Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician is 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 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, 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, without really a fanbase or a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, maybe even thousands or millions of fans with your 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 have shared 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 help 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. 

Nick Ruffalo: The sports world is: you go in, you have a game today. You win, there's a game next week. You lose, there's a game next week. You focus on this game for the hour that it's played, and then you start preparing for the next one because it's coming, whether you like it or not, whether you win or lose. And I think with artists and songs and music, it's like: I'm going to spend 9 months waiting for something to happen in my personal life to spark this song idea, and it never happens. Now it's 14 months. Now it's been 3 years since your last song, because you were uninspired. I just think that inspiration in music is: there's no excuse for that anymore because we have so many things to pull inspiration from. You're not having anything happen in your personal life? Go on Netflix, watch a rom-com and write about the relationship and the love in that if you want to make a love song and you're not in love right now. There's so many places to pull inspiration from today that it's not an inspiration problem. It's a motivation problem. And like with sports, you've got this game coming up. You've got to find that motivation somewhere because you're playing this game, whether you like it or not. And that's the biggest disconnect, in my opinion, for music is: sports find the motivation cause the game's coming no matter what versus music: well, there's no really hard and fast rules so whenever you're inspired, you can just kind of make the song whenever. And it's like: Commit to something and not just have an excuse to not do it because in the sports world, that game's coming no matter what. So when you kind of get that mindset of like: that third Friday of every month, that song's coming no matter what. It's a week away? Well, I better write this song and I better mix it and I better master it or find the people that will help me get it done quickly cause it's coming no matter what.

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 my new friend, Nick Ruffalo. So Nick is a songwriter, producer, arts development specialist, and he's an arts manager with over 20 million streams as an artist and currently has a social media following over a hundred thousand people. And he's someone that wants to help people in the music industry to not just talk the talk, but also to walk the walk. And so today we're going to walk through 3 rules for success with music and specifically focused on, probably the number one most important thing that holds us back from being successful or not, which is our brains and our minds and what's happening in between our skulls. So Nick, thank-you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Nick Ruffalo: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. 

Michael Walker: So, to kick things off, I'd love to hear just a little bit about your story and how you got started and grew from where we all start from, scratch, to getting over 20 million streams as an artist. 

Nick Ruffalo: Absolutely. Yes. So my story is nothing with music in my life until I was 20 years old. Was an athlete: football, baseball, golf, everything all through high school. Went to a very rigorous high school that had a very rigorous football program and that instilled, shockingly as I look back on it, all the values I bring to how I approach my music career now has pretty much all been like a direct one to one to everything from my high school football days, which I can't believe. I just feel like that's what's given me such a different perspective than a lot of people who did grow up with lessons and piano and being in band and choir, and even having like a rock band or just anything in the formative years that came from that music side of things, is going to instill a very different mindset than: it's five in the morning and we're doing up downs until we throw up. That kind of melding together of the two different worlds has given a lot of outlook. So I went to college, a D3 school in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg to play football. While I was there, joined a fraternity with a lot of the guys in the football team. We had parties, someone needed to play the music at the party, so I just kind of started literally just playing songs off my phone on Spotify, which progressed into the natural pipeline of: let me buy a DJ controller. And then that kind of spurred into: let me learn how to make mashups and then eventually remixes. Once COVID hit in 2020 is when I really dived into like, all right, let me spend all this time on YouTube, just learning production. Launched the rough artist project in the summer of 2020, released first original song, kind of jumped on TikTok in early 2021. And it took I mean, so many, so many, so many different video styles. I was trying everything, under the sun, making workout videos with my songs in the background, like just anything, cause I had no idea what I was doing. It was still very early TikTok and it kind of got my stride middle of the summer of 2021. COVID starts to die down, we're allowed to go back to school. I go back for my senior year and then things just really took a life of its own in the TikTok world all from my senior year college dorm room. Just finding my stride with different video styles that the floodgates opened in the September/October range of 2021. Started learning really quickly with TikTok and social media: what is the core values that is going to make a video or a song work or not. Started applying it to the song called Summer 16 that came out in December 2021. Everything kind of went crazy from there. Had a couple of videos do two, three million views. It was all luck in terms of the videos that I was trying stuff for a month and the videos that really went, went within 48 hours of the song releasing. And we'll dive into all of this, I'm sure later. The release radar just coasted that song. That led me to in 2022. As things really opened up and I graduated, went back home to New Jersey about 25 minutes outside of New York City. I was DJing at a bunch of clubs in New York and even going down to Miami and doing some club stuff there. And I just kind of had a moment towards the end of the summer of 2022, where I was like: this is cool and fun now in my twenties, and it's pretty full circle how I got into music and how I started is kind of what's now sparking me to want to make a major change, because I've been DJing for so long. I've been doing the party and the club scene for so long and not like it's been 20 years, but long enough for me to know: I don't see myself doing this in my 30’s and 40s. I see myself really just being more writer, producer, dabbling in other genres outside of dance music. I love folk. I love country. I love Latin and reggaeton and I'm never going to be able to release those songs because everybody's going to kind of keep coming for this dancey pop sound. So I just took a step back, literally wiped all my social media, told everyone I was working with at the time, like managers and labels and stuff: I'm not doing the artist thing anymore. I'm not really sure where it's going to go, but I'm just going to take the rest of the Fall off and figure it out in silence, at least publicly. Just did the whole black screen profile picture, no posting, and kind of just re-entered the space in January of 2023, still pretty clueless as to: okay, what am I going to do? What is this new kind of lane going to look like? And then it just spurred into naturally like people reaching out, like: Hey I see you're a producer. Do you want to produce my stuff? And that kind of spiraled and spiraled and spiraled into doing like 2-3 zoom sessions a day. Had a lot of people down in Nashville I was working with. A lot of people out in LA I was working with. So I decided: let me go to Nashville for a week; let me go to LA for a week. I know I'm going to have to be in one of those two cities. I've been around New York City my whole life. I know I don't want to be there. I was going down to Miami. I love Miami and I love reggaeton, but what drives that scene there is either EDM or Latin and that's not where I'm going to be. So it's really going to be either Nashville with a country focus and doing some pop, or LA with a pop focus, doing a little bit of country. Let me go to both cities for a week, figure it out. Went to Nashville, met all my internet friends that I've been doing zoom stuff with down there for the first time. Had a great time, did a bunch of songs. Loved it, but kind of just had this feeling of: do I want to be in the city if I wasn't doing music? And that's kind of the same approach I took when looking at colleges for football. Here's one of the first main parallels is like: you're always kind of advised by your high school coaches when you're looking at these colleges, if you were to tear an ACL, you can never play football again, would you still want to be at that school as just a student? And I was kind of looking at LA & Nashville: would I want to be in this city if I wasn't doing music? And the answer for me was, yeah. I mean, I've always wanted to move to LA my whole life. When I was deep in the football world, I was like: well, I know I'm never going to make the NFL. I want to be a sports agent and I love entourage and Ari Gold. And I thought I wanted to go down that path. So it was always LA. So I went to Nashville, had a good time and went to LA. Never really left. Been here. Met all my friends from zoom sessions out here. Lexi Skatena, she's an awesome songwriter. She's more on the acoustic singer/songwriter side of things. Went to her birthday party. Literally the first night I was here, met Anthony Bonadonna. And he's more of a R&B/pop/hip-hop writer. He runs our studio. He's our recording engineer. And we all really clicked in person. Met Oren, who's our guitar player. Now we have our team out here. We got our two studios. We run all writing sessions out of this place, then Anthony will take the artist over to the main studio in Hollywood, do all the vocal tracking and comping with them in the vocal booth there. And things just picked up out of nowhere. Just being here, meeting the right people, having those genuine connections. The number one advice I could give to really everybody, if they're thinking about making a change in their life from moving to really pursue the music thing long-term, can you just kind of drop into a random city where nobody can figure it out? Yes. But, we also have so many tools and power in place today where you can meet the right people from social media. I have friends in Orlando and I have friends in Austin, Texas that I still have never met that I've done 5/6/7 songs with just because of Zoom, TikTok, and Instagram. If you start putting yourself out there now, you'll meet the people that when you visit that city, you're not committing long-term, you're just kind of dating. You're going in, you're seeing what it's like. Oh I like it here. The people that I'm friends with from the internet are just as great in real life as they had been on these zoom sessions for the last 6 months. And then you can kind of ease yourself into that community and not have so much pressure. I'm like: I don't know anyone. I don't know what's going on. Social media has led me to everything in terms of career, and also just life at this point. It's been a cool, cool journey for sure.

Michael: That's an awesome story. Congratulations on what you've achieved so far. And yeah, the the thing that kind of like sticks through to me is you, you mentioned how, man, like you just hustled, you just showed up and you just kept showing up and he kept figuring out what works and he tried so many different things and then you, it sounds like through that process, you kind of landed on your own voice and you landed on something that, that resonates. And so I just want to kind of call that out and honor you for, yeah, I think sometimes we look at people like you and other successful artists who have like a big break or it seems like, wow, they had a song that went viral out of nowhere and now they got millions of views that came out of nowhere, but it always seems like there's actually. There's all the roots that are growing underneath the surface until you kind of have that breakout. Like in your case, when you, it was all of the testing, all the things and figuring out what does and what doesn't work, that kind of led to you experiencing some of those breakthroughs. I would love to hear your perspective having, like you mentioned, come from this totally different world of sports and football and you're developing this work ethic. Yeah. You described how that's become part of your DNA and kind of part of something. you provide a different perspective in the music industry. So I would love to hear a few of the lessons or things that you see that correlate between some of those things that you learned in your upbringing and through college football and just your, your experience in general and how those apply to musicians in particular any ones that specifically you see, artists struggling with or like mistakes or misconceptions or just ways that they can glean some insights from these different worlds that maybe they're not a part of. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think right off the bat, like. We're in Super Bowl season right now. You know, this Sunday they have off and then they have a game next Sunday. The big game, the Super Bowl, this is it. They've got two weeks to prepare. And I think what's so lost in the music industry is there's never that pressure, unless you're signed to a major label, you've already made it. There's people on your team and you're at that big career level where there are people imposing these deadlines and things on you, but when you're on your own, you're just starting out. You can take five years to make your first song. And then you can take five years to make your second and there's no, no matter what happens, whether the song is great, it doesn't do great. It does 10 million streams. It does 10 streams. No matter what happens next week, there's another game, whether you like it or not, win or lose. And that's like the biggest thing. It doesn't matter if it's football, baseball, basketball, like

The sports world is: you go in, you have a game today. You win, there's a game next week. You lose, there's a game next week. You focus on this game for the hour that it's played, and then you start preparing for the next one because it's coming, whether you like it or not, whether you win or lose. And I think with artists and songs and music, it's like: I'm going to spend 9 months waiting for something to happen in my personal life to spark this song idea, and it never happens. Now it's 14 months. Now it's been 3 years since your last song, because you were uninspired. I just think that inspiration in music is: there's no excuse for that anymore because we have so many things to pull inspiration from. You're not having anything happen in your personal life? Go on Netflix, watch a rom-com and write about the relationship and the love in that if you want to make a love song and you're not in love right now. There's so many places to pull inspiration from today that it's not an inspiration problem. It's a motivation problem. And like with sports, you've got this game coming up. You've got to find that motivation somewhere because you're playing this game, whether you like it or not. And that's the biggest disconnect, in my opinion, for music is: sports find the motivation cause the game's coming no matter what versus music: well, there's no really hard and fast rules so whenever you're inspired, you can just kind of make the song whenever. And it's like: commit to something, if you go in on January 1st, the new year, and you say every third Friday of the year, no matter what I'm going to release a song. You'll find out really quick, a lot about yourself. Well, I release music more frequently and consistently when I do jazz, because I'm just inclined to make jazz chords quicker or whatever you find out about yourself. You'll never learn until you put yourself through that fire and commit to this has to happen in this time span for the next 365 days. Or you can make up a hypothetical or I'll never do music again. Like if I can't release a song a month for the next year, I won't release music ever again. And like, that's not true, but it'll give you a little bit of fire maybe. But it's just like, how do you 

Commit to something and not just have an excuse to not do it because in the sports world, that game's coming no matter what. So when you kind of get that mindset of like: that third Friday of every month, that song's coming no matter what. It's a week away? Well, I better write this song and I better mix it and I better master it or find the people that will help me get it done quickly cause it's coming no matter what. Oh, man, this is such good stuff. Yeah, I mean, the thing that comes to mind as you share… There's a concept called Parkinson's law that basically means that our time tends to fill the container that we allot to it. So, for example, in college, if you're given a full year to write an essay, then generally you'll take the full year to write the essay and then you'll submit it, but if you're given like a week to write the essay, then you'll write the same essay, in a week. If you're giving it a day, then like you write it in a day and those deadlines you are extremely, it's like a container and then water is going to fill the space of the container. So it sounds like what you're suggesting is that we need to have more discipline as artists to basically make a decision of. What is the container that we want to set for ourselves and that we need to be willing to show up and learn from it and put something out consistently, whether it's a win or a loss, you gotta, you gotta play the game. And if you don't set those boundaries, then similar to Parkinson's law, like it just won't happen because you don't actually have the drive. You don't actually have a focus or a goal to hit. No, exactly. Like even now being on the producer side for other artists' side of things like day one, when we start. First whether they're in LA, whether they're in Belgium or Australia, like we get on a zoom call or we meet in person and we say. What is our point? Is there something written? Is there a concept? Are we starting from zero? Do you have a demo? Where are we starting? And then what's our kind of vision from a sonic perspective, but also commit to the release date. Now commit to the release date right now. It's February 2nd. Okay. March 10th. This song is coming out. That's going to keep us accountable. That's going to make sure you record those vocals. You make sure that your harmonies are all your voices warmed up and not, Oh I got a sore throat. I'm going to take 6 months off. Like you just got to battle through this song is going to come out. March 10th keeps me accountable, keeps you accountable. And I didn't do that at first when I moved into the freelance production side of things. But now that I've been doing that, I haven't had a problem. There were a project take longer than 21 to 24 days because everyone's, they're moving, they're shaking. The pressure doesn't exist. Nothing happens if we miss the March 10th date. But when you feel that pressure, when I'm coming at you like a coach and I'm pushing you, you're going to find that, Oh, I didn't know I could record vocals in a day. Yeah. Because you gave yourself an allotted nine months to do it.

Michael: Super smart. Yeah, I love that idea. So when you start working on a song, you set the release date up front and you say, like, like it or not, like the point that it gets to at this point is the point that it's going to be released. I think another benefit of that is. Yeah, as musicians, especially, we tend to be perfectionists or we tend to want to tweak it and make it better. And in a lot of cases, more time doesn't necessarily mean that it's better, right? We actually might do more harm than good by trying to tinker with it too much, but by doing what you're suggesting and actually setting a deadline, that's going to give you accountability to release it imperfectly because it's not the truth is it never will be perfect, but you still have to you have to put stuff out. 

Exactly. I'm like, I always say to like, if something doesn't work, whether it's a concept, a lyrical concept, a story, something like that doesn't mean that that's done. You can never use it again. Just find a way to rework it. Like, you clearly like something in that nugget of idea. That we're going to build around, and if it doesn't work, we can build around in a different way. Like that song, summer 16 that I had do really well. That concept is not the first time that concept was done. The concept was: let's take a bunch of titles of different songs from the summer of 2016, and then build a course using words from those titles to bring back the nostalgia, the summer of 2016, we try to win movie titles. It didn't work. The song flopped. We tried it with song title. It works. So if we just gave up and said: Oh, well, when you use titles of things, it doesn't work, then that song wouldn't exist. And it's the same thing. It's like, if you went through a breakup and you're doing this sad, sad ballad, it's like, well, everyone does sad ballads when they break up, it doesn't mean you can't write about your breakup, but what about the freeing feeling? Because that person was dragging you down. Let's make it a happy song. Now it works. Guess what? The concept wasn't done. You just needed to try it a different way. And I think so many people. Get so caught up in just this mindset of like, this is the song. It's this lyrical concept. It's this thing. And when it's not this, when this thing goes out into the world, I can never do that again. So I have to wait another nine months to find another thing. But it's like, put out the sad version of the breakup, put out the happy version, put out the happy medium. Now there's your three songs around one concept. Yeah. I think you in particular really appreciate this analogy coming from the sports world, but one of my favorite analogies is that releasing a song or just trying anything new for the first time, sort of like shooting a free throw and the sense that it's helpful to aim for a little bit. But if you spend too much time aiming and you don't just throw the shot and see where it lands, then you're not going to improve. You're not going to learn from it. And so if by following your recommendation of actually like releasing things sort of like shooting the free throw and after you throw it, even if like it was imperfect, even if you know your form was wrong or you know, you missed, you went to the right, you're still better off Having done that, and as long as you pay attention to it, and then you step up back out of the free throw and you shoot again versus like you mentioned, waiting nine months at the free throw line, trying to perfect it, trying to get it exactly right and aim right, and then when you finally shoot it. Most likely you're going to miss it, but maybe you make it, but you still just don't learn nearly as much as if you had a more regular pace of stepping on the free throw line, shooting it, and then continuing to, to release new music. I totally agree. You know, just like in the 1200s or however many thousands of years ago, like there were still artists, there's still people making music in some way, shape, or form. When they left the world, those songs left with them, just because we have the technology to keep things on a hard drive and post post human simally release things doesn't mean that like, you can kind of be like, Oh, well I'm just going to hoard all these songs, like still put them out and pretend that when you leave the world, these songs are going to leave with you and do you want to have them kind of kept away forever? Or do you want to try them all? Cause you never know. Song 78/4,000 that never made it into the world could have been the one that was everyone's wedding song. And you just don't know if you just don't put it out there.

Michael: Good stuff. Well, you know what? We've got a live audiences here right now. So I would love to open up the floor to anyone that's here that has a question they'd like to ask to Nick. And so if you right click on your icon, you can raise your hand to come on here live and feel free to also put a question in the chat if that works. I see Ari from Modern Musician raised his hand. So Ari I got to bring you up on stage here. What's up Ari? How are you doing today?

Ari: I'm doing great. How about you guys?

Fantastic.

Ari: Yeah, man, that was awesome. Nick. Hey, great to hear you. I've been email corresponding with you to bring you on the podcast today. So thanks for coming. And what a great, what a great interview. Thank-you for having me. I appreciate it. The background. I mean, I, we've, this we're approaching like 200 episodes of the podcast now, and I don't think that we've had anyone that comes to mind that has like your background in terms of coming from the sports world and really like having that perspective. So I always appreciate the opportunity to connect with people like yourself that can bring some lessons and wisdom from different lines of thinking. Thank-you. Yeah, absolutely. So Ari I'm sure, I'm sure you have a great question for Nick here what's your question?

Ari: I have a question. So I identified a ton, and we have similar backgrounds, so I played football growing up and it was my passion and I dreamed of going to the NFL and playing football. I didn't quite grow into the body type. So I stayed at about 5'9” and 170 pounds, but I did get to play in college. I played wide receiver. My whole life it's been like sports and music and, and then I also moved to Los Angeles, so I live right by you and we should, we should connect, but yeah, I love, love it out here and had a similar like path to, to making it out here in, in Los Angeles, but my question for you is, do you miss sports and football, or do you feel like you've completely channeled that into your music and what you're doing today?

Nick: Well, I have a bit of a cheating answer here cause when I first moved to LA, I Googled LA flag football near me. And I found this league that has a travel team that they asked me to be on. So we go all around the country, like every other month and do these national tournaments. We're going to Florida, we're going to Fort Lauderdale at the end of February, we're just in Vegas. That's been huge. That's been huge for like, not, not missing the sports side of things. So that's a little bit of a cop out answer, but in terms of bringing the energy, yeah. I mean, there's so many people out here that I meet that are awesome, but like, they don't have the juice, like they just don't bring the intensity. Like no one's, no one's like getting after it. And it's like, come on, we got to bring the juice. We're alive. It's a Friday. Come on, man. I love that analogy that you and the way that you described like what's can be lacking sometimes for independent musicians is just, and I always thought about that. When I was in a band, we never had a coach and we were all kind of together trying to, trying to coach. And there was no one that could really fill the role. We didn't have that kind of authority figure that would lay down. Rule guidelines and deadlines and all of that. It was just this missing thing. And so we hit all these road bumps and didn't know how to work through them. And I, I, I missed that and that's actually one thing I love about being part of Modern Musician is we're very much about applying in a, still in a very kind of loving open way, but like, it's, it's also about having targets and, and having deadlines. Working backwards from goals and hitting, hitting benchmarks and stuff. And so I love that. But it sounds like you've got this amazing mindset around it. So, yeah, I'm really stoked that we're, we, we connected. Thank-you. Yes. Excited as well. Happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Ari. Yeah, you guys should definitely connect in LA sometime. Ari is our director of strategic partnerships here at Modern Musicians. One of the best humans that I know. And, and I mean, he's one of those people that when you peel back the onion, you're like, wait, what? You, you also, he was on days of our lives. He's a famous actor. He's also played college football at a very high level. He's just very emotionally intelligent. But yeah, I bet you guys would really connect, especially having some similar backgrounds, but cool. So I see we have some more folks who have their hands up here live. So let's go to our next attendee, which is Mr. David Patrick Wilson. So David, let's bring you on here. He said in the chat, he said the greatest sports related slogan ever. Just do it. Yup. It's a great, great slogan. All right, David. Can you see in here as okay, are you able to, to speak here? Or if, if not, if you have any technical issues, you can also just put the question in the chat and we'll be happy to answer it for you that way too. All right. Well, we might be having some technical difficulties, David. Again, if you want to put a question in the chat, happy to answer it for you there. But otherwise I see we have some more folks with their hands up. So let's go to David there. There you are. I think we can hear you too. Can you, can you hear me? We can hear you. Oh, this is great. I'm really great, man. Nick, it's really amazing. I was actually recruited by Gettysburg. When I came out of high school, I had two colleges that I was considering. I was recruited by a bunch of places. I was a pretty high level ball player, played in a couple of championship teams. But you know, me the, the entertainment industry I've been an actor, writer, director. I've been in the industry for forever. And it's, It's for me. I see them being really kind of very closely parallel. You had to give yourself gold, even though you're playing on a team and you may not have a team in your paradigm. Now, as a musical artist, you have to have a toughness and an awareness about how you're going to persist in order to be able to succeed. What, what do you think? Do you think that that's the edge that you've had, because it sounds like you've just been doggedly persistent?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think it's parallel to… I'm a Patriots fan. Julian Edelman's one of my favorite players. Like he played quarterback in college. He goes to the Patriots, Tom Brady's there immediately. He switches to receiver. And I think a lot of that can be kind of parallel to the music industry. Just entertainment as a whole of like: maybe you moved to LA to be an actor, but you find out that writing and script writing is more your speed and you're okay, you're willing to switch, you make that switch and you dive all in there. I think a lot of people are so tunnel vision to this is what I am. This is who I'm going to be. These are my goals. And here's how I'm going to get there, which is great. But you might be closing yourself off to so many other opportunities. Like if I was just, I mean, if you asked me what my goals were two years ago, it'd be to DJ all these music festivals. Now it's not even close. I always say I have no goals because you never know what's going to happen. Just. Literally take it day by day, setting all these future big goals might close yourself off to certain opportunities of, Oh, I want to headline this venue as an artist, but like, if someone asks you to play background guitar and that might take you to that venue, are you going to say no, because it's not reaching your goal or what if you become a part of that band and now you're touring around the world as a guitar player? Because you said yes to that opportunity, even if it didn't fit your goals or the role that you wanted to play on the team. Just like Edelman is a pro bowl super bowl MVP, cause he was willing to fit the role that the team needed him in. And not just, I'm a quarterback. If you don't want to draft me, then I'm not going to play stuff. It reminds me of that quote: planning is invaluable, but plans are useless. Yes. So the act of planning is super valuable to give yourself perspective to plan, to look at what you want to do, but. At the bottom at the end of the day, things evolve and change. And especially in today's day and age, like with AI and with everything that's evolving so quickly, it's more important than ever to follow exactly what you just said in terms of being able to adapt and being fast to go where the value is. 

Awesome. All right, so we've got some time here for probably one or two more questions. If anyone has a question here in the audience, if you'd like to raise your hand, we can bring you on here live. Otherwise, you can also put something in the chat if you want us to ask for you. And while we're waiting for a question, I mean, I guess we can probably go a little bit deeper. So I, I know that coming from this background with sports meets meets music one of the biggest things that you mentioned was having discipline, having deadlines and guidance, and just like the willingness to show up and to take the shot and see what happens. I'm curious if you've seen any other correlations or specifically like mindsets or things that apply from your background that you might be a different way of looking at it that most musicians haven't really considered.

I mean, yeah, the biggest thing and like, it's my life motto. I had no success prior to this change. And it's what I attribute 150 percent of any success I've had since making this mindset change is a track. Don't chase. I used to be the chaser. I used to email labels. I used to email managers, artists, Hey, blah, blah, blah. And then I just took a step back and I was like, listen, I'm just going to post that social media. And for the entirety of 2023, I will not initiate a single conversation. I will not reach out to anybody. I will not start any conversations. I'll do what I do best. Feed me, post on social media and let these opportunities come to me. And it 50X my entire career in one year. And it's like the same thing with football is like, we had a saying: if they're good, they'll find you. If you're good, they'll find you. Nick Saban, the coach of Alabama now he's retired, but if you're good enough, he'll find you. He's got 20, 000 football players a year from high school, emailing them. Watch my highlight tape, please. I want to play for Alabama. He's not answering one of those emails. He knows where Derek Henry is. He knows where to make him. Fitzpatrick is. He's going to their games and he's asking them. Derek, please, we need you to come play for us. So why would you put yourself in the music industry in a position where it's you going to a venue, please let me play here instead of them coming to you saying, we've seen you on TikTok, your band looks sick. You guys are killing it with these videos on top of a cliff by the water. You guys bring a great energy. Can you please come play at our venue? And now that power dynamic has shifted so totally on the other side of the pendulum that now you can control, you can say, well, if you want us at our venue. Here's our asking price instead of you, you asked us if you could play at our venue. So we're just going to give you two free drink tickets. Cause you should, you begged us to play here and there's so many different ways you can go about it in the music industry as far as attracting, and now you hold the cards and you get to dictate what projects you take on, what you do, where you play, who you work with, instead of just being this chaser that's just throwing out these fishing hooks and reeling in nothing, and then when something gets reeled in, you've got to like beg the fish to not go back into the water. It all starts from in here, and we have so much accessibility. To get all of this information on yourself, on what you do on your music, on your energy, on your live show out there free of charge to then bring that casting net back in that I don't see like a need for chasing just like in high school football. If you chase the college, they're never going to give you the offer. Oh man, that's so good. Yeah. That's such a great principle that applies to the music industry and just like life in general. I mean, this is definitely a side note. It's not something that is like a focal point here at Modern Musician. But I know when I was in the dating scene, I've been happily married for like 6 years, but in high school there's definitely something about if you are feeling needy or desperate, so you're trying, you're like you're, you're, you're chasing, there's a totally different dynamic versus if you are confident and you're working on yourself and you know, you're growing personally. And if you just can switch that mindset for any opportunities regardless of what type of opportunity it is to you being the person that's worthy or deserving of that opportunity, then gosh, yeah, there's like a universal law to it. tracked don't chase fantastic.

Absolutely. Dating another great analogy for that. Like you're, you're at the, whoever at the bar, they've seen you walk up to 20 other people and ask them for their number. So when you ask: number 21, Hey, please give me your number. They've seen that play out before, versus just being you, being confident and just letting things come to you. And it seems like there's almost as gravitational pull and, and sometimes you have two people who are both self sufficient, they're both not needy or kind of chasing or reaching out, but they're both having that attractive energy and then it's like it pulls and it creates some awesomeness between when it, when it comes together, but it's coming from a place of mutual self worth, mutual fulfillment, as opposed to like, you're either you're trying to get someone else to fill a gap in you. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, I see we've got one more question here from Voss. So Voss, let's bring you on here live and that will be the last question for today before we wrap up. Hey, VoZ, how are you doing today?

VoZ: Doing good. Doing good, Michael. Thank-you for being with us, Nick. I got a quick question. Let's write it down here. Share with us some how you develop your, develop your team and some of the collaborative dynamics within it, because it appears, early on I heard you talking about how you went to these different areas. Nashville, Miami, LA, you're from the New York area, and you have a you were trying to, I guess, find how you were going to fit into a culture, and I think you define that. Find a culture for yourself. I'm making a lot of assumptions here. I apologize, but it, but you've done that. And then and then now you found people that seem to work together. Michael's doing a great job in a, on a much larger scale of bringing together a communities of really divergent styles and people from all over the globe with these, with the zoom meetings and with now with the discord channel, but in your particular case, which is kind of one on one working with people in a collaborative environment, how did you come about determining who you're going to work with? And once you did, what is the collaborative dynamics that you're dealing with that you could share that we might experience if we're doing that ourselves?

Thank-you. Absolutely. Enough. Absolutely. So in terms of my internal team that I work with, Lexi, Anthony, Oren, my writers and engineers and guitar players. I'll just met them out here in LA. I met Lexi because I do these videos on TikTok, where I show a production I'm working on, like duet the video, write lyrics, record yourself singing along and if I, if I like it, we'll turn it into a song. And she was doing those duet challenges for 2 years, and I never even saw them because she was doing them on videos that just got so many submissions. I couldn't go through all of them. Like, I never even knew she was doing those videos. And then her manager at the time reached out to me. It was like you should do a zoom session with her. We met on zoom, wrote a song. She told me how she used to do those videos, came out to LA, went to her birthday and then met Anthony there and Oren and our whole team now. And it just was putting myself out there, attracting her into my life. And then just being a normal human being and meeting people and establishing relationships based on, okay, like, how is your mindset? Are you thinking similarly to me? Are you thinking differently from me? And is that going to be beneficial if we're both thinking the same way? If we're thinking differently, how is that going to work? Just doing testing kind of sessions and projects with them. We all realize we have a great dynamic together and that's what's established this whole team now that I kind of see myself as like the head coach of we ever. Lexi's our offensive coordinator; Anthony's our defensive coordinator. And then in terms of like the artists we work with, it's just, again, putting, putting myself at them, putting themselves out there on TikTok on social media, doing TikTok live streams, and just posting content every single day and making it really, really easy for people to understand, okay, who are you and what do you do? And I mean, I've had videos do 2, 3, 4 million views when I was an artist that nobody reached out to me. That was also an artist to work with me from, because I was positioning myself as an artist, promoting my music. And now I get far more people reaching out to work with me for me to produce and write with them off of videos that maybe get 5, 6, 7 thousand views because I positioned myself and very clearly without being a chaser, but just: Hey, I'm rough. I'm a producer and songwriter. You know, there's a link in my bio that I'll never talk about. I'll never say publicly it's there that if people really are willing to go that next step deeper and try to get in contact with me, there's a form there that they can fill out I'll learn more about them, their project, what they're looking to work on together, jump on a call with them and kind of just see like, where's their mindset, what is their approach to this? Is this going to be an 18-month process? Or are they like, Hey, listen, I got the concept. I'm going to release it in March. Let's roll. And I'm like, great, amazing. Let's do it. And it all just kind of comes from like step one being I'm putting myself out there, I'm posting on social media every single day. I go live on TikTok twice a day, people come to me, I speak to all of them. And then it's just, who's aligning mindset wise, who's aligning kind of in that process strategically timeline wise, that it makes sense for us to really dive into this project together. And then that processes, whether they're in LA or whether they're in Australia, we get on a zoom call and we just talk about the project. Where are we starting from? What's our end goal? When are we releasing this? And then we usually leave that call with action items, whether it's me building out the production a little bit more. Or they've got a demo vocal already, and now it's on me to build around that demo vocal, but I always like to make sure on the production end of things, there's a demo vocal that exists that I could build that production around because then I know, okay, this is where the vocal is going to sit rhythmically and melodically, so I'm not going to crowd that with. All of this production without knowing where that vocal is going to sit. I'll build a production to like 70%-80% of the way there around the demo vocal. And then from there, if they're in LA, we'll meet up in person, go through all the final vocals, make a checklist, record all the different layers, backgrounds, harmonies, octaves, doubles. If they're remote somewhere else in the world, we'll just sit on zoom, come up with a checklist of: okay, in the pre-chorus, we're going to do doubles and we're going to do a high octave harmony in the chorus. We're going to do this. Make it as basically “game plan NFL playbook” as possible. And then when they go into a studio local to them, they know exactly what they’re recording, they don't leave anything up to guessing. They can FaceTime me as they go and have questions, I'll guide them through that recording process. If they're somewhere else in the world, once I have the final vocals, mix it faster and get it ready for Spotify. And then once we're four weeks out from that release date, we'll always just jump on a zoom call and lay out an entire marketing plan of, okay, the four weeks before this release, this is our testing ground. This is what's going to be the six different video styles that you could kind of come up with two videos per style, throw all those nets out there and see, okay, for this particular song. What styles are outperforming the other ones, not on views, not on likes, not on saves. The only metric that matters when you're promoting a song is comments are people that aren't your friends and family going out of their way to ask you, what's this song called? Is this song released yet? I love this song. If someone, even just one person goes out of their way to comment. That you don't know on one of these videos. Okay, great. That's the route we're going. Did people as the comments come in, whatever styles, maybe it's playing acoustic guitar outside and lip syncing it. Maybe it's performing it live into your camera. Maybe it's like talking about why you wrote the song and then playing it in the car. Like we kind of sit down, come up with one of those six styles. Go out there, test them all and see which ones, which one or multiple styles brought in comments. And then we just niche it down, niche it down. And then over that four week period, that song comes out and we should have that one style or two styles that are dialed in that we know, okay, once the song's out, you can just double, triple down on this post, this exact video style in different ways, every other day for the next four weeks, and it's going to continue to kind of bring in comments because it worked through that testing period. And then guess what? By the time that four week release period’s over, we should be rolling right into the next song. Ideally, if that person wants to keep that release schedule, that's going to kind of guarantee to an extent that the success and growth is going to be there over someone who releases kind of willy-nilly. 

Michael: Fantastic, man. That is an awesome breakdown in terms of the entire, you just shared like the entire game plan. And the fact that you're able to do that just off the top of your mind shows me that you're the kind of person that has a plan to start with and that you have it, you know. The documentation around it, you have the checklist for it, which is extremely important. So it sounds super valuable for anyone that you know, anyone that is a good client for you to work with. So I would say like the last question I have here for you is first of all, I want to say as we approach the end of the podcast, thanks again so much for taking the time to be here and to share some of the lessons and insights that you've learned from your whole life, including some different industries from the music industry. I think it's super valuable. And for anyone here who's interested in connecting more or sharing their music and seeing if they're a good fit, like from a production fit, I'd love to hear what you'd recommend as a next step. And I'd also love to hear specifically who are the ideal clients who are like the best fit for you? Out of everyone that you've worked with, who's your favorite kind of client to work with? And what do you think are the specific traits that you're looking for?

Nick: Absolutely. Just people that are honest about me and about themselves throughout the whole process. Yes. And Mike, again, everybody knows, cause I tell everyone, like I come from a football background I've ran face first into people who are 300lbs. You can tell me you don't like the drops. So tell me as quickly as possible. Tell me as soon as you don't like something, literally no feelings will ever be hurt on my end. And I hope I could be the same to you because that's what's going to give us the best. possible song, everybody wants to kind of keep feelings intact. But at the end of the day, what, what feelings are going to hurt more the feelings of telling someone you don't like something on a project you're working on together, or the feelings when that song goes out into the world and you realize this isn't what I wanted, because I didn't want to speak up. Yeah. Transparency is so important. Cool. Well, for anyone who's listening to this right now, who's interested in diving deeper, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more? Absolutely. If you shoot me a DM on Instagram, my username is JustAtRough. Are you FF music official? I respond to every DM ever. I think that's the most important tool to getting in touch with people. Cause you know, it's kind of like your life resume there, where you get to know each other before you've even sparked that convo, you see everyone's posts, what they look like, you get to know who you're talking with even more on a personal level then. 

Michael: Awesome. Well, like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access. And man, it's been great connection with you today. Thanks for doing what you do. And I would definitely encourage anyone who resonated with Nick and what he's doing and that wants to take their music to the next level this next year to reach out to him on Instagram. 

Nick: Absolutely. Appreciate it, Michael. Thank-you for having me. This was a blast. 

Michael: Awesome. All right. So we are officially done with the live recording. We're still here live on the stage.

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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