Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician can be a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money towards achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where Modern Musician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, it’s why I have my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with Modern Musician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, but without really a fanbase or without a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, thousands or maybe even millions of fans with their music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who share their knowledge and success with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

Ryan Krysiak: But that's how many you can potentially get off of YouTube. That's how many people you can have watch your band and see what you're doing on a daily basis. It's crazy the amount of numbers that you would see there compared to how you would get famous or a fan base 20 years ago by just going out and playing shows. They're just numbers that are… they're untouchable any other way. And it's insane to ignore that possibility. And again, it's not like we're the best band in the world. We're not super great musicians. We're not super special. We're just a small town band that decided that we were going to go full bore into this and start making videos on a regular basis.

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

Alright, I’m excited to be here today with Ryan Krysiak. Ryan is one of our platinum artists at Modern Musician and he’s a genius at what he does. I’m super excited for you to be here today because he’s going to share how he’s gotten over 500 MILLION views on his band’s YouTube Channel. 500 Million! Half a BILLION! I’d just like to sit with that for a second and kind of wrap my head around that. There’s like, what 6 or 7 billion people on the earth and half a billion views that have seen your videos. Pretty dang awesome! So Ryan. Congratulations on your success and thank-you so much for being so humble and open with coming on here live to share some of the lessons that you’ve learned, because I really think it’s going to help benefit a lot of artists who are here in our community to be able to use the platform of Youtube to be able to share who they are, share their music, and reach more people with it. 

Ryan Krysiak: Yeah, I’m excited, dude. It’s my favourite thing to talk about this stuff because in my small town, we don’t get to go to other YouTuber’s houses and BS about Youtube. You know what I mean? It’s just the few of us that are here so I really, really enjoy trying to be as transparent as possible about what it’s like to be in this space and make it a career for yourself.

Michael: Amazing. It is really special what we have here with this community and be able to be in a space where you’re just surrounded by musicians who are on a similar wavelength as you. It kind of reminds me of Mr. Beast. I heard him do an interview once where he was talking about how part of the reason he became Mr. Beast and built one of the most successful YouTube channels was because of little mastermind groups he did where he met with other people and just focussed on this stuff over and over again.

Ryan: Wow.

Michael: Yeah, he had a lot of conversations like what we’re about to have today.

Ryan: Yeah!

Michael: So to kick things off, I’d love to hear your story of how you started on YouTube and how you eventually found your way to building the platform and reaching 500 million views. 

Ryan: Yeah, so going back, I was in an original band, and that original band needed money. So, we started a cover band to be able to raise money to record our albums. So, instead of coming out of our own pockets and our own paychecks, we were like: Let’s start another band that makes money and then can fund this original thing. I think a lot of people don’t necessarily go into making covers as being like: I’m going to be the most amazing cover artist ever. Most of the time it’s just a conduit; it’s a way to get to where you wanna get to. And for I think most artists, they want to be an original musician. So yeah, that was kinda where it started. I started making rock covers of Ke$ha and Lady Gaga songs. We would play them in the bars and stuff like that. And then, I actually had the idea to start putting these covers on YouTube which was like in 2009 and everyone in my band was like: you can’t make money off of YouTube. These aren’t our songs. What’s the point of putting them there? It’s not going to do anything for us. So they kinda talked me out of it. And that was like the first in a few roadblocks of people telling me: You can’t do this. Or: You shouldn’t do this. So I put it on the back burner for a while. 2009 was like the infancy of YouTube and it was just getting started, especially with musicians. If we would have continued on doing what we were doing at that point, we would be millionaires a thousand times over. Let's put a cover on YouTube of one of the most popular songs that was at the time. It was a Twenty One Pilots song: Heathens. And then we put that up there to be like: hey, we're going to be playing Warped Tour, so come to our stage. And then that video just got millions and millions of views. And it got people to our stage, but it just lived on much beyond what we originally intended it for. And then we were like, all right, maybe we should do this all the time to gather fans, to then point them to our original music again. And it just kept working.

Michael: Super smart. Yeah. What it reminds me of is: we talk a lot about this idea of tour hacking and virtual tour hacking. And in a nutshell, with our band, how we built our fan base originally was by walking up to fans who were waiting in lines for shows and introducing ourselves and sharing some of our music. And now we teach artists how to do that online and how to, essentially, get their music in front of people who are fans of similar bands and start having conversations with them. And that as a strategy, like at its core, its essence is really basically the same thing that you've discovered with YouTube and with doing these cover songs. It's a way to connect with this existing audience of people that understand or are familiar with something and to be able to provide something new and something fresh for them.

Ryan: Yeah.

Michael: I would love to hear a little bit about your overall mindset and thought process around: why is it valuable for anyone here who is a musician who maybe their intention is that they do want to build a fanbase with their original music and they might be wondering: why should I be recording cover videos on YouTube, or why should I be using YouTube in the first place? I'd love to hear your mindset in terms of that question.

Ryan: Yeah. So it's what you were saying: you were going around and you were putting headphones on people in the line because the hardest part, there's so many artists out there, but if you can just stick a set of headphones on somebody, they can be like: Oh, now I understand what this is. But an album cover and saying, go check out my band. We're called this, it just doesn't ring true with anybody. So I made up this analogy the other day where it's, I don't know if you've ever been to a sandwich shop and they name their sandwich, like, the Vincent Van Gogh or something. They name it some sort of weird name, but really it's a Buffalo chicken sandwich. But if you just looked at that menu board and you just saw the Vincent van Gogh, the Michelangelo, the whatever. You'd be like: I don't know what any of these are. And that's like what you're looking at when you're just looking at a bunch of band names on a show flier or in the “around town" section of your newspaper. What band am I going to go see? All you get is a bunch of names. You putting those headphones on, then people are like: Oh, this is a buffalo chicken sandwich. I like those. You know what I mean? They make that connection with something that they're familiar with. With covers, you can say: go check out my band, we're this whatever. But if you play a song that they're familiar with, if you play that 21 Pilots song, they're like, I like 21 Pilots. This band plays 21 Pilots. I like this band now. That connection is now made where you have to step from “I like 21 pilots” to “I like (whatever my band's name is) First to Eleven”. So you have to bridge that gap somewhere. You have to make that connection of: this is a buffalo chicken sandwich. If you like buffalo chicken, you'll like us. I think that's the thing that covers do. I have so many artists that are amazing, but trying to connect with the fans in that region or across the world that like that type of music, you got to give them that stepping stone or else you're never going to find them. And it's just like looking at that menu board of sandwiches that you don't know what they are. So you've just got to explain what it is a little bit better. So yeah, that's the value in it is that you create something familiar to people, and then give them that stepping stone and bridge the gap between what they know and what they love and what you do and what you love.

Michael: Super smart. I love that analogy: The buffalo chicken. Yeah, as you're describing that too, I just was imagining the… I've heard this in a lot of different ways and it's sort of a philosophical question, the difference between actually tasting the apple versus describing the apple or talking about it or theorizing about it. 

Ryan: Totally, yeah!

Michael: There is a profound difference between you describing your music and saying the name of it and what it sounds like versus actually giving them something that they can experience and understand directly. And it sounds like what you're saying is that cover songs are a great way to really provide that experience and bridge the gap so that people who don't understand who you are or don't have something to connect with are able to really experience it and understand it and have a stepping stone towards connecting with your original music.

Ryan: And it’s like: they can see what you look like, they can see how you act, they get so much more information out of watching you play something that they're familiar with. So yeah, it just makes it so much faster.

Michael: Super smart. Yeah. And I can speak from experience too with Paradise Fears, some of our first songs that got over a million views on YouTube were cover songs and some of our favorite songs to play when we went live or when we performed live, we would always try to work in one or two cover songs into the set. And a lot of times the people who don't know who you are, that's the song that they really can connect with. And they're like: Oh yeah, like I like this song. Oh, this is a cool cover.

Ryan: Even if they think: Oh, this band thinks that whoever they're covering is cool, obviously, and I think that they're cool. So they must be cool. It makes that stepping stone on so many different levels. But like what you're saying I wanted to mention too that there's so many huge acts that their first song was a cover, especially in the metal world. I grew up with Limp Bizkit and Korn and all those bands, and they all did covers. Limp Bizkit's first song that they made it mainstream with was the George Michael cover and then they go on and they show people their original music and it's amazing. And there's so many people that their breakthrough or their icebreaker into the mainstream was a cover song. And unfortunately, and I'd like to try and bust through that a little bit today, is that a lot of people just feel like it's dirty. It's cheating or it's not respectable to do a cover and become famous that way, or gain fans that way. But, another analogy that I came up with was like: running a marathon is impressive. You know what I mean? Like not a lot of people can run a marathon and the analogy is: becoming successful as a musician is like, not a lot of people can do that. And becoming successful as a musician is like the equivalent of finishing that marathon and doing it on just your original content is like running a marathon with a weighted vest on. It's a handicap in a way. Now, if you said: I ran a marathon with a weighted vest on and people would be like: Whoa, that's really impressive. But if you just say I ran a marathon, people are still going to be like: that's impressive. It might not be to that level, but it's still impressive. And the bad thing though is that so many people are trying to run that marathon with a weighted vest on and they just never finish it. You know what I mean? And you can't be like: Hey, I tried to run this marathon with a weighted vest on but I didn't make it. That's not very impressive. You know what I mean? So I think that people want to have this amazing story of how they broke through and became successful on just their original music alone, and most of them never make it there, unfortunately. And if you can do it with that: Hey, I ran a regular marathon first and then I put the weighted vest on and now that's impressive. I think people look at it differently, though. I think they look at it like: I ran a marathon, if you do covers, it's like I ran a marathon but I did it on a bike. I think they think that it's like just cheating. It's not really running a marathon, but it is! Becoming successful is impressive if you're going to do it as a musician and not a lot of people can do it. So I don't see why people have such an aversion to doing covers and just allowing it to be this thing that gathers fans and then you can convert them. It's not like they don't want to be converted either. You know what I mean? It's not like people are like: “just play the covers. I don't ever want to hear your original stuff”! [both laughing] Most of the time they're happy to hear your original stuff. So it just makes so much sense to me, but it's very difficult for me to convince a lot of people to believe what I'm saying, because it's just so ingrained in your head: Nope, that's cheating. Nope, you have to be just an artist through and through; all original content. That's the mindset of just about everybody. It's crazy. But yeah, I want to try and bust that open.

Michael: Yeah, I think we can bust through that. Yeah, I think hopefully. Let me know if you're here live. Let me know if you're open to using cover songs as a tool to allow you to amplify your reach, and would you be okay with getting 500 million views on your YouTube channel with the help of using cover songs? And I think we're gonna have a lot of people are like: yeah! It sounds like a good tool. As you're describing that analogy… I love analogies.

Ryan: I’ve noticed! [both laughing]

Michael: If you could share like 10 more of those I'd be so happy. What came to mind was another way of looking at it and another type of analogy for it too, I think goes in line with what you're saying with the marathon strategy is that: We talk a lot about this fanbase fire and this idea that building your audience is like starting a fire and your logs represent the music and the fuel that you use to start the fire. I've never thought about this way before, but one way to look at cover song is: it's almost like it's a starter firewood. It's almost like it's really flammable.

Ryan: It’s like kindling.

Michael: It’s like really good kindling. It's a great way to easily start the fire. And once you have the fire going, now we can put in some other logs and other things that aren't necessarily doused in lighter fluid. But man, if you could get started with a log that's doused in lighter fluid, it's a great tool. It's a great way to get started.

Ryan: Yeah, there's definitely no shame in it. And yeah, so I wanted to just… You hear me talk about this, but I wanted to just let people know that it's real. Okay? So I have some screen shares and stuff that I want to pull up and I want to be, like I said, I want to be as transparent as possible. So a lot of people don't like to talk about money or whatever, or their accomplishments, but we're gonna do that for a second.

Michael: Let it shine, brother.

Ryan: Because I think that when I started doing this, I was like everyone else, I was like: I'll never be that guy that gets a million views. That's like people that just get lucky or people that have some sort of ability beyond what I have. And I'm not any sort of special musician. I'm not particularly good at my instrument or arranging songs or anything. I just stopped listening to what everyone told me all the time and tried some stuff that I really thought and believed that would work, and it did.

I'll show you my channel first. I'll show you what First to Eleven does. So we'll just go to like our homepage here. 

Michael: 10.7 million views in the past 28 days. Pretty awesome.

Ryan: It's opened up to this analytics page already, so we're just going to go with that first. So yeah, there's the 10.7 million views in the last 28 days. And we've gone up, we've gone down from there. But, 28 days, you can see the curve, it's very steady. We get that on a regular basis. And here's some of our top videos. This Sweet Child of Mine video has 60 million views at this point. We did it like four or five years ago. And this is what it gets on a monthly basis. So every month it gets half a million views. So, that song just lives on forever getting these views. It's already been out for, like I said, four or five years. And it just continues to get that kind of views regularly. We've gone up 15,000 subscribers in the past month. Our revenue is going to show up really weird because we have a company that collects our revenue for us. So all of this is just what slips through the cracks and gets collected by Google. It’s, for the most part, way higher than that. So we've got some weird caveats with how our revenue comes in. Like I said, we have a company that collects all that sort of stuff for us. And we sold part of our catalog about 2 years ago. Only the previous two years are what we are actually collecting at this point because we sold all of the stuff prior to that. Just from these past two years, we make about $16,000 per month on streaming revenue and YouTube revenue. So that's Spotify, Apple Music, and all that sort of stuff. These kind of numbers, those millions of views, equal that kind of revenue, and I think anyone would be happy to get that. We've got 4 people that are in the band. Plus we have a whole team of people that work for us now, so it gets split up and goes its separate ways. But that's the kind of numbers that are possible by building up this catalog of songs on YouTube and Spotify. And we do one song every week at least.

Michael: And real quick, just out of curiosity, I'm not sure if you know this number off the top of your head, but I'm curious with Spotify, with a million streams, you can break it down to, what, like 4 or $5,000 dollars per million streams? Do you know off the top of your head per million views on YouTube, what that kind of looks like?

Ryan: A lot of times, if I'm trying to just ballpark it, it's usually a million streams equals $1,000 on YouTube and some other platforms, it's pretty close to that. Sometimes things go up, things go down. Depends on what rate you're actually getting on your ads. It goes all over the place. But like I said, I just wanted to show that and be transparent and say: this is what is possible, and you don't have to necessarily be a band with 4 people where you divide it into 4 different pots. I know so many drummers that just put a camera in front of themselves and then make videos on YouTube and they get the same amount that we do and they have no overhead because they have no producer, they have no other people to split it with. So imagine, just getting an extra $15,000 a month just from making 1 YouTube video playing through a song on drums. The possibilities are crazy. So here's the channel. Now you can see that, right? So 1.73 million subscribers. We put out like a video today, an hour ago. That's Superstition. Then we did a Christmas song on Tuesday, so that's 2 days ago. So we basically go every Tuesday, every Thursday right now. One Christmas song, one regular song. So these are some of the videos that we put out recently.

Michael: You’re like a content machine!

Ryan: Oh yeah. We definitely have a system and we'll get into that a little bit. But yeah, we put out a video every week at this point and sometimes twice a week. So we did some acoustic covers. We did some Halloween covers. We did all kinds of different stuff, but this is what our channel looks like. As you can see they're getting hundreds of thousands of views. Nothing really in the millions of views. We've had, obviously, some very successful videos, but right now we're just trucking along, putting out videos, getting hundreds of thousands here, there, and then these are our biggest videos of all time. So right there at the top is our Guns N’ Roses one. 60 million views. That was 4 years ago. And then we've got 12 million, 12 million, 11 million, 10 million. I don't know. At one point I'd counted how many were over a million, but I don't remember what it was. That just shows you that this YouTube machine puts you in front of millions and millions of people. Numbers that you would never be able to see just going out and playing shows. And I always tell this story too, that we had a drummer that was in the band. And these were all younger kids and they basically got to be 18 and then they decided they wanted to either go to college or they wanted to play music full-time. And some of them wanted to go to college and some of them wanted to play music full-time. The one that went to college, I went and visited him and he was going to Penn State and Beaver Stadium is a hundred thousand capacity stadium. And we were driving by there and everyone was flooding into there and everyone was trying to go to the football game and it was chaos. I was like: wouldn't it be crazy to play a show in front of that many people? That'd be sick. And he was like, yeah: that would totally change my mind about being a musician. And I was like: but that's how many people watch our YouTube channel every day. You know what I mean? Whether we put out a video or not, hundreds of thousands of people. So you imagine Wembley stadium, the Foo Fighters are playing. What if you were the opening band for the Foo Fighters at Wembley Stadium? You would play in front of a hundred thousand people. But that's how many you can potentially get off of YouTube. That's how many people you can have watch your band and see what you're doing on a daily basis. It's crazy the amount of numbers that you would see there compared to how you would get famous or a fan base 20 years ago by just going out and playing shows. They're just numbers that are untouchable any other way. And it's insane to ignore that possibility. And again, it's not like we're the best band in the world. We're not super great musicians. We're not super special. We're just a small town band that decided that we were going to go full bore into this and start making videos on a regular basis. We started 1 video every month and then we did that for a couple years and then we found out that we were getting really good at it. So we did, once a week after that and then we started to up it to 2-3 times a week sometimes at peak season, which is right now. November/December is when YouTube is at its height so we put out extra videos there and then it calms down in January. We'll go back to 1 video a week. Yeah, there's nothing out of reach to hit these numbers and do this as a fan generation tool and be able to see the same success as us. I should point out too, that it's not like it was just us. So when I had my music school, I also was like: I want to have all my other students do this. So not only did First to Eleven do really well, I had another younger group, they were called Rose Gun Vibe, and they put out a video, and it got half a million views. And they only did like maybe two or three videos, but they got hundreds of thousands of views on their first try, completely unconnected to First to Eleven's success. In fact, there was this weird time where Glamour Magazine was watching YouTube videos, and then they were taking the actual artists and filming them reacting to them. So it was like Halsey was watching a bunch of covers on YouTube. Glamour Magazine reached out to us and was like: Hey, your Halsey cover was awesome. We're gonna have Halsey react to it. And then a week later, they were like: Another band that I did, they were like: your Bebe Rexha cover is amazing. Oh, you're back to the whole… [something weird happens with Michael’s video]

Michael: Arrgh! Angry! Halsey! [both laughing]

Ryan: That set you off. It was Halsey and Bebe Rexha. Then they reached out to us again and they were like: Hey, this cover is really good. Can we feature it on this video? And it happened to us 3 different times, with 3 different bands that were here at the studio, completely unconnected to each other. It's not like I referenced them. They just found these videos the same way as they found the first one. And then, at first I was like, maybe it's only these young kids. It's because they're kids playing these songs. Maybe that's why they're getting views. So then I made some videos of me singing and doing some country songs with a friend of mine, and then those got hundreds of thousands of views. So we weren't doing anything amazing. We didn't have great camera equipment. We didn't have great recording software or anything like that, which I'll show you in a little bit too. But it worked. I don't know if you've heard about this, but my son, this is in the past like two weeks, but my son has an Instagram channel and a TikTok channel. And he's a 7 year-old guitar player. He plays drums too, but he's really good. He's insanely good for his age.

Michael: He’s incredibly impressive. Yeah, everyone should definitely check him out.

Ryan: And his channel is now blowing up too. And he got 60 million views off of his most recent video that he did. And again, completely independent of my success or first to eleven’s success, he started with nothing just like everyone else did and still managed to gather that many views. It's all a testament to covers, and it's all a testament to platforms like YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, that have the ability to attract these giant audiences and give you that exposure. And a lot of people get mad and they say: Spotify pays you a fraction of a penny or whatever. It's not really about what you make on those platforms, it's about the generation of leads and fans and stuff like that. Cause you can convert them to buying t-shirts or CDs or whatever you want to do. But trying to get that many eyes on you is priceless. So if they said, we'll never pay you ever again, I'd be like: okay, fine. But still let me be in the algorithm and still let me hit these numbers because it's invaluable. It's amazing.

Michael: One question that I'd love to address, because I know I've seen quite a few questions coming in around this, I know that you probably get this question all the time as well, is around the copyright issue and the legality of doing it. A lot of folks are like, how does that work? Am I able to monetize these cover songs? How do I appropriately get the licenses for that? Can you share really quickly how that works?

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. That's such a huge part of it too, because when we started, we were doing this, again, just as lead generation. We just wanted to get eyes on this band. At one point someone just told me, they were like: hey, are you claiming your recording rights? And I was like, what are you talking about? And they were like: if you click this button you claim the recording side of your covers. Because there's a publishing side, and there's a recording side. The publishing side is obviously who wrote the song, and the recording side is who recorded the song and in our case we didn't write the song, but we recorded it. It was our recording. But if you didn't click this one button, you didn't get to claim that recording side. So for years on YouTube, we were like: Hey, we made $400 this time, cause that was like, all we would get, was the leftovers, the scraps, because the original songwriters would come in and they would claim their song. Because it was theirs. But if you don't claim the recording side, they get the recording side too. So you have to click that button and say: this is my recording and you can claim it. So then that happened and we started making $10,000 a month. Like it literally was like a night and day switch that all we had to do was click this button. But no one told us. No one explained that to me. So I just went on thinking you couldn't make money from songs on YouTube, but that's how it works. And it's basically through a content ID system. So if you're uploading through distrokid or something like that, there's a little button that you can click that says: Add to YouTube content ID. And if you click that button, then your recording, your audio, goes into YouTube’s system and anytime that it sees that recording, it claims that as being yours. But if it doesn't know that, again, it just takes the publishing rights and just gives all the money to them. 50%! We don't get 100% of our ad revenue. We only get 50% because we didn't write the songs. It's just covers. But 50% is still really good. Still fine.

Michael: Yeah. Oh, yeah. 

Ryan: When you go to Spotify, it's 90/10. You pay 10% of your revenue to the original songwriters and 90% of it you get to keep, which is crazy. And that was what I tried to explain to my band back in 2009. I was like: we can get 90% of what we make. We just have to pay 10% to the original songwriters. We've gotten to the point where the Rolling Stones and Echosmith and Nothing But Thieves and all these bands, Kanye West reached out to us, and basically they say: here! Do a cover of our song because we're happy to give you the revenue because it's revenue we wouldn't have made if you didn't do that. You know what I mean?

Michael: Yeah.

Ryan: If there were no covers of our song, we would just make what we make but if there's covers we get an additional 50% of this new revenue of someone that's doing a cover of this song. Sometimes they're happy that bands are doing this because you know for 60 million views on that Guns N’ Roses song we've made Guns N’ Roses millions of dollars potentially off of that video. And hopefully they're happy because we're happy that we got our piece of it. They got their piece. And that just wouldn't have existed if we were like: Nope, it's not legal to do that. But it 100% is. We went through it. And technically though, there’s some artists that don't want anyone covering their song and they still have the right to do that. So they can potentially just say: Nope, no one's covering. I think the Eagles are one. The Beatles used to be one, but I think they're different now, but the Eagles still are. So if you put an Eagles cover up on YouTube, they'll just shut it off because they don't want the additional revenue. They don't care. They don't want anyone covering their song. But almost everyone else is fine with it. So they still ultimately have the ability to turn it off if they want to, but most of the time they don't.

Michael: Yeah. So it totally makes sense. Yeah. Because it's a win-win, where they're getting a portion of royalties that they probably wouldn't get if they didn't have that extra traffic and exposure. Awesome. All right. So Ryan, I would love to see a little bit of I don't know, a crystal ball or a little bit of a deep dive into your process, because you don't get to a point what you've gotten to without having really great systems and processes and things dialed in. I'm curious what that looks like for you in terms of this content engine. How do you put it together and how do you have that level of output?

Ryan: I can go all the way back to the beginning and when we picked the songs. When we first started the channel, we picked only top 40 songs that had just come out that week. We would look at the billboard charts because what we wanted to do was try and get out ahead of anyone else that was gonna potentially do this cover because we were a no-name band at that point. If we could get out ahead of everyone else, we wanted to do that. So that was like when we did Heathens. We did that right when it came out. Right before Suicide Squad, the movie, came out. Right before the song even blew up. As that song got popular, so did our cover. We just got in at the ground level on those songs. So if you pick a good cover and you do it before it blows up, you rise with the success of that song. It takes you with it. But if you tried your first cover, you wanted to play Sweet Child of Mine, you've got millions of other people that are trying to do a cover of that song. It's going to be tough for you to cut through and get known through that sort of stuff. So we would pick top 40 songs just to try and be the first one that did it. But now I think that you could potentially, if you took a classic song, and you just did it in a new way... A lot of people now on TikTok and Instagram are doing like: it's AC/DC, but it's pop-punk or something like that. And they genre bend things. That's a cool way to just… now you've got a version of it that doesn't sound like everyone else's. And now you can cut through that way too. So there's different mindsets as far as what you're going to do to cut through. But you definitely can't just straight up the middle cover this song exactly the artist did, because there's probably a lot of other people that are trying to do the same thing. So you gotta do something to separate yourself a little bit at the beginning. We all just have a list on our phone. There's four members in the band. We all just have a list on our phone. When we hear a song in Subway, we're like: Oh, I forgot about this song. We’ll put it in our list and then we'll bring it up and we try some stuff. We'll do some artists and sometimes our fan base is like: what are you doing? And sometimes our fan base is like: yes! This is what I want to see you guys do. So we have a lot of success with like new metal sort of stuff, Lincoln Park and Breaking Benjamin, as well as some classic stuff. Like when we do Guns N’ roses, it always does really well. But there's weird stuff. Sometimes we do AC/DC and no one cares. Sometimes we try to do the Foo Fighters and nobody cared about our Foo Fighters songs. I don't know why. They're a great band. We like them. Our fans, I think, like them, but they just didn't do very well. So you find out which bands are good and then you do their most popular song and then their second most popular song and just go down the list. There's millions of songs that you can pull from and yeah, we just put them on a schedule and we just throw them out like 3 months in advance. So we're like: all right, three months from now, we're going to do this song. That gives us a month to get the audio together, 2 weeks to get the video together, 2 weeks to get it mixed and mastered. We have this schedule at least a month ahead of time of the release, you've got to have the audio done. The way that we do it, you can mix and master your own audio, which I'm not saying don't do that, but we don't do that. We basically record everything in logic and we export the tracks dry. So there's no guitar amps on it, there's no bass amp, there's no vocal effects. There's no anything. We use MIDI drums, which makes the process really easy because we don't have to have a mic'd up drum set that could potentially get bumped and the mix is off. So we do MIDI drums just to make things a lot easier. A lot of people can't really tell the difference anymore anyways. But we've streamlined this process. There's four members of the band, like I said, three of us that play guitar, bass and drums. We do our own covers. So I do the guitars, bass and drums of one song while my guitar player does the guitar, bass and drums of another song. And my drummer does the guitar, bass and drums of another song. So we're technically always working on 3 songs at a time. And then as soon as we finish them, we send them to our singer Audra and she puts the vocals on all of them because we obviously can't sing for her. So we have this process of just going through it like that. We can do more because we're all working on one at the same time. But realistically, if we all get 1 or 2 songs done a month, we can stay in this perpetual motion of putting out covers. Yeah, like I said, we try and do it as simple as possible. So our recording setup…. So that was picking songs and then this is how we record them is our recording setup is as bare bones and as straightforward as it possibly can be. If you guys know a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. That's the interface that we use; the most basic two channel. One's got a microphone plugged into it, one's got a guitar plugged into it. That's all we do. And then we have some studio monitors and some headphones. This is a AKG414 [points to his mic], but we use AKG214 microphones. We were lucky enough to get an AKG JBL Soundcraft sponsorship when we first started, like four videos into our channel, they reached out and they were like: you want a microphone?

Michael: Wow!

Ryan: And then because it got so many views, they were like: do you want more stuff? We've flown out to JBL's headquarters and toured the whole thing. They've been super cool to us. But yeah, that's all we use. We use Logic, we all use Mac’s and we all use Logic to record stuff. Now my drummer and my guitar player, they both like to use archetype plugins and these different drum sounds or whatever. I do everything with stock Logic stuff. So the MIDI drum kit that I use when I record, it's called the SoCal kit. It's in Logic. I use the same one every time and then Matchmaker is the guitar amp sim that I use and Modern Stack is what I use for my bass amps. And then I've done it this way for 4 years. Same presets. Because when we export all the dry stems and then my producer who lives in Michigan… he knows everything. You know what I mean? He's like a wonder kid of production. He's worked with huge bands and he blows my mind at how much he knows about production, but he puts whatever amps sim on it and whatever drum library he uses and he mixes and masters everything, and then we get it back from him. If you've never done that before, basically there's a service called SoundBetter, or you can go on Fiverr or anything like that. There's tons of excellent mixing engineers that are just sitting looking for work. You can pay $100 for a mix or $500 for a mix. You get something amazing back. Something better than what you would probably ever be able to do. I was like: I'm going to be a whiz with Logic and I'm going to mix and master everything myself! And I'll never be as good as those guys. They're so good. So I just leave it up to them. That's something that I have to know that I would love to do it, but I'm not the guy. So that's something that I outsource and I just send to everyone else. If you're not a drummer or you're not a guitar player, you can also hire different studio musicians through some of these services. You can hire a guitar player to play guitar on your track, or you can use  the AI drummer in logic. You can just record all your stuff to a click and hit a button and Logic will just put drums to your song. You want to think that: oh, I can't do this because I don't have a drummer. I can't… whatever. I'm not a mixer. With a little bit of money, you can fix all of that sort of stuff. And I'm not talking about thousands of dollars. A couple hundred dollars per song can give you really quality stuff. Even still, you might get away with not having it be that quality. It depends on what kind of music you do. We do modern rock stuff, so it needs to hit really hard and be really tight. But if you're an acoustic singer/songwriter, it could sound like you recorded it in the bathroom. That's cool, because that's what some singer/songwriters go for. So it's not necessarily everyone has to do that sort of stuff, but that's just what we do. So we send all our stuff off to be mixed and mastered. But like I said, there's so many great resources for if you're not a drummer or if you're not proficient of this or that, or you can also do this thing… there's something called karaoke version where basically someone already created a cover of the song. And they use it for karaoke tracks, but you can download the individual instruments from whatever song. Let's say you want to do Smells Like Teen Spirit. You can just take the vocals out and there's the whole cover of smells like teen spirit ready to go for you. And you can pay, again, a small fee. It's $10 or something like that. And then you can use their tracks in your YouTube videos or your Spotify. You can make a cover of the song without even making the cover. You don't necessarily have to. And we use it, or I use it, not everyone uses it. I use it as a way to frame up the song. So if I'm doing a cover, I'll drag in all the karaoke tracks and then I'll just replace them as needed. So let's say there's like a saxophone part or something like that. I'll just pull in the saxophone part and then I'll learn how to play it on guitar and then I'll replace the saxophone. So it's a great way to hear the individual pieces of the song without having to squint and try and get it perfect by listening to just the original recording.

Michael: Wow!

Ryan: So pulling stuff in from that karaoke thing is invaluable. So if you're just a singer, you can pull in those karaoke things and you've got a version of you singing the song now that you can post on TikTok and Instagram. And again, it's legal because you paid for the rights to use that backing track and you can start gathering fans that way.

Michael: Super smart. I see some really cool AI tools coming out that kind of let you create stems from existing tracks. And that idea of using it as a way to quickly create the frame and the outline. I think bandlabs has one that's really amazing. You just can put any track and it exports the stems for you. 

Ryan: So Moises is the one that I use. If I’m just trying to get a cover of the song, I'll just pull it into Moises so that I can hear the drums really well and then I'll just go in and program them the way that they are if we're doing a straight up the middle cover.

Michael: I bet you learn so much to you about production and arrangement just by doing that.

Ryan: Oh yeah! Like I said, I wasn't a phenomenal musician going into this, but I do feel like I've learned so much just from deconstructing and reconstructing existing hit songs. If you just took away all of the individual things that are just First to Eleven and how they do it, it would be: 1 month ahead of time, get your audio done. Two weeks ahead of time, get your video done. Upload to Spotify, playlist pitch it, and put it on YouTube. There’s just four steps to it.

Michael: Yeah.

Ryan: If you’re doing it on TikTok, then you don’t need to do anything. You just need to record it, make a video, and put it up! When I make my son’s videos, there’s no process because we can do it literally at six o'clock and post the video at 6:30 because all I usually do is just raise the audio a little bit and that's all it is. It can be as simple as you want it, and it can be as complicated as you want it. It just depends on what your thing is. You know what I mean? You definitely don't need to have such an elaborate thing like what we do. Cause I think that most people in Modern Musician are, there's probably not a lot of gigging cover bands, in Modern Musicians. There's probably some, but mostly it's independent artists and stuff like that that do this sort of stuff on their own. So it can be, like I said, as easy or as hard as you want it to be. But it just needs to be out. You just need to put it out. 

We didn't really get into the video side of things with First to Eleven, but I've always strayed away from the big theatric videos and all I've shot are, our original videos, are just us playing in a room. It's just the band as if you came to one of our practices and you're just watching us practice. That's the way that I shoot the first to eleven videos. So there's a front facing camera, there's a side facing camera, there's a guitar camera, there's a bass camera, there's a drum camera, there's a whole band wide camera. And we just cut those in and make the video. But the important thing with the first to eleven videos that I think made them a success is that Audra looks into the camera. You know what I mean? So I think a lot of people are like: Oh, she's connecting with me. It’s like I'm there watching the practice. And I think that's one thing that I've tried to help other people get their YouTube started, and they create these very elaborate storyline videos. It's just a lot of moving parts but no one's really connecting with the singer of the band, or the members of the band. Some are moving so fast and there's so many cuts that you never really get a good look at what the singer is. Is the singer enjoying what they're doing? So there's a lot of things that I think are huge and overlooked, where people are like: I have to have the best camera and I have to have lighting and fireworks and, I don't know, all kinds of ridiculous stuff in videos. But really, if you just put yourself out there and be like: I really enjoy singing this song, people are going to connect with that and it's going to be a different sort of response and reception to anyone that sees it. I want to be cool, but I know that I shouldn't. So if you're trying to be too cool in your video, sometimes it puts people off. Like I said, I would love to be cool, but I think that it doesn't work for me. [Michael laughs] I try and be as genuine and open and smile as much as I can.

Michael: I think you’re cool, Ryan. I think you're very cool. Yeah that's awesome. And I think it’s a relief for a lot of people. It’s probably a lot more work to have to come up with elaborate, crazy scenarios versus just being authentic. And one question as it relates to that is around: when you film your videos, do you have the same kind of setup around you and you just record the different songs in the same studio? Or do you switch between studios often? Or what do you recommend people do there? We probably do 4 videos in the studio for every 1 that we do outside the studio.

Michael: Okay.

Ryan: We try and do you know something every month that's outside the studio. I'm a giant kid still, so when we started doing really well on YouTube, I just used our success to just play around. Some of our videos, we just bought go karts and an inflatable racetrack and we just drove them around in the parking lot. And then another video, we got remote control cars and drove them around in the parking lot and then we went and played laser tag. We just goof around. There's no point in doing this if you're not having fun and enjoying yourself. So we go to different Erie locations. Erie is where we're from. And we go to this mansion for our Christmas videos that's all decorated for the holidays, or we go stand in front of a house that has a bunch of Christmas lights. We just try and mix it up a little bit. It helps us get better at making videos being in different environments. But then we also have our set up in the studio where we can walk in there 30 seconds before we start playing and we can be set up because our lights are already there, the backdrops already there, the drum kits already there. And it makes it really easy to make the videos. And I could talk again at length about the process of making the videos and how we've made it as efficient as possible by having two cameramen shooting two different angles that don't get in the way of each other. So we really only have to shoot the video four times, I think, to get eight shots that we eventually compile for the whole video. We also use fake drums so that it's not insanely loud in the studio when we record our videos. I put paint protection film underneath the bottom of the symbols. So they look like regular symbols, but they're dead. They're completely muted. And all the heads are deadened. So when you actually play the drums in the video, it sounds like nothing. And I have my in-ears in so that I can hear the bass extra, good and I can hear myself making sure that I'm playing the right notes. Because I think everybody knows by now that all music videos are synced, they're not the actual audio. We take pride in trying to play everything as accurate as possible. We don't just like: Whatever. We're playing. We're actually playing the songs.

Michael: Yeah, it always makes me laugh. I don't know if you have this experience, right? I'm sure like a lot of us had it as musicians where you can so obviously tell when someone isn't a musician and they're trying to pretend to play something on a TV show.

Ryan: Like in every Disney movie ever.

Michael: Like on the piano, they're like moving around. [both laughing] That's not even close.

Ryan: Never wanted to be that guy. Before we shoot a video, I have 30 minutes to an hour set aside for me to sit down and just learn the song and because we learned so many songs, it's one in one ear out the other. I learned it just long enough to film the video. And then I never have to play it again, unless we end up playing it live. It's just a process where it's like: if I try and learn the song 3 days before we shoot the video, I'm going to forget it. So I learn it 30 minutes before we shoot the video so that it's fresh in my brain and that we play everything accurately. And then by the time we're done, it's gone.

Michael: Got it. I'm sure with the frequency of songs that you're creating, learning how to perform them really quickly as a valuable skill set, you can pick things up very quickly. Cool. Ryan, this has been awesome and super inspiring. Yeah. Thank you for sharing a little underneath the hood of everything that you guys have built and congratulations again on creating the channel and starting from scratch. And despite the challenges and despite the level of doubt and skepticism, you stuck through it and really deserve the platform that you've built.

Yeah, once again, Ryan, thank you so much. We'll do a round of applause. 

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 guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow.

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