Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
This is kind of like that moment where people were talking about streaming and, oh, there's this new thing. You can go stream your music and everybody is just streaming on there. This is that before it's actually happening. This makes too much sense to not do. This is going to solve the monetization problem for the entire creative industry.

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.

Michael Walker:
All right, so I'm excited to be here today with the CEO and founder of Omari MC, Nathaniel Moore. If you haven't heard of him before, he is a music producer whose songs have gotten over 6 million hits. Now, as an agency, he's worked with Warner, Universal, Capitol Records to help artists grow their fan base, monetize their music. Today, I'm really excited to dive into the main topic that I think is a huge question for all artists, which is how can I get my music heard? How can I build a sustainable business with my music? And specifically, the first time that we talked, we were geeking out a little bit about the NFTs and some new different kind of opportunities there, so I'm excited to explore that together. So Nathaniel, thanks for taking the time to be here today.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Absolutely, Michael. I appreciate you having me on. I'm excited to give these artists and musicians some new innovative ways to start monetizing their career, actually doing it and not having to scramble around, getting inconsistent revenue for it, so I'm definitely excited to talk.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Yeah, man, I especially appreciate it too. You're like Michael Jordan in his flu game. You said that your daughter passed on a bit of a cold, so you're fighting through that today.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah, yeah. So if I sound nasally at all, that's why, but we'll push through it.

Michael Walker:
You should good. You sound good. Awesome, man. Well, I'd love to start off just by hearing a little bit about your story and how you got started building the agency.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah. So when I first starting out, I was a music producer. So from the age of 14, there was a kid in my neighborhood and he made beats, so I was like, "That sounds fun." I didn't have any musical background at all, but it sounded fun, so I decided to give it a try. Then I would upload my songs to SoundClick-

Michael Walker:
SoundClick? Wow.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
... so for those new producers... Exactly. For the producers who know what that is, that was a big site in the late 2000s and early 2010s and now, it's definitely fallen off. But people would come there to listen to music, listen to beats, try to buy them from producers, and I would start to sell my beats on there. So fast forward, go through college, I'm still making beats. I'm selling them in college. Then as I graduate, I came to a point where I was working at a State Farm office and learning different things about marketing, but it was just time to dive in and start to look at doing it full-time. So I was in Pittsburgh at that time. I went to school in Atlanta at Morehouse College and I moved back down to Atlanta and pretty much locked myself in a room for a year and said, "I'm going to have to figure it out."

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So I was forming my own email list. I had taken a couple of courses about how to make your beat selling store, how to run an online business. I learned more in those two courses than I'd learned in four years of college, right? So after that, I started to put together my email list and my own website. People started asking me on the email list if I marketed. Like if I did marketing for other people. At the time, I didn't because I was still just trying to sell my beats, but, I guess, more and more kept asking, I opened up that service and then that just took off.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So a few years ago, maybe three, four years ago, hung up my production hat and just focused fully on the marketing and learning Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, Google ads, Microsoft ads. Any ad network. Then we started off with SEO, so getting really strong in that. So that's how we formed from me being 14 years old to now, we have a few dozen employees and independent contractors combined. So yeah. That is our story.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome, man. It's such an exciting time to be able to, whatever you want to learn, on the internet, to be willing to access these courses that are at a higher standard than most college programs at this point. It's just insane. So really cool. I think it's a good testament to just the entrepreneurial ability that we all have to be able to learn. Especially some of the things that you decided to focus on, I feel like are such a high value tool to learn. Like advertising on all those platforms, which is a really cool opportunity.

Michael Walker:
So now, having the experience of learning these tools yourselves and working with a lot of artists to be able to help them implement digital advertising to be able to grow their audience, I'm sure that you start to see a lot of patterns and see the same mistakes and same challenges coming up over and over again. So I'd be curious to hear, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see artists struggling with when it comes to growing their fan base and monetizing their music?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The biggest challenges we typically see is that people don't know exactly where to focus most of their attention and they don't know how to monetize. So most people don't have a website when they come to us. They have maybe a couple social media pages started. A lot of them are just looking to grow their Spotify numbers. They think that the money that I pay for Spotify advertising will be paid back to me from royalties. What they don't realize is that turns you into a one trick pony and you're a product, you're not a business because you just have a single stream of revenue. Virtually no sustainable good business has one stream of revenue ever. Have to diversify your revenue, eps when it comes to this subject. So Spotify sets their payment rate, Apple Music sets their payment rate, Tidal sets it. It really doesn't matter if they double it or they triple it. That doesn't solve your problem. All right?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So the bigger problem that artists have is okay, if Spotify's not going to pay me enough and people don't buy CDs anymore, how can I monetize? Right? so that's where this whole new scope of, I call it the stock market for artists in that it's combined with NFTs and now, artists can have their own cryptocurrency, which is what we're very big proponents. So the biggest problems is people don't know how to really purvey their message to an audience in the first place, so that's marketing in general, and I know there's a lot of different settings within Facebook and Google, and it can get confusing, but learning that first is one of the biggest problems.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So where to spend and how to spend it. Then after that, it's how to monetize it from that spend. So having a built out product line, having cryptocurrency or NFTs or merch or songwriting services or beat packs and all that stuff. If you're not sending people to a sales funnel and collecting their email addresses and sending them to their website, mostly, most of that traffic you want to send to your website, you are going to have problems really building a sustainable long-term business. You might maybe get lucky and go viral for one second and get a bunch of streams that way, but how many people have you seen just burn out like that? Like they were big for a year or something and then they're gone. Right? If they didn't build a sustainable back end system to capture the emails and follow up with people and have the retargeting ads and a sustainable method to monetize going forward, it's just going to fizzle away and all the years you spent working towards it, it's all going to be for naught if you can't sustain your audience.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. Yeah, there's like five different gold nuggets of wisdom that you just dropped there. So to circle back and reiterate, it sounds like what you're saying is that really one of the biggest mistakes is focusing on maybe vanity metrics where it's wanting to get more streams and not realizing that more streams really isn't necessarily the answer when it comes to having a sustainable business.

Michael Walker:
Then another big one that stuck out was really, even if you get more streams, if you don't have a good foundation or a good system for capturing the contact info and the email addresses and having an actual sales funnel, then a lot of it's just wasted. The analogy that comes to mind that we use a lot for this is what we call building a rain catcher where let's say one of the songs go viral like you were talking about, and it's kind of like there's a storm that passes and it's raining. It's like raining exposure. But if all you're doing is holding out your hands, then most of the rain just goes in the ground. So it sounds like what you're saying is it's really important to have that funnel, have that rain catcher in place, so that you can continue to build a relationship with those people and you can actually monetize that as opposed to just wasting the exposure.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah. So the "vanity metrics" still play a part in it, right? Let's say I'm trying to sell my vinyl albums and I do have a good amount of streams on Spotify that will contribute towards people actually buying it, but that the thinking around it shifts, right? It's being used to sell higher margin items. So your followers on Instagram or your subscribers on YouTube or TikTok or whatever are used to aid in selling those other higher margin items. So are they vanity metrics? If you don't use them correctly, yes. If you do use them correctly, then they can contribute towards social proof and selling those other items. But yeah, you're right about you need to have the rain catcher, the moat around your house, right? You need to have something to protect you from all that ad spend that's coming in.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Courses are great for that. Learning YouTube videos is great for that. Courses are preferable because they walk you through everything step by step. But the thing with trying to listen to... Even listening to podcasts are great. They're just not going to be step by step for you. Let's say I'm learning something new and if I want to learn it the fastest way, a course is the fastest way to learn it because it's going to be step by step for me.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's such a good point, especially in today's day and age, that there's a lot of information. Right? There's so much information that we feel so overwhelmed with it. The thing that most of us are lacking isn't necessarily more information, but it's more structured information that's more relevant. If anything, we need less information, but better information. So I 100% agree that courses are a really great opportunity to be able to take a more structured approach.

Michael Walker:
So one thing that you were just talking about that I would love to dig a little bit deeper into, because I know this is kind of like a new territory that were digging into right now, and also I think that there's sometimes... It's important to be careful with things that are trending or things that are kind of like a bubble that can pop. But at the same time, a lot of times those bubbles, there is real substance to it and there's truth. I feel like NFTs are one of those things right now that some musicians are having incredible success with. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, for anyone who's listening to this right now who is maybe they've heard the word NFT, but they don't really understand what it is or how does it all work, could you just explain what an NFT is?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah. An NFT is a non-fungible token. That's what the acronym stands for. Essentially it's a stamp of ownership on a digital asset. So there is MP3s floating around or video files floating around. If we wanted to track down the original, it may be... It's virtual impossible to do that at a certain point with some files, so that's why you've seen image sites like Shutterstock or one of them where you can buy somebody's images and the original owner on there says, "Hey, these are my images. You can buy it and license it if you want to use it." What an NFT, how it improves upon that is that it now has this stamp on it, this signature that says this is the original file. You can buy the original file and then structure those royalties however you want essentially.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So if I want to have an offering for $25,000 to buy my non-fungible token, which could be like a movie file or a music file, whatever, somebody can get those rights to that non-fungible token based on whatever auction price that's available. Now, I can also set it up where I get royalties based off the resell of those. So if I sell it for $25,000 and somebody else sells it for $50,000, but I had a royalty of 0.5% for every sale going forward or something like that, I would then get paid based off of every sale after it. All right?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So the bubble that happened with NFT, it was a bubble because it was a very new concept and it popped. So it doesn't mean that the technology is useless, it just meant it was a lot of press around it and people started to just throw money in and didn't really know the future use of this. Just like when the internet was first-

Michael Walker:
It's kind of like the internet bubble. Yeah.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah. The dotcom bubble in, what was it, 2000. So in case you're not familiar, dotcom bubble is just the internet was getting bigger and bigger and anybody who was starting a business online essentially could just go raise a bunch of money. Venture capitalists like the... They throw money at a lot of different companies in search of just finding one home run. Right? So the one home run can just cover all your losses pretty much or one or two... pretty much your 2% of that is going to cover all your losses. What happened with it is people will throw money at something and then it pops, but then if it's a good idea, it still sustains afterward. So you're going to overpay at the beginning, like there was the Beeple NFT that sold for like $69 million, which somebody, right now, definitely overpaid for it right now. But-

Michael Walker:
So what was that $69 million? What did they get with that purchase?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
It was a collection, I think. It was an artist, not a music artist, but they took a picture one day, I believe, for 5,000 days and that was a art piece, right? Like a famous art piece. It was a billionaire, obviously, like a crypto-billionaire that would buy that. They thought, "This is an iconic art piece. A da Vinci piece or a Picasso piece." Something like that, right? Which would go... like a Picasso piece would go for millions of dollars today. So that was the thinking behind the purchase.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
However, the real use that I see with this, because NFTs, they're nice, but they're not the whole pie. The whole pie, to me, is that artists get their own cryptocurrency. All right? So they have their own blockchain and within this chain, you can then have other items within it. Right now, the only one that's doing it well right now, there's a couple out there... Actually, there's really only two that I know about. The one that is doing it well is called Rally, R-A-L-Y. It's traded on Coinbase, so they just got listed, I think it was last week or two weeks ago, just got listed on Coinbase, so this is very early for this and the price honestly is not all that bad right now. So if you're listening to this, you just got to... an alley-oop, you can do what you want with it.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
But what happens with Rally is that artists or film studios or entertainers, influencers can get their own token and then people can buy and sell their token. Now, you have a certain percentage of your token that you own and it vests over time, which means that you can't just sell it off right after people buy it. You have to wait a certain period of time before you can sell off your shares. Just like with a stock with whenever somebody IPOs, which means they have an initial public offering, the company that puts that out can't just sell it the first day of it, right? They can't just ruin their stock prices. Laws around that. There's flow controls around that. So you can't just ruin the price.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
But this is a golden moment for musicians and influencers because you don't have to rely anyone on Spotify telling you how much you're going to be paid. You can now market your own token to people... This is a new concept, so at the beginning, you're going to have to explain this to them like I'm explaining it now. But let's say that you own half of a token that is going up in value and all the people who own your token will stay in it because they see that it's going up in value. That's how you mimic the largest flow of wealth in the world, which is the stock market. There's more money going into the stock market, pretty much stock market and real estate, right? Follow the money as they say. Don't worship the money, but it makes too much sense to not have this system set up with artists and influencers.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Before, this wasn't possible because an independent artist would have to hire a bunch of accountants and lawyers and all that stuff and have their bookkeeping kept up with. It would have just been a logistics nightmare before. But now, you can have it on the blockchain and people can go see the transactions that is on your token and a company can set up your own token for you. So this skips all this headache and you can just have your own token and market your own token and way more people are going to buy into your token than, say, your Patreon account. Because with a Patreon, they're pretty much donating to you. Like you get exclusive content on Patreon, but it's really somebody who wants to support you. These are avid fans. Because they can go get all the content they want for 10 bucks a month on Netflix or your Hulu. But with this one, like let's say that they pay their 10 bucks or they probably wouldn't mind paying 100 bucks because they now have an asset. They get to buy and trade on your chain.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The cool thing about Rally is that when somebody sells on your chain, they still have to pay you a fee. So even if their asset goes up in value and they sell it because they realize that gain, they still pay you even when they sell it. So the system is set up very well. I have a very similar idea. This is how I stumbled upon it, because I had a very similar idea that I was going to go do. People can check out our podcast, No-Nonsense Music Marketing, that I've talked about this back in April and I didn't find Rally until probably last month honestly. But I've just been diving into it because this was my idea pretty much and these are the only guys that did it well. There's one other called Fyooz and they had a coin launch with Lil Yachty, but their system is not as solid as Rally's is, so Rally is... I'm on their Discord server and all this stuff.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
I've studied this stuff, guys. I suggest you go do that too. This is kind of like that moment where people were talking about streaming and, "Oh, there's this new thing. You can go stream your music," and everybody's just streaming on there. This is that before it's actually happening. This makes too much sense to not do. This is going to solve the monetization problem for the entire creative industry. Right now, they're rolling it out to mid-size influencers, like small, mid-sized, to fix any bugs, work out any kinks, but after they get their first few big ones on there, the sky's the limit for this. If you get in earlier, obviously when you get in early on things, you benefit. If you're in early on Amazon, you benefit. If you're in early on Netflix, you benefit. Early on Apple... Go down the list. Early on Bitcoin. These are 50,000% gains on some of these. Like 200,000%, right?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So very exciting times. It is a new concept, so there's stuff to get used to. There might be a couple people that fight it, but this, it just makes too much sense.

Michael Walker:
Hey, what's up, guys? So quick intermission from the podcast so I can tell you about an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public, they normally reserve for our $500,000 clients that we work with personally. This is a presentation called 6 Steps to Explode Your Fanbase & Make a Profit With Your Music Online. Specifically we're going to walk through how to build a paid traffic and automated funnel that's going to allow you to grow your fan base online and the system's designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music. We've invested over $130,000 in the past year to test out different traffic sources and different offers and really see what's working best right now for musicians, and so I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. So if that's something you're interested in, in the description, there should be a little link that you can click on to go get that.

Michael Walker:
The other thing I wanted to mention is if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating a podcast is if people click subscribe. Then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear. So that will help us reach a lot more people. So if you're getting value from this and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you clicking the subscribe button. All right. Let's get back to the podcast.

Michael Walker:
Holy cow, man. That's really cool. So it sounds like really the premise of this, that it's like a stock market for musicians and that you're going to be able to create your own currency. Imagine having a 5% share of the Beatles before they blew up and then the Beatles get massive and then you actually have this stake in them and you could do whatever you want with that. You could sell it or you could hold onto it. It's really cool.

Michael Walker:
I think that what's really fascinating about it too and relating it to the application of artwork, like visual artwork, compared to music, music has never really gone for millions of dollars, right? For a song, for a piece of art. But it is a piece of artwork, but that's probably because it really hasn't... With art, you could have the authentic source image, right? Yeah, you can copy it, you can duplicate it, you can do whatever, but the original source of the painting is this tangible, physical thing and it goes for millions and millions of dollars. So it sounds like this is really an opportunity to put a stamp of authenticity on the artwork for musicians in a way that really the value should be just as much as these iconic pieces of artwork for painters and for visual artists. It's really cool.

Michael Walker:
So the tool is called Rally that you're mentioning right now and basically... What does the process look like for getting started with it? I feel like one of the biggest blocks for artists getting started with it is just going to be being able to communicate the value of it with their fans and just understanding it as a whole. So what would your recommendations be for... What's the process like for getting started with this and actually communicating it with someone who has an existing audience already?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The first step is to build up your audience. So you're not going to... Actually, first two steps. If you don't have a fan base existing, you're not going to have interest in your collection in the first place, okay? So that's why I was talking about those vanity metrics before, is that you now have a much more fluid stepladder to go into monetization with this currency idea. So building up your fan base, in the first place, you have to have demand. There is thousands of companies listed on the stock markets. Not all of them have the same demand. So you need to know how to bring demand to yourself. You need to know how to market yourself and get your numbers up on Spotify and Instagram and funnel them into your email list so that you can have this audience to communicate with effectively when your coin does launch or your new NFT does launch. You need to have somebody to sell it to. So that's the first step.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Second step is going to use Rally, like go in and use it, so that you know exactly how it works and you can explain it. The only reason I can explain it just off the top of my head, like no notes, no nothing, is because I go and use it. You don't have to spend 5,000 bucks. I mean, if you have 5,000, I recommend you put in if you have it. Never invest in anything you're not willing to use, but this is a great opportunity that I see. Go in and actually use the platform. Don't just buy it on Coinbase and have it just have it sit in your account or whatever or whatever exchange you're using. Rally is different than a lot of other cryptocurrencies in that you can... When you buy it, you can actually use it. If you go buy Bitcoin right now, there's only so many places that you can go put it.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
With Rally, when you buy it, it's called bridging in. You can bridge it in to the platform to Rally and you can start using it by buying other people's coins so that you can see, okay, what exactly happens when I bought this coin. What other things do they have on this platform? You can go join the Discord server and look at what they're developing, what new rules they've put in place. All this stuff, you can go look at. That's the beautiful thing about cryptocurrency is that they just put everything out and you, when you own that coin, you get to vote on different things.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So the way it works is that if you like some of the changes that they want to do within a cryptocurrency, like let's say that you wanted... Let's say they were starting everybody out with 50,000 of their own coin and you wanted that to go up to 100,000. If they put that out as a proposal to everybody that owns a coin, you can then vote yes or no. Like you can pay some coin to vote yes or no on that change. So whenever you're invested in this, you're really invested in it. You get to have a vote for new changes that come along. Another cool thing about Rally is that people, depending on how much your coin grows each week, everybody who holds that coin gets some weekly rewards. So if I hold 5% of somebody's coin and it's grown in a week, it'll show you how many coins are going towards that person's chain, but you get, they're called dividends in the stock world, you get weekly dividends just for holding that coin.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So there's so much to it. Go and use it so that you understand how everything works. Don't just see it as like, oh, this is a quick way to make some money. No, go know what you're doing so that you can explain this to people and you really have to be able to explain it. If you're doing an ad within 60 seconds to catch somebody's attention, at least be able to catch their attention within five seconds so that you can explain it. But those are the two things I'd say to go do and go do them for weeks and months. Become an expert at it so whenever your coin does launch, you'll know exactly what to do.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Like I said, this is something sustainable. This can be like you don't have to go chase around for your next dollar. You'll know what to do and you'll know what's going on so that you have your full-time music income along with all your other products and services. This is a career now. This isn't something that when you tell your parents, "I want to go be a musician," they don't gasp for air anymore. It's like, "Yeah, I want you to go be a musician because you know what you're doing with this."

Michael Walker:
That's awesome, man. Yeah, it sounds like a really cool opportunity. So just to understand how Rally works and how it functions with creating your own coin, it sounds like what you're saying is that Rally is sort of like an umbrella type of currency and then when you sign up for it, you basically can create your own currency that really is... It's really ultimately still Rally currency, but it's like you can create your own currency underneath the Rally signature.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yes. You have to get approved, so that's what I was saying, you have to have demand in order for them to put their resources into you. Not every single person who wants to come out with stock gets approved by the FCC in the US. So whenever you submit your application, like if you've been doing your due diligence and your marketing and building up your audience, you should get approved faster than other people, right? Then after you get approved is when they'll say, "Okay, here's your schedule to come out with your own coin." That's how it works on Rally.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
But yes, Rally is the undergirding currency on the platform. Whenever people buy into somebody's chain, they're doing it with Rally. So you can still use debit and credit card on the site, it's just once you convert it to Rally and then convert it to their chain. So every time they get a new influencer or a new artist and as they get these micro-influencers, they're called, which are just little smaller influencers, as they keep building that up and then as they move to bigger influencers, all of that stays in the Rally currency. So you can hold some of both. You can hold both individual artists' coin and you can have just some Rally coin on the side. But yeah, all of them are traded on the Rally currency and then Rally backs all the other individual creator currencies on the platform.

Michael Walker:
That's so interesting. So let's say that someone is listening or watching this right now and they're considering creating their own currency and signing up for Rally. When do you think is the right time in terms of... Like you mentioned a mistake would be just trying to get this launched without even having any sort of audience or any demand. When do you think is the proper time? How much demand or how much of an audience do they need to really have in order to really capitalize on the opportunity?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Honestly, I've seen just varying amounts on there right now. So before they get bigger, you have a better chance right now I'd say, even if you're not huge yet. So that might look like, I don't know, like 5,000 followers on Instagram or wherever, 10,000... There's some people on there with millions, but I have seen some that are on the smaller side because they got in earlier. Another thing that would help if you're smaller would be if you're involved in the community in the first place. Like if you go and... Let's say you have 100 bucks that you can spend on it. You still hold some Rally coins, so you still have a say in somebody's voting rights and you have a say in the community. You can just go spend your 100 bucks on the platform. Just play around, maybe buy a couple different individual Creator Coins on there. But you'll get more familiar with how it works.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
After you do that and you are involved in the Discord server and you're commenting on Rally's Twitter and all that, you are now top of mind whenever you submit your application to them. So you have a better chance of getting approved faster if you're involved in the community if you don't have a lot of followers in the first place. If you do, then they'll likely put preference on you because it obviously benefits them if you can communicate this message effectively to other people.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Rally, they've done some marketing, but like I said, it's purposefully, from my eyes, purposefully going a little slower so that they can really work out any kinks. They virtually have no competition on this. They're the only one listed on Coinbase as doing this right now. Like I said, Fyooz is the other one. Their market cap, which is essentially how many coins there are times the price of the coin, their market cap is like 10X or 8X. Eight times bigger than Fyooz's is, so Rally is much bigger and they're doing a better job on the platform. Their platform is easier to use. So this is a decent time to hop in if you're on the smaller side and you want to invest some time into not just building up your own coin, but building up the community.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Awesome. So it sounds like what you're saying is that ideally, in order to really capitalize, get the most out of it, even if you have a bit of a smaller audience right now, maybe like 5,000, 10,000 followers, because it's relatively early, you can still get in with that. Even if you are on the smaller side, the first step really would just be to start interacting more with the community and joining Rally, investing maybe $100 into it, which, again, isn't really... It's not like you're spending $100, it's like you're investing in an asset. So potentially, if Rally increases by three times, then that $100 becomes $300.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
That's exactly right.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Cool, man. So I think the last thing that would definitely be worth talking about, because all of the platform relies on this like you talked about, is building an audience, building demand, driving traffic. So maybe we could talk a little bit about some of the best strategies or tools that you're using right now that you've seen working when it comes to building a real engaged audience either through Spotify streams or building an email list or just building a community. What are some of the best tools right now to be able to do that?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Best tools... We usually recommend different percentages of your marketing budget going towards different platforms. So never put all your eggs in one basket because Instagram or YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, definitely Twitter, can just yank your platform any time they want. If you say something that they don't like, even if it's something totally legal or whatever, if they decide they don't like it, they can pull you off their platform. So always diversify your spend. Even sometimes when you didn't say anything, there's just these bugs and the algorithms on there, you can just get yanked for a month and it's hard to get your stuff back. We run ads for people who have had this happen before and it's just a pain sometimes. If that was your only traffic source, you're screwed for the month, right? So diversify your spend.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
With that said, we see Instagram or Facebook ads still being really good for building up your email lists, sending traffic to your website. So having ads that hook people in with the music, send them to your website. You can have an offer there. Some people do free song downloads. I typically like having a more juicy headline. Like let's say that you dove off the stage at a concert and you broke your arm. Right? Watch me break my arm at this crazy concert. Enter your email here. There's just one idea for you. That's going to get more sign-ups than just, hey, sign up for my newsletter. The people entice-

Michael Walker:
So everyone here should go break their arms immediately. There's this uptick of broken arms around the country.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
If that's the sacrifice you're willing to make, go for it. But entice people. Get them excited to sign up for your email list. Not just hey, sign up. Nobody wants to just sign up. They want to be entertained. You're an entertainer. Go entertain them. That includes with your copywriting on your website. So the best way, send them in from Instagram and Facebook to your website, sign up for your email list, send to a squeeze page or a landing page, and it's just a page to get their email out of them, that's... Spend a good 30% of your budget there, 25%. Somewhere in there. A good percentage of it.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The next thing you could do is YouTube promotion. So YouTube is actually more specific than Instagram or Facebook because you can actually get in front of specific songs on YouTube, so you can target... Like let's say you sound like the Beatles. We were talking about the Beatles before. You can target specific songs from the Beatles if they're monetizing those videos and serve your ads on those videos whereas on Facebook, you can just target fans of the Beatles, right? They don't have an intent really while they're scrolling Instagram or Facebook to find a Beatles video on their feed. They just like the Beatles. So Facebook just serves your ad to them. But on YouTube, people are searching for the Beatles and you can get in front of them. So another 25% of your ad spend towards YouTube or Google Ads. If it's working better than Facebook... All these are tests, right? These are just percentages we've seen. If you see that YouTube starts to work better than Facebook and Instagram, spend more on YouTube.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The next level down would be your Spotify and TikTok ads. So Spotify playlisting, we usually say about 20% of your budget, maybe 15 to 20%, to go towards it. A little bit of that is vanity metrics like I was talking about because people typically do not follow you as much on Spotify because nothing really happens when you follow somebody on Spotify. Maybe they show up in your Release Radar. There's no interaction on Spotify. So people usually just listen on there. So sending some traffic there is good. Not as much of your budget on Spotify playlisting as you would Instagram and Facebook ads or YouTube ads, but still a percentage of your budget.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Then your TikTok promotion, maybe testing out a little bit of alternative advertisements like Snapchat ads or something like that is also a good idea. Just because whenever you test things, you might find a gem somewhere. We started running Microsoft ads probably about a year ago. Something like that. Those worked well for us because you can get clicks a little bit cheaper than you do on Google. There's not as much traffic on Microsoft, but those clicks, they're good clicks. Good people looking for good services. So having the bulk of your budget go towards Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, and then some... Spotify's in there too, and then TikTok at the tail end. Then the rest of that budget, maybe there's like 20% left or something, you can test out on some other marketing to see if new marketing's going to work. But yeah, that's usually the breakdown we recommend for people.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Yeah, thanks for sharing that, man. It definitely helps to have a idea of what we should budget for, what to split it between different platforms. For YouTube ads, I'm curious, I know there are a few different types of YouTube ads. Right now, I'm taking a course about YouTube ads. We've mostly done Facebook and Instagram, so it's something that we're exploring right now. Would you recommend... I know that there's pre-roll ads where it's you click on the video to watch it and then you have a pre-roll ad and you don't have to pay for it unless they watch 15 seconds of it or if they click on it-

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
30 seconds.

Michael Walker:
30 seconds. Awesome.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Do you recommend running those kinds of videos? Those ads, they go to the same squeeze page? Or would it be more like the suggested recommended videos or just like organic discovery? What have you seen the best results with so far?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Good question. So if you're running... It depends on what you're trying to do with the ad. The first one, it's called the instream ads, those ones that you can skip after five seconds. If you want to get clicks to your website, it is usually better to run the instream ads because you can have the button right in there that will say visit site or click here or get this offer, whatever. You can put that button directly in there and you do those ads with the understanding that you want people to get off the video and go to your site. That's not to build up your views mostly. You can use it to build up more views because those actually get views a lot easier than the discovery ads do, but you don't have any like button or subscribe button on those instream ads, right? It is served on the other person's channel.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
So if you're looking for comments or you're looking for likes or subscribers, not the best to do the instream ads. You can test it, but it's not the best to do those. Those are best for trying to get a conversion, trying to get an email list sign up on your website or a purchase down the line on your website. You need to hook their attention within the first five seconds. So if you have a slow starting music video or something like that, it's not best for the instream ads.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
The discovery ads are good for getting those subscribers or likes or comments because those are people clicking on the ad. You come up with a headline for the ad and people click on it, and they go to the actual watch page of the video. You still need... Whichever ad you're doing, you still need to grab people's attention within the first five to 10 seconds. So if you even want to make a music video or some type of offer style video or sales video, have in mind that the first five seconds are key. So if you have a really jarring first five seconds of a video, your music video, yeah, you can run that for instream to see how it does or maybe you chop it down to 30 seconds and have a watch the full video here as your button on the instream ad or you make a custom in-screen for that instream ad and say watch the full video, click here and you have an arrow going down to it.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
But just think through how people are watching the video. That's one thing I can say that will be helpful, is put yourself in the viewer's seat. If I were served this ad in the first five seconds, would I keep listening? Think back through all the ads you've seen on YouTube and how many you actually stuck around for. What made you stick around? What stuck out about the ads that you actually watched all the way through? There's something that they did within the first five seconds that made you stick around. So use that psychological trick to get people to either click on your videos for discovery ads or keep watching and then take whatever action you want them to take.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's super smart. Yeah, I've heard that described as the hook, right? The first five seconds. The hook is the most important part. And that you want to make it as intentionally... that you want to open a loop with it where it's like when you open a loop, it's like a TV series or at the end of the episode, there's a cliffhanger and it opens this loop, and it's like a hook that pulls you back in, but also making sure that it's the right hook for the right kind of person who is really going to... You want them to engage with it. Awesome. Cool, man.

Michael Walker:
Well, hey, this has been a lot of fun. I feel like we've gotten to explore NFTs and the way... I've heard little bits here and there about it, but I've never heard anyone talk about it the way that you just have with the stock market approach and actually having your own currency. It makes me more excited than ever to be able to explore this and to see what it turns into for musicians because I think you're right that having the ability to have a tangible stamp or an authentic source of truth could really empower a lot of musicians to have $50 million albums that they're able to sell to people. It's pretty incredible. So thank you so much for taking the time to share the lessons that you've learned the past, what, 15, 20 years doing this. For anyone who is watching or listening to this right now who wants to connect more or learn more about what you offer, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more with you?

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
You guys can head to omarimc.com or just search Omari on Google. That's O-M-A-R-I-M-C.com. One cool thing that we do is, I talked about courses before, is that we give out courses whenever anybody buys a promotion from us, so we have Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram ads management, TikTok promotions. So any time anybody buys anything, you can select a course that we have. There's no upsell or anything after it. You can just get the full course just for buying Spotify promotion or whatever, so that's a special offer that we do, but yeah, that's how you guys can connect with us. Then when you're on the website, obviously it has all of our socials on there and our contact info and phone number and text and all that stuff. So that's how you can connect with us.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Awesome, man. So it sounds like really what you guys offer is done for you promotion, and it's combined with free courses when someone gets it. So I would definitely encourage anyone who's listening or watching this right now, especially... Even if you are taking... You're like, "Okay, I really want to learn how to run Facebook ads," or, "I really want to learn how to do this," to be able to go to the website and to look at some of the different promotion services you offer, because it would be great to be able to break off Spotify promotion if that's not something you're really focused on and be able to work with a professional who has invested a lot already to figure out the best way to promote.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
Yeah. Absolutely, man.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Well, Nathaniel, it's been a lot of fun talking with you today. I appreciate you taking the time.

Nathaniel Moore (Omari MC):
All right. Thanks, Michael. Pleasure to be here.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today. If you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then that will make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. Third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.