cool. I spent $10,000 and I made $45,000 back. I'm just going to spend 10 million and I'll make 45 million back. Cool." And that would be pretty awesome. That's exactly how it worked, but that's, that's not how works what's going to happen is as you scale your campaigns what's going to happen is naturally your cost per acquisition is going to start to increase. So that left side of the teeter totter is going to start to go up because now the algorithms have basically figured out who are those fans who are most likely to resonate with your music?

Michael Walker:
So either you're going to need to get smarter about decreasing your cost per acquisition and basically doing things like, we could geek out here and go down too much a rabbit hole. You probably keep things a little bit more, avoid the geek zone a little bit too much since we're just talking here and we can't visually show some of this stuff, but one thing that's so important with paid traffic especially is split testing. And this is one of the best ways to decrease your cost for acquisition is to, let's say, for example, that you have one of you have three different songs and 75% of people that listen to song A, they say, "oh, this is amazing." And they end up joining your email list. And let's say that 35% of people that listen to song B say, "oh, this is great. I love it." And they join your email list. That means that song A outperforms song B by two times. And so that would mean that your cost per acquisition, the left side of the teeter totter is literally twice as heavy just from that one test. ,So if you're testing those two different things, you say, "wow, song A works a lot better to start with." Then now you're going to start running more traffic there and it's going to significantly decrease your cost per acquisition, and it's going to balance things out.

Michael Walker:
And so really that's just the whole game of paid traffic, is the teeter totter and decreasing your cost per acquisition, increasing your value per acquisition, and doing that by connecting with your fans and figuring out what do they want? What do they actually find valuable? And creating a value ladder of different price points for different people based on their level of connection with the songs.

Jared Christianson:
What's up podcast listeners? You're listening to my episode with Michael Walker. My name's Jared Christianson. I co-produced this podcast with my partner Ari Welcome. And we just wanted to take a second to thank you so much for listening to this podcast and being part of this community. I really hope that you get a ton of value out of these interviews. And I can't believe that we're already at a hundred episodes. So, big thank you from our podcast team here at Modern Musician and Michael. During this episode, Michael talks a lot about what we implement in our Gold Artist Academy program, everything from the Street Team software, the value ladder, setting up these scalable campaigns, generating hundreds, even thousands of messages every week with new fans. Everything from the morning routine, the things we recommend for artists, your artist identity, how to build a tribe around your music, how to build revenue systems and automation into your marketing.

Jared Christianson:
It's a three month course, and we walk you step-by-step, every step of the way. You get private coaching with our team once a week, group coaching and so much more if you've been feeling on the fence, but you've been feeling an urge that you want to take the next step and you just need some guidance and a system that's been proven over and over again. I want to encourage you to apply for Gold Artist Academy. The link is in the description. You can stop the episode now go apply. And if we accept your application, we'll set you up with a free artist breakthrough session where we're going to look at where you're at in your music career. And most importantly, if we can help you take it to the next level. So you got nothing to lose, hit the link in the description apply, and let's get back to the episode.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, I know this is geeky for a lot of us, but I think it's important because I feel like what I see, especially outside of Modern Musician, the people who aren't learning this stuff in our programs, is that they aren't thinking about this. What we just talked about, cost per acquisition value and having offers on the back end so that you're not just sending people to go stream, but you're also giving the opportunity to maybe get a small commitment, $10 merch bundle, and then upgrade to a VIP or having these other offers is how you actually can grow your audience while potentially profiting quite a bit from it, too.

Jared Christianson:
So I think it's important to know and a really important thing that Modern Musician, that you showed me and that we show everybody that we work with. So awesome stuff. So I've got a few more questions here. One of the things I wanted to talk about that I know you're really excited about is the tools. So can you talk to me a little bit about Street Team, the software, why you developed it and why it's important for artists and why it can help?

Michael Walker:
Yeah, a hundred percent. You know the right questions to ask of me, to geek out and go deep. So the Street Team, the analogy that we use here is, once you start driving traffic. And so whether you're tour hacking or virtual tour hacking or using hyper networking, when you start to have new fans who are discovering you every single day, it's like it starts to rain, right? It's kind of like there's a storm, and each rain drop represents a fan. And if all you're doing, when the storm's happening is holding out your hands, then most of the rain just goes into the ground and it's wasted. You're just kind of left holding what in your hands. So that's why you hear so many stories about one hit wonders and people you're like, "wow, there was a new album?" And, probably they didn't have a rain catcher. They didn't have a way to basically capture the rain as falling down. So you can build a deeper relationship with your fans.

Michael Walker:
And so really at the core of digital marketing in general, and at the core of what we found was working both for Modern Musician and for our artists, was this idea of building a rain catcher, or building a funnel to really capture the rain as it's falling down so that you can build a deeper relationship with those people. And it's not just a one-time relationship. If you're sending people to Spotify, not only are you getting paid a fraction of a penny, but you're losing the ability to actually connect deeper with those people and actually continue to send follow up campaigns and to send them an email when you release a new song, because you're probably never going to hear from them again, if you just send them to a platform that you don't own.

Michael Walker:
And so one of the major tools that we've focused on for the past five years, has been about building a rain catcher and building a funnel. And in the past we found seven or eight different software tools that we've been using to create these funnels. So the paid traffic is kind of generating the rain, but then in terms of actually having an email list to send automated emails and text messages and to convert people from listening to actually joining your email list, we're using tools like ClickFunnels, and ActiveCampaign, and ManyChat, and Janis.ai, and Dialogflow, and all these different tools that especially as you start to grow your audience and you have 10,000 or 20,000 or more, these are tools that can cost between $300 a month to a $1000 per month. Or in our case, we are spending I think three or four-thousand dollars per month. Because once you build an audience of a hundred thousand people, the price goes up significantly.

Michael Walker:
And these tools are amazing. I mean, the fact that you can build this funnel and this rain catcher, it's one of the best investments that you can make. But it was a really major investment and our program, we spent so much time with our coaches. We trained, we have all this training to basically set up all these different tools that are different tools and teaching them how to talk to each other. And this is something called an API language, it's like these tools talk to each other using code and developer language. And I've learned how to write code in the past year and it was, I mean, I'm not going to lie, I've actually really enjoyed learning how to write code. I was a weird kid in school that liked math and I have loved learning this language, but it took a ton of time and a ton of energy.

Michael Walker:
And for most, I would say like 99% of the artists that we work with, they didn't want to touch APIs and building developer languages and all these different tools in tech. That was one of their biggest challenges. It's just overwhelming, because there's so many different tools that I need to learn. And so our whole programs about building a team that is able to set up these tools and master them and link them together. But the bottom line is that even though we're able to build this amazing system, and these amazing tools, it's still like seven or eight different tools talking to each other, and there's a lot of updates and then they have to keep talking to each other and it's just sort of like a Frankenstein of these different software tools. And it ends up being really expensive as you start to grow, too.

Michael Walker:
Again, it's a good investment, but there were challenges when we did that. It wasn't integrated. And so really the purpose of the Street Team software that we built, was that we wanted to create a platform that's specifically designed for musicians and that could integrate all those different tools that we had been using from ActiveCampaign, and ClickFunnels, and ManyChat, and Janis.ai, so that you could have a CRM. Which stands for Customer Relationship Manager, that allows you to have two-way text message communication.

Michael Walker:
Oh, that's another one, too. Community. That alone was hundreds of dollars per month just to have a few thousand people in your text message community. And so we wanted to build this all-in-one platform and now Street Team is so exciting. It's basically a one-stop integrated tool, that allows you to have two way text communication, email communication, allows you to build websites and funnels. So if you're using Wix or Squarespace or Bandzoogle or a website builder, then it basically does all of that, but it's plugged into your two-way communications. So you can send text messages like Community and you can have automated email-

Michael Walker:
... communications, you can send text messages like Community and you can have automated email sequences which is what we found has been one of the highest ROI uses of your time is building email automations and sequences and that's all built into the same platform. And to plug it all into your systems so that, when you have fans that join your Street Team, you are giving them points for doing things like subscribing to your email list and subscribing to your YouTube and your social media accounts and referring their friends and streaming your music and they can get points for doing these things.

Michael Walker:
And based on the number of points, we segment them into different groups. So, gold or everywhere from bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond. And what we found is that, that diamond audience, so the top 5% of your fan base, based on the people who are the most engaged, who really care the most is one of the most powerful audiences that you can use to create something called a lookalike audience. And so, I feel like we're going there, we're going there with this, we're getting geeky.

Michael Walker:
But lookalike audiences, basically, if you have a group of people and you have a list of emails and their phone numbers, then using Instagram, Facebook, Google and YouTube have their own version of this as well, you can upload that list and you can create a similar audience, a lookalike audience. And it's going to look at that group you gave and, based on all of the data that YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram have on their users, which is a lot of information, they're able to create a lookalike audience of one to two million people that most closely matched the characteristics of the group that you gave them and the minimum amount that you need is 100 people to create a lookalike audience.

Michael Walker:
And so, basically, what Street Team does is it ranks your fans based on how engaged that they are and based on their lifetime value, so how much have they actually purchased from you. And then you can create lookalike audiences based on your diamond fans, the people who have invested the most or the most supportive and, by plugging, you're targeting into those lookalike audiences, the more data that's coming into your Street Team, the better relationships that you're building with your fans. The better you understand who are the people who really show up and really care, the better that you're targeting gets.

Michael Walker:
And this is something that we just rolled out, the automatic lookalike audience integrations who are our playground artists which is our first access clients that we roll out all the new features in Street Team with. And so, I'm super, super excited to have it automated and fully built in for you. It's something that, previously, the only way to do it was to export your list manually. And now, built into the platform, automatically, without you having to touch anything, you're going to be able to basically upload a list of your most valuable fans that really resonate most with your music and use that to reach more people that are similar to them.

Jared Christianson:
Dude, yes, awesome. Lookalike audiences are crazy, I've seen them work over and over again. When you implement those, it's just like how is this so smart, how do they know how to find exactly the right kind of people? And so, the fact that the Street Team platform does that is insane, automatically. And plus all the funnels, the text messaging, the email, automations, super cool tool, I'm so glad we were able to take what we were doing and bring it into a tool of our own.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, this is probably the, I wouldn't even say the cherry on top, this is probably the best part of the whole thing is that, with all these other tools, we had to create in our program, basically, three months' worth of one-on-one sessions with our team setting up active campaign and click funnels and many chat and setting up all these different tools. And there's a lot of tech, really sophisticated tech and it took a lot of time and energy to put it all together. With Street Team, we have this thing called template snapshots and, basically, when someone joins our program now or we're working with the client or when someone joins Street Team, we also have template specifically just for anyone who are using the software, then we can click a couple buttons and literally push out all of the email sequences, all of the messenger flows, all of the funnels, all of the templates into your accounts immediately. And it takes three minutes and it literally saves.

Michael Walker:
No exaggeration, I would say that this saves between 500 to a thousand hours of setup time needing to fully integrate and set up all of these systems. You can do it in a couple of clicks and all you need to do is just customize what's your artist's name and what's your branding and just update it to make it match your style, pretty dang cool. And then, when we run more split tests on our own, we can update those templates and we can update all of the templates in your account. So, just by having an account, we're keeping it refreshed with the most high converting funnels and campaigns, things that we see working best that allow you to really connect with your fans. We can keep those in sync so that, whenever something new comes out, then we can actually push that out into your account automatically. So, that's definitely one of the things, I would say, that's probably the best part of having the Street Team software.

Jared Christianson:
That's so awesome, cool. Well, do you have a hard stop or how much time do you have?

Michael Walker:
Let me double check here but I think that this is the last thing on my play for today so I don't have a hard stop. And there is one topic that we haven't dug into yet, which is an exciting one, and I think you probably already know what I'm thinking about but it's three letters and it rhymes with I feel free.

Jared Christianson:
Let me guess, NFT?

Michael Walker:
Boom shakalaka.

Jared Christianson:
I knew it. Yes, yes, that was on my list of questions to ask was to talk about the NFT marketplace.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, so this is so much fun, man. You're a great host, dude. Who am I? I'm just going to go to Hawaii for a few months. Jared, you need to get those in the podcast. So, the NFT marketplace, this is right up there with the Street Team software in terms of things that I'm personally really excited about and geeking out on and, really, it's very interconnected with Street Team. So, right now, I think we're in an industry that's right before disruption when it comes to NFTs and music in general. I'm a little bit more on the skeptical side around NFTs, I think it's like the internet where there's so much hype and there's a bubble and we've experienced the ups and downs of that. And I think, when I see certain things that are NFTs that are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I'm like, "Okay, I think that it's a bubble."

Michael Walker:
Someone bought a picture of a potato and it costs $20,000, but I think that there are some industries, especially for art, where there's a huge opportunity. I think the music industry is one of those. We are in this unique situation where music, which used to have this very tangible value to it, where people would go out to a record shop and they would purchase a CD and hold it in their hands and, when people came over to their house, they would show off their vinyl collection. Now, with streaming, it's amazing. It's such a cool opportunity that anyone can access, basically, the world's music from their phone instantly. Very, very cool and they can do it with a very, very low subscription fee and listen to unlimited music.

Michael Walker:
The issue is that, for artists or for musicians, just in terms of how economics work, one of the main laws of economics is supply and demand. And in a nutshell, when you have a huge supply of something, then the price goes way, way down, the demand goes down, it's all about supply and demand. And if there's less supply, then the price goes up. And so, in a world with streaming, how much supply is there? Unlimited.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, infinite.

Michael Walker:
Unlimited abundance, there's no limit. If you have a subscription fee, a low subscription fee, you can stream unlimited music essentially for free. And so, in terms of economic value, supply and demand, it's no surprise that the value of what people are getting paid for their music has gone so, so down with NFTs. And it's almost like the antithesis to ownership because, when you stream music, you don't own anything about that song, you are literally subscribing and you're just getting to listen and stream it and just license it almost. Your ears get to listen to it, you pay a fraction of a penny to listen to it.

Michael Walker:
And I really think that artwork, for so long, has really been all about ownership and about being able to own a limited piece of artwork and hang it on your wall. And is that because of social status or reputation? Probably for some people. When you look at art collectors, some people pay millions of dollars. Mona Lisa is $800 million to hang on your wall and not everyone's going to spend $800 million to hang artwork on their wall but there are people that money is not an object for them. And for them, being able to express themselves and own a limited piece of artwork is something that the value is very subjective and it could be very high. And this is what we found in the music industry as well for NFTs. Some of these NFTs are going for millions of dollars and the reason is because of supply and demand and there's a limited amount of those NFTs.

Michael Walker:
So, I think that there's something missing with an equation where the Mona Lisa can be sold for $800 million but Let It Be by the Beatles has never been sold for more than a dollar. And in terms of impact, in terms of artwork, if there was a equivalent ... Because with the Mona Lisa, look, you can actually duplicate the Mona Lisa, you can print out a canvas, you can print out a copy and you could actually print out something that, if you put it side by side to the Mona Lisa, then most people might not be able to tell the difference between the original one and the printout but one of them would be worth $800 million and one of them be worth $40. Why is that? Because one is the original and one of them is authentic and it's one of a kind. And even though you can enjoy the other artwork and you can hang it on your wall and you can put it wherever, it's not worth $800 million like the original, there's something about that ownership of it. And there's people who are paid a lot of money to verify that it's legitimate, that it's authentic.

Michael Walker:
So, I think that there's a huge opportunity for music, for there to be in a very similar way to the Mona Lisa. If you purchase the Mona Lisa, you don't own the copyright to Mona Lisa, you own the artwork itself. So, the original artist can still sell the Mona Lisa. And so, I think that the same thing applies to music, at least in my opinion. I think it's an interesting idea to sell copyright royalties and ownership to the music itself but I think it's complicating things in a lot of cases, whereas, I think the artwork can stand for itself. So, basically, what we've created and we've done an alpha drop for our music, we're calling it the Music Relic Marketplace and these are NFT-

Jared Christianson:
I love that term. The relic, that's a great term.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, yeah. The purpose of it is that we wanted to, I don't know, simplify the idea of NFT so that fans don't necessarily need to learn how to write code and become a developer in order to own these NFTs. Because that's one of the biggest challenges with NFTs is you need to get a MetaMask wallet, you need to jump across all these different platforms and you need to learn how to write code or you need to at least be tech savvy to understand how it works. So, really, what we wanted to do was to streamline it in a way that ... And also, another thing is that it's so confusing. The landscape is the wild west because, what's an NFT? It's a GIF or it's a photo or it's a video or it's a song and there's different kinds of song NFTs.

Michael Walker:
And so, we wanted to create a platform where you know exactly what a music relic is because there's a framework, there's an archetype behind what these music relics are. So, in the Music Relic Marketplace, there's five different rarities of music NFTs that you can offer, that you can create from your music. One of them, and the most rare, is what we call your diamond NFT and your diamond NFT is for your entire discography. So, it's basically a one-of-a-kind addition of all of your albums from start to finish. And, when you release a new album, basically, you add on a new album to your diamond NFT and it's still one of a kind and that's the most rare one.

Michael Walker:
The next most rare one is the platinum relic and that's for your album, so that's from an album from start to finish. And you can think about these NFTs as being one thing. So, especially with ... Okay, I'm pulling myself back there because we could get into a rabbit hole but I'll explain how the different groupings of music. I think the overall trend of music and content in general, for better or for worse, has been shorter and shorter attention span. And so, I think that there is a case to be made for having curated, very, very small bite size pieces of content. But at the same time, there are people that, they want more, they want the full meal, they want the entire thing. And I feel like this model of having these five different kinds of music NFT is actually going to open that back up so the people who really want the full meal, they want the full album, now, they actually can have an option. It's much more rare to own one of them but the platinum NFT is the full album and there might be only 10 copies of this for each album.

Michael Walker:
Then the next level of rarity is the gold NFTs. And so, for these, there are about a hundred of them total and these are based on songs. So, you might have, for each song, you have a hundred additions. Another way you can look at this is trading cards. If you have NBA trading cards, you might have the same card but there's only a hundred of them total and so that's a similar idea. So, there's a hundred additions of each of these songs. So, they're a little bit more common but a hundred is still relatively, fairly rare. And one of these hundred additions of Let It Be by the Beatles might be worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Michael Walker:
Then the next rarity is silver and that stands for refrain. And so, refrains are a verse, chorus, bridge or a repeating section in a song and you might have a thousand refrains. And the most common is the bronze NFTs. And so, those are your moments and this is what I'm personally really excited about because I think that this falls in line really nicely with the current, you can call it meme culture. And when I say meme, I don't mean necessarily GIFs or the picture where it's a meme, those are memes too, but I mean more of a cultural phenomenon which is we have these TikTok profiles where we have 15-second clips of videos and we're swiping left and right very, very quickly.

Michael Walker:
So, moments, the idea is that this is an under 15-second long clip from your songs and, ideally, it's going to be a curated moment that really delivers on a silver platter the most eye catching or ear catching, I guess, ear catching clips from your songs. That, if it's the very first thing that a new fan who's never heard of you before was going to listen to, you want it to be the thing that they're like, "Oh, man, I need to listen to this artist. This is amazing." It's like the live show moments where everything drops out and everyone gets goosebumps. So, taking those moments and putting them into one of these limited-edition bronze relics, I think it's going to be one of the best promotional tools.

Michael Walker:
And with the Music Relic Marketplace, we basically, as a provider, have built it in the Street Team so that you can mint these which means you can create them on the blockchain. We're using flow blockchain which is one of the only environmentally friendly blockchains which isn't terrible for the environment. It takes less energy to mint an NFT on flow than it takes to do a Google search or to post on Instagram. So, it's much more environmentally friendly which is important, I know, for a lot of people. And so, what you can do is basically, as a provider, we are giving you a platform within Street Team to be able to mint these NFTs and transfer them to your fans and to decide what do you want. We mint these for you and then you decide what do I want to do with these NFTs.

Michael Walker:
Do I want to offer them for auction or I want to offer it for sale, you can even give them for free to your fans if you have a super fan who's really supportive and you're like, "Look, I want to give you one of my gold NFTs." Or you can do it for your bronze NFTs, if you have 500 of them for each moment, then maybe use it as a way to bring people into your community and to join your email list. Join my community and get a free bronze NFT while they last. When you're at a live show, you can say, "Hey, if you like the music, then I have these NFTs. They're limited edition, there's only 500 of them. But if you go to this website and you sign up here, then I'll send you a bronze NFT." And it's also connected to that clip from your song, it's a really cool moment from the song.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, so hopefully, it's definitely a deep dive into it and hopefully it makes sense without visually seeing the examples of these NFTs but it's also very cool design. So, one of our graphic designers at Modern Musician, Curtis Peel, created a really awesome animation mockup. Basically, it's like a 3D cube that plays the clip from the song or the album or whatever, depending on the NFT, and it has a different frame based on how rare it is and has your cover art, your album artwork on it and it just looks really cool, it pops out of the page. So-

Jared Christianson:
Awesome.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Oh, the last thing that's really exciting about the integration between the Music Relic Marketplace and Street Team is that, because it's within the Street Team platform, you can do things like create different tiers of access to different content based on what kind of NFT your fans own. So, it's like having a Patreon page but, with your Patreon, either ... And we call this your inner circle in Street Teams. So, you can create an inner circle with, let's say, five different tiers of access to you so you have bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond. And similar to Patreon, you can have different tiers of access that someone can subscribe to and pay a monthly subscription fee to access that tier. Or, if they own one of your platinum relics, then they can get access to the platinum tier without the monthly subscription fee as long as they own the Relic. They can also trade it to other people down the line. They can resell it, in which case, they wouldn't have access to that tier anymore but whoever got it, now, they have access to it.

Jared Christianson:
Like a key?

Michael Walker:
It's like a key and that's something that I'm really excited about because I think that there is this model of ownership and status and being able to connect deeper with artists that, building that into the Relic Marketplace, I think, is going to be really a cool way for fans both to self-identify who are the fans who really care the most and are really the ones who are the true fans, I suppose you could say, or the ones who really ... Yeah, I think that money isn't everything, of course. In fact, it's almost nothing, it's just an idea that we all believe in but it's a very, very important idea that we've all decided helps us to operate around society. And we decide that, okay, this is our best objective way to represent value and so, therefore ...

Michael Walker:
I really believe in this that, if you look at what someone spends each month, then you could basically get a pure look at what do they value in their lives and what do they actually value most. And so, I do think that having this type of tiered access where someone can own one of the rarest relics from an artist is a great way to see who really values you and values your music most. And to identify those people and connect with them and serve them and build a deeper relationship with them and plug in that data to your targeting so now you're reaching more fans that are similar to all of your fans who own a gold platinum or diamond NFT.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, back to lookalike audiences, plugging them in. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm super excited for the whole concept of NFTs and I think that it's in its infancy right now and it's the third layer of the internet. The whole idea of cryptocurrencies and stuff is this whole third layer on top that's why they call it Web 3.0. And the same thing happened when Web 2.0 came out, everybody was like, "That's a fad, that's not going anywhere," they didn't understand it yet because it was so new and I think the same thing's going to happen. So, I think, if you can get on board with NFTs now, you're just going to be ahead of the game, you're going to be more educated. And if you start to apply them, you're going to be one of those first artists to take advantage of the opportunity.

Michael Walker:
100%. Yeah, that's so true. One of my favorite analogies and, if you listen to podcasts, you've probably heard me talk about this analogy before because it's one of my favorites but it certainly is true in the case of NFTs that it's like we're surfers and we're looking to catch the wave and there is this opportunity right now. If you look around the landscape, you're like, "Hmm, I feel that there is a wave that's happening right now and it's cresting," and you allow yourself to swim along with it then you have this opportunity where you can catch the wave and get a huge boost momentum.

Michael Walker:
It's also a lot more, I don't know, uncertain or it's more scary and that's the way it always is because it's easier to look at a wave that already passed and be able to point at it and say, "Hey, this thing was successful for this other person." But if you spend all your time and energy trying to catch up and catch this wave that's already passed, then you might never get to it. As opposed to looking at, okay, what are my opportunities right now, how can I be ahead of the curve and actually swim along with that so that you can catch that wave as it crests.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, and I see this as this big wave that's coming, that's going to be surfable very soon. And if you can see that, I think a smaller wave came and went but the next one's coming and it's going to be really big and this isn't going anywhere.

Michael Walker:
It's a tsunami.

Jared Christianson:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
It's a giant wave. If you don't catch it, you will die. I won't go that far but I think it's on the level of maybe just below tsunami. You won't die if you don't catch it but it's going to change everything.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. So, I want to do a few rapid-fire questions. These are personal, selfish questions that I've prepared. The first one is what's your biggest hope or dream related to Modern Musician?

Michael Walker:
Oh, man. Dude, you're asking some really good questions.

Jared Christianson:
I did my research, I prepared for this one.

Michael Walker:
Biggest hope or dream for Modern Musician. I want to create the next Apple Store for musicians but for it to be the NFT marketplace. I want to help eradicate poverty for musicians and to change the narrative. Right now, there's still this remnants of starving artist mentality or the-

Michael Walker:
... Of starving artist mentality. There's so many people that feel, I don't know, embarrassed about making music, feel like they're not good enough, or they're met with skepticism from their family. When they say that they want to make music full time, they're like, "Who do you think you are to be able to do this?" Just because the old model used to be that it was like a lottery ticket, it was so rare. It's not the case anymore. You can do this. If you are willing to show up and do the work, then a hundred percent you can do this. It's not necessarily a game of lottery ticket luck anymore.

Michael Walker:
So I want to create the world's biggest platform that helps artists, specifically music artists, to sustain their craft, and to kind of bring back ownership to fans of music. And ultimately... I think we've geeked over this before, Jared, but ultimately Modern Musician isn't really a business where I see myself 10 years from now being... I don't want to be the face of Modern Musician, and it's basically just relies on me.

Michael Walker:
I think that our team is too talented and it's really not about me, long term. I think that what I would really like to do is to be a member of the board of Modern Musician and still stay connected, but for the business to operate itself, and for Modern Musician, for me personally, to be a stepping stone, to be able to connect with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and people at his level to help build the future of humanity and things like Neurolink, these brain interfaces, to be able to literally communicate with each other telepathically, and be able to create music with our thoughts and merge with AI as the real tidal wave comes across us.

Michael Walker:
I think that there's things like that are probably the biggest ideas that I can imagine that are going to change what it means to be a human. And I think that music is connected to those things. Music, it speaks a language that in some ways is more primal or more rooted. It's more connected than our words and our languages that we speak. But that's really my biggest goal, or my biggest dream, is to be able to connect with the future of technology that changes what it means to be a human and provides essentially a path towards living in an environment where there are zero limitations on anything. It's pure... We can imagine something and it just exists immediately.

Jared Christianson:
Dude, that's what I love about you so much is your ability to dream big. It's almost scary. It takes a lot of courage and vision to think like that and to think like you do. And that's why I love being around you and seeing what you're doing. And yeah, man, I just appreciate everything that you've done for all the musicians that you've touched over the years.

Michael Walker:
Thanks, man. That means a lot. And I mean, I could say the exact same thing about you. You're such a gifted, both musician yourself, and leader at Modern Musician, and you really exemplify what it means to be a modern musician. So I usually appreciate you, and being able to connect with you and seeing your journey over the past five years.

Jared Christianson:
Thanks, man. So next rapid fire question. What is one of the best, or most worthwhile, investments you've ever made?

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I would say probably... The one that comes to mind first is the investment in Jeff Walker's coaching program. When I was really kind of at that point where I'd lost my identity, I didn't know what I was going to do. Am I going to go back to college? I never went to school. I didn't have any real world experience aside from touring full time with my band, which in retrospect, provided a huge amount of real world experience. But it's certainly no formal education. And that was an investment, it was $12,000 at the time. And I didn't have $12,000 just sitting around to invest in something like that. So I ended up putting it on a credit card, doing the monthly plan, and it was one of the most challenging years of my life because I invested a lot into my business and about $36,000 at its peak of debt.

Michael Walker:
And it wasn't until the end of the first year that things started to connect. And in retrospect, I can see that I had planted the seed and was nurturing it and it was starting to sprout, but the fruits hadn't necessarily started falling yet. So that first year when I was at that turning point, deciding to stay with his program, continue to focus on the music, on the business, was another investment. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't be here right now, for sure. We wouldn't have Modern Musician, wouldn't be helping hundreds of thousands of musicians.

Michael Walker:
We wouldn't have connected, and everything that we just talked about over the last hour or so just wouldn't even have existed if it wasn't for the value of mentorship, and the value of someone who's just further along then I was, being able to look at where I was and look at my path and see a future for myself that was bigger than the vision that I had seen. I didn't even know it was possible, but he had seen what was possible, and he could see something inside of me that was bigger than what I saw myself. And I think that's really the role that a mentor provides. So I think in general, mentorship is one of the most valuable things that you can invest into, whether it's your time or your money, finding the right person who's done the things that you want to do and connecting with them, and in the community too, is a really important part of that.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. Yeah, I agree. It's been one of the best investments I've made. Modern Musician was that for me. I think that, like you said, having somebody who can see further than you can at the time and that who's been there before, can help you along the way better than you can just all alone by yourself. Awesome. So next question is in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has had most improved your life?

Michael Walker:
Oh man, it's a really good question. That was a tough one. I feel like there's so many things. Honestly, I think that the habit tracker and just the morning routine in general, is probably the most important one. So that's the green shake that I drink every morning, it's meditation, it's going for a run every morning, it's getting high quality sleep. And I think that's probably kind of... And the Vision Map. Oh yeah. The Vision Map is one of those things where it's the foundation of building an entire house on. If it was built on sand, then with one storm it would come crumbling down. But having that foundation has been really, really important.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. So the morning routine, having a routine kind of setting your day up for success. The Vision Map thing is something that I've been doing more recently in the morning. It's the first thing I look at, and it totally changes my day. And also it helps me align with where I actually want to go. Because for a while it was kind of like I'd built it out and I'd look at it every once in a while, but I came in a couple weeks ago and I was like, "Hey, this is out of alignment with where I used to... I used to think this." I used to have these ideas about my future self and what I want and all that. And I realized this needs an update. And I love that it's a living and breathing document that you can go back to. So that's awesome.

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. Yeah. It's really it's channeling your creative power that comes from a universal nature, I would say.

Jared Christianson:
Of your mind.

Michael Walker:
It does. I don't know. It's possible, I think, to what some people would call woo woo or something to start thinking the law of attraction and stuff. But there is something very true about the fact that everything that's manmade started out as a thought, and then through action, and through energy moving towards that thought, it became a real thing, but it started out as the thought. And that's something that there's been a lot of studies now, and Olympic athletes, and the most successful entrepreneurs, they're all masters at creating a vision. And the vision's literally so connected to that final outcome that in some cases, like Steve Jobs, he famously had his reality distortion field, literally distort reality around and create things that were seemingly impossible. So I really believe that, deep down, that's one of the most important things that you can work on in yourself is looking within and asking yourself really, what do you want to create? What do you want to imagine? And give yourself permission to fully create that and imagine it, and then become the person who deserves to create that.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. So I got one more rapid fire question, and then I got a couple from the audience, and then we could probably wrap this episode up. But the last one is if you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why?

Michael Walker:
Probably that you are enough. Yeah. Yeah. And this is something I still... I need this billboard for myself, just as much as anyone else. But yeah, I would say at its root of the human condition, it's sort of this feeling... I've lived with it my whole life. And sometimes it's hard to... It's almost like a fish swimming in water. If you swim in water for your whole life, then you might not even be aware that you're swimming in water, because it just is. But yeah, I think that almost all of us have carried around this constant level of baseline anxiety or pain, or they're just this feeling of not enough. And maybe it's connected to our egos and this sense of being separate from everyone else, which I think ultimately is an illusion that creates this sense of not enoughness because it's a lie that we aren't... That we're alone, that we're not interconnected with everyone and everything else.

Michael Walker:
And so honestly I'm not usually aware of it. Sometimes when I'm meditating, I'll be able to just let go completely, just be completely present and just observe and be one with everything. But most of the time, I would say, is still operating from a level of ego and not enoughness. I don't fully know, too, how much of that is a good thing. Maybe, I don't know, that feeling of not enoughness is also responsible for almost everything that's good in my life. The reason that I became a musician is because I felt like I wasn't enough. I got rejected in high school. I remember really traumatizing experience where I basically got publicly rejected by a girl in high school. And that became, that feeling of being rejected, of feeling not enough, was probably what inspired me to start a band and want to never feel like that again.

Michael Walker:
And to feel not like a loser, I guess. And so I don't know, it's a tricky one. That feel of, you don't ever want to be complacent, but at the same time, I think there is the sense of being plugged in when you do fully understand and grasp that you are enough exactly as you are, and that you are just part of this one as one life that we're all connected to. Then I think that's ultimately where we're headed towards. And what I hope that we realize with these brain interfaces is that we're not actually as separate as we think. We're actually a part of one living being.

Jared Christianson:
Dude, I knew I was going to get some deep stuff and I love that. I think we should make that billboard. You are enough. It's like a phrase... It's something that everybody needs to hear, I think from time to time. Dude, so good. So couple questions from the audience, since we are live here today, I've got some queued in here, right here. So from Karina, what is the single most important thing you recommend an artist do every single day?

Michael Walker:
Good one. Yeah. I think that probably the Vision Map would be the number one thing. And I think that we walk through it on most of the master classes that we do live on Wednesdays, but in a nutshell, this is you plugging back in with what's your biggest goal, or what's your biggest dreams, and to do it on a one to three, five year basis, because obviously if you go too much further out then it's trying to look at a landscape like 500 miles away when you're walking. It's like, well maybe you need to look a little bit closer. But I think that's probably the number one habit is, I would say, goal setting. And every day, reconnecting with what are your top three to five goals for the next year, and next three months, next month, next week. And just checking in on those top three goals and priorities so that you can stay in alignment with them.

Jared Christianson:
I would totally agree too, but that's something I learned really from you is this planning. It was something that I was kind of dropping the ball on before we met, and I saw the way that you did it, and now you've got vision magnets and mind maps. And I was going to go into a little bit more of that, but that could be a rabbit hole all on its own. And if you sign up for our master class, our free master class, you can see how all that works. But planning, I think, is so underused by musicians. And on a short period, on a longer term, and definitely can change the game. I know the reason why our album did so well this last time around was a hundred percent due to the planning.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah. Just goal setting in a nutshell. I mean, when you see the most successful people over and over and over again, it's scientifically proven that goal setting is one of the traits that they have in common, then it's hard to ignore that.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. So we'll do one more, and then we can wrap it up. But from beta dub machine, how much does the average new musician need to spend in order to get a solid fan base of at least a thousand people?

Michael Walker:
It really depends on what you're willing to invest in terms of your time versus money. I mean, theoretically, you could just walk up to people on lines for shows. You could go tour hacking and it wouldn't cost you anything. So in that case, zero. In terms of promotion, you can just do that, and you can spend the time and energy to... You can do the same thing online. You can follow other artists that have similar music who have fans that might like your music too. You can start connecting with their communities. You can start having conversations with their fans and start sharing your music as well. So all that is within your grasp if you're willing to invest the time and the energy to do that. And it's like anything, you can either invest your time or your money. And the secret of wealthy people is that they've gotten really, really good at investing money to save time.

Michael Walker:
Because time is a very, very precious resource that right now at least, there's no way to replenish. And so that being said, if you don't have a lot of money to start with, then if all you have to invest is your time, then invest your time. And figure out where to invest your time to get the best return. So in my opinion, it probably would be tour hacking because I think that's probably the best way that you can invest zero and actually make tens of thousands of dollars even if you're doing it well. So that's one option. I mean, the fastest way, if you have a budget, then I would invest... Clearly I'm going to be more biased here, but I would invest in mentorship. We have our Gold Arts Academy and it's not for everyone, and we're very selective with who we bring in.

Michael Walker:
We make sure that it's the right fit. Right now we get between 700, 800 applications per month. And we narrow it down to about 25 to 30 artists to work with based on your music, and based on the application, and just what your goals are. But there's other options too. There's lots of different courses, and programs, and things you can invest in. So if you have a budget, then I think probably the fastest way to get to your first thousand fans is one, get a program or course or something from someone who has already invested the time for you, and already invested the money, because otherwise you're going to spend way more money and way more time, just trying to figure it out on your own. We've invested over $730,000 in the past year to figure out what's not working, so that you can not have to invest that yourself.

Michael Walker:
If you have a budget and you're willing to invest, you just want to get results as quickly as possible, then I would recommend finding the right mentor that you resonate with. And it might not be us, right? There's different mentors for different people and at different times. So I would encourage you to follow your gut, and go with the mentors that you personally resonate with who've done the thing that you're looking to do, and find a way to surround yourself with the right people, figure out the people who are on the same path, or the people who are a bit ahead of you, and do whatever you can to connect with those people, to surround yourself with them. Even if it's doing things like... If you're looking to become a producer, offer to be an intern and to get coffee for a producer that you really look up to. There's a lot of opportunities. If you're willing to show up and focus on providing value, then you can trade your time and get opportunities to get mentored by people. But yeah, hopefully that helps. Does that make sense?

Jared Christianson:
Yeah, totally. I think that's the perfect way to kind of close it out here today, too, because I was going to say if there's anybody here who wants to work with Modern Musician, or if you're watching this somewhere else and you want to apply for Gold Artist Academy, maybe you think that Modern Musician is a good fit for you, we'll have a link right below this video and you guys can apply there. But yeah, dude, that was awesome. This has been so fun for me. I geek out, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I like listening. I do like absorbing information that way, but sometimes I'm like, "What would it be like to host?" And this has been super fun for me and I get to interview you. So this is awesome, man.

Michael Walker:
Thanks, man. Dude, you killed it. I mean, for someone who doesn't do a lot of podcasts, you had great questions, you showed up, and you're a fantastic host. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to play a slightly different role that I normally play on the podcast and get to be able to share.

Jared Christianson:
Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for your time, Michael. Do you have any last words for us today?

Michael Walker:
You are enough.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then that'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or 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 their music careers to the next level. It's time to be a modern musician now. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.