Payola: The Music Marketing Cheat Code Nobody Admits To..

I told Leor and Russell, I said, "You know what? I don't think I want to do this [ __ ] if it ain't no money." And Leor told me, he said, "Let me tell you something about the music shit." He said, "This [ __ ] is all pale." He was like, "I can make your grandma the hottest [ __ ] in the country. All I need is 6 months." He said, "Ain't none of this [ __ ] real." He said, "The reason we telling you this cuz you a solid motherfucker." He said, "So if you want to [ __ ] around with it, it's good, but we just going to let you know that ain't none of this [ __ ] real." So the season veteran album dropped, Les Ride was the first single. That's back when the music box was out. We used to watch the videos, you call and do the [ __ ] right? Come on, [ __ ] I'm sitting inside my mama house, Jack. The music box come on. They said, "Number one, debuting this week on the box. Let's ride. I'm on." I'm like, "Nigga, I'm number one." I called Leor. I said, "Lee, I'm number one on the box." He said, "I know, Richie. We bought the spot. Give me a minute. I'll call you back." >> Imagine that. You spend years as an artist trying to make it and one day you finally get to hear your song on the radio. And not only is it playing, it's number one. And so out of excitement, you call your label owner and you're like, "We did it. We did it, Joe." And Joe's like, "Yeah, I know. We paid for it." Now, to be real, that would mess me up, too. Because there is something about learning that money was involved that can make an accomplishment feel less real. And what's even crazier is that artists today still feel that way. They think paying for promo is fake. They think paying for a feature is inauthentic. They think paying to be on a tour is a scam and they think that paying somebody to react to their music is just straight up corny. Most artists, I might even argue all artists feel like if the music is good enough, then it should just be discovered organically. But there is a problem with that idea. And I can tell you guys after spending years in the music industry, if I haven't learned anything else is this. The people that are trying to win that you're competing with, they're spending money and they're spending a lot of it. And if you're a part of the 40% of artists subscribe to this channel, then to be real, this video might not even be for you because you spent enough time listening to me talk about marketing that I'm sure I've gotten you guys over the fear of paying for [ __ ] at this point. This is for the 60%, the ones that feel like that music will blow up off of vibes and good energy. Because after watching artists argue about poliola and paid promo and organic growth for years, I think we've actually combined a bunch of different things into one argument. Because paying for attention and paying people to like you are not the same thing. Let me explain. But before I do, make sure you hit that subscribe button because it's completely free. And I already know how artists feel when they hear money and music in the same conversation. So consider this one on the house. So do your part by helping us grow and reaching more artists by hitting that button. Now let's get back into the video. Now, I think we should start the conversation by separating two things. Because when most artists use the word piola today, they use that [ __ ] for everything. You paid a blog, Piola. You paid for a playlist, Paola. You paid a reactioner or a Tik Tocker to do a little dance to your song, Piola. If another artist finds out you spent $20 to promote your Instagram reel, they're going to accuse you of being an industry plant and they're going to accuse you of participating in Poliola. But historically, Piola referred to something much different. It was secretly paying the radio for airplay without disclosing that that spot was paid for. And that's important because paying for overall promotion in itself is not Poliola. I mean, really think about it. Advertising has always existed. Marketing has always existed. Sponsorships have always existed. And today, there's an entire ecosystem built around paying people and platforms to distribute content and distribute music. And one of the most common versions in music today is a strategy that's called seating. Listen to how this artist breaks that down. >> Going to blow the whistle on the industry real quick. In the industry is two forms of marketing that's used heavily. It's seeding and it's clipping. Whenever you see academics say cheese, rap, bars, etc. All posting the same thing around the same time with the same narrative. That's a seed in campaign. That means someone gave them a budget and some content and a narrative to spread to the world. So, what Lar Russell just described is a marketing strategy called seeding. And it's probably one of the most popular forms of marketing within the labels and within a lot of the bigger upcoming artists. At its simplest, you're basically finding people who already have attention and then paying those people to distribute you to their source of attention. So, that could be a streamer or a meme page or a music blog page or a curator. And the goal of this strategy is very simple. It's about discovery. And some of the most elite teams and artists use this strategy every day to get their music and their content discovered. Now, here's the part where a lot of artists get uncomfortable about this strategy, right? They'll say, "But if that person likes me, then why do I have to pay it?" And to be real, you know, sometimes it's fair. There are people who support music for free every single day. But I do think that artists who speak that way are combining two completely different ideas because there is organic validation, but there's also distribution. Organic validation is, "I heard your song and I like it." But distribution says, "How did I even hear this song in the first place?" And even though it might sound like it, those are not the same question. And this distinction becomes important because there are people out there who make very strong arguments against what I'm saying. And I'll be real with y'all, I actually agree with a lot of it. >> Yo, I ain't going to lie, bro. I'm sorry that whatever content creators bag I'm [ __ ] up by saying this, but if you're an artist, do not pay for no [ __ ] promo, bro. That [ __ ] does not work. As somebody that used to accept promo, I don't do it no more because I would rather give my opinion than, you know what I'm saying, promote y'all shitty ass music. Anyways, but bro, on some real [ __ ] like all jokes aside, your promo, unless you got that label bread, unless there's a label backing you up, it's over, gang. Like, your little $50, your $100, your $20 to whatever Twitter page, whatever Instagram page, whatever, bro. It's not It's not doing nothing for you, bro. You got a better chance of making your own account and doing it for free. I promise you. >> So, I actually agree with bro, right? Like, one $50 promo post is probably not about to change your career. And if somebody is trying to sell you the dream that it will, then that is definitely a person that doesn't deserve your $50. As a matter of fact, just get some groceries with that money, right? Like, you probably get a much better return on that. But where I do disagree is in how the strategy gets used. I mean, listen to how that artist talked about it versus how Lar Russell talked about it. Lar Russell talked about having a network of pages whose audiences overlap and having a narrative that he's spreading throughout those pages versus that artist talked about paying for one post on one account. It's the nuance of having a message and a piece of content or song spread through a specific community that makes that strategy so attractive to labels, not the fact that one post on one account could blow up. And I'll be real with y'all. That's why it frustrates me whenever I hear artists proudly say that they don't believe in paytoplay or that they'll only do things organically because to me that says that they don't understand how these strategies actually work. And it also tells me one of two things. Either that's an artist that's not treating this like a business yet or it's an artist who's still in the rosecolored glasses phase of being an artist. Meaning that it's an artist who probably believes that if they just make a song that's good enough and the right person hears it, then that person will unlock every single opportunity that they need to blow up and just make it happen for them. And that's usually an artist who feels like a career is just supposed to happen. And that to me is the amateur phase of an artist. And not because I think amateurs are stupid, but because I see an artist who hasn't done this long enough to understand what people are actually paying for. Because the deeper you get into this business, the longer you play this game, the more you realize that everybody pays for something. And I've actually been on both sides of this, both working with independent artists who are using these strategies and working with major labels who are using these strategies. And when I worked at a major label, it wasn't crazy to see a developing artist get a couple thousand dollar just to do this strategy, right? Like they might get anywhere from 1,500 to 3K to do exactly what Lar Russo was talking about. and we might run those campaigns two, three, maybe four times a quarter. And so, contrary to what a lot of smaller artists like to think about artists who are assigned to major labels, we weren't spending $100,000 every single time a song came out. Sometimes we were testing, sometimes we would put money behind something and just see what happens with it. And if nothing happened, then we'd be like, "Okay, well, we learned something from that situation." But if that song started to move, then we would spend more and we would spend it much faster. And as the artists got bigger, their budgets got bigger and the spending became a lot more frequent. Now, the most amount of money I've ever personally spent was like 180k in a weekend. And I think a lot of artists would hear that number and think, "Damn, that's a lot of money." But most would misunderstand what we were doing with that money because these dollars aren't always being used to create demand. Sometimes they're being used to test for demand. Sometimes they're being used to find an audience or find the pocket we need to be pushing to. And sometimes, most of the times, it's being used to take something that's already working and just make it work faster. And the more time you spend around this business, the more you realize that paying isn't always limited to the things that artists think of as just promo. And recently, OG artist Melanie Fiona went viral for talking about another version of this. >> I don't know if I'm supposed to be blowing the whistle on this information, but whenever you see your favorite artist on television, they paid to be there. Okay? Whenever you see a late night television look or a daytime television moment, they pay to be there. It costs to be on TV. You're not just getting an invitation that somebody wants you to promote their music or they want to promote your music. Hey, we want to give you this opportunity, this prime time opportunity. You think that doesn't come with a cost? It it does. It comes with a cost. And then the cost to prep for that moment also is coming out of the artist's budget independent or signed to a major label which eventually they have to pay back anyways. So anytime you see somebody doing something something it costs. >> When I saw people reacting to this I immediately thought about something that I experienced early in my career. I remember being on a call with a press team because an artist that we were working with had just gotten the opportunity to perform on a major late night show. And during that conversation, we all learned that there was a pretty big production fee associated with doing that performance. And the explanation that the show's team basically made was quality, right? Like it basically boiled down to quality control. And they said to us, "Hey, this is national television and there's a standard that we need to maintain and have for this show." And that standard comes with a certain lighting, a certain sound, and a certain level of production. Basically, the artist and the performance needs to look like it belongs here. And like Melanie Fiona said, maintaining that level of quality costs money. And I wanted to show you guys that clip because I think that a lot of times paytoplay gets misconstrued as this thing that really only happens to small and upcoming artists. And I'll be real, pay to play hits you at every level of your career as an artist. And the number just really gets bigger. One day you're paying $50 to a promo page with 10K. The next day you're paying eight bands to a promo page with 3 million followers. One year you're paying $150 to be on the underground showcase. And then the next year you're paying tens of thousands of dollars for production for a late night TV show. The game never changes, man. The number just gets bigger. And look, I don't tell that story to say that every single television performance works the exact same way. She said that. I'm not saying that, but I'm telling y'all what I saw from my own experiences. But that experience did change the way that I started to think about paytoplay. Because a lot of times pay to play can sound like, hey, give me $500 and I'll let you perform at this, you know, [ __ ] underground showcase. But sometimes there's a legitimate cost that comes with executing an opportunity at the standard that opportunity requires. So the transaction alone doesn't really tell you whether or not the opportunity is good or worth it. But I do want to make something clear here. Being comfortable with paying for opportunities does not mean that you should pay for every single opportunity. Because sometimes paytoplay is genuinely a terrible investment and this marketer explains that perfectly. >> Don't buy on to tours. I swear to God. So for those who don't know, a tour by Bayon essentially is where you pay a headlining artist a bunch of money 5 10 $50,000 so that you can open for them on their upcoming tour. The issue with this is those buy slots are usually like first of five artists playing in a night. So you're going on at like 6:30 in front of no one. And since you're not getting paid, all the money that you're making comes out of merch sales. But if no one was there to watch you, then you're not going to sell any merch. Plus, if you're not really good live, then like you're going to look very amateurish next to all these pro seasoned artists on the tour who didn't buy on who have their own draws and the artist wanted on the tour. And the industry is going to be able to figure out real quick if you bought on to a tour or not, right? And then they're going to target you in the future to go buy on to more tours cuz they just want that easy money to cover the cost for their headliner. Plus, if you don't follow up that buy on with another tour in those markets, then the few people who did see you are going to forget. You got to keep following up consistently if you're trying to build an audience. >> Now, again, I actually agree with him and I've told artists that very same thing. If you're spending thousands of dollars to get on somebody else's tour with no real game plan of what to do with that opportunity, then why are you even there? If nobody knows you, if you're not capturing content, if you don't have a plan to get some leads, or if you're not pushing a release or just selling merch or just trying to get some performance reps in, then why are you there? And what exactly did you buy? Now, where I do disagree with Matt comes down to this. If you pay attention to what he said, it basically comes down to the quality of the artist and them not having a plan when they pay for this opportunity. And while I do agree with like 80% of what Matt is saying, the 20% where I disagree comes back again to not having a plan with the paid opportunity. And this is exactly like how I describe Lar Russell talking about paying for seating versus the other artists talking about paying for a promo post. Because while I might think that paying to be on shows or paying to be on tours is stupid most of the times, it's not actually always a bad idea. And it's only not bad if you have a legitimate plan or legitimate end goal for paying for that opportunity. So, if you're trying to get better at performing, if you're using that tour to get content, if you're using that tour to, you know, grow your email list or try to push some new merch that you want to test out, or maybe you want to build a narrative about you being on the road and you just need some footage to help you craft that narrative for, I don't know, like a seeding campaign or ad campaign or something. All those things and so many other things could be a viable reason to even attempt to do that strategy. I mean, for real, you might even know that you're going to lose money, but you've consciously decided that this opportunity is worth investing in myself as a marketing opportunity. At that point, cool. I'm fine with that because at least there's a strategy. And I think ultimately the questions that artists should be asking themselves, it's not did I have to pay? It should be what am I paying for? Are you paying for attention? Are you paying for infrastructure? Are you paying for access? Are you paying for production or experience or content? Because sometimes you might absolutely be paying for something that's not useful at all. Which is why something costing money doesn't automatically make it valuable. But also something costing money doesn't automatically make it a scam either. A serious artist can absolutely look at an opportunity that comes across their way, you know, crunch the numbers, do some math in their head, and decide, hey, that opportunity just isn't worth it for me. But the amateur artist thinks that the fact that they even have to pay for the opportunity automatically makes it not legit. And again, those are two completely different things because maturity as an artist isn't necessarily being pro paytoplay or being anti- paytoplay. It's learning how to understand what exactly you're paying for. And if you're an artist watching this and these types of conversations are the exact type of stuff that you're trying to figure out, then we built the no labels necessary community just for you. After years of doing some of the strategies we talked about in this video and teaching some of the strategies that we talked about in this video, we decided to build a community space for artists who are serious about their career and actually trying to move things forward. In that space, we go deeper into some of the tactics that you guys have heard me talk about on this channel. So things like content and ads and seeding, understanding your audience, campaign strategy, and most importantly, how to even put all of this [ __ ] together. So, if you want to learn with us and be around other artists who are actually doing the work, then hit the link below this video and check our community out. All right, I'm done with the plug. Let's get back into the video. Now, the reason I wanted to make this video is because when I hear a lot of younger artists today talk about pay to play, you would think it was some [ __ ] that was just invented. And as we discussed earlier in the video, it started with radio and it's evolved as the music industry has evolved into different ways to promote artists. And even today, it's not just limited to promo pages or paying to be on an artist show. Listen to how the baby talks about how earlier in his career he was paying to play with something else. >> Early on in your career, man, you paid Booy 15,000. >> I most definitely paid him 15,000. Then I paid him like investment, huh? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I don't I don't Man, I don't regret I don't regret none of that. I paid Tory Lane's 10. I got a verse to that I never even put out. I never even put it out. I paid Tory Lane's 10 for a verse uh on a song called like Squad Goes. I paid Booy. Who else I pay? Who else I pay for a verse? Um I think that's about it. The other person with me early on the early end was Yo Gotti. I think he did that on the love though. Uh-huh. On the song that I had that was going up. >> Hey, early on when >> I paid I paid I paid little baby 10. >> Damn. >> Mhm. I paid him 10. Hell yeah. I paid him 10 for a song called Today. Who else I pay other than that? I mean, come Yeah, that's that's probably it. >> Now, I love this clip and wanted to show you guys this clip because in the same story, you have both sides of everything. Some opportunities the baby had to buy and some of his opportunities came off of the strength of the relationships that he had built. And neither one invalidates the other. I mean, he didn't get that free Yogati verse and suddenly think, damn, now I got to delete all the songs I had to buy features for. No, that would be absolutely crazy. They were just different opportunities acquired in different ways. And the feature in itself doesn't even really guarantee anything because you could pay an artist 20K for a feature and that doesn't mean that their fans will like you or like the song. In that situation, you purchased access, but what happens with that access still depends on you. And once you understand that, the way that major labels spend money starts to make a lot more sense. And honestly, now that I think about it, one of the biggest lessons that I learned from working on the major label campaign came from a situation that I don't think I'll ever forget. Now, I'm going to leave the names out this story because honestly, the names aren't important, but there was a time where we were working on a release for a major artist. And at the same time, another major artist was getting ready to drop music, too. Now, the other artist we were working with was arguably bigger. You know, would probably be arguably a bigger superstar, but the artist we were working with was a really big artist, too. And a part of the campaign that we were doing for him involved us paying for promo on music blog pages, right, across, I think, Instagram and I want to say Tik Tok and Twitter. And for this campaign, we had planned to buy placements on some of the biggest music pages across all of those platforms. But then we ran into this really big problem that honestly I don't think any of us saw coming. We couldn't even buy these spots on these pages because the other artist who was dropping at the same time had basically bought the block. And what I mean by that is that he bought all of the inventory across all of the biggest rap pages for like the whole weekend. You know what I'm saying? Like or at the very least like four or five days straight. And I want you guys to remember, we weren't working with some independent upcoming artist that only had like a $500 budget. We had a bag, too. You know what I'm saying? And we we was working with a big artist. Like, bro, had some bread. But at the end of the day, there's only so much inventory available. And somebody had beat us there with more money and was ready to go. And that moment taught me something about this business that I promise you guys, I'll never forget for as long as I live. At the highest level, nobody is just waiting around to be discovered. they're like really competing. And when they compete, they're willing to take away opportunities for other artists to be able to compete because those artists realize that they're competing for attention with other artists. And again, they're willing to take it away from other artists if they have to. And attention has something in common with almost every other valuable resource. It's limited, which means that eventually somebody puts a price on it. And once that happens, you have a market. The music page has attention. That touring artist has attention. The artist selling the feature has attention. The TV show you want to be on has attention. The streamer you want to collab with has attention. And they're all selling completely different opportunities. But underneath all of them, they have a very similar resource. Access. Access to an audience or an infrastructure or an association or an opportunity. And that's why I think that sometimes most artists have a hard time understanding what they're buying when they do pay to play because you're not buying fans or love or even loyalty to your journey as an artist. Most of the time you're buying the opportunity to get in front of somebody. And what happens next is a completely different problem. And once I understood that, it started to make me look at campaigns that I was proud of way differently. So I want to tell you guys this story about a campaign I worked on, right? A few years ago, I was working with an artist named Moyo on this song he had just released called Moments. I don't know. You guys might have heard of him. If not, you should go check it out. It's a really fast song. I'm going to do the singing [ __ ] I hope this [ __ ] hit like I think. >> Forever. >> I don't know. You might have heard it. If not, that's not the important part of the story. Now, something started happening with that song on TikTok and people were responding really favorably to this piece of content that he had put out around it. And it was one of those situations where you know a song is about to go crazy because like the content wasn't big production or super high quality. It was like bro just propped his phone up, saying the song and [ __ ] started going crazy. So we're seeing this happen, right? Like people are responding to it. The content is moving in real time and and people are loving the song. The streams are going up, views going up, all that. And our marketer brains kicked in and said, "Hey, there's clearly something here." But more importantly, we didn't create the spark that happened organically. Now, this is the part where a lot of artists would say, "Hey, we got to stop right there. Like, freeze everything. It's already moving organically. Let's just keep it organic." But thank God I'm smarter than that because that's not what we did. We saw the signal and we started to amplify it. And we did it specifically through a seeding campaign. And we took that content, we took that song, and we put it in a bunch of different spaces and started a conversation about how, you know, this black alternative artist from Ireland was was killing [ __ ] You know what I'm saying? And that campaign got the song in more spaces, got him into more conversations, and overall expanded the reach that that song got. And within a few months of all that happening, bro had a song that was still taking off, and he was basically vetting label deals. Now, did Seeding create that song? Did Seeding create the original Tik Tok response? Again, no. Did Cory's genius seeding plan force people to become fans of the song? Again, no. But what it did was take something that was already showing signs of life and give it more opportunities to live. The spark was organic, but the amplification wasn't. And again, those two things can absolutely exist at the same time. And it's another part of the reason why it frustrates me whenever artists have the conversation about organic growth because they act like just because they're starting to pay for opportunities or pay for more ways for their music to get seen that all of the organic stuff just stops. And they act like whatever happened before those moments just stop being real. But that's not how professional marketing works and that's not how the people who do this really well are thinking about these types of campaigns. If they see something moving organically, they don't look at it as a reason to not market it or to not spend money on it. In fact, they start to go harder on it. Think back to what I told you guys about how most labels spend money. They'll put something out, they'll put a little money down, and then they just watch and sees what happens. If nothing happens, then they just keep it pushing on to the next thing. But if something does happen, then they spend more and they amplify the signal that they see. And with Moyo, the same principle applied. We just saw the signal first before we started spending any money. And that's exactly why I think the whole the whole organic versus paid conversation is just a flawed conversation to have because organic validation and paid distribution are not on opposite sides of the spectrum. I mean, you could pay to put your song in front of a million people, but you can't pay for those million people to genuinely [ __ ] with you and [ __ ] with the song. At the end of the day, that's still the song's job, and that's still your job as an artist. And I think that's where a lot of artists get lost. They feel like paying for the opportunity to be discovered feels like they're paying for the discovery itself. But for real, you're not. You're paying for the introduction, but what happens after the introduction still has to be real. And that applies to almost every single thing that we talked about in this video. If you pay for a feature, then you're paying for access to that artist and potentially access to their audience. If you pay to be on tour, then you're paying for access to that room and to the people that that artist is going to bring out. And if you pay for a seating campaign, then you're paying for access to people that have already built these massive sources of attention. But at the end of the day, none of those things can guarantee conversion to the music. They just guarantee the chance to get people to convert to the music. And that's why the lesson from this video isn't to just pay everybody. You know, please, for the love of God, don't do that. But the lesson is understand what you're buying and understand why you're buying it. And do your best to understand what success from the thing looks like before you spend your hard-earned money on it. Because sometimes the smartest decision really is just paying for the opportunity. But sometimes the smartest option is just keeping your money in your pockets. And sometimes the opportunity that you would have gladly paid for will just happen to you for free. And at the end of the day, that's just business. And that's also a part of the magic that makes this game fun. Because the goal isn't to never pay. And the goal also isn't to pay for everything. But the goal is to understand what you are paying for and what you expect to get as an artist paying for these things because you can't just buy people loving your music, but you absolutely can buy the opportunity for them to discover it and maybe fall in love with it. And again, those are two completely different things. And if you enjoy music industry breakdowns like this, then consider becoming a member of the channel. Members get access to exclusive videos and breakdowns that we don't release publicly. You know, stuff like this. Let's get into step one. How do you become an industry plant 101? Step one is to make great music. You got the best marketing plan. You can have the the savviest group of people behind you that are that are playing as your team and kind of helping you build. If fans do not feel like they have a song or a batch of songs alike, then almost none of this [ __ ] works, right? So, if that's your kind of content, then hit the join button below and become a member today. But guys, I want to know what y'all think. When does paying for access to attention become smart marketing versus when does it cross the line into buying success? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Other than that, if you like this video, make sure you hit the like button, subscribe, share this with the artist that needs a little bit of gain today. My name is Cory and I'll see y'all next