Will Black: And as an artist building a fan base, unplug fan base and put in the word community, and I'll tell ya, it's a much better way to visualize what you're creating for yourself as a musical business, because there's a difference between treating a music as a business and treating it as a hobby. Livestreaming has just really filled that void as best as I think you possibly can without being able to see people face to face.

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 slowly 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.

Michael Walker: 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, so I'm really excited to be here today with Will Black. Will is a rock singer from Canada. He performs new classic rock. I view him as a modern day Bon Jovi. He's a great example of an artist who really embodies the meaning of Modern Musician. He is an artist in our Gold Artist Academy right now, and when we met him, he was doing some really incredible things online with his community, and he does live streams every single night. He's a full-time musician.

Michael Walker: I think that nowadays, more than ever, it's so important to learn how to use the tools with the internet, and specifically livestreaming in order to connect with people and be able to perform for them, especially if you're not able to go out and tour live. Will, thanks so much for taking time to be here today. I would love if you could just share a little bit about your story and how you got to this point that you're at now, that'd be awesome.

Will Black: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks Mike, for having me on the show and having me as part of Gold Academy, it's been a fantastic experience. I just want to add that the community of team members that you've created to run and carry members through the program is just awesome, really great personalities and just an awesome community to now be a part of. So, thanks for that. My story, well, I'll just take it back to when it's relevant as being an independent musician creating original music. That was probably started for me in 2008, when the first record came out.

Will Black: All the records I've done, including that one were all self-produced and self written, singer-songwriter vibe. Yeah, modern day Bon Jovi is fine. Bruce Springsteen, a lot of influence in there, John Mellencamp, a lot of classic guys, singer-songwriter guys.

Michael Walker: Did you read his autobiography?

Will Black: It's one of those books I had. Someone gifted it to me. I was going to read it, and ended gifting it back to somebody else because I was leaving Bermuda at one point. I'd lived there for a long time. But what I did watch was his Netflix special, which is basically ... It's called Live on Broadway. It was on Broadway for like 18 months straight. He did the show five nights a week on Broadway, and then they filmed it last night of the run. It was a Netflix special. That is basically a live two hour serve, two and a half hour play of his autobiography.

Michael Walker: Wow.

Will Black: It's incredible. I recommend anyone who's a fan of just music just watch it. It's just a guy with 40 years under his belt of being a professional touring musician, everything Bruce Springsteen's done. Whether you like him or not, it's just an amazing show to watch. I've seen that, really enjoyed that. I've been a Bruce fan for, well, since probably '92 when Lucky Town and Better Days came out. I think it was of the two, the double album released back then. But yeah, I always like to quote Bruce as a guy who's 71 years old now, but he still is making what I think is relevant music in regards to his career.

Will Black: He may be in the Twilight of his career to a large degree, just because of his biological age, but he still makes records that are completely relevant and fresh and awesome sound, like if you listen to Letter to You, which is the one he just put out in 2020, and it's my record of the year. I think it's amazing. It's just great.

Michael Walker: That's awesome.

Will Black: Yeah, that's me talking about Bruce. [crosstalk 00:04:05] I know you asked me about my story, but that is part of my story. I think a lot of people listening right now, they have an artist or a creative individual that is part of their story. Someone that maybe they model themselves after a little bit. Because I certainly do with Bruce, and Jon Bon Jovi too, to a degree as well. It's funny, they're both from New Jersey. I'm not from anywhere near New Jersey. I'm from Canada, so it's quite a bit North from there.

Will Black: But funny enough, one of my good buddies is from Long Branch, which is right down the corner from Asbury Park where a lot of these guys grew up and performed. I did have the pleasure of one night, after a Bruce Springsteen pre-tour show that I won tickets to, I was on the stage at The Stone Pony, which is a very famous bar in Asbury Park. I remember I got up there and I was pretty drunk. We just finished watching a Bruce Springsteen concert with my buddy. My buddy talked to the manager of the bar, because it was a Monday night, and this bar is set up almost like a hard rock cafe. His guitar's on the walls artwork, has a big paraphernalia store.

Will Black: But there's a big stage and a huge concert area. My buddy was like, "Yo, would you mind if my buddy got up and sang some songs? Would that be okay?" The guy's like, "Yeah, no problem, as long as he doesn't sing any Bruce Springsteen tunes. He was half joking, but yeah, it was an amazing experience. That was the same year actually, believe it or not, that my first record came out, 2008, just before the Magic Tour that Springsteen was doing.

Will Black: But I think a lot of people when they're coming up, there's always somebody or a couple of us that you gravitate towards and you kind of emulate. Yeah, for a long time, for me, it's been Springsteen. He's rarely done something where I've gone, oh, man, I wouldn't have done that. I don't like that. He's been pretty solid for me.

Michael Walker: It's not a bad way to start out, man. Before your first album comes out, sharing the stage with Bruce Springsteen.

Will Black: Well, I mean, didn't share the stage. I was on a stage that he was known for, like The Stone Pony, everybody's played there. He wasn't there. I was by myself. This was a post Springsteen show. Actually, I didn't have a guitar.

Michael Walker: But at some point he was on that stage.

Will Black: Yeah, of course. Exactly.

Michael Walker: Okay. Well, that's still pretty awesome. Yeah, I'd love to hear, so in terms of your journey as a musician, I'd love to hear how you became a full-time musician, or what you feel like were some of the biggest forks on the roads. Were there any like moments where everything changed for you or there's like a key decision you had to make, and what did that look like?

Will Black: Sure. I think there's two that I can think of sort of early in my career that a lot of us might be able to relate to. The first was when I made the switch from being sort of a 9:00 to 5:00 day job guy. I was working in IT for a courier company called Loomis in Canada, in Vancouver, and I had an opportunity to go do a contract on cruise ships performing with my friend Ray Polan. We had a duo called the Door Crashers. We'd been playing kind of weekend warrior gigs in and around Vancouver.

Will Black: We had specifically put this band to try and get a cruise ship gig and get out of Vancouver for various reasons. A lot of them are relationship-based with significant others at the time, but we did. What happened is that the summer came around, summer of 2001. Yeah, and we got a contract offer to go play on Carnival Inspiration down in New Orleans, Louisiana, [Sally 00:07:23] in New Orleans, and we got it. It was great. But we had to kind of make a real leap of faith because we had to build all these backing tracks.

Will Black: We had to teach ourselves how to do that. While we're doing all this work, putting this act together, specifically to go on cruise ships, and we had day jobs. He was working at a music store. I was doing this IT job I mentioned. We had long-term relationships that we were in that were going to come to an end. We were making a very conscious decision to say to ourselves, we wanted this fork in the road in our lives, just not just as people, but as musicians.

Will Black: We ended up getting a gig, a fill-in gig to go cover a band that had to leave for whatever reason. Then we were supposed to fly out like September 18th. It's like the morning of September 11th, we were rehearsing. I remember staring at the screen, the big screen in his parents' house, rehearsing tunes, watching what's going on in New York City. I said to Ray, I said, "Dude, I don't think we're going anywhere right now." It was true. We were delayed about a week, but we did get down there. That was sort of my story for the next three or four years.

Will Black: Also met my wife on that first contract. Again, relationships drive a lot of this as well, and we've been together ever since. That's been an amazing thing, but also what happened is that, out of these cruise ship gigs, you're always evolving as an artist. After a few years of cruise ship gigs, I realized it wasn't for me a long-term goal, because I wanted to be on land again. I wanted to have some stability. I wanted to have a family and wanted things that were on land, that were hard to do on cruise ships. I mean, I'm not going to talk about cruise ship life, but it's a whole dynamic that's very particular to partying and having a great old time being very independent.

Will Black: A couple of years later, an opportunity to get a house gig at a bar in Bermuda playing five nights a week, April through New Years. So, nine months out of the year. I got the gig because I was doing a cruise into Bermuda out of Philly. I met the owner of the bar. They were looking for a guy. It was very much just serendipitous how it all happened. I was like the second last week of my contract, and I just happened to meet the band that was hosting an open mic. They said, "Hey, do you want to play at the bar around the corner? Because they're looking for a guy." I'm like, "Yeah, why didn't we connect like months ago?"

Will Black: But it just all came together. I started that gig in 2005 at the Hog Penny Pub in Hamilton Bermuda, and I was their host entertainer for 12 years until 2017. So, those two particular events in my life really formed my career. There was the cruise ship thing for three years off and on and then 12 years as sort of the house guy at this bar on a Caribbean Island.

Michael Walker: Awesome. I mean, you hear a lot of stories about some of the greatest musicians of all time and how ... I mean, like the Beatles, for example, the reason that they got so good is because they, every single night, they're performing. They're performing over and over and over again. That's amazing 17 years of, or was it, what? Like 15 years?

Will Black: 12 years.

Michael Walker: 12 years on that.

Will Black: 12 years. Yeah.

Michael Walker: I'm curious what the transition looked like between ... I know now you're doing these, every single night, these livestreams. What did that transition look like? When did you decide to start doing livestreams, and was it like all at once? You're like, well, you know what? I'm just going to start doing this every night for a month? Or how did you start doing that? What are some of the benefits of livestreaming, you think, versus doing live shows?

Will Black: Sure. Well, I first started live streaming in 2013 when my second record was coming out and it wasn't a fancy setup. It was just a web cam and I had like a blue Yeti mic, which is like an awesome kind of podcasting type mic. That was my set for a number of years while I was in Bermuda. I think livestreaming for me was always ... It was something I did for a long time, just for my inner circle members, which is my Patreon membership group, so I did it a couple of times a week. I've been doing that for a long time since 2013.

Will Black: But the live stream that you're talking about was when I launched my acoustic rock show series on Facebook, and I did that almost a year to the day today, actually. It was on January 12th of 2020, I started it. I went in starting it, having already done many, many livestreams off and on up to that, but never something really consistent on Facebook, a public one. I said, I'm going to make this one nightly. It's going to be what? Half hour long. I'm just going to go for it. Keep it real consistent, see if I can build fan base and engage in this way.

Will Black: It was great. I think I did it for about three or four months before I took a break, like I did three or four months straight, every day.

Michael Walker: Wow.

Will Black: Let me preface that by saying, part of the reason that I did that and I could get away with it was because of all the nights I'd spent performing at Hog Penny. When you mentioned the Beatles earlier, it's true. When you perform consistently over, and over, and over, and over again, you're going to get better, whether you like it or not. Better at singing, better at playing, better at salesmanship, better at pacing yourself physically, better at everything. It wasn't a real grind doing the livestreaming every day, but it got to the point, I actually took a break. I think I got sick. I got a throat cold or something. I had to take a week off.

Will Black: But the good thing about taking a break now and then is it gives you some perspective. It lets you sort of unplug from the machine, from the internet and just take get a better look on things. That was good. I've had to do that. I've done that a couple of times, where the first year I've taken a break for like a week here or there. It always gives me a chance to sort of get a better perspective, so I've changed the format of the show up a little bit. We can go through all the iterations, but basically a lot of things have just sort of ... Change has been made based upon the data I'm getting from the shows prior, which is always good to be course correcting your ship as you're going along.

Will Black: Yeah, I mean, livestreaming versus doing an actual in-person live show, well, first of all, there's the idea that you can livestream anybody anywhere, which goes without saying, I mean, if you're online, you've got an entire world at your fingertips as a possible audience, but there's something else to be said too. I think the livestreaming is more relevant now than ever because of COVID, and the pandemic, and the lockdowns, and just the lack of socializing that people have generally speaking. Because one of the big things about live shows is when ... I did a lot of these sort of self-promoted self book tours throughout the UK and in Canada.

Will Black: These events were always sort of like 100, 150 people cap type rooms, small rooms, but they were very social events. There was chatting with each other. I always would always do a pre-show, hangout with folks, and then, afterwards, people are chatting. It's about being in a room with a bunch of people that love the same kind of musical experience that you do. A lot of people are missing that and it's a very popular, I hate to use the word hobby, but it's a very popular event for people to go to live shows.

Will Black: I think livestreaming, because you create a community the same way that you would if you're doing it in-person. There's a community of people that they get to know each other and their personalities through the chat rooms, whether you're doing it on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, whatever. It doesn't matter. There's going to be a community that builds around these livestreaming. As an artist building a fan base, you're essentially fan base. You can unplug fan base and put in the word community, and I'll tell ya, it's a much better way to visualize what you're creating for yourself as a musical business, because there's a difference between treating a music as a business and treating it as a hobby.

Will Black: Here, I will use the word hobby, and livestreaming has just really filled that void as best as I think you possibly can without being able to see these people face to face. The other thing is that livestream, because again, because of the pandemic, and a lot more people have been doing it, it's become a lot more mainstream to get people involved in watching a livestream, because they know what the word is, it's just become a lot more prevalent. It's not like this kind of niche, weird geeky, oh, they sit at their computers and they watch other guys play.

Will Black: No, it's actually, it's as common now as watching a show on Netflix, which five years ago people are like, what the hell is Netflix? I mean, I remember when Netflix was a DVD rental box at the grocery store. That's what it was. That's what it started as, right? VHS cassettes ware. I think livestreaming is actually ... It's evolving and things are going to change, especially you're going to see things like 5G as that rolls out, and bandwidth speeds are getting faster and faster and cameras get better and better. You're going to start seeing some maybe augmented reality AR type elements getting posted and they're like people.

Will Black: You're going to be able to like engage with people in ways you've never thought of before. By the way, just to set the record straight, it's not nightly anymore. I think in the summer of 2020, I dropped it down to six nights a week and then five, and I've been at five nights a week for six months, Wednesday through Saturday.

Michael Walker: How dare you take the weekends off, or how dare you take two days off a week.

Will Black: I know. Mondays and Tuesdays are my weekend, yeah.

Michael Walker: No, that's amazing. I mean, a couple of things that popped up as you were sharing that. One, so you were just talking about this idea of like AR and virtual reality components with the livestreaming. I think that's really fascinating. I think you're right, that, that's something that, looking forward, elements are going to start being brought into, both livestreaming for musicians, but just like in general with like Oculus Rift and whatnot in our phones. The retreat that we were talking about, that I went to two weeks ago, someone pulled out their phone and he does these like virtual hikes where he just like goes around the world and goes on hikes. He has this gear that basically records it.

Michael Walker: He pulled up his phone and he was showing it to me. He was like looking around and it was this beautiful hike and this really cool virtual reality experience, but done on your phone, like you move your phone around. It's like, you're there. It's like a little portal. A little portal into another place. I think you're right. I think that, in terms of musicians in live shows, in live performances, there's probably going to be a point where it's like the virtual experience of, literally is like holding up a phone, I'm looking around, or even better, eventually when we either have, instead of like phones, but they're a little bit more natively connected to our brains maybe, or we have glasses or something that really allow us to stream like that. That'd be really cool.

Michael Walker: It sounds like you've been livestreaming for a while, and you mentioned that you started out doing it for your inner circle, for this private community. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your inner circle and what that looks like and how that got started.

Will Black: The inner circle has always been hosted on Patreon. For people that don't know, Patreon is a website where you go, it doesn't matter really what kind of art you create. It doesn't actually have to be art. They do all sorts of creator type hosting options. What it is, is you basically create a community which you then monetize on a monthly basis as a membership fee, and then you offer different levels of perks, right? From my inner circle, you can call it whatever you want. For a long time, which is Will Black on Patreon.

Will Black: But what three or four years into it, I thought, I should brand this because if I ever decided to take his community off of Patreon, because maybe Patreon would fail for some reason, if I had a branding for it, people would know, oh, I just take the branding to another site, or whatever. I started calling it the Inner Circle. I created a little graphic that was fun. A lot of members buy clothing and apparel with that graphic on it, so they show a kind of a spree decor by wearing it and posting pictures of it, which is always great.

Will Black: Whenever you can do that as an artist with your own branding, it's great for you. And you know what? The fans love it. They love to be able to wear your stuff. So, Inner Circle on Patreon started, I think February 14th. Is it Valentine's Day? It's like, I think it's the day before Valentine's Day, February 13th, 2013. We do an anniversary every year. It kind of nice surged when I first started. Then over the years, I got to be honest, that up until I left Bermuda and my gig at Hog Penny, which was my day job, that was my day job.

Will Black: I was working five nights a week from basically 8.30 to 1.30, so it was like five hours a night, travel, set up. I had to set up and tear down my stage every night, play for three hours straight, which was the gig. That's the way it went, tear it down, go home. Now, luckily, I only lived around the corner, but the point I'm making is that, that was my gig. That was my day job. My independent music career was something on the side, and it was a hobby. I treated it as a hobby because it wasn't my livelihood. It was my sole source of income that I was supporting my family with. When I left Bermuda in November of 2017 and came here to Estonia, which is where I've been ever since, it became my sole source of income.

Will Black: That was something that I wanted to challenge myself with. I guess you're talking about milestones in my career. That was milestone number three, is when we, as a family, left Bermuda, we just had our son, we came here. I said, "I want to give it a go. I want the freedom just to focus on my music and make a living off my business." That was the big third milestone for me. That was really driven by the income I had coming in every month, and still do, from Inner Circle through Patreon. Membership is, I think right now it's about 137 members, which is okay. What I would say is defining of the Inner Circle isn't the number of people in it, but the quality of the people that are in.

Will Black: It's a community of people that really want to integrate and support you that much more than just a regular fan. I've had people who've been members since the beginning and people who've just joined, but they all have this same sort of trait where there's like, they really support independent music. They're really keen on what you do. I've got some people that support me every month, but I never see them. I never hear from them. It doesn't mean they don't care. It's just, some people prefer to support just by financially supporting every month.

Will Black: Then I got some people that they may be in one of the lowest levels, like the tiers. The entry-level I have is like $3 a month, but they might be the most vocal and you might see them the most, but that's just the level of they're able to contribute. I've got a bunch of different levels. It goes from three, five, 10, 20, and then I've got some like angel level ones above that, which I've got a few of those members as well. I think the biggest thing with them is that I always try and keep them first and foremost. If there's any certain new announcements or is there anything up with me, I try and make sure that they know about it first and foremost.

Will Black: They get the livestreams twice a week. That's sort of a general one that everyone gets, and then they get more perks as they go up. The kind of the main VIP level is $20 a month. They get a personal video song request recorded for them every month, which I'm actually just in the middle of doing this week. But it's been great. There's a lot of growth potential there, and I'm always working on better ways to connect with this community, whether it's on Facebook, which is the main social network I've worked through, that and YouTube, and how to connect best with people and offer them what they're looking for by giving them the value that they get when they join the Inner Circle. This is about value, right?

Will Black: They're going to pay you more money per month to be part of your Inner Circle. The idea is that you're also going to be able to give them more value back. There's never a feeling like, wow, why am I charging so much for these people? You never second guess why you would be charging people for your services as a musician, because you have every right to, as long as you understand that as you charge more for your services, you're giving them something that's more value than you would give at a lower level. I think that's a very justified way to look at your business.

Michael Walker: Oh, what's up guys? So, quick intermission from the podcast so that 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're normally reserved for our $5,000 clients that we [inaudible 00:22:06]. This is a presentation called six steps to explode your fan base and 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 lie to grow your fan base online in a systems designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music.

Michael Walker: 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. I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. 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. 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 new 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.

Michael Walker: That'll help us reach a lot more people. 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: That's so important. Yeah. I mean, that's like the fundamental thing with ... It's like business 101. or it's like the most foundational element of business, is figuring out what do people value and what is value? And then, how do you serve at a higher level and how do you provide more value? It sounds like that's really the point that you focus on that's allowed you to grow this community and to build this tribe, is really figuring out what do they value? In a lot of cases, like you said, people, I think as musicians sometimes undervalue ourselves, or we forget to, or we ...

Michael Walker: In the music community as a whole, there's this mindset of starving artist. Sometimes it really takes an ability to shine a light on that and to stop focusing on yourself so much and think more about what's valuable for your fans, and doing that allows you to provide more value and that have more of a sustainable business from it.

Will Black: Yeah, I agree. I don't know why, but I see, I think with younger musicians, like, I feel like I'm kind of in the middle. I'm 43, and I see a lot of musicians that are older than me and I see a lot of musicians that are younger than me. I'm sort of right in the middle of the pack, I think. But I think with younger musicians that may be still, as people, don't have the life experiences and under the belt to really appreciate the amount of value that their music brings to other people. There's nothing wrong with charging people to experience your music and what you have to offer as a musician.

Will Black: Because there's lots of other services I offer. I do private livestreaming, group Hangouts. I do those as well, which is ... Those are great. I've got some higher level things where I do song commissions, or song lits, I call them, which are tiny snippets of songs, it's like a 60 second song for people that are like ... Instead of offering a full song commission, give a smaller one. Lots of different like merch items, shirts, sign the lyric sheets, pre-release access to content, which is something I'm doing with this new record I'm rolling out.

Will Black: It's fantastic. Because what happens is that the fans are part of an experience that is unique just to you, and for them to be able to contribute and know that they're helping you financially, it gives them a real satisfaction. I just think that a lot of musicians have to understand that, that there's nothing wrong with asking for support when you're providing this service. I know music sometimes comes across as a sort of like a intangible thing, and it's all about creative, and the finances are going to ruin it. Well, let me stop you right there, because if you're going to be an independent music business person, you have to embrace the business side of it to a degree, and actually a large degree.

Will Black: Sometimes more than the artistic side, which is what I found. The administrative and logistical sides of it can be quite imposing.

Michael Walker: That's such a good point. It's been reflected a few times in the last few weeks for me is this point of you need to ask, if you want something, you need to be willing to ask for it. A lot of times we avoid asking for something because we're afraid that the answer is going to be no. The truth is a lot of times it's going to ask for something the answer is going to be no, but if you don't ask for it, then the answer is most definitely, no.

Will Black: That's right.

Michael Walker: Especially when it comes to making offers, you're like, as a business, your income is going to be directly related to how many offers are you making? If you're not asking, if you're not making offers, if you're not creating things that are valuable and asking people if it's valuable enough for them to invest in it, then you're not going to be making any income. A lot of the most successful business owners or entrepreneurs are people who've gotten really good at asking and getting rejected and learned that it's not personal, and that through the asking, you get feedback and you learn, okay, what do people actually find valuable? And you're able to adapt based on that.

Will Black: Yeah. You bring up a great point about things being personal. Social networks by there ... We draw a very fine line between personal, not personal, because you're interacting with people on a one-to-one basis. They're writing comments on your posts. A lot of my interaction with my fans is through livestream, but I also have a lot of videos I use, of video performance. I've got hundreds of videos I've filmed over the last 10 years. I've over the last six months just started rolling them out a bit to try to engage fan base because I've got all this content. Now, I've seen every comment you can imagine from really amazingly like life story, like wow, I can't believe that you got something I got from music, to people like you're shit. I just think your shit, and you should take your stuff down. Why are you even trying? Why are you even bothering?

Will Black: Everything, most people tend to be in the middle. Just like politics, most people tend to be in the middle. Then you've got your extreme lovers and your extreme trolls. I think you have to take all that with a grain of salt and just be aware that it's really like, if I can put on again, the administrative hat for a minute, it's data. Understand that a lot of people are saying things to you, but you have to kind of take a step back from it and look at it constructively. This information is data, that you can take and go, okay, is there anything ... From a second glean, that maybe there's some good constructive feedback coming here that like, ah, maybe the camera angle wasn't particularly good on that shot.

Will Black: Or maybe my mic is a little funky sounding on this video. Stuff like that. Most of the time, I got to be honest, people do not give you constructive feedback. They don't give you a real nugget of wisdom. Like, wow, that's awesome. Not because they don't want to, because they probably just don't realize how they could say something you could take from it, but not taking the negative stuff too personally, and also not taking the positive stuff too personally as well, and just understand that it's all good, but you guys see it from the right perspective.

Michael Walker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is certainly a super power in and of itself, is learning how to have thick, thick skin and taking things ... I love what you said, taking what works for you and just dropping the rest and not taking it too personally. If you take all the trolls or any hate comments you get too seriously, then it's going to be game over, because the bigger you grow, the more people that are going to be like that. That's just naturally the same way that a C chord doesn't resonate well with an F sharp chord. There's going to be people who just don't get it. Also, one thing that I see a lot is people feeling discouraged or artists, especially if they're earlier on, they haven't established really a core audience yet, and they haven't really built a community yet of people who are enjoying their music.

Michael Walker: They're sort of relying on their friends and family, or close relationships to support their music. Sometimes they're really supporting you because they know you and because they're your friends and family, but they're not necessarily like a super fan, or the person who really gets it, who loves the music, is just like a fan for the sake of being a fan. It seems like sometimes when that's the case, it's hard to really realize the true value of music, that, that there will be people in the community that are really at that super fan level.

Michael Walker: I'd love to hear a little bit about, maybe we could dig deeper into clearly, you've had a lot of experience doing livestreams and building this community of people. Those 140 people, those are the roots of your tree, right? Those are some very high quality connections that you've made. A couple of things that I'd like to dig into. One is like, for someone who is just starting out and they haven't built that kind of community yet, how do they start to establish that inner circle community? Or how do they start to establish that?

Michael Walker: Then two, with the live streams, I'd just be curious, what are the elements that you think go into making livestreams successful, or how can people make them as engaging as possible? And what are some general tips around, how do people structure their livestreams, and what should they do and say on the livestreams?

Will Black: Okay. A successful livestream, the nuts and bolts are, I got to be honest, here's a confession. I don't own a smartphone and haven't owned a smartphone in about 10, 15 years. Back then, they weren't even called smartphones. Yeah, I've got a phone, but it's a 2008 Nokia candy bar phone. The reason I mention that is I don't stream from my phone. I have no experience streaming from a mobile device. I'm a PC guy, always have been. No offense to Mac users, Mac's fine, but I just use PC, and I use OBS, which is a free open source piece of software that you can stream from. It's fantastic. Works great. It's very solid. It's been around for years. They're like on version 26 of it. It's very solid.

Will Black: You need some basic components. You need a camera. Okay? You can use the camera on your laptop. Let's assume you've got a laptop. Lots of people ... We'll say people, laptops. Laptops, you can use that. I use a Logitech HD 1080P high-end camera. I've used it for a while now. They're both $200 American. That's my camera I'm using right now for this podcast as we're doing this interview. You need a decent mic. Now, I've experimented with a lot of different ones. I've had the mic right in front of my face, similar to what you're using right now.

Will Black: I mean, that looks like an SM7 you're using or something like that, for sure. I've got one of those. I've used Beta 57s, 58s, whatever. These are all different Shure microphones. What I'm using now is a bit different. I'm using a Zoom H4n field mic. It looks like a rectangle and it's got a stereo mic. It looks like a set across here, it's kind of on the front of it. I put that on a mic stand off camera. Then, out of the line out or headphone jack, it's the same thing, I just run a little quarter-inch, or sorry, a stereo sized jack into the mic input on my laptop. That's what you're hearing right now when I snap my fingers.

Will Black: It's just one mic, but it's a room mic. This is picking up room sound. When I do anything with my guitar, in the past, I would've moved that around to make the guitar. I would've had a mic on my vocal. I got away from that. I have a very high end mic set up that I use for recording my records, and I was actually using that for my livestream for a while. But I got away from it, because you know what I found? Is that, well, first of all, there was a very concrete reason I got away from the high techy super studio sounding sound. I had a malfunction with my computer. I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I had to figure work around.

Will Black: So, I went to this mic. I've canvassed the fan base since then, and they all agree that this setup is better. For one thing, there's no mic in front of my face anymore. It's just me on a screen. Just like when you see actors in your favorite movies and they're talking, there's normally a boom mic just off camera above their heads. Same thing here. That's the audio portion of that. The other thing you need is you need a light, you need to lay it on your face. You don't want too many shadows. You don't want to be dark. If it gets dark, that looks pixely and kind of blurry.

Will Black: I've just got a simple little like a desktop reading lamp hooked onto a mic stand. Apparently, this lamp has been in this house for like 40 or 50 years. It's like my wife used it when she was a little kid. That's how old this lamp is. Anyways, I've got it on a mic stand, plugged in, and that's giving me just some splash on the front. The other thing is the background. This is just a curtain, but notice how it's a uniform color. There's a bit of gradiation happening, just adds a bit of contrast behind me, but it's a nice kind of, not too interesting, but not completely doll surface behind me, and that's it.

Will Black: You can do a live stream sitting down like I'm doing right now, or you can do it standing up. I prefer to stand, but I've got a sore foot so I don't stand these days. But standing is great. Get different energy. You can experiment with both. Some fans like some, some fans like the other. Those are the main components that you need to have before you livestream are those kind of main things. You're creating a stage. Then the other thing you can do, if you want to start getting into more advanced stuff, you can start creating graphics.

Will Black: You can create them in Photoshop or any sort of a graphic editing software, and then you can superimpose those on your screen. I do that all the time. A great way to announce upcoming shows, any offers you're making, website links, anything, there's that. Then you got to figure out, where are you going to livestream on? I deal with two platforms for livestream. I do a Facebook live and I deal with YouTube, and they both have their pros and cons. At the moment, YouTube is what I use for all of my Inner Circle stuff, because I just have for years and years, and all my free public shows are on Facebook.

Will Black: I've also experimented the last couple months with the new paid access portion of Facebook live, which is really interesting because people don't have to switch networks if you want to charge them tickets, but there's some limitations to that as well, which I probably won't get into here. But those are the networks. Then you get on there, you have to learn how to use a creator, which is the name of the software application in Facebook that you stream from through creators, where you create your live producer, sort of a setup. Again, this is all off of desktop. From mobile, it's very similar, but some of the things will be a little bit different.

Will Black: None of the components about putting the livestream together is so much different, but just the way you would navigate there through Facebook. Then you basically plan a show, put a time, it'll create an event, and then just promote that through your network channels to everybody who's out there in your network, which brings it back to the first question you were asking about, "Well, what if I don't have a network? What if it's just my family and friends and my college roommates and whatever else that are watching or listening to my music? Well, first of all, they're probably not going to be your biggest fans, I'll tell you why, because they're obligated to listen to your music because they know you personally.

Will Black: You got to get out of that circle. You got to get rid of it. They're there to help you along the way. But really, if you want to make this a business, you've got to go and find the people that connect with you for one reason only, and that's because of you and your music. You as the musician, I mean. People that become super fans, a lot of times, they like your personality as well. They don't think you're a scoundrel, but they love your music. That's not going to happen. But you got to create that new community. You got to get out of that comfort zone of the people that are going to tell you what you need to hear just to keep it going.

Will Black: Those are like the hobby level group. You've got a hobby, people say it's great. They support you within your hobby, but as soon as you want to make it to like, you're bringing in new people, take that next step. How do you do that? Okay. This is like one of the number one things that you learn in the Gold Academy that I've been doing with Modern Musician, is that you learn how to get traffic into your music, which is wherever you put it online, and then in turn, you start offering people different aspects of your musical services that you have, whether you're singing them a song, you've got a piece of merch, you got a new record coming out. Maybe you're writing them a song, who knows?

Will Black: But to get that traffic organically, which means just kind of going through the idea of like, well, what if I just put up a website, an SEO will pick it up, or maybe I can get a blog to carry me and I can get some traffic there. Those organic kind of passive ways of doing it, I've never had a lot of success with. I think you can maybe sort of from a viral standpoint, and maybe if you have some real good context. Let's say that you're getting on with it with a record company and they have channels that they funnel their artists through to get them exposure, like Pitchfork, or something like that, which is a big well-known music album review site.

Will Black: There's that aspect, but we're not talking about music labels. We're talking about you, the creator, the independent musician, how do you do it? The most success I've had has been using Facebook ads. Facebook ads is a very ... It's a very simple, straightforward, but very deep. There's a lot of layers to it. But to get into, it's pretty straightforward way of accessing people out there that are in your niche, because it doesn't matter what kind of music you make. It could be, it's so crazy, it's beyond Bjork. It's not even definable. You know what? It is definable. Everybody's music is definable, and it doesn't matter how good or bad you think your music is, there's somebody out there who loves your music.

Will Black: The point is Facebook ads is a way to find that community of people that are into the types of things that are associated with your music. Now, you got to do a bit of a slew thing to figure out what that target market is. Target market is a very specific way. Fans don't like being told they're part of a target market, because it takes some of the magic out of it. But the fact of the matter is, if you're going to get the nuts and bolts of it, fans are customers. My perspective is when you call somebody a customer, it's like, I'm stowing upon you the honor of sharing what I do with you. I want you to be my best customer ever.

Will Black: Fans don't like being called customers though. I've tried it in the past. I always run up against a brick wall, that they generally seem to take it as an affront, but it isn't. It's more like a badge of honor. It's like, look, I'm sharing my music with you. Therefore, you're a customer. Therefore, I'm going to treat you with respect that a customer would have, and a fan is just a industry jargon for customer, really is what it is. You need to figure out who those people are that like your music. Then you gotta market to them.

Will Black: You have to get your music in front of them somehow. I think one of the easiest and best ways to do that is, I'm going to give you an example right now, record yourself on your mobile device, or on your PC singing six songs, three originals and three covers. If you don't have any originals, do six covers. If you've got one original, do one and five, but do six videos, okay? Take those videos and then have, with a small budget, just a couple of dollars per day per video, start putting them on Facebook ads, start with an artist that is somehow related to what you do.

Will Black: For me, a simple one is Bon Jovi. Target people like Bon Jovi, take those videos, see which ones get the most views. Not just the most views, but the longest views. They get the best metrics, which is a whole other discussion, but it's pretty straightforward. Just see which one's worked the best. You can get the most bang for your buck for it. Then start from there. Out of that, you're going to get people leaving comments. You'll be building an audience based off the views of those videos that you can now re-market to.

Will Black: I mean, you can send them another ad, send them another video, send them another video. Send them 10 videos. Record yourself doing a bunch of videos. Now, here's something I want to point out right away is that people are concerned, oh, cover videos. Am I going to get my account banned on Facebook? Well, first of all, Facebook doesn't have the digital rights management sort of a set up that YouTube does for covering songs. Sometimes people have run into problems with cover songs being on their accounts. My attitude is, and I've never had a problem is that you don't publish publicly your cover songs.

Will Black: You only upload them and use them for ads. I've never run into a problem. Just use them for ads. Don't host a cover song publicly on your Facebook business page, or even your personal page. You don't need to, and you just ask and get picked up by a search engine.

Michael Walker: Right. One thing, so I can speak to this because I just talked with, or one of the last people I interviewed is royalties, song trust, literally her whole job is understanding the lay of the land. She described it in a very similar way that like, livestreaming right now is, well, we talked about in terms of livestreaming in terms of videos, and that like live streaming is sort of like the Wild West right now, where they're still kind of establishing the rules. What she had mentioned, if I remember correctly, is that technically, if you publish a cover song on YouTube or Facebook, then the rights owner is within rights to ask you to take it down if they want to.

Michael Walker: But that's about the worst thing that's going to happen is that they ask you to take it down, or that you lose access. You shouldn't put too much stock into one of the cover videos, but also there's not as much risk, as I think a lot of people bring, and they're like, oh, I don't want to like go to jail or something. But really, it's like, for most artists, it's extra promotion for them. It's actually a win-win for everyone, but just understand that it is within their rights to ask you to take it down if you do publish it live on your profile, and even, it sounds like what you're recommending too, is an even safer way of doing it is just using those for ads without even publishing them live.

Will Black: Yeah. I use what's called a dark post, which means that you use some sort of on the backend just for the ad. What I did is about three years ago, I got dinged officially by whatever record label manages Brian Adams, and they deemed me with ... I had a cover of Summer 69, uploaded, sitting in my Facebook page videos tab with a bunch of other covers. It was like, you need to take this down. It was official. It was like, it was from Facebook. It was a copy of the letter. I thought, oh, wow, wow. Okay, so I took it down.

Will Black: I also took down every other cover song I'd ever posted and hosted on my Facebook page. I've never had a problem since, but having said that, I've been using cover songs all the time on Facebook, but I do them as dark posts, or sometimes what I'll do is I'll share the dark post onto a page. The content is not living on my page. It's just been shared onto my page. It seems to work fine. The big thing is, is that, when a record label is looking, for whatever reason to, to nab people that are using song ... It doesn't happen as much as you think, at least not my experience. They're going to do a search in Facebook.

Will Black: Searches are going to be looking for where the videos are originally uploaded to and parked. Normally, you're fine, you're fine. Unless you get really, really popular and you start getting basically, but that's the same with anything in any industry, as you start getting more and more attention, more people are going to pay attention to what you're doing so you might have to change some things along the way, but we're not talking about that right now. We're talking about the very beginning. That's one way to get around that.

Will Black: You get these videos up and running. Now you're creating, we talked about this early in the conversation, community. Now, there's a way to do this, to set this up, which is a funnel of sorts, a video funnel of people watching one video. They like it, show them another one. They liked that one, you show them another one. You can automate all of this, that they watch a certain percentage of the video, and then they're going to be into sort of an audience that watches the next one. You can make this as many levels deep as you want. But the point is, when they kind of pop out the end of this funnel, you now have a new fan who's no longer what we would call a cold lead. They're now a warm lead.

Will Black: I'm breaking it down using some marketing terms here to describe fans. But again, it's kind of like, eh. Fans don't want to be described as leads, but this is ... We're talking with the business of music here. Essentially, what's happening is that, you're taking someone who's never heard of you. Now, they've seen and engaged with your video by watching it a dozen times, say a dozen videos. Now they're a warm lead. Now that person, what I would suggest is you want to start trying to engage them with some more content, because you don't want to lose the fact, well, they like watching videos, so give them more videos.

Will Black: Maybe do livestreams, engage them with that, put them on your profile. Maybe retarget some of your livestream shows to these audience. Maybe retarget and intro offer like, one thing we talked about a lot in Modern Musicians is a CD starter pack. Lots of people still buy CDs. It's not a disputable fact. It is a proven fact. People do buy CDs still. Sell them that. Sell them a CD starter pack that has got a picture of you, maybe some stickers, maybe a CD. Of course a CD, and with me, I put in a guitar pick. That's a whole course in of itself to learn how to do that, but it's pretty straightforward.

Will Black: Capture their email address into a squeeze page, where, hey, if you come and sign up for my newsletter, I'll give you three unreleased songs or something like that. Now, somebody who's first starting out might be like, well, I don't have a lot of content. Create some, take an afternoon and record six of your favorite songs. Just get them down in front of your camera, [inaudible 00:46:31] too fancy. That's really not important. What comes across the humanity of what you're doing is more important than the technology, which is what I've learned as well.

Will Black: But just get the content down, and whatever you do, keep it consistent. That's the other thing as well. And you're going to need a Facebook page. So, if you don't have a Facebook page, most of you probably do, that are listening this. You've got to have a Facebook page, which is different from your personal profile. I see some artists actually work off their personal page. I don't know why. I don't see the benefit. To me, there's just a lot more blips and whistles and tracking stuff with a page versus a personal profile. So, I would say get off your personal profile, and folks want a page.

Michael Walker: Yeah. Not to mention, I think, legally, you're not allowed to use your personal profiles like a business profile on Facebook. So, you can just have your whole page or your whole account banned from it.

Will Black: You could. Yeah. Then, the other thing is, if you really want to get into the community aspect things, create a Facebook group and call it your Street Team, and right there and then, you've got an online community where people can gather, comment on your posts, dah, dah, dah. Because what I find is that the Facebook page is like, that's like a bulletin board. You know when you go to the music store and in the back of the store, maybe when you first walk in, they've got a big bulletin board with people's business cards and gigs and lessons. That's what your Facebook page is. It's just a bulletin board that people walk by.

Will Black: But your Facebook group is actually like the clubhouse. That's where people go and gather and look, and they go there looking for content and get used to being and seeing each other. I just find that the yeah, the Facebook group is a better format for bringing everyone together. That's something I learned through Modern Musician as well, but that's a bunch of stuff to get started. The thing is, it's all doable. You do need to have a budget. I know that's the other question. Well, how much money am I going to spend a day on this? Well, five to $10 a day, I think, is a good budget to start with.

Will Black: You're going to need some capital to start to run off of. It isn't going to be paying for itself right off the top, because a lot of times I found that for a person to come around on average and maybe buy one of your offers, four or six weeks is typical. So, it's downline. So, you have to have some capital to work with. Whether you make that, you put some aside from your day job, or you've already got something coming in from something else, I don't know, but I think that's a good way to look at it. Just like starting any business, you need some money to start out with.

Michael Walker: Yeah, absolutely. That's one thing I think is really important that sometimes musicians overlook is when they're just getting started with the business, starting any business is really like, yeah ... In a lot of ways, as online entrepreneurs, we have a huge advantage because we don't need like a retail space. We don't really need to spend $30,000 on just buying a store and getting everything set up. Really, it's a lot faster route to market, but you're totally right. For me, personally, I've invested tens of thousands of dollars.

Michael Walker: In some cases, money that I didn't have right away in order to build the business, and it wasn't necessarily like a instant, so like just automatically you're making $10,000 a month. It takes time and energy, but it does, over time, it's planting a seed and it starts to grow. Eventually the fruits start to come. I know we had, what is it? We call it Facebook glitch day. Facebook glitch day.

Will Black: Oh, yeah, November 11th.

Michael Walker: November 11th. Now, it's our calendars in Modern Musician, because it's just this day where for some reason, we still don't fully understand why, but Facebook glitched out or something, and so all of the campaigns that our artists are running got about 10 times as much traffic that they normally do on a normal day. How much did ... I know for you, it was something crazy, in like eight hours, you brought in a certain amount of revenue. What did that look like?

Will Black: Yeah, it glitched out for about eight hours, I think. I did $2,000 net sales, and I brought in through my Messenger, everyone knows what a Messenger is, but I had 25,000 new contacts created in eight hours. My budget at that point was I was spending a hundred dollars a day on ads, which isn't too crazy. It seems like a lot somebody first starting out, but a hundred bucks a day is not that much in the grand scheme. Yeah, and orders of magnitude bigger. What happened is that it was a real challenge because people end up ordering.

Will Black: I sold 200 starter packs with all my upsells, which upsells, by the way, folks is when you have ... When someone buys a starter pack, they might also get an offer like, well, hey, if you're going to get the start pack, why not get three signed lyric cards, or grab the CD as well. When you add in everything that people bought, I had over 200 orders in different configurations, and that's all manageable, except it wasn't like ... I was kind of going along, and then a spike, boom, of orders. Imagine doing that to your fulfillment system. It screwed everything right up.

Will Black: It took me about six weeks. What happened is that I had to get new CDs made, I had to order stuff. Actually, I ended up ordering a bunch of different stuff from India, then that was the late because of COVID delays. It was crazy. At the same time, I had my planned calendar mail. Calendars are really fussy because you have to sign it. I signed everybody's birthdays and they're really big and bulky. Literally, I'm a one man operation. I don't have any assistance at this time. What I learned real quickly was you can scale up your budget and you can scale the amount of people you bring in your funnel very quickly at the click of a button by putting an extra zero on your budget.

Will Black: What you can't scale overnight is your fulfillment ability, because when it's just one guy yeah, it was crazy. I learned about that. I got some great contacts. Actually, there's one gal in particular, her and her mom, that came through because of that day. She has since gone on to create the very first Will Black fan group on Facebook that's ever been made, which I thought was really cool. She asked me, she said, "Would you mind giving me your blessing? I want to create a fan page for you." I said, "That'd be amazing." Because the one I host, the Will Black Ops Street team, I tell people it's not really a fan page. It's a way for me to sort of quarterback the group and share content, disseminate it, create discussion, how to host livestreams.

Will Black: But if people want to post random stuff, I actually heavily moderate it. I do that on purpose because I want people to know that group has a specific purpose, but when Audra decided, hey, can I create this group on Facebook? That's perfect. That's great. I mean, that'd be awesome because that is exactly what I don't have the resources to moderate, and I think that'd be another outlet. There was a lot of great things that came out of that day, a real good learning experience. I made some money out of it too, which was great. But yeah, November 11th, we'll remember remembrance day forever.

Michael Walker: November 11th. That's amazing. 25,000 people, eight hours, over $2,000. That's not even talking about lifetime value of those people, like we talked about. It's like six weeks or more, I mean, if you're looking at a year, three years down the line, that's incredible, and totally understanding what you're talking about too, in terms of, I call those high quality problems when basically the problems that things are working too well, and so it's like things start to break. That's definitely been the experience with our business as well, is that you reach these glass ceilings that you have to kind of break through in terms of fulfillment.

Michael Walker: When you have something that's working, especially if you're doing it using the tools we're talking about with paid traffic and building automation and systems, that there's these different points where in order to scale up, you might be putting in a dollar and getting $3 or $4 out, but the problem isn't the budget anymore. It's that it starts to break with fulfillment, and then you have to start doing things like building a team and you have to start really leaning more into automations and stuff. That's awesome. Definitely, it sounds like a big learning lesson, or a lot of things came up when you had that experience, which were a good foreshadowing of, as you continue to scale up, some of those things that you'll be able to transition so you can scale effectively.

Will Black: Yeah. Let's talk about scale for a minute. Because I know that when you and I first spoke for the first time in September of last year, and I said, to do your program, I said, the big thing is that everything you guys teach has to be scalable. You he said, yeah, that's like a overlying principle of what we teach at Modern Musician. Even when you're first starting out, or if you're veteran, scaling has to be there. When we say scaling, we're talking about the idea that you can take your fundamental business practice, and whether you're doing a hundred, a thousand, or 10,000 people, the strategy is pretty much the same, and you're able to fairly simply keep the strategy going and just building upon what you're doing, almost in a fractal kind of way.

Will Black: I think is a good way to look at it, without having to reinvent the horse or break, like what's happened to me. My fulfillment sort of broke because I had so many orders that came through one day. I lost some customers. I had some bitchy pissed off customers, like, well, I've waited two months for my CD. I actually just had to refund somebody. I didn't have to, but they asked. They said, "I ordered my disc in November, I still haven't seen it yet." I said, "Yeah, yeah, I know. It went out before Christmas, and it's been super long." Just be straight up with them. I refunded her. I said, I'm really sorry.

Will Black: She said, "I'm probably going to get it. If I do, I'll send it back." I said, "No, no, no, don't send it back." I said, "Keep it, listen to it. Just let me know that you got it safe and sound and don't worry about it." I think customer service, which is something that a lot of people will start having experienced and be part of, is something you learn about. Always over-deliver, always be really humble and really kind with people. Remember they are customers. I know they're fans, but they're customers first, and customers have to be treated awesomely, because there's so many other options, especially with music that they could be spending their time and money on.

Will Black: So, it's much easier to lose a customer than it's to gain one. Don't ostracize your fan base. I know during the show, I'm swapping between using the word fan and customer, because realistically, for a musician, that's what it is. It's just super important to treat them the way they deserve to be treated, which special.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. Yeah. There's certainly like a super power of being able to give true appreciation. You don't necessarily want it to ... If you're just like creating artificial, like you're just making up stuff, then it just doesn't land. But if you can cultivate the ability to truly appreciate, I'm not just ... I mean, your fans is a great example, but just like people in your life, if you can create mechanisms in your own life in order to get really good at appreciating people and appreciating things, maybe starting a gratitude journal like every day you write down three things you're grateful for, and make it a point in your inner circle community, like things like having a member of the month, or during your livestreams.

Michael Walker: I'm sure that you do this with your community is that you acknowledge, you acknowledge them. You appreciate them. You make sure that they feel seen and understood and appreciated. As humans, that's like one of our most foundational needs is to be appreciated and to be seen and to be heard. I think you're totally right that a huge lever or something that's really important as a musician is learning how to appreciate your fans, and to do it in a way that is very authentic and makes them feel valued.

Will Black: Yeah. Authentic is big. Yeah, people want to know that they're getting the real deal and they do want to be recognized. I try and make a point to say, thank you as often as I can, and when I do it, be sincere about it. Don't make it sound rote. Don't make a sound routine. Just really be thankful when you say it. I'm thankful right now that you and I have this opportunity in this podcast. I mean, six months ago, I'd never heard of you. Here we are, six months from now. Now we've got this great relationship and a whole bunch of new opportunities to work together throughout 2021 and move forward.

Will Black: It's grateful. I'm very grateful for the community at Modern Musician, because it's a group of people that have very similar goals, morals towards achieving those goals and in a musical context.

Michael Walker: Thank you, man. I really appreciate that. The feeling is definitely mutual, both in terms of ... I mean, with you, I'm really grateful. I'm grateful for this whole community that we're building with like Gold Artist Academy, and also, everyone that's listening to this right now of musicians. I think that we have this amazing opportunity, so it's really to connect with people on ... There's sort of this healing process that happens with music when you really learn to express yourself. I just feel really grateful for the opportunity to ... As time has gone on, I've realized more and more that this whole Modern Musician and everything we're doing isn't really about me personally, as much as about the movements, about the community, and about the team and about the artists and the fact that there's a need there.

Michael Walker: I also hugely appreciate you, both from your literally decades of experience through ... It's not the easy path, right? Becoming a musician and doing this.

Will Black: Yeah, it's not easy.

Michael Walker: There are much easier paths that you could have taken, but it took a lot of inward reflection, and then I think a lot of challenge in order to go down that path. I definitely want to honor you for being on that path and for being generous, to not only be on that path, but to share some lessons that you learned. Thanks for taking the time to be here today.

Will Black: Yeah, man. Absolutely.

Michael Walker: Cool. All right. For anyone that's watching or listening to this right now, and they're like, oh man, this is awesome. This is really helpful, and I'd like to maybe look more into Will Black so I can connect with him or I can watch one of his livestreams, or I can check out his Patreon, what's the best place for people to learn more about you?

Will Black: Right. Well, Facebook's probably a good place to go since that's where I'm at most of the time, and that's just facebook.com/willblack. If you want to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole, you can just sign up for my newsletter, which is at willblack.net. Then if you go onto YouTube, easiest way to get there is willblack.com/youtube. Yeah.

Michael Walker: Yeah, so we'll put all the links in the show notes too, so that people can just go there and click it as easy as possible. Awesome. All right. Well, Will, you're the man. I really appreciate you, and I hope that 2021 you're both able to continue to deepen your relationship with your community through the online, through livestreams, and knock on wood, we'll see the state of the world if we can start doing some live shows and maybe you can make it out here to Orlando, Florida.

Will Black: Yeah. I'd love to get down there. It's a beautiful part of the country. Thanks.

Michael Walker: Boom. Awesome.

Will Black: Awesome, man.

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, any questions about the podcast, then there's few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends 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, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.