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S2E33 – Is Collaborating Hurting You

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Collaborating is a tremendously effective marketing approach to the music industry.

However, it does have both its pros and cons, which I discuss with you in this episode!

Your Brand is EVERYTHING!

We first start by talking about your brand.

Your brand is essentially a person, and you must make your decisions in the same way as you would yourself..

This means the things you say, the other businesses you interact with, and the customers you deal with on a daily basis!

I purposely started with the CONS of collaborating when beatmaking, selling beats, or with brands and sponsorships because many people don’t realize the harm it can bring to your business.

But of course, there’s many pros of collaborating as a music producer, too!

Cons of Collaborating as a Producer

This was the list of cons I used for this episode of Music Production Made Simple podcast:

  • Other people’s actions effect your brand
  • You have to often split earnings/commissions
  • You have to read the fine-print of the agreement
  • It’s RARE that a deal is fair..
  • It’s harder for you to be yourself (and have a strong opinion)
  • Hope that no foul play is going on in the background..

Pros of Music Collaboration

And, here’s the pros we talked about:

  • Build an audience faster (which makes marketing efforts easier)
  • Can make a lot more money
  • Learn a different point of view

Recap of Collaborating as a Beatmaker

If you want to collaborate with another producer to make beats, you are stepping into a different ball game.

It can bring you many rewards and growth, but it can also bring harm, that you may not even be aware of!

When looking at the agreement and offer, balance the pros and cons carefully.

It could be the best collaboration and decision of your life.. or the worst!

Beatmaking Collaborate Contracts

Community

Questions about this episode

Transcript

S2E33 – Is Collaborating Hurting You

  1. Season two, episode 33 is collaborating hurting you.
  2. Alright, so collaborating is when you are essentially working with a different brand
  3. and trying to grow your brand through someone else's brand.
  4. Okay, there's a lot of pros, there's a lot of cons to this.
  5. And when you're in the music industry, you are surrounded with collaborating.
  6. I'm just gonna give you some pros and cons in this episode, some things that I've
  7. learned over the years from working with a lot of different businesses over my time
  8. than the industry, which I hope is gonna help you out.
  9. Okay. Before we get into this episode, definitely check out the free beat making
  10. resources I have for you. I have free books, free sounds, and there's gonna be some
  11. more free things coming up here very soon.
  12. The Melody Minute is almost done.
  13. I'm just gonna create some free videos in the emails.
  14. To access the free resources, just go to it's gratuitous.com forward slash
  15. resources. Okay, so let's get into the pros and cons of collaborating.
  16. I'm gonna first start with the cons.
  17. And in order for you to understand both the pros and the cons, you first need to
  18. actually understand that your brand is what people know you for.
  19. Alright, so for example, myself, when I create a tutorial, an FL Studio tutorial,
  20. people know me as gratuitous, not by my first name, Riley, right?
  21. So that name gratuitous is my brand, and you have to understand that if you're gonna
  22. start working with different businesses or different people, that you have to
  23. look at your brand with your morals and what you're wanting to get across.
  24. Now that you understand that your brand is essentially a person, because you really
  25. gotta think about that. Now we can talk about the pros and the cons.
  26. Because you have to think that this brand, aka your person, is
  27. essentially what you are promoting, what you're putting out there, and you don't
  28. want harm towards your brand's name.
  29. Your brand is everything, right?
  30. Okay, so let's talk about the cons now..
  31. Okay So the first point is other people's actions affect your brand.
  32. If you start working with another brand, if they do something really, really bad,
  33. that can come onto you just because you're you are associated with them.
  34. And I mean that this can happen from all angles, whether you are allowing
  35. sponsorships on your videos or in your podcast or whatever, right?
  36. Let's say that brand did something really bad, everything kind of goes to where you
  37. know they've advertised, people allowed them to advertise.
  38. So, in other words, you have connections to them now.
  39. Whereas if you never collaborated with them, you would never be a part of their
  40. actions. Now, the next point is you often have to split earnings and commissions.
  41. So, for example, let's say I created a beat making course, but I brought someone
  42. else in, and there was two people creating the course.
  43. Now it's probably gonna be a 50-50 split.
  44. So if you make 10 sales at you know, X amount of dollars, you're only getting half
  45. of that. The next point is you have to read the fine print of the agreement.
  46. When you are just doing your own thing, for you know, there's always some rules that
  47. you always have to understand in regards to your business and stuff, but once you
  48. start working with somebody else, there is gonna be an agreement.
  49. And if you're not signing an agreement, then you are doing things foolishly in the
  50. business world. You always need to have a paper trail, and the fine print is not fun
  51. to read. I'm telling you, you gotta read every single clause within that agreement.
  52. A clause is just like a point, right?
  53. And it can get really technical.
  54. Now, the next point is is it's rare that a deal fair for both sides..
  55. That's the whole point Like if you are going to collaborate, when I talk about the
  56. pros here, when you collaborate with somebody, it's all about making sure that the
  57. deal for both parties, you know, both business parties is fair and then it benefits
  58. both of you. However, even for myself, as I've been in this music industry,
  59. sometimes you work with a brand or work with somebody, and the deal
  60. isn't totally fair for both sides, and it's kind of weird, but at the same time,
  61. it's enough benefit to sign that agreement.
  62. And this happens so much within the music industry, especially when it comes to your
  63. songs or record labels and publishing, right?
  64. These publishers have big amount of money, and the artist typically is
  65. much smaller, and so they are willing to sign that deal, but that doesn't mean that
  66. that deal is really 100% fair, but the artist felt that it was a good
  67. enough deal to sign to, you know, I guess pursue the career in music.
  68. But I'm just talking about business in general.
  69. Whenever you are gonna sign an agreement, it is quite rare that the deal is fair for
  70. both parties. Typically, one party is trying to leverage more than the other.
  71. That's the whole point of you know, business.
  72. However, that's also a red flag to be looking out for when it comes to businesses,
  73. and they're trying to have one up on you in a sense of having the advantage.
  74. Now, I do also want to say that there has been some brands within this audio
  75. industry which have been phenomenal to work with, right?
  76. They're so fair, they understand business, and it's just such a pleasure to work
  77. with because they're there to help you, and you know, whatever skills that you're
  78. bringing to the table. And so that is, you know.
  79. So what I'm saying is it's rare that a deal is fair.
  80. Still on the cons here, okay. The next point is it's harder for you to be yourself
  81. and have your own opinion. So when you start working with a brand, sometimes you got
  82. to be a little bit more careful now with what you're saying, because if you say
  83. something that that brand doesn't like, they can you know cut off the deal, or they
  84. might make you look bad. So that's another con that you really don't have as much
  85. flexibility as what you think.
  86. Whereas if you were just doing your own thing.
  87. One final thing I want to say about collaborating with somebody is trust, right?
  88. You're hoping that no foul play is going on in the background, such as if they're
  89. hiding sales from you, or if they're not paying you out well, or or whatever,
  90. there's always the issue of trust.
  91. Okay. And so that's what I have for cons.
  92. But let's talk about some pros because there are pros to collaborating because you
  93. see people collaborate all the time.
  94. So the pros to collaborating with somebody is that, and when I say somebody, I mean
  95. like a person or a brand, something that you feel that if you connect with the other
  96. business, it's going to help your business.
  97. And so the first point for the pro is you're able to build an audience faster, which
  98. makes the marketing efforts way easier.
  99. Because if this brand's really big and then you kind of tag along, you you get to
  100. kind of go with their traffic.
  101. All right. So you will discover in this music industry and in business, it's all
  102. about traffic, it's all about eyeballs on the product, eyeballs on your website.
  103. That's what it's all about. The more people that are looking at your stuff, the more
  104. potential for sales. you They talk about.
  105. You start to grow.. All right So if you can collaborate with somebody, you are
  106. kind of sharing audiences. Another pro, so another point is you can make a lot
  107. more money because of this, right?
  108. With more people looking at your stuff, there's more potential for sales.
  109. One other really valuable pro of collaborating with somebody is sometimes you get to
  110. learn a different point of view.
  111. You get to maybe hear their angle on the
  112. situation. And you know, you may not ever experience that if you didn't
  113. collaborate. So there's some pros and cons for you guys when it comes to
  114. collaborating within this music industry.
  115. Definitely check out some of the previous episodes I've talked about in regards to
  116. copyright and all that kind of stuff because your copyright is your ownership.
  117. And when you start collaborating, the copyright is starting to kind of get shared
  118. sometimes, or they're kind of licensing it off of you.
  119. So be careful out there, okay?
  120. So just a quick recap. So really at the end of the day, what I'm trying to say is
  121. the safest approach is really just kind of keeping to yourself and doing your own
  122. thing, but it is much harder. You kind of have to learn the full business side of
  123. things. Partnerships and collaborations are fine, but you really just have to think
  124. about them. Like, do they benefit both you fairly?
  125. Like, you know, do they benefit both parties within this agreement that you're gonna
  126. sign? Because never do business without an agreement in paper.
  127. It's just best practices. It doesn't matter how well you know somebody, always get
  128. the paperwork for the business.
  129. If anything happens, you can back yourself up, okay?
  130. Does it benefit both you guys fairly?
  131. Can you both grow well together??
  132. And can you easily get out of the contract or the agreement or the partnership if
  133. things aren't going well Or maybe you're too busy for it or something, right?
  134. So these are just all things that you have to think about.
  135. So I hope this episode helps you guys out.
  136. This is more of the business side of the music industry.
  137. If you guys do want to learn to make beats from scratch, check out my website, it's
  138. gratuitous.com forward slash courses.
  139. Now, the one thing I want to say is I've been having some lessons with students, and
  140. anyone can learn the music program, right?
  141. I talk about this a lot, but not everybody can make a beat.
  142. Creating a catchy loop and creating a drum loop, many people struggle with.
  143. And that is what my platform is designed for.
  144. There's really like three kinds of stages in there.
  145. So there is learning the daw, then there's making the beat, but there's really like
  146. an in-between. There could be hip hop, there could be dance, it could be metal, it
  147. could be country, it could be pop.
  148. Each of these genres have their own unique traits.
  149. But at the end of the day, they all have to follow the basic music theory of making
  150. a beat, such as you know, one, two, three, four, and picking a key and a
  151. scale to know the notes you're allowed to play.
  152. So that's what I'm trying to say that when you pick a music program, you gotta learn
  153. how it all works, right? That's like Photoshop or video editing.
  154. Then you got to learn how to make a beat, which is timing, right?
  155. How to count beats, understanding the notes you're allowed to play.
  156. But then in between that is for you to decide well, do you want hip hop beats?
  157. Do you want dance beats? Do you want pop?
  158. Do you want country? And my platform doesn't teach you the hip hop and the dance.
  159. My platform teaches you how to make to make the beat so that when you go the style
  160. of beat that you want you understand the fundamental tools and then it's just the
  161. kind of small characteristic traits that are different for example with if you made
  162. dubstep way back in the day dubstep took advantage of LFOs whereas typical
  163. beats didn't so that's kind of what made dubstep really unique in that sense but
  164. one quick YouTube tutorial and you'd be able to figure that out but making the beat
  165. people are really struggling with even when I do lessons with students that is what
  166. I'm finding that you know just how to create that catchy melody so again just keep
  167. listening to the podcast visit the website be on the lookout for the melody minute
  168. there's gonna be a lot of good training and don't forget about my free resources
  169. just go to it's gratuitous.com forward slash resources feel free to reach out
  170. anytime you have questions about making beats I'm here to help you guys I've been
  171. doing this for over 10 years of beat making education and I will talk to you in the
  172. next episode
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