Johnny Dwinell: We don't need permission anymore like I did when I was an artist. We had to get 8 planets to align to even get a shot and at bat, at getting on the national stage. And now you don't need to. You don't need anybody's permission. That's the exciting news. The bad part is you're going to have to be a business person. You're going to have to be a marketer/a promotion person to get it done.

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

All right. I'm excited to be here today with Johnny Dwinell. So Johnny co-founded Daredevil Production in 2012, and he focuses on helping break artists in a digital world. He's had a digital marketing for events featuring popular artists like Tracy Lawrence, Jamie O'Neil, and Andy Griggs. He's teamed up with multi-hits songwriter Brent Baxter to actually launch a music business podcast focused on helping artists and songwriters in today's music industry. It's called the Climb Show, but abbreviated CLIMB. He was an official mentor at CDBaby's DIY musician conference in Nashville, and he's the author of 2 bestselling books: Music Marketing on Twitter: how to get a thousand loyal fans per month in just 15 minutes per day, and Advanced Music Marketing on Twitter: how to turn new followers into actual fans. I'm really excited to talk with him today about, really, the transition between the old music industry and the new music industry and the transition from the radio, this platform that used to break artists and today, what are the opportunities that are available to you as an independent artist to actually be able to break your music digitally, and why it's easier now, more than ever, and what are the main things you need to focus on in order to be successful. Johnny, thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Johnny Dwinell: Thank you, Mike. That's good to be here, man.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. So maybe we can kick things off with just if you could share a little bit about yourself and your story and kinda how you got started down this path.

Johnny: Sure. I started as an artist. I've been in a band since I was in 7th grade and we worked our way up back in the hair band days. Okay. The Allman brothers actually moved our band from Wisconsin down to Florida. So we were doing that whole thing. We toured for years and worked our way right up to Warner brothers and Rob Kavalo, and we're laying down the railroad track to get that whole thing started when we're just, I like to say, a day late and a dollar short. That's right when the Nirvana thing took off. We were a little young then they just lifted up the needle on the genre and did it. We were just kinda okay, this is over. What do we do next? From there, I'd always heard the guys from the Altman Brothers talking about Nashville. I'd never been there. So I moved to Nashville right after I got off the road in the mid-90’s. I was there for a couple years and I was gonna do the songwriting thing, but I think the culture shock of being the front man in a 3 ring circus for so long versus the songwriting thing just wasn't sitting right, and I wanted to make some money. So I went into business. I got an opportunity to go out to California and that started kinda laying the groundwork for what led me back to Nashville with DareDevil and to see the vacuum that was in the music business. I first was in the electronics manufacturing industry, and I got a front row seat because I had a company that did sales for this product that was just called a walk on water soldering product. So I had a database of names and engineers in the highest levels of technology up and down the West coast from JPL, Mars. Our stuff was everywhere. Raytheon, D.O.D, all that kind of stuff. So I really had a front row seat to watch what happened to the whole electronics industry in the wake of the first guy that adapted to the disruption of the internet, which is Michael Dell. Okay. In 7 years, Michael Dell goes from making computers out of his dorm room to being the largest computer maker on the planet and becoming the richest Texan. Not that it's about money, but that's a metric on impact. When you think about generations of wealth accumulation from the oil families in Texas, and in 7 years, this guy can buy and sell them because he just adapted first. I thought that was really interesting. I ended up going from there to another division of the electronics industry, and then I ended up in the financial industry where I learned 2 really important lessons about content marketing and about honoring the platform. Quick story, I was in the mortgage industry, so I'm selling mortgages and doing really well, but I had me trying to get outta the music industry. I woke up one day, Mike, with an insane amount of discretionary income spent on a home recording studio, and I was in 2 bands in Los Angeles. It chose me. I didn't choose music. [Michael laughs] I say that because a friend of mine that was in the mortgage office was like, you've got that studio. You should do a radio show to promote your mortgage business. And I was like: I'm thinking big time. I don't have an agent. I don't know anything about radio talent. How's that work? He's like: no, man, on the weekend, all those shows, everything from health and vitamins to cars and finances and mortgages and hobbies, all that stuff? Those are paid infomercials and you can buy a time slot, educate people with content marketing on stuff that's valuable to them, create a relationship and get some business. And I thought that's really interesting cuz I was working for a huge company called Ameriquest, which, if you remember they sponsored the Stones tour back in the day and MLB, and I was making 150-200 calls a day to get 3 applications. It was a grind. We went and we tried it and it was a big commitment because you had to buy 6 months at a time. So the cheapest station we could find was an am station, but that commitment was like $14,000. We didn't have to pay it up front, but we had to commit to it. You had to buy six months with the shows. So we put together this show and we would record it in the studio, upload it to the satellite link, and they would broadcast it from the station on Saturday. So we did the show and we’re there with pencils, and papers, and ready to just start taking applications from the radio show first weekend. Nobody called. Second weekend, no calls. Third weekend, 0 calls. So this is where I learned about honoring the platform. So I called the station and the station manager, god bless her, was way smarter than me. She knew my phone wasn't ringing. She knew why my phone wasn't ringing, but she knew that my type A personality, I was gonna need to be in enough pain to call her before I was gonna receive that information stuff. [laughing] The phone call was like: Hey Johnny, you're calling me because your phone isn't ringing. I'm like, yes! And she's like: all right, calm down. Are you prepared to do everything I tell you to do to a T if I tell you exactly what you're doing? And I said, yes! And she said, first thing I wanna tell you is your content is amazing. We're getting lots of calls on it. People love it. And I said I disagree because we're not getting any phone calls. And she said that's because you're not honoring the platform. And I said, what does that mean? And she said you have a half hour time slot. We put in 5 minutes worth of commercials, you got 25 minutes worth of content. I said, yes. She said your show's got a beginning, a middle and an end. It's brilliant content. You wrap up with your point in a nice, neat little bow and you give your phone number. I said, yes. And she said: that's how people consume sitcoms on television. And I said, yes! She said, Johnny, that's not how people consume am radio on Saturday. And I was like: oh wow, mind blow. And she's yeah, they're running around running errands, going to the grocery store, going to Home Depot, taking the kids to soccer practice, getting their lives put back an order for the next week. And I thought, wow. She said, just make 2 tweaks and the phone will ring. So the first week, instead of doing one 25-minute show, do 5 5-minute shows. And she said the same show, just change the metaphors. The repetition will help drive your point home because people are listening to a couple minutes here and a couple minutes there. And then she said: #2 I don't care if you got the president of the United States on the phone, you gotta interrupt him and every 2-minutes, give your phone number. So we did that exactly that fourth week. We got 5 phone calls, 2 turned into loans. That revenue paid for the whole commitment, and then shortly we were on 5 stations in 3 markets, and I went from making 150 phone calls a day to get 3 apps, to getting 75-100 apps on the weekend, and they were calling me. That was honoring the platform. And I see that in the music industry. So after the meltdown happened, a buddy of mine that I had known for quite some time said: when are you coming back to Nashville? Let's produce some records. So I went back. I moved back, got into kind of partnered up in a studio and we were co-producing records, and we just saw these amazing indie artists coming in. Important artists that had something to say, and I noticed that they're spending their whole entire budget on the record. I was like: this is insane! I knew enough to know a record deal back in the day and still to this day, they're gonna give you a budget, however big or however small it may be, they're gonna give you maybe 5% to make the record, and the rest of it's gonna be spent on promotion. So everybody was intoxicated, if you will, with the idea of no gatekeepers, like they could just put their music out to the world and make that happen, but at the same time, nobody was thinking about the reality of promotion. If good music finds its own audience, why do record labels have promo departments? It's not the case. They work their butts off to get that music in front of audiences who repeatedly fall in love with them. I started doing digital stuff for the studio to startup pragmatism: If we can help these artists sell a few more records, maybe they'll come back and do another record with us and we can increase the sales. And the more that I did that, the more I realized that there's a huge problem here. This is 2011. The record industry still had not really had to deal with the disruption of the internet. We had a pricing ping in 1999 with Napster and that was significant, but that wasn't a marketing issue. The marketing pipeline was still intact; was still protected. We only had 2 choices, really, to listen to music: listen to what you bought, or listen to the radio. So during the 2000’s, we still had huge, huge records. +10 million selling records because they could market it. Spotify's not invented until 2009, and that kind of came as a result of the iPhone, which came out in 2007, doesn't come to America until 2011 and doesn't really become ubiquitous until 2018. All of a sudden, it's like now the record industry has to deal with the disruption of the internet and they're not honoring the platform. And it makes sense when you look at it. This is true for artists too, indie artists, major label artists, labels, indie labels, the only experience that they've had with success on a digital platform has manifested itself in the form of a viral piece of content. That's how the chain smokers got their deal. That selfie went viral. There's a million of those stories. So that's what they're chasing because that's what success looks like. But if you just think about the basics of marketing, which is, marketing 101: you need reach and frequency. We gotta reach millions of people. We gotta do it repetitively. And if you look at the way, a label and also an artist thinks about the strategy for a broadcast promotion strategy, like on radio, there's not a label that's gonna go to, P1 radio with a debut single from a debut artist that isn't gonna work that single for at least 6 months. Usually closer to a year. It's a game of inches. It's like a football analogy: it's a game of inches. We just need to have forward motion. Even if it's an inch, that's fine. Just enough to get a new set of downs. We can see the end zone off in the distance. We know that if we grind and grind and grind, we'll get into the end zone. The end zone's a touchdown. It's not winning the game. And if you look at 30,000 feet on the long game strategy of a record label, Mike, would you agree that industry standard sort of gestation period for a label being able to get that ROI on an artist is usually the third record. That's where the money's made.

Michael: Right. If ever. [both laughing]

Johnny: Yeah. If ever, yeah. If there's gonna be money made, that's where it happens. So you're talking about at least 2 singles from the first record, 2 singles from the second record, 6 months a piece to a year. You're talking about a 2.5 year long-term plan: this is what we're gonna do if we believe in an artist, and this is how we're gonna grind. And then you look at the artist’s and the label’s strategy for digital, which is a home run Derby. If it doesn't go viral, it's a failure. Using that same football metaphor, it's like first down on their own 25-yard line, they hike the ball, they throw a 75-yard bomb. If the receiver doesn't catch it for a touchdown, they walk off the field and they got 3 downs left. It's devoid of the fundamentals of marketing, repetition, and strategy. And here's the trip with broadcast platforms like radio and the MTV, BET, CMT, when they played music back in the day, the repetition, the frequency part of the reach and frequency marketing 101 equation was built into rotational format programming. So they had the luxury of being able to pound the same exact content down your throat, literally, if it's in heavy rotation, you're talking about every hour to every 90 minutes, right? If it's 70 spins a week during peak listening hours, that's what that comes out to. You don't have the luxury to do that on digital, cause you don't have a captive audience, but the fundamentals still is the same, just in order to execute it successfully, we have to honor the platform. So this is where we're cooking up lots of different kinds of ideas and different strategies that are working to help make hits bigger. If you listen to less, if you read the trades, it's: oh, hits are getting smaller and that's because nobody's promoting right on digital. The labels aren't breaking artists on digital. There are outliers that happen, but radio doesn't work anymore. It used to be: you're Bruce Springsteen. You're some kid from Jersey. You get a record deal. You're plucked out of obscurity. They put you on the radio and then you become popular and now you gotta be popular enough to get on the radio. So radio's not the taste maker anymore. We have to address that. We have to think about it in a different way. Again, I saw there's a huge vacuum here. I liken the record business, in a lot of ways, to Hollywood. They're both very similar industries, albeit with very different products and this matters, but they're both about the same age, about 100 years old-ish, they make artistic intellectual property, and they're masters at promoting that artistic intel on to broadcast platforms. But if you watch what Hollywood does, which is what I've been doing for the last 10 years, they're much farther ahead on that huge transformation from broadcast to digital than the record industry is. You saw Netflix was essentially the Spotify of Hollywood. Initially when it first came out, because there wasn't original Netflix content, so they created a billion dollar business that was on rented property. They didn't own any of the intellectual property. So it wasn't their traffic, they didn't own the traffic. They just had this vehicle that was a bunch of ones and zeros. It's lucky that they lasted as long as they did without creating their own content before somebody in Hollywood went: Hey, wait a second, we own Friends, we're getting these massive licensing checks from Netflix for Friends, but we own that. That's our traffic. Why don't we just set up a stupid video player, we got the money, and we could get it. So the knee jerk reaction to Hollywood was we should get 100% of the revenue that our artistic intellectual property creates. And then the 2.0 part is: oh wow, for the first time we have the data; we know who the customer is. We know what Michael Walker likes and what he doesn't like. So I'm gonna intelligently market to you and show you this and not this, because I know that you're not interested in this and it makes your life easier and it keeps a good relationship between us. Think about it, man, the music industry still doesn't know who the customer is. They're doing business with Spotify and streaming services. This is a new fangled digital way of doing business, the same old way. And the only leverage that Spotify has because it's a distributor. That's another thing. It's not a marketing engine. It's a distributor. Distribution is where you go to consume a product, and marketing is why you're going there. So I think too many people believe they're gonna break on Spotify and they don't. That's where I'm gonna go once you break, once I find out about you. But in any business, I don't care what the industry is, the only reason that a distributor exists, the only leverage they have is because they have a relationship with the end user that the creator of the product or service either can't have, which for the longest time was the reality in Hollywood and in the music industry, or in this case today in the music industry, they just simply don't have it. And so the second that they say it's Michael Walker and here's what he likes to listen to. and here's what he skips past, they're irrelevant. So I see this, and I'm so excited because I see that we don't need permission anymore like I did when I was an artist. We had to get 8 planets to align to even get a shot and at bat at getting on the national stage, and now you don't need anybody's permission. That's the exciting news. The bad part is you're gonna have to be a business person. You're gonna have to be a marketer, a promotion person to get it done.

Michael: Alright, let’s take a quick break from the podcast so I can tell you about a free, special offer that we're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. So, if you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level to connect with a community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast, or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this can be perfect for you. So right now, we’re offering a free 2-week trial to our Music Mentor coaching program, and if you sign up in the show notes below, you’re going to get access to our entire Music Mentor content vault for free. The vault’s organized into 4 different content pillars: the first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business. When you sign up, you'll unlock our best in-depth masterclasses from a network of world-class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds where our highest level of Modern Musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our Music Mentor spotlight series. That's where we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. One of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top level music mentors. A lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast are there live interacting with you personally. So, imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private Music Mentor community. This is definitely one of my favorite parts of Music Mentor and maybe the most valuable is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career. So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then click on the link in the show notes right now and you can sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing content, connect with the community, and sign-up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, so don't miss out. go sign up for free now, and let's get back to our interview. 

Holy cow. There's so much good stuff in there. Lots of gold nuggets that you're dropping. When you talked about that line: the record industry doesn't understand who the customer is or who the fan is, that was like a light bulb moment. That gave me goosebumps. Cuz it's true! Who has the data? Spotify has the data and they're not necessarily that friendly with their API. They don't open that up. You don't get the email addresses of fans who follow you on Spotify. They don't really have a direct path for you as an artist or as a record label to understand all of that data, aside from what Spotify feeds you, which is very little. One one point that I wanna reiterate that you brought up that's so important is that idea of when we're budgeting for production versus marketing, and how what are the biggest mistakes that you see is the budget, like all of their money towards recording it and $0 towards promotion. One analogy that comes to mind as you described, that is the analogy of that in your music career, your marketing, your promotion is like the engine in a car, right? If you spend a ton of money, you could get a beautiful looking car that sits in your garage.

Johnny: I love this, yeah.

Michael: If you don't invest in the promotion or the marketing, you don't have an engine in the car. So it's literally just gonna sit there. It could be beautiful, but it's not gonna go anywhere. It's not gonna do anything. It's like the most crucial part. Like you need to have an engine. If you wanna go places which, really, the main function of a car is to take you to different places. Really the main engine of growth is your marketing. It's your promotion, therefore it deserves your attention, deserves the majority of the budget. And it's ultimately what's gonna provide a better return on your investment as well. Clearly, you need to have a great product as well, but if you don't have marketing or promotion around it, then it's not just gonna magically get seen.

Johnny: If nobody knows about it, it's not gonna happen. Here's the thing: it doesn't matter how groundbreaking it is. Again, so frontline in the electronics industry, one of my clients was TiVo. TiVo had the most unbelievable freaking invention ever that nobody knew that they needed, that everybody now has, and we don't live without. TiVo was the bomb, but because they marketed it wrong. They went insolvent and they had to license their technology to everybody else. So now we call 'em DVRs but it was TiVo. It was theirs. They invented it. So every DVR that you have, that cable company is paying something to TiVo. And for them, it's because they marketed it wrong. And so here's proof positive: that product is so unbelievable, but it doesn't matter if the marketing sucks. Another great music example that I always use just to set people straight is Guns and Roses. That is still to date the biggest debut record in the history of the record industry. I think it sold 30 million records. So whether you love them, whether you hate them, you simply cannot argue the impact that Appetite for Destruction had on society; how many people liked it and how good the art was. You can not like it based on taste, and that's fine, but it's amazingly good, incredible art. It's the art that you aspire to have, just in terms of success; a success metric, but that record was a stiff for the first year when it came out. Why? Because nobody heard it. They couldn't get on radio. They couldn't get on MTV. That record came out in ‘87. It didn't break until ‘88. So there's nuance to this, right? A lot of artists were like: if I could just get on tour, that would change everything. Yes. That would help. But, again, proof positive when Guns and Roses comes out of the gate with Appetite, they go on tour with Aerosmith. That's where I saw them. I'm a musician. I got it. So got it. I went out and bought the record, but that tour with Aerosmith, which is arguably, if it wasn't the #1 tour that year, it was in the top 3, was worth 60,000 records. Why? Because there was no market penetration. Literally, depending on who you talk to in the camp, they were one week or one day away from being dropped from Geffen Records before Tom Zutout out went to David Geffen and said: I really believe in this band, flex your music mobile muscle, and please make somebody spin this video at least 1 time on MTV. And so he calls in a favor, Geffen does, MTV acquiesce him, and they spun Welcome to the Jungle at 3:00 AM on a Sunday, which is very late on a Saturday. At a time in 1988, when there were still probably, a few million people still up partying, watching MTV. And then the phones lit up at MTV and they're like: oh wow, people really like this. So they started to put it in rotation. And once that happened, all the radio stations followed, and then the rest is history. But when you understand the fundamentals of how it worked, it gets your brain asking the right questions about how this is gonna work on digital? And once you do that, and you're attaching it to the fundamentals, then your subconscious will inevitably reward you with the correct answers. So that's where we come from with that. I have to remind people of this on my podcast. Nobody ever listened to the radio to discover new artists, and at the same time, the radio is where we discovered all the new artists either directly or indirectly, but we weren't there waking up in the morning going: I wonder what brand new artists we’re gonna be turned on to today that’s gonna become my soundtrack. No! I don't care what music you listen to, you listen to the radio for the same reason: to hear your jam. And so the way radio worked was, I just use a country music example cause I know the numbers, but in 1994, Reba McIntyre comes out with their 18th studio record, right? Slow clap. You are the queen of country. If you have 18 studio records in any genre, you are everybody's jam. God bless you. That single was: Why Haven't I Heard From You. It's gonna go immediately into heavy rotation, and if you remember the way the labels used to promote these, it was so brilliant: They would drop the single first and the record's not available. And they'd let that thing cook on radio for a couple, 3-4 months, and then they drop their record and they'd have incredible sales days. The DJs would put it into heavy rotation. The program directors would. You remember how [puts on cheesy radio announcer voice] this is Johnny D from WKKR right here. We've got the new Reba McIntyre single. I go, why haven't I heard from you? And you can only find it right here on WKKB every hour on the hour. [Michael chuckling] So we're listening to hear what? Reba, and then they slide in this new dude named Tim McGraw that we never heard. And it was: Indian Outlaw. I always used the first single on the second record cause the first one was stiff. But the thing is that most music consumers, the first time they heard Indian Outlaw was really like the 7th time. Because your brains’ not subconsciously recognizing the voice cuz it's not Tim McGraw yet. You don't know the name. You don't know the voice. You don't know the song, but through pounding and over and over again, all of a sudden now you're turning onto it. And once you get past the point of subconscious recognition, you're still not winning. You don't have a fan, you just have somebody that's like: oh, there's that song again that I like? Who is that again? What is that? What's that beat? And that's not in any way, shape or form how anybody thinks about digital. We have this intoxicating misguided view and it's on purpose. I still don't understand how these platforms, and I'm not ripping on the platforms, God bless them for being good businesses, but BandZoogle, BandCamp, ReverbNation, NoiseTrader, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all got VC money, millions of dollars to start these companies cuz we invented some really cool way, a new way, for artists and fans to do business. But nobody's talking about why they're gonna do business and that's what's missing. So we all feel, and I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation, there's an implication that there's digital foot traffic on these platforms, right? There's a billion people that go to YouTube a day, and if I put my music there, then somebody's gonna stumble across it. No, they're not looking for you! So there's things that you can do to tweak that, but you have to have a really keen understanding of what foot traffic is, right? I'm a big fan of cover songs for that reason. The day the original artist drops it, you come out with a cover, you can get some people turned on to you. It's a very cool way of doing it organically, but you have to understand that for that moment, that very slim moment; a few weeks in time, there's foot traffic for that specific song, and then it's gone. So how do we take what we know about radio and the repetition, and apply that to digital? So these are the things that we're doing when we're putting together strategies for our clientele.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, this is great. And you're really speaking my language it's and it's super interesting to hear the transition from radio and how a lot of those same fundamentals, the same marketing principles apply, but the music industry just hasn't caught up yet. This is something I've experienced a lot when it comes to digital marketing and online marketing.

Johnny: You’re a genius with that, by the way. I'm sitting over here in the cheap seats when it comes to your company, and you're really fricking good dude like super smart. And I wanted to shout you out on that.

Michael: Hey, thanks, man. I appreciate that, and honestly, I wish that I could take more credit for it, but I'm just a function of my mentors and the people that I've learned from who are some of the masters of this world. And one thing that I've noticed is through having personally invested a lot of time and money with my mentors who are masters in internet marketing, a lot of the things that all successful digital entrepreneurs understand nowadays when it comes to technology and paid traffic and acquisition and digital marketing in general, there's so many things that the music industry just hasn't caught up to yet. We're just behind. We're stuck in this old model, and just by understanding some of these concepts that already exist in these other industries that they're doing successfully, you reference the film industry and a couple ways that they're ahead of the music industry, really can give you a head start cuz you realize, wow I can do the same thing in the music industry.

Johnny: Yeah. First I’d like to say, when somebody told me this, it blew my mind. It was the owner of that first electronics company I went to. But he is like: the Chinese word for crisis is comprised of two characters: One character stands for danger, the other character stands for opportunity. So the music industry right now is in a big crisis, make no mistake about it. And it doesn't look like it because… I predicted this; I've been talking about this for six years. At one point, we contracted from a $75 billion year industry, I think in 2017, it went down to $15 billion. So we contracted 80% and people were really struggling, and this is right when the labels finally stopped fighting streaming and started embracing it, and now we're rising up from the ashes. There was an article that I read that said: at the same time it took the music industry to contract 80%, digital gaming exploded to a $150 billion business industry. And I said: that's what's gonna happen in the music industry. We're gonna go through this metamorphosis and now we're gonna have so many more people that are paying to consume it through streaming, which is a good thing, ultimately. It's important that it happened. It's an important link in the Crow Magnum Man chart of us stopping dragging in our knuckles on the ground as an industry, and walking upright as a homosapien. So it's already happened. So right now, like I think last year, it was like $81 billion. So we've already surpassed our best year in the music industry, but we're not breaking new artists and it doesn't feel like that. Cause you're like, oh, what about this artist? Or, what about Morgan Wallen? Or what about Billie Eilish? These are outliers. These are allies. If you just go to Wikipedia and search for debut records on any given year, your mind will be blown how many, even if you don't listen to that music, you'll know those brand names. Oh, that's a punk band. Oh, that's an R&B artist. Oh, that's a country artist. Even if you don't listen to that music. Why? Because they've been marketed and you know who they are and you don't even listen to it. So that's how good the record industry used to be at that. And now, the sky's the limit. The other point being that radio was a huge log jam. Like 95% of all the artists on all the major labels didn't make any money because they couldn't get on the radio. They only played 12 songs an hour, and if you look at 12 songs an hour x 24 hours x 7 days, I'll do the math for you: it's 2,016 spins a week on a radio station. And if a heavy rotation song is 70 spins a week, if you got just 20 songs on heavy rotation, it's 1,400 spins. It's 66% of the bandwidth right there on 20 songs! So there was no room if they're gonna be there for six months on that playlist. Man, you wanna talk about prime real estate. Very difficult, but now that we don't have a physical distribution log jam, we don't have a promotion log jam, we just have a very imperfect understanding of how this works. For the baseball fans out there, when I first started putting this together in my mind and seeing the light and the vacuum that exists, I remember telling my mom and of course, I'm taking 90 minutes to explain this and I'm so excited and she's so excited that I'm excited, and then at the end she just sums up: She's like oh, so it's kinda Moneyball for the music industry. I'm like, holy crap. That's the elevator pitch. So as long as you understand baseball or at least you like Brad Pitt, that's the elevator pitch. [both laughing] It's like Moneyball for the music. Exactly! Using that data to find… I know now that even though I don't have all the questions answered, but even with that, we could break an artist for 20% of the cost that a major label is trying to spend on P1 radio. To get it in front of more people and do it repeatedly and devise different ways that people will consume it. You just can't pound the same video over and over again. You can't pound the same audio file. You gotta do something else on top of that to make it work on digital, and that's what we're doing.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, this stuff is super, super interesting. I would love to dig a little bit into: I know that there's a few different strategies that you found that are helping you to break artists in today's day and age, digitally versus kinda like the old model with the radio industry, but maybe if we have time to go through one of your favorite new tactics or new strategies that you see working right now that maybe stands on the shoulders of what you've learned through the radio experience, what would you recommend for someone who maybe who's listening or watching this right now, and let's assume that the person we're speaking to right now is someone who has invested the time invested, the money into recording at least an EP or like a collection of songs that they're proud of, and let's assume that these are actually competitive and they're viable, that these are like some good enough quality songs, and they don't have an infinite that they can draw from for their budget for marketing, they have a limited amount of finances they can invest in it, but they've saved up a decent amount to be able to invest into marketing. Where do you think is the first place that you'd recommend they get started with actually promoting their music?

Johnny: Here's what I think on that: There's no lack of generational artists out there; the Prince’s, the Adele’s, the Guns and Roses, the Stevie wonders. There's no lack of those in existence on our planet. There is a lack of market penetration. So focus on market penetration. So what do I mean by that? This was born from like the one billionth rough conversation I had with an industry executive that was high up. I left being very upset with myself because I didn't communicate what we were trying to do and the vision that I saw and why was I missing it. Like, why didn't he understand? So it's my fault if he's not understanding. And I was like: what's the romance of radio? It's not working anymore. So I went in there and they're like: Johnny, if we spend $5,000 on digital marketing, when do we get $5,001 back. I said: the last big artist you guys promoted, how'd you do it? They said, radio. They asked: how much did you spend? And when did you get it back? They're like: we didn't. Can we start the conversation here just with that? So that led me down saying: radio's not the answer. Everybody thinks radio's the answer. So what was the answer? What had to happen back in the day when it worked to take an obscure artist and all of a sudden they're popular enough to sell tickets and sell records? What happened? And the answer was market penetration. Radio for a century was the vehicle that delivered market penetration. So let's start there, and then here's how you craft the digital: There's 5 boxes you have to check on terrestrial radio to achieve market penetration. If you miss one, you don't have it. #1 is you need to have medium-heavy rotation. That's 40-70 spins a week. #2, you have to have that in each market or at least in a market, right? If I'm getting 200 spins a week across 180 stations, I don't have market penetration. Maybe it looks good cumulatively on a heat map, you're getting some exposure, but that repetition doesn't exist. #3 medium-heavy rotation in each market, this is key, for months and months. #4 it has to happen during peak listener hours. If you've got 70 spins a week in a market and it's happening during the overnights, 95% of the audience is sleeping. So you're not reaching anybody. And that brings me to the fifth one, which is really the key with radio that’s a 400lb gorilla nobody wants to talk about is: that station has to have sufficient listenership in the market to achieve market penetration. And how important was that? A chart position was important. Like a billboard chart position was huge because it was a bankable metric that measured market penetration. Real quick, like White Snake, David Coverdale, the 1987 record comes out. Still the Night. First single goes top 40. Awesome. They go headlining. They started opening up for Molly Cru. Now they're headlining. And he's got this down to a $90,000 show. It's what it costs him $90,000/week. And then Here I Go Again hits #1 and stays there for 14-16 weeks, and right when that happened, he goes back and renegotiates with the promoter. He improves his guarantee to $2.4 million/week. Why did the promoters come to the table? Because they both know that this is the #1 it's getting so many spins, so many people are hearing it that they’re gonna sell more tickets. So yeah, let's cut 'em in and give 'em a bigger piece of the pie. So think about that in terms on digital and here's where the vanity play, you've gotta put your ego in check and your vanity in check. And I'm doing this right now with an artist named Rick Monroe, who I just adore, and for the same ad dollar with the budget that he gave me, we could reach 10x the amount of people, if we go wide, if we go coast to coast or multinational, and more people will be exposed to that music. But what we won't achieve is market penetration. So when you have a smaller budget, just focus on the goal. If you are in Nashville and you're trying to create a bigger draw in Nashville, then spend every ad dollar you have becoming a bigger draw in Nashville and running digital promotion just in the market that's going to move the needle for you, so that you can: Hey, we've done it so many times where an artist is like, Hey, we're a $1,200/night bar band. Now you're a $2,500/night band. Now you're a $4,000/night band. Why? Because we're turning people away at the door because we're focusing our energy there. But if you focus on one market, you're gonna spend all your promo money there, and let's not forget your blood, sweat, and tears and your energy and your time focusing on that one market. But if you're competitive and you're a compelling artist, then the more people hear about it, and the more frequently they hear about it, the more your draw is gonna go, the more money you're gonna get paid at the live gigs. So with Rick, I just said, what are your 5 markets that are your best markets right now where you have the best, and that you're also gonna hit during… so we're doing a four release schedule. So on my podcast, I tell people just to eliminate the word “single” from your vocabulary. This is now a toxic word. Okay? This is what happens on radio. But if you get lucky and you get 5 million views on YouTube cuz you had a little bit of a viral music video, God bless you. That's awesome. But if that's the focus and you don't have something right behind that in the hopper, all bullets loaded and ready to go and your promotion strategy, you're screwed because they're gonna forget about you. So I said, let's do a 4 release strategy, 6 weeks apart. Every week we're gonna be pushing out new content to these 5 markets, and we're just gonna keep pounding them and pound. But every single piece of content we push out has to have the hook of the song that we're promoting for that 6 weeks in the background. We're just gonna keep pushing it like that. So already we're starting to see some needles move there. But you have to understand on the heat maps, like with he's got management and fm.com, it doesn't look as pretty as it should to the way they're doing it with other artists. So there's pushback, but we need to pound the market and get your money up, and then you'll see that this works and then we can expand out from there. But this is what I would do. Don't go for the validation of trying to get to a million views, go for the validation of becoming a profitable business in a market, or if you've got multiple markets that you have draws, and God bless you. Focus on those markets and keep that going, because I'll tell you, our offices are with Madison House, which is a huge booking agency, and Jordan over there is like: man, if I find an artist that I know can do hard ticket sales, that even like 250 or 300 people on any given show, I'm gonna work with them. Cuz I know that we can replicate that in these other markets. These things that you want, like with the better booking agency and better gigs, you have the power to create, but you're focusing on trying to eat the whole elephant in one sitting, and just focus on this one market. Become a bigger fish in that market and have a strategy that is constantly putting content in front of it. The last thing I'll say is: know that with organic social media, you're only reaching 1-3% of the people who already know and love you. So the other part of paid promotion, which there's no way around it, okay, if you could win the lottery and then that would be awesome, but you can't go to your landlord or your mortgage company and say: I'm gonna pay this all up as soon as I win the lottery. No! So you can't base your strategy on going viral, you want to have a solid, fundamental strategy. So when you're just repeating, pushing it out, and making sure that everybody that's already seen you, that's already reacted, that's already watched your content is getting the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, that's how you do it. And with digital, you're able to see who liked it. I think about this, Michael, I always use Universal and Luke Bryan, as an example of the inefficiency of the major label system. It used to be the only way to do it, so that's, naturally, where they come from. So I'm not flagging on 'em, but let's just be objective and just matter of fact on this. Okay. Luke Bryan, 6 #1’s off that one record. Nobody's ever done that in the history of country music. He is an icon, a huge star. There are millions and millions of country fans who love Luke Bryan. The reason I use him as an example is because the people who don't love Luke Bryan, are equally as passionate. They think he's the devil. They think he ruined country music and ushered in bro-country and changed the genre forever, and they don't like them. Keep in mind this example I'm gonna give you, it doesn't matter to Universal in terms of this artist Luke Bryant, and it doesn't matter to Luke Bryant because of where he is at the top of the totem pole, but it certainly matters to universal for the new artist that they just signed, and it matters to you if you just got signed on Universal and it matters to an indie artist. Okay? So dig it. So when they spend a million dollars to get a Luke Bryan single to #1 on P1 radio, they are purposefully and intentionally spending a boatload of money to put their product in front of people that they know not only don't like it, but will never like it. So inefficient. And so as an indie artist, when you can see: I put out this video content, here's 3,000 people who watch this 100% of the way through you’re used to thinking about that as a consumption metric. Here's how many views we got on YouTube. That's awesome. Hey, great. Awesome. Thumbs up. But Michael, you and I look at that and we're like, oh, that's 3,000 accounts. Those are actual people who watch that content and will want to see the next piece of content that we put out, and we can target them specifically. And so now we know that we're spending our precious time and our precious monetary resources retargeting only the people who are in the market right now. Some of the people in the cold market are never gonna come into your market, even if it's the same genre. Some of the people will, but they're not ready to yet. They're gonna need to be a bigger party before they come in. So you're spending a little bit of your content touching those people, but you're really intentionally focusing on the repetition from the people who already like what you're doing, and making them bigger fans. And with paid digital, you're gonna make sure that you reach 100% of them all the time. Make sense?

Michael: So good. Yeah, it totally makes sense. A couple of analogies that are coming up as you're describing that were, one is around this idea… It sounds like what you're recommending is… it's tempting, but mostly it's tempting from like a “it feels good in terms of vanity metrics to have bigger numbers”, even if those numbers don't actually result in making a profit or having a real business. But it sounds like what you're recommending is… I've heard this analogy before that if you have a light bulb, but you concentrate that light, either it disperses and it can show the room, but if you focus that energy, then that can actually cut through a steel door.

Johnny: I'm still stealing this. I'm so stealing this, I love this analogy! [both laughing]

Michael: Go for it. Yeah, I definitely didn't invent this one. But that's the idea is that with focus; with narrowing it, you really can penetrate. It's exactly what you're talking about: Market penetrations. You narrow the focus, and it just makes it so much more powerful as opposed to, if you just have a light bulb, then you have to really crank up the heat in order to penetrate people's thick skin now; thick skin of attention threshold. There's so many things that can take our attention nowadays, you need to be able to of cut through. And the second analogy that kind of pertains to that. I think is this idea of having a pointed nature. You're talking about market penetration. I think it's almost like we all have this very rough, thick skin nowadays with so much content and so much information, our brains have like a rough attention threshold that in order for something to like really cut through the noise, it has to really speak to us and has to really cut through. And so it sounds like what you're recommending is, sharpening your edge. If you are trying to appeal to everybody, and you have this very dull, flat edge, it's gonna be harder to cut through, versus if you really focus on that smaller niche; that smaller market, it gives you this pointed edge that allows you to cut through that attention threshold. And once you've cut through now, it's gonna be easier to start to widen and start to expand because you have proof of concept. You've already seen that it's working at least in that one market.

Johnny: Yeah. And listen, the only way that you're going to break is through market penetration. Think about how TikTok broke Old Town Road and some of this stuff from Walker Hayes and all that, because you're on TikTok and you look at this video, it's like [singing] fancy like Applebee’s is on a first date, and you swipe down again: fancy like Applebee's is on a first date. You swipe again, fancy like Applebee's on the first swipe again, fancy like Applebee’s. You're hearing that hook in repetition. It's focusing on that repetition thing, but it's synced to different video content. Understand this: from the industry perspective, they're like let's make it viral so that people will do that because that's user-generated content. That's viral. True. Awesome. God bless if you can do that, but the principle of why that works still applies. So you can create that repetition. Can you imagine like… Britney Spears was gonna come back on the music scene here now that she's got her freedom, and I was with a buddy of mine that owns a publishing company and we were drunk and we figured out how to just explode her back on the scene. Can you imagine if she came out and said: Hey, here's my total budget for my next music video. I'm gonna divide this by 15 and I'm gonna crowdsource directors to do a music video, and there's only 2 rules. #1 you have to serve my brand. You can't do me wrong. #2 we're gonna have a whiteboard. You just can't do the same concept that somebody else does. Can you imagine the news that would be where it's like: we're gonna have 15 different video interpretations of the same song. Fans are gonna be like: I can't wait till next week. I wanna see what's gonna happen. And then she owns the space in their brains for that long. There's microcontent that can allow you to do this. But in this way, now you are honoring the digital platform, and your stuff is being consumed, but that repetition has to happen. You have to have that long-term approach the way that we had with terrestrial radio. If you pull up the stakes after two weeks, I can promise you it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work! And there's a lot of railroad track that has to be laid down. Some of the artists that went viral, I think Noah Guthrie who had 76 cover songs, 76 weeks in a row, every week he put out a new cover song and he just kept getting a little more subscribers and a little more views and boom. And then on the 77th one, that was the magic storm that happened where he did the right song at the right time. But that same song doesn't happen if it's his third week in. It's that repetition; it's the consistency. You have to replicate the consistency of rotational format programming on radio. How are you gonna do it and make 'em watch? There's your answer.

Michael: It's so good. It's so interesting. Yeah, one thing that it kinda reminds me of as you're talking about TikTok and how you have this ability to remix your song with all this different front end visual content, but really it's about the hook and it's about the familiarity and you're starting to be driven into people's subconscious. So every single time that song is used, it reminded me of: I actually haven't read this book all the way through, I started reading it and it was pretty dense, but The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, I know it's a classic in evolutionary psychology.

Johnny: I haven’t heard of this.

Michael: It's pretty dense. I only made it through a little bit and I was like, I need to come back to this. I know the core premise has been really revolutionary and it was around the idea…. One of the concepts from the book, cuz it talked about meme culture, and nowadays when we think about memes, usually the first thing that comes to mind is those little pictures or it's like a funny meme or something, but it gets spread and it gets transmitted. But where that idea really came from is from Richard Dawkins in this book. He's talking about memes, and memes are really cultural transmissions. One of the natures of these memes is that they tend to replicate themselves, and they're shared between different members of the culture and they propagate and it's almost like they're a living organism. One of the functions of these memes is that the memes that are most likely to survive are actually the ones where they're being remixed, and they're very easy to take this and then add a new angle to it.

Johnny: Like Smudge the cat! So that's the one where the one girl from the Housewives or whatever, and she's like pointing and she's all angry, and then there's always this smart ass response from the Smudge the cat. That has been recycled. So it's just what you're saying. Yeah, this is fascinating. Go on. This is great.

Michael: That's basically the idea is that, what you were talking about with the TikTok, having that different angle, but you have the underlying hook and that's this meme that's being transmitted. This is a weird way to look at it, but almost like a Trojan horse where it's like the same Trojan horse is being cast in a bunch of different outlines or a bunch of different vehicles that's kinda the same underlying meme that's being transmitted.

Johnny: Guess what, that's a new way of also fundamentally doing it the same old way. In my example on radio, Reba McIntyre was the Trojan horse that ushered in Tim McGraw and every other artist who had the kind of prestige and the amount of spins and the activity on radio that Reba had in 1994, is the reason why Tim McGraw's Tim McGraw today. Because we were forced to listen to that, something we didn't know, we didn't ask for, we didn't even know that we liked. And I love Tim McGraw, but I'm just saying he was a nobody then. Nobody knows who he is. The reason he gets to where he is because they Trojan-horsed you on a captive platform. That's a brilliant way to put it, Michael. Yeah. How do we do that on digital? There's a million ways to do it. When you talk to industry people, and I bring this up, like we need to do a bunch of different music videos. And they're just like: oh who's got that kind of budget? And I'm like: see, you're thinking like MTV. MTV didn't even spin those videos anymore. So you can do micro-content. You can do 18-second videos with just the hook, like you said. I had a couple rockstar buddies of mine, I'm talking to 'em and I'm trying to explain this to 'em and still they go back to: here's all these ideas that we have for content for this music video. Yes, this is awesome! Okay. But what if we did this? And I'm like no! It should be “and”. Take these 30 different ideas, pick the one that you feel best translates/interprets your artistic vision for the music video, and let's make a full-length music video about that, and we're going to use all of the rest of this for micro-content to push that out there. You guys, most artists think, and this is the epiphany that Rick Monroe had, the artist I'm working at, he’s a huge listener of the podcast and he was like: I finally got it! When we're done making the record, we're not done working. We're just getting started. I'm like, yeah you're on your own 5-yard line, and now you've got 95 yards to go. And so they just embraced the creativity part of the promotion thing. His guitar player finally just got off the stool, so to speak, and said: I'm a ninja at ProTools. I can become a ninja at a video editing platform like Final Cut Pro. Let's get this inhouse. We can shoot 24 FPFS from our iPhones. Let's just make sure that we're constantly putting out. So they embraced it and they're owning this! And this was a huge mindset transformation of the artist. Guess what? Exactly as I predicted and have been talking about for years on my podcast, this has become a creative itch that they now love to scratch. You know what I mean? Because the same feeling that you get when you sing your song in front of a live audience and they connect with that and they're like: oh, that's awesome, this is the same high that you get when you do some really cool promotion stuff, and people start to respond because they're hearing your music. It requires you to be extra creative, right? This is going to turn into something that is initially the pain in the ass, but now for Rick Monroe, it's just part of their everyday. It's as simple as playing guitar every day. They enjoy it just like that because it is creative. It's a sandbox, and that's where we like to live as artists is in the sandbox.

Michael: 100%. Yeah. That's so good. And it's so easy to overlook that or to feel like marketing or promotion is like this, I don't know, guy in the corner that has like a business suit on who's trying to just be salesy or it's: oh, that's I don't wanna focus; I don't have to worry about that stuff. That's not fun. But exactly the way that you're describing, no actually, this is an opportunity for you to unleash your creativity. This is one of my favorite analogies too about marketing: outsourcing your marketing completely is outsourcing your marriage.

Johnny: Yeah!

Michael: There's just some things like you don't really want to outsource, cuz they're just so fundamental to who you are.

Johnny: That's so good! Yeah. I'm stealing that to you, Michael. [both laughing] I'm just coming to your show to rape and pillage your brain.

Michael: This is an example of meme culture in action. These are cultural ideas that have been transmitted to me at some point. I didn't come up with all this stuff. I just heard it and I put some stuff together in different ways in my own way of interpreting it. I didn't come up with the idea. So this is just meme culture in action.

Johnny: But getting it and understanding it and executing it, that's the key. It's really about the understanding. When I do some of the workshops and stuff, people get a little wound up cause they're like: oh, enough with the mindset stuff. Give me something that'll work! The mindset is what works. You have to think about this differently first, and then you're going to be on the right trai. Right now, you're on the wrong trail. You're on the trail of: I'm gonna try this. Oh, it doesn't work. I'm gonna try this. Oh, it doesn't work. And now you're just upset because nothing works and you feel defeated. But if you're on the mindset with the right fundamentals and you're thinking about it differently, then the failures are just one more way not to make a light bulb, but we know we're on the right track and we're going to keep going down there, and then through that repetition… Right now, if you focus on digital marketing y'all, where all of your competition and all the big money in the music industry and the people who pull the levers in the industry that won't let you inside their club, you'll be where they are not. When was the last time that you saw a major label promote a music video in your feed?

Michael: Yeah, missed opportunity for sure. You're just falling behind.

Johnny: Wow! It's blue ocean. Go get it!

Michael: Right. At the risk of too many analogies, but I think this is a good one for what you just described is so true that: the mindset is such an important foundation. It's like you're planting a tree, and the mindset is like the soil and the fertilizer that you plant the tree in. And if you don't have that, if you're planting it in stone, then it's just not gonna work, and so it is important. Like you need to start with that foundation in order for it to grow into a thriving plant.

Johnny: And there's nuance to that. You know what I mean? Some plants you can put in this little bitty thing, and some plants you need to put in a bigger thing, and some plants are in this little thing and that's the only way they can start, and then you have to know when to move them to a bigger thing. Otherwise, the plant dies. I didn't make up the rules.

Michael: Totally. That just expanded my understanding of that analogy. Good stuff. Hey, John, this has been awesome. Really great conversation.

Johnny: I enjoyed it.

Michael: So I appreciate you coming on here and sharing your experience. It's super interesting too, just hearing this world that you came from and all the lessons that really apply now to this new model, the music industry. It's awesome. For anyone who's listening or watching this right now, who would love to learn more or connect with you more, what would be the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Johnny: Sure. All my socials are @DareDevilProduction or @DareDevil_Production. DareDevilProduction.com is the website. You can certainly find me on my podcast, which is TheClimbShow music business podcast, and if you just go to theclimbshow.com you can find it there. We've been doing it for 6 years. There's a lot of good creative stuff on there.

When will this air Michael? Do you know yet?

Michael: Yeah, so usually the turnaround time is about month and a half before it airs.

Johnny: Okay. Gotcha. What I'm doing this July; so we're doing this now in July and so this will air after this, but I will have another one coming up, but I'm doing a 5-day Facebook ads challenge for artists. So Facebook ads and just digital promotion will be the #1 tool that every artist and every label will use moving forward to break their artists. It's what you need to know how to do. My Facebook ads education, which is the engine for Daredevil production, it's what we mainly do with our corporate clients and our industry music industry clients. It costs me $5,000 and I teach you and walk you through in a 5-day challenge how to set-up and launch your first promotion campaign. I do it for less than $2 a day. When this airs, I'll give you a different link and we'll have a different time and just go look at the link, in the show notes and come and join us. This is gonna be something that's gonna change your world forever, and the quicker that you learn how to do this, the less people you're gonna be competing with. It's a really amazing opportunity to do it.

Michael: Awesome. That sounds super cool. Yeah. So we'll make sure to throw all the links in the show notes so that you guys can check that out. Whenever you're listening or watching this and yeah man, appreciate you get coming on here again. The stuff is stuff's awesome. I geek out about this. I can tell that both of us you spend a lot of time geeking out about this kind of stuff.

Johnny: I can talk about it forever. Michael, thank you so much for having me on. Appreciate it. Thank you, Ari. And thank you Pamela Mary for connecting us.

Michael: Yeah. Shout out to uh, Pamela. She's awesome. Thank you, Pamela is a great, great find.

Johnny: Awesome buddy.

Michael: 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. First if you hit ‘subscribe’ then that’s make sure you don’t miss a new episode. Secondly if you share it with your friends, on 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 take their music to the next level. The time to be a Modern Musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.