Michael Walker: Hey, this is Michael from Modern Musician, and before we start the show, I wanted to let you know that right now I’m looking for new artists to mentor personally. Specifically, we’re looking for artists that have at least 1 song professionally recorded. It doesn’t have to be Beyonce level production, but it just needs to be something that you feel proud of and you’re ready to promote. We’re looking for artists who are really just poised for growth, and are ready to go all in on their music. There’s a saying that when the student’s ready, the mentor appears, and so if that's you, if you’re truly ready for it, then I want to invite you to apply for a free coaching call with our team. The goal is to launch an automated system that allows you to build a loyal and engaged fan base so you make a sustainable income with your music online without having to sell your soul to social media, or post 20x a day on TikTok. Before we get started, we always offer a free 30-minute coaching call to make sure it’s a good fit before you get your campaign launched. At this point, the artists that we’ve worked with have hit over 561.3 million streams, a #1 album on iTunes, and we’ve helped many artists grow from scratch to making a full-time income with their music online. In a few rare cases, they’ve even been able to generate over $1 million a year with their music. With that being said, we are very selective with who we work with just based on who’s the best fit and who we can best serve. Because we have a limited amount of time available for those free sessions, we do require an application process where you submit your music, and you can apply for a free coaching call with our team. So if you’re interested, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes to submit an application and share one of your songs. I'm looking forward to checking out your music, and now… let’s start the show!

Patrick Ross: Actually getting people that care about your music, actually understanding what it takes to go from, 1-10-100 to actually getting some people to come down and see you, and to actually care. That takes time. It takes energy. It takes effort, and I think a lot of times artists look to artists that inspire them that are maybe, in their eyes, really, really successful. They are successful artists, but there's a whole journey that you didn't see half the time because you didn't know who they were. 

Michael: 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.

YYEEAAHH! All right. I'm here with my new friend Patrick Ross. Patrick is the COO of a company called Music Ally, which combines his tech savvy background with industry knowledge to help drive innovation across the global music business. He has experience in leading digital marketing at Cobalt's, AWOL, and is working across the UK music scene helping shape the future of music industry evolution. So I'm excited to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit about the current landscape in the music industry and where things are going. Right now at the time of recording it, we're in a period of pretty intense revolution, and so looking forward to hearing his thoughts on what's happening and where things are going. So Patrick, thanks for time to be here today!

Patrick: Thank-you very much, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here.

Michael: Awesome. So to kick things off, for anyone who this is their first time connecting with you, could you share a quick introduction into your story, and how you became the COO of Music Ally?

Patrick: Yeah, sure. As my,Instagram and X and everywhere else says, “Guy from ATL in LDN”. So originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Born to a Scottish father, which would later come into play on why I'm in this country. I grew up in Atlanta. Did music as a lot of folks do as most people in the music industry, and then one day I found out there was this thing called the music business, which my father sort of encouraged me to figure out because he said: you need to get a real job, and then drove up to Nashville, Tennessee. Had never been there. Had never seen music row. Drove down and saw these companies BMI, and hadno idea what that was, but it had been on the CDs that I owned. I was like: Oh my gosh, this is a thing! They've got buildings with Sony and with all of these things I've heard of. So had a friend of mine that took me up there. He was a year older. He went there first, and they had a music business program. So that was a dad and mom's way of: all right, you can keep doing music, but you better learn something else about it. So yeah, I went there for a music business degree. Started out as a production major, which was great working in RCA Studio B where Elvis recorded getting to do things on tape. Actually I didn't love country music that much when I lived there. I found much more of a love for it when I moved away, but listening to a certain pop-country vocalist go over and over and over again, I realized that that was maybe not the cup of tea for me of actually having to be in that side of things, and so shifted to becoming a business major, so the business side of it, because in my mind it's kind of been a thing throughout my career, and no offense to any of the artists, but I don't necessarily have to like it, or I can love it, but it doesn't matter I can do my job, regardless. I often actually tell people: beware if I actually like your music, because I'm into a lot of very indie niche sort of things. My taste is certainly not a sign of something being commercially successful in any way, shape, or form. But yeah, that early on was something that allowed me to go: Look, I want to be able to provide this service that I don't need to understand the music. Sometimes I do, and that's great, and occasionally those match up, but kind of made it my business to understand the audience side of it. Dating myself, Facebook came out when I was in college. Back in the early days of those that remember it, you had to have a college email address to sign up, and at the end of my term at Belmont, I moved over here to London to finish up my music business degree. At the time, I was like wearing a Napster t-shirt to school. My college professors would look at me and be like: boy, what are you doing? Don't you know that you're killing this thing? I have a lot of downloaded music that I discovered, so certainly stealing music, as they would call it now, but also wanted a job…

Michael: [incredulously] You, you did that? No!

Patrick: I know, right? 

Michael: Everyone was doing it? 

Patrick: And now I know about all of these artists that I never would have discovered and have gone on to… but yeah, you know, anyway. Won’t go into too much into that, but the world that opened up, which obviously streaming is something that is now part of that. Moved over here, finished up the degree, got an internship at a Canadian record label, but the London branch: Network Records. Love those guys. I went and told them about my degree, because I wanted a job, of course. I've learned about music business. I can tell you about music publishing. I've learned about that. I know what sync is about too. They all looked at me and kind of nodded their heads and were like: but what can you do? I was like, oh, well I can…. you know…. I did this… and I tried to explain all these. No, no, no. But like, what can you actually do? I was like: oh, I mean in my spare time I did a little bit of web design. I can kind of graphic design, not very badly. This was the era of MySpace. I was like: I could customize a MySpace page? And they're like, oh my god, that's so useful! Then the other, string to my bow was at this time, Americans or people with American accounts, were the only ones that could book Facebook ads globally, so I was, I think, the only person in the music industry that could book Facebook ads at the advent of Facebook ads. They were so nascent at the time. You could pick the currency, but it was always the same value. They hadn't worked that out yet. So you'd be able to pick whichever one. They were still working out the system but yeah, we needed to figure out what I was going to do to be able to survive and eat. The label at the time was decreasing in size, not increasing. They're a wonderful record label, but as they put it: when you do a 50/50 deal with Josh Rouse, that works out really well for Josh Rouse, and care to do those sorts of thingsm, however, it doesn't work great for our overheads, so we're actually going to have to shrink down. One of the most beneficial things I got out of there was the wonderful women that worked there basically sat me down and explained to me what the music industry at the time, this was in 2007/2008, needed out of digital, and basically allowed me to kind of craft a pitch. So the Facebook ads building banners, I called it web presence management, and allowed me to sort of like target a pitch of what my skills were. Then yeah, just go out and hustle for clients and started my own little web presence management agency, as I called it (never liked the word marketing). Helped at those early years, people transition from MySpace to Facebook and Bebo Pages and Friendster and Verb, iMeme and all these things run around. Into the Instagram era and YouTube and yeah, basically helping artists do all of that. I'll wrap it up to this chapter is that one of my clients very early on, so I had people like wind up records, helping them take bands like Seether and Finger Eleven and market them to a UK audience, and I was very fortunate to have a lot of folks bring me in to do stuff like that. But got this client called AWOL that I've never heard of little startup company originally based in Sheffield. They just opened an office down here in London in a historic recording studio in St. John's Wood. Not to be confused with Abbey Road Rack Studios. The two guys that founded it were record producers. The other guy worked at Apple. Yeah, they're up in Sheffield where the Arctic Monkeys are from. So I had early success of basically going to the supermarket and every band from Sheffield being like: Hey guys, you got that cd! Did you want to put it on iTunes? And people were like: how would we do that? I became their first London hire and helped to basically do the marketing side, with a big focus on how do we take these artists that we have thesame deal I think they have today: 15% 30 day rolling contract. No one's tied down. But how do we support them? How do we help them market themselves? I suppose most of the rest of my journey in music has been kind of trying to figure that out. AWOL bought by a company called Cobalt. I was there 10 years total: 5 pre-Cobalt, 5 post, and then made my way out the door and headed over here to Music Ally because I sort of discovered a passion after working with lots of big artists at what's now AWOL Recordings, that there was a real need for education for training for actually helping these developing artists to get where they needed to be, and that's what found me joining Music Ally back in 2018, and here I am today.

Michael: Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing your story. It sounds like you kind of came in at this revolution point kind of between the traditional music industry, and then things going digital and social media and MySpace and Facebook, and so you probably kind of witness this big transition and kind of the legacy versus the new model that's happening. So I'm curious with your background and with the many artists that you've worked with now, right now, it seems like we're kind of in the middle of a similar transition, maybe, in terms of the old way and then the new way of what's happening. So I'd love to hear a little bit in terms of with the artists you're working with right now: what are some of the biggest mistakes or challenges that you see in the current music industry? 

Patrick: I mean yea, I've definitely been around for a period of transition. If anything, I got tired of all the transition a few years ago. I'm actually really excited about where we are now. I'm leaning in a bit more cause it finally feels like we're getting back to some things that were… maybe it was just too soon, technologically. This idea of communities, which is a big buzzword. The idea of, we use the word superfan, but like real fans. The concept of artists actually being able to communicate directly cause what I saw was, and I was part of this process, was: yeah man, you need to be on Facebook cause that's how you're going to find everybody because we had to get out of MySpace. Okay. Yeah, man, you need to be on Instagram. Yeah, man, you need to be on... I kind of watched what I was doing setting all these up, and anyone that's been doing digital marketing for a while will have known the platform hopping and the amount of energy that, ourselves in the industry as well as the artists themselves, spent building other people's platforms, building up followers, fans, likes, whatever you want to call it, and then realizing you got to pay to reach them or that they're no longer on that platform anymore and what does that even mean to you? And that we're now into this era of transition which feels very healthy to me that streaming is here to stay, and it came in, and in a financial sense, it saved the industry, in the sense of overall revenue, but it's much more difficult for individual artists. Obviously it's broken down the barriers. I mean, you can release a song by recording something in your bedroom that sounds great. You can get it out globally to reach an audience. So all of this is really, really amazing, but I think we're still finding our footing and I think artists, we’re doing the same. So I think one of the things as we're in this transition is that too many people… so I deal with artists of all levels here at MusicAlly. I mean, we're dealing with major labels on one side, down to people coming from developing countries trying to break out. So we see all of it. We talk to all of these folks, and I see people focus too much on maybe one platform; be it Spotify, just because that's the biggest, and I have no qualms with Spotify, but they focus so much on those stream numbers and on these kind of vanity metrics. One of the signals that's happened recently is, as I hope everyone knows, you can't make any money until you've made a thousand streams. I take that as a signal from Spotify as an industry indicator of: you need to look elsewhere to make your first bit of money. This is not the place to come and do that. I think it's a good indicator of: too long people have thought that being playlisted or having some sort of level of success there was going to actually lead to long-term success, and everyone from the artists themselves to the big labels that are certainly shrinking right now in terms of overhead and marketing people, is that that isn't actually what we're after. The thing that was always the case, I'll not mention the Grateful Dead other than right now, but building a fan base, and any other great artists you probably ever knew built a fan base. We did that in weird ways and I think we're kind of balancing back, but actually getting people that care about your music, actually understanding what it takes to go from 1-10-100 to actually getting some people to come down and see you, and to actually care. That takes time. It takes energy. It takes effort, and I think a lot of times artists look to artists that inspire them that are maybe, in their eyes, really, really successful. They are successful artists, but there's a whole journey that you didn't see half the time because you didn't know who they were. Realizing that every artist started very small; started with that first gig, that first release. Generally, 9/10, that's not how they blew up. They worked really hard until you got to get to this point where you saw them as: Oh, I want to be like that. But actually trying to look back, trying to trace back and understand what was their journey, and learning from that and realizing that, yeah, it is a journey and that every piece… don't skip steps, as a friend of mine would say. Each one of those steps along the way helps you build and it gets you to where you're going. It's not like an overnight flash in the pan and you don't want to be a flash in the pan. You want to be sustainable. 

Michael: Super good. Yeah. It's a lot to unpack there. It sounds like what you're saying is that one of the biggest things that's happening right now is because of tools like Spotify, and because of the internet, it's easier than ever to create music, release music, but it's also led to more than necessary attention focused on vanity metrics or things that don't really move the needle in terms of building a sustainable career. Streaming in a lot of cases isn't really going to be a major revenue generator until someone has a very large audience, and so you're seeing a return to the relationships and the community focus of building real fans. 

Patrick: An audience and a catalog. I think the other one is a catalog meaning: a few singles, EP’s. An artist I used to manage, we went from day one, but a catalog is something you release every time and you can get, I've seen millions and millions of streams on one song. That's not going to sustain you, but it takes time to do that. Real fans with a real catalog, and that takes time of making, creating, releasing, which is a lot of work, putting that up there, doing the shows, going out there and creating the connection. Yeah, those things go part and parcel. 

Michael: Totally makes sense. One analogy that came to mind as you were sharing that and this analogy that I come back to a lot is sort of this analogy of planting a seed and letting it blossom and grow and how that's sort of like building a music career. One of the points that you brought up was around how one mistake or challenge that's really natural is to look at artists that we role model that are successful and sort of like you see a tree with all the fruits falling down, so you see all the amazing things and you're like: great, I want to be like that, but maybe not fully appreciating or recognizing that before the tree can grow, there's a period where it needs to blossom, and needs to be nurtured and the roots actually grow downward first before it starts to sprout upward. So it sounds like what you're really recommending is starting by building the core, by building this foundation, building this community, developing real relationships. In the short-term, you might not necessarily see an immediate, hundreds of thousands of dollars right away, but you are building the roots, you're building the system, and over time that can start to blossom into more of a sustainable career. 

Patrick: 100%. I think those roots, if we look for them in those artists that have blossomed, I mean, there's an Ed Sheeran quote where I think once he finally got signed to a major label, it was like, oh my gosh, you must be killing it now in terms of like how much money you're making. And he was like: what are you talking about? You know what my deal is like? I don't see anything from that, but my first, however many 4-5 EPs are on a DIY distributor that I own 100% of, and that's where I still make my money. I make my money off of touring, and yes, now you've heard of me. There's nothing wrong, we wouldn't have heard of him without a major label like it's great, but that wasn't the end all and be all. But a lot of these stories… because of the internet, spend the time search be like, okay well what was the first big…. really what did it? What were they doing 2 years before that? Where were they 5 years before that? Go find small videos and see what rooms they were playing in front of and like what kinda… I encourage every artist out there to find the artist they love, but try and go back as far as you can and if they inspire you, actually understand what it took to get them to the place that they could inspire you. 

Michael: Awesome. So, the next natural question that comes up is around: for an artist who might be listening and watching this right now, who is maybe at that stage where they're starting out, they don't have a large audience, but they have the music, they have an album, they have something that they're looking to grow. Probably one of the biggest questions that they're wondering is: how do I build that initial contact? How do I build the roots? How do I start to build an audience in the right way? I should also probably mention: everything you just shared perfectly sounds like an advertisement for our software that we’ve developed that is all about building a community that is like a CRM platform. So you have an email list and you own it, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't own your audience and it's all about direct fan connection. It's a little bit like if Patreon and Discord and MySpace had a baby, then it would be like this platform. I love to hear your answer to that question around building the community and kind of starting grassroots when there's so much content online and there's so much distraction and social media and all the different moving parts. What do you recommend for most artists who are just getting started and they're looking to build a real connection with their fans in the right way without getting fake followers or fake streams? 

Patrick: I'm going to take the segue of the fact that you were talking about the thing you're working on. Something we have here at Music Ally that we've just launched is… so Music Ally traditionally has always been focused on the industry, so a lot of artists out there may not have heard of us because our clients have traditionally tended to be “the music industry”, so artists’ managers, record labels, publishers, major indie labels, all those sorts, but we've just built something called Music Ally Pro. The reason we've used the word “pro” is we see that the landscape is changing, and it's not the same world that it was. There aren't necessarily going to be people just waiting to sign you and pick you up, so part of what we do over at Music Ally Pro is to try and create training and insight content. So basically videos, case studies, campaigns, just going back to education, to help people learn and understand. MusicAllyPro pro.musically.com, but wherever you find it, education is really important, and I'm just taking the time to learn how to do these things, to understand the industry that you're trying to be a part of, and actually being interested. Even if your goal is to, if they do still exist, to get signed up to a big deal and have someone take care of everything for you, fantastic. You're going to do much better if you can actually understand this. So, we always suggest that people go out there, and whether it's taking training content courses from us, from someone else, just looking at what's available online, just getting your hands dirty and going into the meta advertising, or TikTok advertising, or YouTube creator studio, whatever it is, there's all these tools, and spending the time to actually learn these things. I've worked with some really inspiring student musicians. There was a wonderful Ukrainian gal that I had the opportunity to mentor recently, and when we started the whole thing, she had a beautiful vision for what she wanted to do, had huge ideas, very interesting music, huge ideas of VR experiences. Still on putting her first single out, but had these just amazing visions and dreams, and I sat down with her over many, many sessions of mentoring, and I made her learn how to use Facebook advertising. At the beginning it was like, okay. Then watching her start to get it by just messing with it, going through and like: wait, okay oh, it's trying to make me do that, but I don't want to do that. I wanna to do this, and by the end, she'd suddenly looked at just one example of a tool had suddenly looked at something before that was just this advertising platform to like: Holy crap, the wonderful creative assets, cause she's great at making videos to: I can use this thing creatively. I think that was the first time that it was a creative tool to take what I've made and reach people. I love seeing those kinds of connections that all these platforms out there, they do require creativity, and so, yes, there's creativity that goes into making the music. Yes, there's creativity that goes into making the album artwork or the music videos, but there's also a creativity in reaching the audience, whether that's just organic posting, or actually looking into” what tools are available to me and can I actually get good at these things? I think some of the artists that we've seen today… I mean Lil Nas X… I talked to people today who don't even know about Old Town Road as a TikTok thing, which is amazing and fantastic. It's been like this fully formed artist that came to me with a great album. I'm like: this is a person that was able to look at exactly, understood all the different avenues of how technology works and works against you in some ways, and navigated that. I think that's really like a lot of the power of understanding how these things can be extensions of your creativity. That was a very long winded answer once again. [laughs]

Michael: Great answer. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is that the tools are going to change, but you want to see what are the tools available to you to help you to reach and connect with new fans, and in particular, one that you had mentioned was Facebook or meta advertising, Instagram. I love meta advertising and that's primarily what I've learned for traffic generation for Modern Musician and for our artists. I'm curious: when you're running these campaigns, what have you found being some of the best objectives? Are you generally just doing it for engagement, or do you recommend that people create an email list? How do people kind of take the next step from just putting out an ad and getting in front of people, to actually building that into a real relationship with those people? 

Patrick: Sure. So my 2 favorite platforms, probably just because they've been around the longest, are GoogleAds for YouTube, and then MetaAdvertising, which we're talking about Instagram, right? The reason with both of them, and with any of these platforms, they tend to have something called audiences. We're all talking about audience building, so whatever advertising platform you find yourself in, they'll have it in a different place. There's some place called audiences and that's what I tend to show people, basically, how to do it right: How to go in and build audiences, meaning: you book those first ads that are, and this is when it's the most tricky, let's say, because you've got very few followers to actually base off of, but what you're trying to do is build audiences in the sense of any of the advertising platforms, but yeah, meta specifically. So what we'll do is go run an ad, and then build an audience and it's all about kind of funneling of: okay. I now know, and this is the power of these, the people that have seen this first ad that and now we have what we call it: I have a fan funnel. So it goes from there's like the whole internet, and then you basically have these unknowns they don't even know about you, you have these people that are kind of like aware, and then they kind of get casually, and then they engage, and then you've got that super fan thing, and using advertising is a great way to pull them through that funnel, but you have to look at it realistically of: the first time I've never heard of you and I've seen an interesting and creative visual, especially on Instagram where you're going to be penalized to send somebody off platform to send someone to Spotify, that's just how it works, so the best thing you can do is keep them on there, but because you can build an audience of people who've seen that specific creative, you can then build that audience enough to serve them creative #2 that maybe gives them a little bit more. You can have fun with it. You can even go… There's bands that we work with that do really funny things where you go: Hey now you're seeing me here because you've watched this and this, which is a brand awareness objective, if we're going back to like the objectives within Meta, but the idea of getting people to be aware? That's really important. One view of an Instagram story ad is not much awareness at all, but it's about that second, third, fourth, and bringing them down the funnel to going: all right, I've seen this now, I'm actually getting quite interested in this, and then actually getting them to come through to the profile itself. To answer the question about what I pay for engagement, generally never, engagement is not one that we go for. Video views, so stories and reels, that's where it's at today, right? So video views, as much an actual person watching the video, that's the kind of thing we tend to go for. Once they're down the funnel, once they know who you are, that's where you can start going through things like link clicks, but be honest. I think, one of the “being honest” things is, I'm assuming most people are using these platforms themselves, what works on you? And somebody going: Hey, you've never heard of me, click here now. Is that really going to work? Or is it much more like using the space, while someone's in a doom scroll or just going through a bunch of stories to actually catch some attention and then try and grab that, which these platforms that you do by building an audience and the audience's side of things, so that you can keep coming back to them, build awareness and ideally get them down to the point, which is what you really want, is for them to actually listen to a song, ideally listen to an EP, maybe even listen to an entire album, come to a show, but realizing that these things can build up to that in stages. 

Michael: Got it. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is that one thing that is understandable is that these platforms, they want to incentivize you to stay on the platform, and so you're running native ads like video view campaigns, one of the benefits is that they tend to get better engagement because you don't get penalized for, basically, driving people off of the platforms. So one strategy is to keep people on the platform, start building relationships through video views, and is what you're saying, that's sort of like the core strategy, and then at one point, hopefully, they've built enough of a connection that they go look you up on Spotify and follow you there, or do you recommend that they go to some sort of email list, subscription, or what's like the next stage after someone kind of listens and they start engaging, or do you mostly just focus like primarily on just building the audience on socials? 

Patrick: Like an email address is what we want. So don't get me wrong, I love email and the whole tug of war here with the advertising platform, which I will say, generally if they have anything that says advanced or show more, or they've got a little option that's got a little sparkle or a magic wand, turn all that crap off because you're pulling at them to try to actually reach the people that you want to reach. Their goal is to get you to spend as much money as possible. You're trying to get people to actually connect with you, so you’re kind of doing that tug of war. I kind of would go: it's more of like keep serving video content to get someone aware so that they feel like the most logical next step is actually visit your profile and see that they like the content, actually give you a follow, then what you can do is, again, about these audiences, you can build an audience of people who have followed you. That's a thing that they actually allowed on Instagram in the past couple years, which has been really great so you can actually target your followers, and your engagers, people that have watched, organically, your content, and then I think you're in a much better place for the call to action, for the “come over here and listen to me on Spotify or give me the email address”. We're always suggesting that you start wide, and give it the time, and don't jump in too soon, and I'll give a real world example of this going to a SoFarSounds gig where the gal stopped before she even played one song and made everyone get their phone out and told us all to follow her on Spotify, which is a little bit aggressive. [boh chuckling] Let me hear the set, let me get an idea, and if I'm into this, give me reasons to come deeper, and then yes, as soon as you can, you want to get an email address, you want to get something that allows you to no longer have to pay to reach them, and you want to bring them into a community, but give it the time it takes to let people funnel down and then the ideal, I'll stop after this, but this one is to actually have a large enough follower and actual, not advertising based, engagement audience that then you can build a lookalike audience off of, find more of those people, but all of that takes time and you just have to give it the time it takes experimenting with the creative, and not trying to be too salesy, too pushy, too action-oriented, and let people kind of naturally find their way in through these advertising platforms. 

Michael: Got it. That's super helpful. Yeah, so it sounds like what you're saying is similar to “you probably shouldn't get married on your first date with someone”. There's sort of like a relationship that needs to get formed and built. So a good strategy when you're just getting started is to start dating and start sharing some content and ideally, get to a point where someone actually follows you on the platform, and then maybe from there, having a retargeting audience that is of all the people that have followed you, and those are the people that you might have more of an objective to get them off the platform, but that way, you can start to actually build some engagement and organic growth on the platform as well, at the same time as building your own email lists and not relying as much on the platform to reach people. 

Patrick: And the same token also beware when you're starting out of anything that's getting you way too many followers, especially in countries that you're not anytime in the near future going to be able to tour in. I've worked with artists who came back to me, had someone work on their campaign. It's like: yeah, look, man, I'm almost like 500,000 likes on there. And I'm like: cool, you're based in LA and most of your audience is in Malaysia and Russia. Are you planning to go there? So just actually thinking about who you're building up because you're only gonna dig yourself a hole of building up a group of people that aren't there for the music. Yeah, it's better to have less of them because then now, like the audience you just talked about, if you pollute it with people that aren't there to actually get to know you that have come for whatever reason, or you've attracted bots, well then that's not a good place to be. So, yeah, be patient, and it's much, much better to have smaller numbers but engage smaller numbers that are actually there and excited to hear more about the music, which at the end of the day is what you're trying to achieve. 

Michael: That's a great point. Yeah. It seems like, especially for us as music creators, that there's a desire to… we have egos as humans and there is legitimate social proof in having numbers, right? And a lot of times people they, at first glance, they'll judge a book on its cover. So there's a serious bias, so there's an attraction to getting those vanity metrics, but just because you can have a campaign that's targeting third world countries where there's a lot of bots or not real people, and you're getting big numbers, doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually building a real community and building an engagement with fans that are going to come out to your shows, that are going to spend money supporting you, and so it sounds like one thing that you'd recommend is being careful not to just focus on the cheapest cost per engagement, but also just make sure you're reaching the right people that you do your targeting correctly so that they're people that are actually going to be a good fit for the community. 

Patrick: Yeah, and I think it's an evolution that we're still in the dawn of social media. 100 years from now, people will look back and think some of the stuff we did was ridiculous. I feel like the people that do the best is those that see it as a natural extension of human connection, which is what it was supposed to be and what it can be, what it often isn't, but when you actually start to view it through that lens of: okay, am I actually using this to reach other human beings who, yeah, connect with my music, connect with the sort of causes that I'm interested in, the context of why I make music? There's so many more ways to create that human connection. Those platforms can facilitate that, but you have to go in with that intention, as opposed to, as you mentioned, and not to say that you can target Argentina and get fans that are interested. We've done that with people. We've done some really fun, interesting campaigns with a small artist and we photoshopped him into billboards of the famous soccer football stadiums around South America. We're like: hey, check out my song and maybe one day I'll be able to come here. So you can actually attract people, but we were trying to find real people wherever they are. 

Michael: Makes sense. Awesome. Well, Patrick, it's been great connecting today and I appreciate you sharing some of your experience and lessons for today how you can actually build a community in the right way and build a real relationship. So, for anyone who's listening to us right now, and is interested in learning more about Music Ally, and take the next step, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more?

Patrick: Well you can go to pro.musically.com, as I said before. Check that out also musically.com. We're on all the social medias. If anyone wants to get in touch with me and ask any further questions, just Patrick@musically.com. Michael, I appreciate you saying music ALLY correctly. It's not a music alley, so we really appreciate that here. [both chuckle] It's a play on words on the domain, but we're always interested in hearing more, hearing folk’s stories, because we try to sit here that we're based in the UK and dotted all around the world, we try to sit here and listen and help and truly be an ally to all those out there because we understand it's hard. We understand the challenges and staying on top of it. So thank-you, Michael, very much for having me and for making this happen, and for your lovely audience. You've obviously got a passion and a heart to help folks out and more of that's needed in the world. So thank you, sir. 

Michael: Thanks, man, I appreciate that. I appreciate being a part of it. I was literally just thinking the same thing. I was thinking that we as musicians, we need as many allies as we can get, so I appreciate what you guys are doing. All right. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes and I look forward to talking again soon. 

Patrick: Awesome. 

Michael: Yeeeaaaah. 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.