Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest this week is Chris Zeru, the manager of Logic
Speaker 1: and so much more so. I was at a meeting
Speaker 1: at the Soho House last August and I got up
Speaker 1: to go to the bathroom and these guys Shanghai mean
Speaker 1: they knew who I was. It's always great to be recognized,
Speaker 1: and they said, oh, we want to talk to you,
Speaker 1: want to talk to you. So I was done with
Speaker 1: my meeting. I sat down with these guys, Chris and
Speaker 1: one of the guys who worked with him, and they
Speaker 1: told me the story of managing Logic and they all said,
Speaker 1: you gotta watch the vm A. Something's really gonna happen
Speaker 1: on the vm A s And they were right, Chris,
Speaker 1: how old are you? And you really had quite a career.
Speaker 1: But let's go from the beginning. So you're from Long Island,
Speaker 1: Long Island, New York guests. Okay, what town exactly? Garden City,
Speaker 1: Garden City, Garden you grow up? Are you interested in music? Very?
Speaker 1: I guess when I started figuring out my identity right
Speaker 1: as an Adams became very interested in music. I think
Speaker 1: before that I don't have much much memory of of
Speaker 1: being more of a music fan than the average person.
Speaker 1: But definitely as I got older, right, I think I would.
Speaker 1: I would just dive in a little bit more. If
Speaker 1: I liked an artists or a band, I would use
Speaker 1: the Internet and try and find out as much as
Speaker 1: I possibly could about that particular artist. Well, that's interesting
Speaker 1: because being twenty eight, you grew up in the napster era. Yes,
Speaker 1: you remember using Napster. We're not with the police, are
Speaker 1: not here? I use naps I I do remember using
Speaker 1: Napster heavily, heavilyly, okay. And did you ever buy CDs
Speaker 1: all the time? Yeah? I used to go to the
Speaker 1: city store. There's a you know, Pete, I don't even
Speaker 1: remember the name of the city store. There's a pizza
Speaker 1: place that I would go to Friday nights with my
Speaker 1: parents and brothers and sisters and record store right next door,
Speaker 1: and I would spend hours there. So okay. And there
Speaker 1: are how many kids in your family? I'm one of six?
Speaker 1: One of six? And where are you in the hierarchy?
Speaker 1: Second oldest, second oldest? And your father did what for
Speaker 1: a living? He worked in I t his whole life,
Speaker 1: still does Okay? And how far from New York City.
Speaker 1: Were you about a thirty five minute trip on the
Speaker 1: Long Island Railroad and did you go all time? And
Speaker 1: what would you do in the city. I mean, I'd
Speaker 1: go when when I was old enough to go with friends. Right,
Speaker 1: you just go to go school, go to the pinball place.
Speaker 1: That's a good look at the musical instrument at mann
Speaker 1: He's the greatest city in the world. We'd go as
Speaker 1: a family around Christmas time. It's tradition. We still do it.
Speaker 1: And then and then as I and I am again,
Speaker 1: I'm skipping around. As I got into the business, it
Speaker 1: was super helpful for me. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: it was serendipity and luck right being being born in
Speaker 1: New York in Long Island, right when I decide, okays
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do. Them get in the music business.
Speaker 1: Half of the major labels, if not more, their headquarters
Speaker 1: are based in Manhattan, So I'd constantly going in for
Speaker 1: meetings and and things like that. Yeah, people say, you know,
Speaker 1: you can do it from anywhere now, but face to
Speaker 1: face does make a difference, big difference, I do believe.
Speaker 1: Because of the Internet, right, you can do it from anywhere,
Speaker 1: but face to face that that that personal connection when
Speaker 1: somebody goes along way. Okay, so you're in the high school,
Speaker 1: when do you decide, hey, this is something I might
Speaker 1: want to make a career aut them. Not not in
Speaker 1: high school, it was. It was definitely later, I think
Speaker 1: my again, at a less since, when you start trying
Speaker 1: to figure out your identity or what you're passionate about.
Speaker 1: For me, it was it was sports, specifically soccer. That
Speaker 1: was my main focus majority of of my teenage years.
Speaker 1: And um, I guess I've always been a little bit
Speaker 1: ambitious and and um very set some audacious goals. I
Speaker 1: wanted to be a professional soccer player. Um that was
Speaker 1: and I took it very seriously. I kind of dedicated
Speaker 1: my life to it. And for me, it was okay,
Speaker 1: if I played Division one, that's the first step of
Speaker 1: getting there. And so so from probably sophomore year in
Speaker 1: high school, I really dedicated my life and time to
Speaker 1: to trying to become a professional soccer player and getting
Speaker 1: a Division one scholarship as my first step, and and um,
Speaker 1: that was my focus. I did that. I jumped around
Speaker 1: a little bit, I played my freshman year, I went
Speaker 1: to Kinnisius College in Buffalo, didn't love Buffalo, didn't have
Speaker 1: the greatest experience with with the coach there, and I
Speaker 1: think that was a theme throughout my short college career.
Speaker 1: Um it kind of started to to take my passion
Speaker 1: away for the sporting I think it ruined it for
Speaker 1: me a little bit. So, So at this late date,
Speaker 1: do you think you have the ability to go all
Speaker 1: the way? No? And and that's also something that I realized, right,
Speaker 1: I think I'm very fortunate to be very self aware.
Speaker 1: And you know, shortly after playing, you know, you start
Speaker 1: with what I would do is I would look at
Speaker 1: seniors who who are definitely better than me. They would graduate,
Speaker 1: and I'd watch them, right, and and that social media
Speaker 1: is a beautiful thing, and I'd keep in touch with
Speaker 1: these guys a lot of them, and they would go
Speaker 1: and kind of jump around and try to play a
Speaker 1: much lower level professional teams and not really have much luck.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, holy shit, right, and I got okay,
Speaker 1: I got two more years or three more years to
Speaker 1: get as good as he was, and he's not even
Speaker 1: So it was it was that played a big role
Speaker 1: in me deciding to not play anymore. Was you know what,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm good enough. Okay, so you're one
Speaker 1: year in Knician. Then where'd you go from? I did
Speaker 1: one semester there. I played the first semester I transferred.
Speaker 1: There was a college at Delphi University on Long Island.
Speaker 1: The coach is very interested. That's where Gary de Labatte
Speaker 1: went from this Howard Church show. That's why I hear
Speaker 1: about it all the time. And and uh, there was
Speaker 1: a coach there that was very interested in me. But
Speaker 1: I chose to go to Kinnisius. So I rang them
Speaker 1: over over the holiday. I was like, listen, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about transferring. I didn't want to take time off.
Speaker 1: I wanted to find a team in place, because at
Speaker 1: Division one level in the in the off season, right
Speaker 1: and I guess was spring semester. Um, you play, you
Speaker 1: play five days a week, and then that's how it goes.
Speaker 1: So I rang him. He was like, listen, you could
Speaker 1: walk on the team right now. So I did that.
Speaker 1: I transferred there. I played there in my sophomore year. Um,
Speaker 1: and that's when I kind of decided, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm just not going to do this anymore. And did
Speaker 1: you literally stop playing? Literally stop playing? And you play
Speaker 1: it all in pick up games. Now I wish I did.
Speaker 1: I I don't have the time. Um, I use as
Speaker 1: an excuse probably, but there's a lot of leagues you
Speaker 1: can play him, but I'm in the office until until Okay,
Speaker 1: so you drop out of uh playing American football, I
Speaker 1: mean European football soccer. And if you only drop out
Speaker 1: because you don't think you're gonna goodenough, not because you've
Speaker 1: been motivated by the music thing or anything. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it was it was a combination of of that, right,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, recognizing that and saying, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna kind of stop, and
Speaker 1: then having some some bad experiences with coaches who really
Speaker 1: really ruined my love of the game a little bit
Speaker 1: at um, you know, not not just not being great people,
Speaker 1: I think ultimately is what did it for me, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, not making it fun anymore. I I really
Speaker 1: love that sport. Um, it was amazing, smad love competing.
Speaker 1: I'm very competitive and it was now lit for me
Speaker 1: right to be competitive and do that, and especially I
Speaker 1: was trying to do it at the highest level. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think I truly do think my experiences with
Speaker 1: some bad coaches at that level really ruined it for me,
Speaker 1: and and being a little bit you know what, I
Speaker 1: just don't think I'm quite good enough. Um, it was
Speaker 1: a combination of all of that. Well, I have to ask,
Speaker 1: because you're of the demo, what do you see going
Speaker 1: forward visa the European foot well in American football in
Speaker 1: the United States? I think, and again very opinionated, but
Speaker 1: I think this is your chance. Don't hold back. Now,
Speaker 1: that's a good question. I think in thirty years it's
Speaker 1: gonna be the biggest sport in America. Right, and you
Speaker 1: think American football survives, I do not. I'm with you,
Speaker 1: I do not. I just think because of of the
Speaker 1: the now is, people are recognizing the dangers of playing
Speaker 1: that sport. I think, and again, it takes time. It
Speaker 1: takes you years, right, I think people are gonna start.
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna see an up swing back into baseball.
Speaker 1: It's where the best athletes go. I think that those
Speaker 1: sports succeed, right. And I think because maybe soccer in
Speaker 1: this country isn't as sexy. I think when when very
Speaker 1: good athletes get to a certain age, you generally drop
Speaker 1: soccer and you focus on probably American football and and
Speaker 1: and maybe basketball, right, um, just because I think that's
Speaker 1: it's not a sexy to play soccer. Everyone everyone plays
Speaker 1: it super young, right, every but then you just drop it. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're having the best athletes literally in the country
Speaker 1: deciding to play soccer, you're going to see that change.
Speaker 1: I think it needs the perfect storm, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: what it's going to take to really because it happens
Speaker 1: every every four years, right, everybody gets World Cup fever, right,
Speaker 1: And for me, I think in order for the stick
Speaker 1: beyond just that summer, you need a superstar athlete, an
Speaker 1: American kid, an American player who is a is a
Speaker 1: true world class player, not just in the US but
Speaker 1: in the world, and combining with a a big US
Speaker 1: soccer run in the World Cup, I think at that moment,
Speaker 1: the perfect storm, it'll it'll it'll stay. Okay, so you're
Speaker 1: in the Delphi, you stop playing soccer, and then what
Speaker 1: and then I it wasn't initially stopped dead. I debated,
Speaker 1: I said, you know what, maybe I'll play Division two.
Speaker 1: So I immediately transferred to another. I went to four,
Speaker 1: I went to four different colleges, and you did graduate?
Speaker 1: I did I graduate from a Delphi. I went back. Um,
Speaker 1: but just you know, generally speaking, going from community community,
Speaker 1: you can start off with a whole new set of
Speaker 1: people have already been there for a while. Are you
Speaker 1: the type of person who can fit in anywhere? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's never been too much of an issue for me.
Speaker 1: I was also at that point when I transferred and
Speaker 1: went back to Long On it was all local, so
Speaker 1: it's a little different. I had a bunch of really
Speaker 1: really good friends that I grew up with for at
Speaker 1: that point, what fifteen years, seventeen years, so I wasn't
Speaker 1: as um needing a community at at whatever school I
Speaker 1: was at. I had my You went from all Aware
Speaker 1: CW Post, which is another school Long On division school program.
Speaker 1: They're very good, and I transferred there on me because
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, what if I decided to
Speaker 1: play and then I ultimately decided not to. I think
Speaker 1: I jumped at that point back to community college because
Speaker 1: I'm like, all right, am I going to transfer out
Speaker 1: of Long Island and then just you know, forget playing
Speaker 1: and go somewhere else, maybe to a bigger school. Um.
Speaker 1: And then again at that time, I think I started
Speaker 1: to uh debate the idea of of of dabbling as
Speaker 1: a career in music. Okay, so tell us about your inkling,
Speaker 1: how you decide you might do that. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: that was a weird time in my life. I think
Speaker 1: it was nineteen where you know, I devoted how many
Speaker 1: of her years it was to the sport, and it
Speaker 1: was just I'm not doing it anymore. So I kind
Speaker 1: of had to figure out what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And I remember just asking myself kind of kind of
Speaker 1: self talk a little bit, you know what, what do
Speaker 1: I love as much as the sport of soccers? I
Speaker 1: wanted to fill that void with something that was truly
Speaker 1: passionate about. And the only thing I could answer that
Speaker 1: with was music, right, And that sounds silly because everybody
Speaker 1: loves music, but I think I again, looking back, I
Speaker 1: was definitely more passionate, I think than the average person.
Speaker 1: So I was just like, okay, cool, I'm gonna try.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna figure it out. I don't think I was
Speaker 1: somebody who wanted to just be a normal college kid.
Speaker 1: I needed something to work on or work towards at least,
Speaker 1: So for me, that's how kind of I stumbled into music. Okay,
Speaker 1: And did you know what role you wanted to play
Speaker 1: in music. I didn't. I didn't I started. So then
Speaker 1: I when I kind of figured that out, I would
Speaker 1: literally just go to Barnes and Noble, right, and I
Speaker 1: would go to the music section and just try and
Speaker 1: read music business books and just I knew nothing nothing.
Speaker 1: So to me, I think I stumbled upon artist management
Speaker 1: because I was like, all right, this has the lowest
Speaker 1: barrier to entry. I think, if you can do it
Speaker 1: yourself and license to starve. But that's why the buried
Speaker 1: entry is so low, absolutely because I didn't know. I
Speaker 1: had no relationships in the business. I had no connections,
Speaker 1: So that was me. I was like, listen, Okay, if
Speaker 1: I do this myself, if I find an artist and
Speaker 1: I kind of build something, that's that's my my my
Speaker 1: entry into the business. So I think that's how I
Speaker 1: truly stumbled upon arts management. Okay, what was the next step?
Speaker 1: The next step is finding talent, which is the hardest
Speaker 1: thing to do with the greatest manager, but without hit
Speaker 1: act forget it correct, you know. And this goes back
Speaker 1: to my passion I think throughout and what I realized
Speaker 1: looking back now, there was a lot of parallels between
Speaker 1: my my love of soccer and my love of music.
Speaker 1: I would train a lot, and often by myself when
Speaker 1: I'm not at practice, right, and I would always have
Speaker 1: music with me and when I that's just they went
Speaker 1: hand in hand. Um. So with that said, I would
Speaker 1: find myself on the internet on different music blogs and
Speaker 1: and just looking at up and coming artists. So I
Speaker 1: already knew that world a little bit just from being
Speaker 1: a fan, right, and and then so I said, okay,
Speaker 1: I need to find artists. I would just go to
Speaker 1: those same websites and blogs and look for talent. Okay,
Speaker 1: how much time did you spend doing that? Probably a
Speaker 1: ridiculous amount of time, like hours a day. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so all my free time, basically, that's what And
Speaker 1: your parents said, what about this? You know they were
Speaker 1: My parents are greatest people in the world. They they
Speaker 1: I truly believe. If I was at this time, I
Speaker 1: was again nineteen, probably almost twenty years old, I think
Speaker 1: if I, you know, transition my life the way I did,
Speaker 1: I you know, stop playing soccer and I said, hey,
Speaker 1: I want to be an astronaut. They were like great
Speaker 1: rock out so they financially helpful, not no, not at all,
Speaker 1: you know they they I don't think they could have
Speaker 1: been and um, you know they want to and still
Speaker 1: work ethic in me and I think they did that.
Speaker 1: I was probably the only kid at Division one soccer
Speaker 1: team who had to have a job. My dad. My
Speaker 1: dad was very adamant about me working, said, what were
Speaker 1: you doing, Kenisius? I worked at the gym. I signed
Speaker 1: people in right, it was a work study. What do
Speaker 1: you want to call it? But yeah, he was like, listen,
Speaker 1: you need to, you know, fund your life, and you
Speaker 1: have to have a job. I was like, Dad, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm Division one soccer is a full time job and
Speaker 1: being a full time student. He's like, I don't give
Speaker 1: a ship. So okay, So now you have this epiphany
Speaker 1: when you're in community college. I think, I think that's
Speaker 1: what it was. Are you still working at the time. Yes.
Speaker 1: I worked in retail, worked in the mall. There was
Speaker 1: a store called Rule, which was I guess a a
Speaker 1: more adult version of Ambercrombie and Fitch is where I worked. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you're living at home. I'm living at home and
Speaker 1: you're surfing the next do you start contacting these acts?
Speaker 1: I did? And how did that turn out? I mean good?
Speaker 1: I would try and start a dialogue in a relationship
Speaker 1: with them a little bit. You would say, what, I'm
Speaker 1: nobody from nowhere, come work with me exactly literally, and
Speaker 1: and a lot of it was Hey, let me show
Speaker 1: you what I think I can do for you, and
Speaker 1: I'll prove myself to you. Right. I had no I
Speaker 1: had no experience, I had no resume, and that all
Speaker 1: it was as just trying to say, hey, listen, you know,
Speaker 1: so what happened? Um? I started working with an artist
Speaker 1: and everything was going well. I've learned the artist was weird.
Speaker 1: You were on the island. The artist was weird. The
Speaker 1: first artist I ever worked with was was an artist
Speaker 1: by the name of Jazz Cardier. He was from Toronto.
Speaker 1: Came across amount a website, reached out to him. Um, Yes,
Speaker 1: started a relationship, started working together. UM. And it was
Speaker 1: cool for me because you learned as you go, right, Um,
Speaker 1: started working with him. Everything went well. I think shortly
Speaker 1: after that we we decided to to part way is
Speaker 1: probably a couple of months in Um. But what did
Speaker 1: you do for him? Uh? Kind of everything, right, I
Speaker 1: mean what did you achieve? Uh? My big thing was
Speaker 1: was finding attention wherever eyeballs and ears were That's where
Speaker 1: I wanted my artists obey. To this day that that
Speaker 1: hasn't changed. Um And I think I understood the internet
Speaker 1: really well, probably just from being a fan of it
Speaker 1: and watching what was happening. I'd watched different artists have
Speaker 1: moments and uh create buzz or blowing up. But if
Speaker 1: you want to call it right and I reverse engineer that.
Speaker 1: That was my big thing. Okay, that artist got to
Speaker 1: hear how he'd do it, and I would just dive
Speaker 1: in and try and figure it out. I still do
Speaker 1: that to this to this day. What did you do
Speaker 1: for this artist? I developed a lot of relationships with
Speaker 1: these blogs And that sounds funny right today in two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen these blogs, but at the time this is
Speaker 1: probably two thousand ten, no oh nine, probably, and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: they were they were everything at the time. I think
Speaker 1: there was a lot of attention there and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of um eyeballs and ears. Okay, so if
Speaker 1: you had a relationship, would they promote this guy's song? Correct?
Speaker 1: And did you see any reaction? Absolutely? And that's a
Speaker 1: beautiful part about the internet. Data right, and it's much
Speaker 1: there's much more data now, but at the time you know,
Speaker 1: whether we put something up on YouTube. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: music streaming wasn't a conversation. The word at the time
Speaker 1: didn't exist really. Um, I think YouTube was the only
Speaker 1: music streaming service in the world probably at the time.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe Spot of five, but it was
Speaker 1: Spotified was in eleven, right, so in Europe only, and
Speaker 1: and um a YouTube was was huge at the time.
Speaker 1: So you get to see the views, you get to
Speaker 1: see you know, the listons. And also why did it
Speaker 1: end with this person in Toronto? Um, I think we
Speaker 1: mutually agreed to to to part ways, right, And at
Speaker 1: the time I found another artist, um that I started
Speaker 1: working with Philadelphia, a young rapper, amazing kid. So I
Speaker 1: was kind of balancing them both and then I think
Speaker 1: the other one took more of my attention. Okay, So
Speaker 1: the person in Toronto, whatever happened to him, Um, he's
Speaker 1: doing well now. Okay, So he's the one in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: The name of this rapper is Okay, And what happened
Speaker 1: there a little bit of the same scenario where where
Speaker 1: I think, you know, and at that point when I
Speaker 1: was working with him, I had came across logic stuff
Speaker 1: and started building relationship with logic a little bit okay,
Speaker 1: but before you get there, the guy in Toronto, the
Speaker 1: guy in Philadelphia. You have actions, you're interacting with the blogs.
Speaker 1: You're not making any money, no, no, no, no. Management
Speaker 1: is a business where the money comes later. If you
Speaker 1: do it right, the money comes out. If you do
Speaker 1: it wrong, it doesn't come at all. Right, So a
Speaker 1: little slower, how do you end up interacting with logic?
Speaker 1: So that's that's a that's a funny story. Actually it's
Speaker 1: you know, and again a lot of and and now,
Speaker 1: especially being a little bit older, I look back and
Speaker 1: how much of it was serendipity and how much of
Speaker 1: it was luck and how literally. So I was working
Speaker 1: with this artist out of out of Philly, and this
Speaker 1: is early days of Twitter again, this is late oh nine,
Speaker 1: very early, right, and I'm on Twitter. That's just what
Speaker 1: I did, right, I'd follow things that I was interested
Speaker 1: in passion about all music ship basically. And at the time,
Speaker 1: this artist DJ, I followed him right, and he tweeted
Speaker 1: out a YouTube link right, just U R L, no description,
Speaker 1: no nothing, And I was probably bored. I was on
Speaker 1: my I was at home on my computer, and I
Speaker 1: clicked the video, and it was an acapella video of
Speaker 1: logic rapping. He was walking down the University of Maryland somewhere.
Speaker 1: It was poorly done at the time, and I ended
Speaker 1: up speaking a lot of about it after and I
Speaker 1: figured out why it was such poor quality. He ended
Speaker 1: up having the microphone. He put it in his hoodie.
Speaker 1: He was wearing a hoodie and he put it in
Speaker 1: the hoodie so it could pick up his his voice.
Speaker 1: And it was probably a minute and a half video,
Speaker 1: right and something destruct me and I was like, I
Speaker 1: think he was very as a rapper. You could tell
Speaker 1: his his technical ability and how skilled he was. Something
Speaker 1: just him and I was like, this kid is a
Speaker 1: student in the game. I need I need more um.
Speaker 1: And it was very difficult to find him before you
Speaker 1: get there. How many views did the video have when
Speaker 1: you saw it, Yeah, it was difficult to find. Difficult
Speaker 1: to find him. I don't know what social media he
Speaker 1: had at the time, if any, wasn't really much there.
Speaker 1: He didn't really have a fan page or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I found his personal Facebook and I literally just Facebook
Speaker 1: chat at him. Now this is two two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: very early Facebook chat at him very much, say why
Speaker 1: I reached out to everybody else I wanted to work with.
Speaker 1: I was just blindly ambitious. I didn't think ship right,
Speaker 1: and I reached out to him and started conversating. I
Speaker 1: think at the time he had thought I was a fan,
Speaker 1: so he was super He was really sweet kid, I mean,
Speaker 1: and and we start a dialogue. Shortly after, I think
Speaker 1: I got his phone number and I call him and
Speaker 1: I want to work with you. And I jumped on
Speaker 1: a megabus um, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I
Speaker 1: think it's what was I getting to to Maryland four?
Speaker 1: I think thirty dollars round trip, very very explained to people,
Speaker 1: because not everybody knows what the mega bus. It's probably
Speaker 1: just an East coast thing, right, certainly New York, New
Speaker 1: York to Boston, etcetera. But for the people listening who
Speaker 1: are certainly not from that are explained the megabus. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's a it's a big bus, right,
Speaker 1: you pay little to no money and they'll take you
Speaker 1: basically anywhere up and down the East Coast. It's very
Speaker 1: beautiful things. Okay, but you wait, you wait in line
Speaker 1: in the cold, you wait for the bus to come.
Speaker 1: They're generally very late. And you walk on the bus.
Speaker 1: You have your E ticket I'd printed out at my
Speaker 1: parents house and jump on the long Land are getting
Speaker 1: the city and go um and yeah, I go down
Speaker 1: to see him and the megabus that some of these
Speaker 1: buses depending when you booked, the prices different, like but
Speaker 1: girly could be very cheap, correct, and some of them
Speaker 1: have WiFi. Dadn't at the time, no one nobody have
Speaker 1: waf right, Okay, So you go Maryland. Your parents are
Speaker 1: like this is fine, the most supportive parents in the
Speaker 1: entire world. Okay, And okay, you're going. You plan you
Speaker 1: you know you're going to Maryland. You think you're gonna
Speaker 1: stay at his house were You're gonna take the megabus
Speaker 1: back the same day. So so I think how it
Speaker 1: happened first before I visited. So at the time, he
Speaker 1: was again he had a little team together. You didn't
Speaker 1: have management, okay, the team was what his friends. Yes,
Speaker 1: literally um, and he was like, hey, we wanna you know,
Speaker 1: we want to shoot a video. I think he was
Speaker 1: putting together his first project ever at the time, and
Speaker 1: he was like, hey, we want to shoot a video.
Speaker 1: I want to meet you. You know, maybe we'll come
Speaker 1: up to New York and you can kind of show
Speaker 1: us around Manhattan and we could we could, you know,
Speaker 1: meet each other at the time point and shoot, I
Speaker 1: guess is what you'd call it. We shoot very low budget.
Speaker 1: I mean no budget, right, is how we do it. UM.
Speaker 1: So he I was like, cool, come up right, I'll
Speaker 1: meet you and I'll take you guys around. I don't
Speaker 1: I mean man Hatt's Manhattan, I don't know. I was like,
Speaker 1: I was like, ship where I even? I don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: I had a buddy who lived there and he had
Speaker 1: a top, so you guys want to use that as
Speaker 1: a location. UM. And he came up. I met him.
Speaker 1: We kind of hung the entire So this was before
Speaker 1: you took the megabus. Correct, he came up, We hang out.
Speaker 1: There's a big issue with managers. You always need an
Speaker 1: act that wants it as much as the manager wants.
Speaker 1: And so how did you pick up? And where was
Speaker 1: he at in terms of his desire? U? The kid
Speaker 1: is is the most ambitious kid I've ever met in
Speaker 1: my life. To this day, he still is. And and
Speaker 1: I think that's that's common from any successful artist. Um.
Speaker 1: You you have to really because it's it's hard as hell. Right,
Speaker 1: looking back at my very short eight years, it is
Speaker 1: hard as hell. Okay, so he comes to New York.
Speaker 1: How do you close them? Listen. I wasn't trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, be be forced for the aggress I was like, man,
Speaker 1: let's just let's let's work together and if I if
Speaker 1: you like me. I was literally that simple. If you
Speaker 1: like me and you know you you like what I'm
Speaker 1: doing for you, let's work together. And if not, all good.
Speaker 1: It was that simple, right, um. And we spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time before he had met on the phone together.
Speaker 1: We speak pretty often. I tell him kind of some
Speaker 1: of the ideas I had. We talked about his music
Speaker 1: a lot. Um. I was he was fortunate enough to
Speaker 1: kind of I guess once I gained his trust to
Speaker 1: let me in his his creative world, I guess, um.
Speaker 1: And he came up. I kind of took him around
Speaker 1: for the day and they went back they I think
Speaker 1: they did the megabus or they did. One of his
Speaker 1: friends drove up and they all packed in a car
Speaker 1: and came up very shortly after. I was a qual
Speaker 1: come down and see you. At the time, he was
Speaker 1: living in his best friend's basement, to this day. His
Speaker 1: best friend is Lenny. His name is called Big Lembo.
Speaker 1: Um he met him, I guess he logic was at
Speaker 1: a I believe this is I don't want to get
Speaker 1: the story wrong. He had opened up for somebody at
Speaker 1: some up and coming show and Lenny saw him and
Speaker 1: they started talking after the show, and Lodge just kind
Speaker 1: of working the dead in jobs. At the time. He
Speaker 1: was living with his I guess his stepmother, godmother Mary Joe,
Speaker 1: whatever you wanna call her. Um. His relationship with with
Speaker 1: both his parents at the time weren't great, so he
Speaker 1: wasn't really living with either one of them, and was logic,
Speaker 1: at this point, we're the same age or he's probably
Speaker 1: nineteen or twenty. I was nine, probably twenty, and he
Speaker 1: was working, Yeah, he was. He was just working dead
Speaker 1: in jobs and developed a relationship with Lenny, and I
Speaker 1: guess he was like, Lenny, could if you let me
Speaker 1: live there, give me one year. Give me one year
Speaker 1: to see if this thing works out. I want to
Speaker 1: go all in. I don't want to go to work
Speaker 1: and take having anything to take my time away. I
Speaker 1: want to work on music every day all day. Lenny
Speaker 1: was kind enough, He's like dude come living my basement,
Speaker 1: so at the time he was living in Lenny's basement.
Speaker 1: I went down there and it was probably a little
Speaker 1: bit less than a twenty four hour trip. We didn't
Speaker 1: we didn't really sleep. We kind of just hung the
Speaker 1: whole night and talked UM and I left early the
Speaker 1: next morning. Were they going to shoot video in New York?
Speaker 1: In New York and they ran around New York video.
Speaker 1: I thought the video was in Maryland. No, no no, no,
Speaker 1: they ran around a shot. I just went down to
Speaker 1: Maryland after I met him in New York to continue
Speaker 1: building a relationship, and I wanted to see, you know,
Speaker 1: where he comes from. So I went down there. Was
Speaker 1: the first time I went to ended up going down
Speaker 1: there many times, but that was the first time I
Speaker 1: jumped on a mega bus and we kind of hung
Speaker 1: you know, all night and got to know each other better. UM,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that was okay. So what's the next step? UM,
Speaker 1: I think we were working together. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we ever even had a real conversation at the point
Speaker 1: of things, you know, it started just going well, right.
Speaker 1: I think we we um were like minded. We we
Speaker 1: we love working hard and and UM, I think we
Speaker 1: just started working together. So we're putting together his first
Speaker 1: mixtape at the time. Um it was called Young Sinatra,
Speaker 1: which is like his alter ego as as a rapper,
Speaker 1: and um, we put that together, we put it out,
Speaker 1: and I would do my thing, right. I think I
Speaker 1: had my little niche of understanding the internet at the
Speaker 1: time and the music business again, uh, probably going towards now,
Speaker 1: very the recorded music business was in a very weird spot, right, Um,
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I guess my ignorance at the time
Speaker 1: was beneficial because I didn't understand really the that side
Speaker 1: of the business. Um, I understood how to try and
Speaker 1: break through. And and my I guess philosophy or thesis
Speaker 1: was building a fan base. It was always long term
Speaker 1: thinking at the time, and so was his right. And
Speaker 1: you have to be willing to make that. I think
Speaker 1: if you constantly try to do things for force small
Speaker 1: gains or short term wins, you ended up not really
Speaker 1: gonna win long term. So it was always about building
Speaker 1: a fan base, building a base, building a base. That
Speaker 1: was our thing. Now with the previous actually worked, the blogs,
Speaker 1: How did you do it with logic? Same thing, same thing.
Speaker 1: And I think with those acts I I ended up
Speaker 1: just developing great relationships with a lot of these blogs
Speaker 1: and websites and even understanding that world even better and
Speaker 1: doing certain things to cut through and different you know,
Speaker 1: social media outlets at the time, understanding their algorithms and
Speaker 1: where I could post things, at what time of the day,
Speaker 1: when I reached the most people. You know, I think
Speaker 1: I can be a big nerd with that kind of stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And it just helped me understand how to reach more people,
Speaker 1: and I would focus on that, and that's what we
Speaker 1: really do. So at the time, our our our thing
Speaker 1: was free music, right and even to this day you
Speaker 1: set at to people, it's kind of it's kind of crazy, um.
Speaker 1: And I think we did that because we were thinking
Speaker 1: long term. Right, if we put out quality music and
Speaker 1: and great content to reach people, and you do it consistently,
Speaker 1: you're probably gonna win in the end, right and and
Speaker 1: and it was always a long term mentality. We didn't
Speaker 1: want anything tomorrow, um. And I think that looking back
Speaker 1: was was huge that we both had the same mindset. Okay,
Speaker 1: at the time, you're trying to build awareness, but how
Speaker 1: do you ultimately know who your fans are at that point?
Speaker 1: That's a good question. Because that's difficult and a lot
Speaker 1: of that we didn't have that detailed data, right, I
Speaker 1: think that you can get today. Um it was so
Speaker 1: I use what was huge at the time was YouTube, right,
Speaker 1: Like I said, I think that was the only music
Speaker 1: streaming service in in in in the world at the time.
Speaker 1: We're at least in in the US. And so what
Speaker 1: we would do we'd go through the project, him and
Speaker 1: I would have conversations and we'd want to shoot four
Speaker 1: or five music videos for just one project. And the
Speaker 1: project may have fifteen songs on it, right at least
Speaker 1: even be edited or just one take him walking in
Speaker 1: his so to speak, point and shoot is what we
Speaker 1: called it, him walking in his hoodie, no budget. What
Speaker 1: we would do we we found a young director and
Speaker 1: we kind of bargain with them where we were building
Speaker 1: out right the YouTube channel and we're getting a certain
Speaker 1: amount of views at the time. I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you because we didn't have money, if you work
Speaker 1: with us, I'll put your logo at the front of
Speaker 1: the video. So that's how I kind of we we
Speaker 1: kind of did it that way. Embartered a little bit
Speaker 1: um and we traded attention for a lot of stuff right,
Speaker 1: So we did that. We'd work with a young director
Speaker 1: at the time who was super talented, ambitious, hustler. Um
Speaker 1: and we point shooting. The whole thing of doing four
Speaker 1: to five music videos a project was because identified, well,
Speaker 1: YouTube is how you reach people. So let's pick the
Speaker 1: strongest singles, right is what we were doing really, um,
Speaker 1: and let's highlight those still the same thing to this day.
Speaker 1: And a single as a gateway drug to dive in
Speaker 1: deeper and and and fall in love with the artist hopefully.
Speaker 1: How do you know that you're getting traction or are
Speaker 1: you getting views? Right at the time was how we know.
Speaker 1: And then then what we try to do is convert
Speaker 1: that into social media follows. Whether we're building his Twitter
Speaker 1: at the time, it's probably on the Twitter and Facebook.
Speaker 1: At the Instagram didn't exist. There wasn't much else, so
Speaker 1: Snapchat certainly didn't exist. Um and yeah, try and convert
Speaker 1: it into a real fans who would stay. Okay, so
Speaker 1: he does his first mixtape and what's the step after that?
Speaker 1: Do another one? It was consistency. Okay, how many mixtapes
Speaker 1: we did four together before we put on an album?
Speaker 1: Four free projects right, which which and I remember then
Speaker 1: and I'm probably jumping around a bit, starting to have
Speaker 1: meetings at at labels and record companies, and the conversation
Speaker 1: around few free music was was odd. I think my
Speaker 1: perspective at the time differed from a lot of other
Speaker 1: people because I would always say I would it was contradiction.
Speaker 1: I would say, you absolutely can monetize free music, right,
Speaker 1: And what that was is you just have to think
Speaker 1: long term, and if you do it the right way
Speaker 1: and build a base, you're gonna tour, You're gonna sell merch.
Speaker 1: We become a brand. That was our goal, um, and
Speaker 1: I think I think we did a pretty good job
Speaker 1: at that. But what came first touring or label meeting.
Speaker 1: Probably at the same time, I think, okay, so when
Speaker 1: do you decide let's literally put the act on. We
Speaker 1: we probably put out two projects maybe yeah, again it's
Speaker 1: going back to a little blurb two projects. At the time,
Speaker 1: it was all intuition. It was all gut, right, you
Speaker 1: start building the following you can and and a lot
Speaker 1: of things we would do is all about the fans.
Speaker 1: We would have conversations about hey, you stream, remember you
Speaker 1: stream at the time, Yeah, that was you know on Twitter,
Speaker 1: constantly go on you streams, just do Q and as
Speaker 1: with the fans for two three hours a day, right
Speaker 1: when he wasn't working on music show the process. Hey,
Speaker 1: you stream you recording a song? How many people would
Speaker 1: tune in? I don't know. Eight hundreds? Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a lot, um because I just understood that attention was
Speaker 1: very valuable and even if it's a five people, it
Speaker 1: goes a long way. So we do that. And so
Speaker 1: to answer your question, how do we know when guatur
Speaker 1: straight intuition, straight gut. At the time we're doing labels,
Speaker 1: he would jump on a megabus, come up to me,
Speaker 1: sleep at my parents house. He crashed on the floor
Speaker 1: in my room. Um. And then we jump on the
Speaker 1: Long Island railroad and going to Penn Station and have
Speaker 1: label meetings. And okay, just to be very clear, this
Speaker 1: is before or after you've gone on the road. Before okay,
Speaker 1: you would set up a meeting or you would knock
Speaker 1: on the door and sit in the waiting. So just
Speaker 1: as we're creating, you know, and building this fan base
Speaker 1: online it you know, there's an r S out there
Speaker 1: and there's people who pay attention. Just like I was
Speaker 1: in the blog world, they were as well, and they
Speaker 1: reach out and say, hey, we're interested. We love to
Speaker 1: have a conversation, UM, and we would take meetings and
Speaker 1: get to know people and UM try to learn how
Speaker 1: that world worked a little bit. So how would the
Speaker 1: meetings end? Good to meet you, We'll we'll we'll get
Speaker 1: back to you. We'll think on it. And did you
Speaker 1: then pester them or did they disappear they come back?
Speaker 1: I didn't pester anybody. I think logic and I were
Speaker 1: having conversations at the time. I said, we'll do it
Speaker 1: when it feels right. If it feels right, if it doesn't,
Speaker 1: we don't do it. And you know, having that trust
Speaker 1: in what you're doing, I think is important. We would
Speaker 1: turn down deals at the time and you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so a little slower you're going for all these A
Speaker 1: and R meetings. How many do you think you took
Speaker 1: before you went on the road? A lot. I think
Speaker 1: we probably took definitely met with every major at some point,
Speaker 1: whether some were pre touring somewhere, and all of those acts,
Speaker 1: all those companies reached out to you. You didn't reach
Speaker 1: out to them. Correct. Did you have a lawyer at
Speaker 1: the time, I did, which again was very still working
Speaker 1: with him to this day. He represents Logics to this day.
Speaker 1: Was very serendipitous as well. Again, as I had no
Speaker 1: right relationship in the business, right I needed a management
Speaker 1: contract and I didn't know any entertainment lawyers. I didn't
Speaker 1: know anybody. So my my closest connection to the music
Speaker 1: business was at one of my one of my best
Speaker 1: friends dads worked in Manhattan. That was my connection. I
Speaker 1: literally called my buddy. I said, hey, dude, cause you
Speaker 1: ask your dad if he knows any entertainment lawyers. He said, sure,
Speaker 1: call his dad. Again serendipity. Look, he's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: think in he had an office down in Soho And
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, I think and he's an accountant. I
Speaker 1: think an entertainment attorney moved into the building this week.
Speaker 1: Let me grab the super and get his card for you.
Speaker 1: That night, I drove to my buddy's house grab his card.
Speaker 1: I called the lawyer that was eight years ago, and
Speaker 1: it's the same lawyer, same one. So I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm you know, I'm working with this artist. I kind
Speaker 1: of need management contract and I had to pay for
Speaker 1: the management and that same kid, my buddy actually lent
Speaker 1: me the money too, probably and how old. Is the
Speaker 1: lawyer is your contemporary or older? He's older now, he's
Speaker 1: probably closer. I didn't even want to say his age,
Speaker 1: but yeah, he's he's older than me. He's much almost
Speaker 1: double my age. So did your lawyer help get you
Speaker 1: meetings or you're just fielding emails? Just fielding emails? That
Speaker 1: was my that was my you know thesis at the time,
Speaker 1: it'll come to us if we're doing if we're doing
Speaker 1: it right, and we're building an audience, and it's going
Speaker 1: to come to us. And that's exactly what happened. And
Speaker 1: at this point you're all in on logic. You don't
Speaker 1: have any other acts. Correct, It was all in on
Speaker 1: logic at this time. And then shortly after I met
Speaker 1: John Billion, who's my second client that that I'm working with.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this week's edition of the Bob
Speaker 1: Left Sets podcast. If you want to see photos and
Speaker 1: videos of my guests and the tune In studios here
Speaker 1: in Venice, California, check out at tune In on Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Instagram, and now more with president of Visionary Music
Speaker 1: Group Chris Rue. So you're with logic, how do you
Speaker 1: decide to put it on the road? So we it
Speaker 1: was it was intuition, it was goud. Obviously, we're feeling
Speaker 1: things out, and I think I felt I was like, listen,
Speaker 1: I think at this point, as I do, we could
Speaker 1: probably tour. I think there's thirty markets at a minimum
Speaker 1: in this country where we can do three tickets, right,
Speaker 1: three three or four hundred tickets. And again you're going
Speaker 1: straight off intuition. I didn't have a lot of What
Speaker 1: it was was kind of feeling things out with your
Speaker 1: gut and the same way we take meetings, right, if
Speaker 1: something feels right, we'll entertain. If it doesn't, we won't.
Speaker 1: And you know, so I think we decided said, let's
Speaker 1: we're gonna do it. We're gonna put up a tour.
Speaker 1: And you need capital, you need money to do that.
Speaker 1: So I think I was like, listen, what if we
Speaker 1: signed a deal, because at this point, there was you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of interests, a lot of offers. So what
Speaker 1: if we signed a deal and used that advanced money
Speaker 1: to fund our tour? And I think that's what we
Speaker 1: agreed to do. We signed with def JAM at the time,
Speaker 1: this is how long after your initial meeting with Logic
Speaker 1: less than a year, a little bit less than a year.
Speaker 1: So this is this is very very early, UM, and
Speaker 1: we decided on def JAM. It felt right. We again,
Speaker 1: after all the meetings everything, it just just in our
Speaker 1: guts felt the best. Um. We did the deal. I remember,
Speaker 1: I was, I was still in college. I was. I
Speaker 1: remember the weird juxtaposition. I was studying for finals on
Speaker 1: on my desk in my room. And then I also
Speaker 1: had a record contract with notes from his lawyer that
Speaker 1: I was trying to go through and decipher at the
Speaker 1: same time. Um, we signed and and use the money,
Speaker 1: and we toured it and I told you have to
Speaker 1: I said, please, we don't want to. We don't want
Speaker 1: to announce anything. We wanted hands off. UM. And that's
Speaker 1: what we did. We didn't. I don't think we announced
Speaker 1: the deal for another year and a half after that.
Speaker 1: Do you remember how much money they gave you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I do. Okay, you're not gonna tell me. But was
Speaker 1: there any money to put in your pocket after the tour?
Speaker 1: Very little? Very little? Okay. So how do you get
Speaker 1: an agent? Yeah? We had an agent at the time.
Speaker 1: There's a little boutique agency, UM called New Agency that
Speaker 1: would they specialized. They were really smart and yes, and
Speaker 1: then Matt Adler is who we were working with, still
Speaker 1: a good friend of mine today. I was actually with
Speaker 1: him the other day. Um we. They specialized in kind
Speaker 1: of working with up and coming artists, right and they
Speaker 1: scour the blog world the same thing I was doing.
Speaker 1: They reach out and find built a relationship with them.
Speaker 1: Started working with Matt Adler, and we went through and
Speaker 1: we put a tour together and we funded it with
Speaker 1: the advanced money. And it was a lot of it. Man, Like,
Speaker 1: I had no clue what I was doing. It was
Speaker 1: figuring it out as we went. Um we we. We
Speaker 1: rented a minivan and a Nissan Ultima from Enterprise rent
Speaker 1: a Car. I was doing the paperwork on that and
Speaker 1: it was specifically said, you cannot leave the state of
Speaker 1: New York. And I was like, listen, if you know
Speaker 1: we're going to California and we're coming back, they'll never
Speaker 1: know we left. And you know, I'm sure at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, going through easy passes all through and tolls
Speaker 1: throughout the country, we had our license plate snapped many times.
Speaker 1: But uh, yes, we did that. We rented a minivan
Speaker 1: and and and uh Nissan Altima. We there was a
Speaker 1: company in Rochester that I reached out to. I was
Speaker 1: looking for independent merch companies because they were the cheapest. Again,
Speaker 1: we paid for own merch. We didn't have a um
Speaker 1: E merch they all the time. Reached out to them.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, and these are numbers that I'm probably
Speaker 1: making up in my head. How okay, how many T
Speaker 1: shirts do we have? Do we need? And um would
Speaker 1: carry them around and garbage bags and we didn't really
Speaker 1: have that great of a system. It was after the
Speaker 1: show run over the merch table, because all kids would
Speaker 1: come by. I'd be I'd be selling merch and shoving
Speaker 1: the money in our pocket, then sitting down and going
Speaker 1: through and counting it, putting in Manila and of so
Speaker 1: that's that was my accounting system was Manila envelopes. I
Speaker 1: went through before the tour and I wrote, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: doing thirty cities. I think it was at the time.
Speaker 1: I'd write the city, right, and I have an open
Speaker 1: it would be an empty envelope. We'd settle and it
Speaker 1: was all cash at the time because we've got zero
Speaker 1: guarantees right, Logic had no tour history. Nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: pay us, so we did door deals and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: if you do well, you can make good money. And
Speaker 1: we did. And I take the I'd settle with the promoter,
Speaker 1: and I take the cash, and I put in the
Speaker 1: envelope and I, you know, close it and lick it
Speaker 1: closed like it and I'd write, Okay, Denver, Colorado, two
Speaker 1: thousand four dollars right. And if somebody needed twenty bucks
Speaker 1: for food, weed, whatever it was, you have to open
Speaker 1: it minus twenty and all on a sharp you had
Speaker 1: to write it. That was. That was the accounting system.
Speaker 1: And you know, again did a lot of stupid things,
Speaker 1: but you've learned as you go. We carry the backpack around.
Speaker 1: We carry all the Manila envelopes with cash in one backpack,
Speaker 1: leave it unattended in in the in the green room,
Speaker 1: and walk around the venue just the backpacks in there.
Speaker 1: Probably at one point probably had forty or five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars cash in it. Um. Yeah, it's very silly. So
Speaker 1: how did you get people to come to the show?
Speaker 1: That was it? Using his socials? Hey, we announced the tour,
Speaker 1: oh man, I mean we promoted the ship out of
Speaker 1: it because you had to. Um, we announced the tour.
Speaker 1: We did a tour poster with the city's We're coming
Speaker 1: here and constantly promoted it on his social media. Um,
Speaker 1: the twitted really well. I think we probably sold out.
Speaker 1: And how many people did you? We did v I
Speaker 1: P as well? People were paying for v I P,
Speaker 1: which is like, this is crazy just to meet him,
Speaker 1: take a photo and snake his hand. How much was
Speaker 1: v I P? Man, I don't know. Everything was cheap.
Speaker 1: We were selling tickets with twelve dollars to the show
Speaker 1: general mission, so I'm sure VP was probably twenty five bucks.
Speaker 1: And and again we didn't care about the money. It
Speaker 1: was listen, I want to make a statement. We want
Speaker 1: to sell it. Build a story. That was part of it.
Speaker 1: We didn't like. It was literally, yeah, we don't care
Speaker 1: if we make money. I remember having conversations with the
Speaker 1: agent saying, what's the cheapest we could sell tickets for
Speaker 1: Let's do that. That was it? Okay? How many people
Speaker 1: were part of your entourage? Very small at the time,
Speaker 1: probably five for six, right, we had me. I did
Speaker 1: a little bit of it, and I was like this,
Speaker 1: I'm not I can't do this whole thing. I gotta
Speaker 1: you know, it's a little It was a lot for
Speaker 1: me because I had to work and I get stressed
Speaker 1: out that you know, we're driving the middle and I
Speaker 1: were all over the place. Um, probably five or six people. Right.
Speaker 1: A video guy that the director were working with came
Speaker 1: on the road film content that was wall was about right.
Speaker 1: We we put out things at the time they were
Speaker 1: called just Another Days, um episodes, and what they were
Speaker 1: was just behind the scenes of him on the road
Speaker 1: and what his life was like and what and the
Speaker 1: performance was what he would wrap the background track. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: I was, yes, UM for one of my early clients,
Speaker 1: I was a DJ because I did I just what
Speaker 1: I did, right, So I when I say DJ, I
Speaker 1: had my laptop and I had iTunes and it was
Speaker 1: the instrumental and I used the space bar to play
Speaker 1: and stop. Um. So it was it was a lot
Speaker 1: of that. Uh. And yeah it was simple as as
Speaker 1: as simple as we can make it. And so you
Speaker 1: come back from the tour, it was success. Everybody's worn
Speaker 1: out and where do you go from there? Another mixtape?
Speaker 1: Keep going, def jam hands off please? Okay? Then after
Speaker 1: the mixtape, I think we did too. I think we did.
Speaker 1: We did one more after we signed, which the concept
Speaker 1: of that to def jam was was ludicrous, right, hands off,
Speaker 1: you just gave us a nice advanced check. We're we're
Speaker 1: doing another mixtape that we're gonna put out for free.
Speaker 1: Um and we did that. We built it even bigger
Speaker 1: because I was like, you know what, when we do
Speaker 1: his debut album, I wanted to be a big thing,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to sell a hundred thousand albums first week,
Speaker 1: and I knew we could do it. So that was
Speaker 1: the goal. Okay, So when did the first album come
Speaker 1: out two thousand four or how many tours had there
Speaker 1: been at that point? Uh? We had sold and I
Speaker 1: remember because there was things that we'd use to write
Speaker 1: to grab people's attention as part of the story. We
Speaker 1: had sold a hundred and fifty thousand tickets worldwide at
Speaker 1: that point without without selling a single song. Yes, so
Speaker 1: you also toured toward Europe. Wow. Okay, so you finally
Speaker 1: put out the first album. You want to sell a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand comblems? Correct? You told me that the label
Speaker 1: didn't agree or believe you. Correct? And let me let
Speaker 1: me preface this with I love Deaf Jam to death.
Speaker 1: They are we would not be here without them. There
Speaker 1: phenomenal partner and and a lot of looking back was
Speaker 1: a lot was my fault. Um. I felt, I can say, hey,
Speaker 1: hands off, we'll call you in a year when we're ready. Um,
Speaker 1: that's a mistake. You want to keep them engaged, you
Speaker 1: want to keep them motivated, you want them to follow
Speaker 1: the story. I didn't do any of that. UM. I
Speaker 1: was very much like, listen, we're doing this ourselves. We
Speaker 1: got it, this independent mentality. Um. And then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I felt, okay, it's time to hand in
Speaker 1: our debut album. Let's go. Mistake. UM. They we had
Speaker 1: no in their mind, no data or analytics to show
Speaker 1: that we could sell hundred thousand albums. My thing was,
Speaker 1: and I remember talking to the head of sales at
Speaker 1: the time, My thing was, Dude, we sold a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand tickets worldwide, and tickets are more expensive
Speaker 1: than what we're selling this album for. We did probably
Speaker 1: at that point a couple of hundred thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: merch sales. UM, like, listen, if they're spending money like
Speaker 1: that on him and his brand is to me, seeing
Speaker 1: an artist live is the ultimate test to a base.
Speaker 1: I think it is the It is the most important
Speaker 1: barometer of where an artist is at. Can you sell
Speaker 1: tickets and if so, how many can you sell? It
Speaker 1: is the ultimate thing, right, We're all living in our
Speaker 1: lives with all distractions and to go to a show,
Speaker 1: to go to a live show, that what what it
Speaker 1: takes behind that if you really break down a ticket sale,
Speaker 1: whether you know you're an older demo fan base, those parents,
Speaker 1: the parents are getting babysitters, they might be taking off work,
Speaker 1: they may be tired at work the next day because
Speaker 1: they were out later the trains, they have to take
Speaker 1: their the transportation, whatever, and spending their hard earned dollars
Speaker 1: on it. Um so so so that to me was
Speaker 1: the most it still is the most important thing. Can
Speaker 1: you sell tickets? Okay? So you disappear for you you
Speaker 1: come back so that you can sell a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: albums and they say, no, you can't. There's nothing that
Speaker 1: we have that data that we look at to show
Speaker 1: us that you can sell a hundred thousand albums. And
Speaker 1: at the time physical physical album sales were still very important,
Speaker 1: not very important and important. Um and that game is expensive, right.
Speaker 1: Whatever you don't sell in physical retail, you have to
Speaker 1: buy back. So they try to be as exact as
Speaker 1: they possibly can. At the time, I'm in there. I'm
Speaker 1: twenty years old, kicking and screaming that we're gonna saw
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand records the first week, which is an
Speaker 1: incredibly audacious number. We didn't have any sales history. We
Speaker 1: hadn't sold a song, so they're looking at me like
Speaker 1: I had two heads, um and it was a battle.
Speaker 1: It was it was It was comedy that they ultimately
Speaker 1: make and what happened not a lot. They that if
Speaker 1: we if in again, and they might disagree. I don't
Speaker 1: know if if we had been shipped properly, he would
Speaker 1: have sold well over a hundred thousand allums. We sold
Speaker 1: seventy five thousand albums. I think they only had printed
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen thousand physical copies in the United States. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's the first week you did. And then what
Speaker 1: did they say? You know, what was great about it
Speaker 1: is and where our relationship really grew. I think they
Speaker 1: were they were not afraid to say, listen, we didn't
Speaker 1: understand this right. And again, looking back, it was a
Speaker 1: very disruptive time in the business. Right you had people
Speaker 1: like Logic and artists like Logic that we're building this
Speaker 1: thing on the internet didn't exist in the history of
Speaker 1: music there nothing like that existed, and you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't blame them, I don't. It was a very
Speaker 1: weird thing to look back at and what we were doing,
Speaker 1: what a handful of artists were doing. So you sell
Speaker 1: seventy thousand albums, and what's the march forward from there?
Speaker 1: Keep buildings, let's move let's move to uh, let's move
Speaker 1: to album number two. It was consistency. Let's tour off
Speaker 1: it first of all, right, so first your tour and
Speaker 1: what kind of buildings are you doing? Then we were
Speaker 1: doing Man, it gets a little blurry at this point,
Speaker 1: I think we had probably sold in New York. I
Speaker 1: think we're doing twelve tickets probably like an Irving Plaza
Speaker 1: before before the album came out. Um, maybe even more
Speaker 1: than that, almost two thousand tickets before them came out.
Speaker 1: So at that point, I'm probably doing three thousand cap
Speaker 1: rooms majority of the major cities. Um, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of tickets. Yeah, because we had built it early, we started.
Speaker 1: You know what's crazy is you know where logics at from.
Speaker 1: He's gonna be doing arenas this summer sum arenas. We
Speaker 1: started at three d cap rooms, So it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of crazy and we didn't skip a step. I think
Speaker 1: that was very important. Um, it was it was we
Speaker 1: we sell a room or tour and we'd scale what's
Speaker 1: the next what's the next jump after that? Okay, what's
Speaker 1: the next jump after that? And we did it, you know,
Speaker 1: step by step. So how long until the second album?
Speaker 1: A year? I think we we try to stay consistent
Speaker 1: almost a year in between, right, and in between your
Speaker 1: working the first record, your tours? What are the goals
Speaker 1: for the second record? Well over a hundred thousand? Um,
Speaker 1: what do we do? I don't even know we did? Okay?
Speaker 1: In this story? Is it just keep going up? We
Speaker 1: Are there any disappointments? Um, there's always disappointments. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're building something thing and you're in it,
Speaker 1: it takes a while to to build, right. I think
Speaker 1: you have to be focused and you know, really stay
Speaker 1: focused on what the end goal is. And if you
Speaker 1: do that, I think you can get through a lot
Speaker 1: of the bumps in the road. I'll call it. Now
Speaker 1: as you're gaining traction, he's selling these number of records,
Speaker 1: you're wet behind the years. Anybody come along and try
Speaker 1: to steal your act? I'm sure, not that I know of,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure, I'm sure, and I think that's where
Speaker 1: it's important finding you know, clients are artists that that
Speaker 1: you can trust and work with, I think, and again
Speaker 1: that's all intuition for me, right, you know, my two
Speaker 1: guys are their family to me at this point, Logic
Speaker 1: and John Belling their family. Just I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: at Logic's wedding, I was the best man. It's a family.
Speaker 1: So the second album comes out in two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: you say, yeah, I think it was okay, and what
Speaker 1: happens after I'm sorry, yeah, I was fifteen was incredible
Speaker 1: to story was the name of the OA comes out
Speaker 1: and it's continuing to build. It's continuing to build. We
Speaker 1: grow everything. We our sales goals at the time whatever
Speaker 1: they were. Um, we sold a lot of albums. I
Speaker 1: think we ended up having it was top five debut,
Speaker 1: uh maybe the number one hip hop and we ended
Speaker 1: up getting a number two or three on top two.
Speaker 1: Um scale touring, go bigger. We did that. My only
Speaker 1: goal going to an album, right, and it was from
Speaker 1: day one, was was double the fan base, double the touring.
Speaker 1: It's all I cared about to this day. That's all
Speaker 1: I care about because if you do that, everything that's
Speaker 1: gonna take care of yourself. And at this point in time,
Speaker 1: after the second album comes out and he's going on
Speaker 1: the road, are you putting any money in your pocket?
Speaker 1: I'm sure at that point, yeah, right. I think as
Speaker 1: it got bigger, I think we all were. That was
Speaker 1: you know, that was the biggest revenue for us. Was
Speaker 1: was live, live shows, touring, Okay, and so it still is.
Speaker 1: Go through the second second album cycle, which leaves us
Speaker 1: where yeah, maybe maybe four thousand cab rooms at that
Speaker 1: point we did again, double the fan base, double the touring.
Speaker 1: We did it um. And then going into going into
Speaker 1: his his third album, same goal, same thing. It was
Speaker 1: consistency and momentum. We didn't want to take a lot
Speaker 1: of time off. I think that was also looking and
Speaker 1: and and that's all I do. I just try to
Speaker 1: understand the current state of the music business and where
Speaker 1: things are at, where people's attentions are. And again, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't have six hours, but you go in the
Speaker 1: details of it, um, all the different things that happened
Speaker 1: throughout this that journey so far, going into two albums,
Speaker 1: right from four mix tapes of two albums. You know,
Speaker 1: you have different forms of social media coming out. Instagram
Speaker 1: popped out, Snapchat popped out, and it was identifying those things, okay,
Speaker 1: like logics in my in my humble opinion, and I
Speaker 1: think Snapchat had told usus he's one of the first
Speaker 1: artists ever on on Snapchat and was building a Snapchat
Speaker 1: following was because I was watching what young kids were using.
Speaker 1: I'd watched my little sister, what are you what are
Speaker 1: you using? What is that right? And try and understand
Speaker 1: and figure it out. And Okay, if that's where attention is,
Speaker 1: that's where I want my artist to be. And now
Speaker 1: you're at the third album, correct, So how does that
Speaker 1: album come together? Um? Really? Well? Uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: think he was more confident and and um, he wanted
Speaker 1: to make an album that was personal to him. I
Speaker 1: think he's always done that. I think it's been at
Speaker 1: the foundation of how he writes music. UM, and talk
Speaker 1: about some of the struggles and personal stuff that he
Speaker 1: was dealing with, whether that's you know, anxiety at the time.
Speaker 1: I think was was was um problematic in his life,
Speaker 1: So he made an album about that. It was about
Speaker 1: being human. I think was was the core of it, okay,
Speaker 1: and these albums are made where this one last one.
Speaker 1: At this point he had built a studio in his
Speaker 1: in his house, he had a guesthouse, UM and he
Speaker 1: wanted to convert the basement of the guesthouse into a studio,
Speaker 1: which he did that. He made almost this entire last
Speaker 1: album and in that and that's that's the producer. He
Speaker 1: has an in house guy that he's been using since
Speaker 1: the mixtape days. He met at the University of Maryland
Speaker 1: at a beat battle. The kid's name is six, incredibly talented.
Speaker 1: We were working with him from Mixed Hip one so
Speaker 1: two thousands, so there's no outside forces, No big names
Speaker 1: come in, very little, I think throughout the time we
Speaker 1: were doing sessions and figuring it out, and it's who
Speaker 1: you really vibe with, and you have to understand each
Speaker 1: other's brains creatively, and that's a difficult thing to do
Speaker 1: with a lot of people. UM and Logic has been
Speaker 1: with Six. I think he executive produced this last album.
Speaker 1: Um And does a lot with him. We'd bring in
Speaker 1: different musicians and instrument players and things like that that
Speaker 1: Logic met throughout the time. I think No Idea was
Speaker 1: very kind. Um he signed us when he was at
Speaker 1: def Jam to to open his world to us. So
Speaker 1: Logic met a lot of people throughout that process too
Speaker 1: that he still works with. So how does one come together? Um,
Speaker 1: one eight hundred comes together in a very natural way.
Speaker 1: He just he made the song. He sent it to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and I was like, ship, this is special right. Um.
Speaker 1: At the time, he didn't think anything of it. He
Speaker 1: just made the song, sent it to me. And it
Speaker 1: was as as the processs how he works, he'll if
Speaker 1: not there in the studio and he'll just send me
Speaker 1: music as it comes to go. Hey made this last night,
Speaker 1: call me right that simple and that was one of
Speaker 1: the tracks that he made. And he said call me,
Speaker 1: but did you know I did? He'll tell you I did.
Speaker 1: I did. Okay, I'm gonna this is really gonna date me.
Speaker 1: But I was talking to Al Cooper had a record
Speaker 1: come to gold Sounds of the South, and he signed
Speaker 1: Leonard Skinner the first album just come out with Freebird,
Speaker 1: and he got a call from I think it was
Speaker 1: Ronnie van ziand Jacksonville. Al was living in a leant
Speaker 1: at the time and he says, we have a new song.
Speaker 1: We gotta record and they came up and they recorded
Speaker 1: sweet Home Alabama. Okay, And the record didn't come out
Speaker 1: for a year. And I asked cal I go, did
Speaker 1: you know it was a hand? He goes it was
Speaker 1: sweet Home Alabama. So the question is, did you have
Speaker 1: that same feeling? Okay, this is the breakthrough track. This
Speaker 1: is gonna make the difference. I don't know if I
Speaker 1: looked at a breakthrough, I said, this is a big
Speaker 1: there's a big record. Um I did, and and it
Speaker 1: was a lot of It was kind of having conversations
Speaker 1: with him that to get him to agree with me, right,
Speaker 1: I don't think he he keme on it's this third album.
Speaker 1: He never had a hit record at that point. Um
Speaker 1: And you know, I was having conversations, but I think
Speaker 1: this could be this could be big. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: because of the song and and and there was there's
Speaker 1: no no brainer, right, um and and I think we
Speaker 1: wanted to be incredibly genuine about it, which was probably
Speaker 1: stacking the odds against us. The title of the song
Speaker 1: is is the Suicide Prevention Lifeline Phone Number? Which is
Speaker 1: very which is not typical. Right. You don't see songs
Speaker 1: that are um and and doing certain things like that
Speaker 1: one of the first standout lyrics in the first thirty
Speaker 1: seconds of the songs I Want to Die Today. I
Speaker 1: don't think Top forty radio particularly likes that, um. But
Speaker 1: it was one of the situations where you know, real
Speaker 1: genuine music, just one is what happened? Okay, So you
Speaker 1: go to the label and you do they immediately pick
Speaker 1: up on the track. Yeah. I think I identified it
Speaker 1: to them way later, right after we sent them all
Speaker 1: the music, because he probably made it in the middle
Speaker 1: of the album process, maybe towards the end of it,
Speaker 1: and then when we and all the music, it was
Speaker 1: just having conversations, Hey, this song. I think the song
Speaker 1: is special. I think the song is big um, and
Speaker 1: they believe as well. They they bought in and how
Speaker 1: did you get the guest vocal um from Alesia? And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think the song is a story, right,
Speaker 1: it's and we're talking about having a female vocalist and
Speaker 1: I love Leslie. I try to get him to work
Speaker 1: with Leslie in the past. So I threw that out
Speaker 1: there and he was like, yo, I love that. I
Speaker 1: think I reached out to put them in touch and
Speaker 1: they got in touch. And then at the time I
Speaker 1: think one of his friends had put him on to Khalid,
Speaker 1: and I think he reached out to Kaled and and
Speaker 1: that came together. I think they Kalid went to his
Speaker 1: house and cut it at his studio. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: go a little slower. The album comes out exactly when
Speaker 1: May fifth, And what is the first track they're working? Uh?
Speaker 1: Was one eight hundred that came out in April. It
Speaker 1: was the last song we dropped before the album came
Speaker 1: out a week prior. Okay, So what happens with the
Speaker 1: because it seems to me the track doesn't really blow
Speaker 1: up until the v M as correct, So what happened
Speaker 1: between the end of April and August? Um, we didn't
Speaker 1: impact immediately, right. We wanted the story. You wanted the
Speaker 1: number one album. That was a big goal for us.
Speaker 1: We wanted to sell over two hundred thousand albums. That
Speaker 1: was another big goal for US, UM, which isn't easy
Speaker 1: to do. UM and we we I think we two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand we sold the first week. UM.
Speaker 1: We're very happy about that he has number one album.
Speaker 1: UM is part of a story and it's telling that
Speaker 1: that story and make well the reason I asked irrelevant
Speaker 1: of your specific track. We live in an era where
Speaker 1: there's so much product that term that it's hard to
Speaker 1: get noticed. And it used to be if something you know,
Speaker 1: I used this track by Rag and bow Man Human
Speaker 1: it was number one all over the world except in America. Okay,
Speaker 1: the track didn't change, but it didn't make it in America.
Speaker 1: So prior to one could say in the Internet, if
Speaker 1: something was phenomenal, creed would rise to the top. I
Speaker 1: don't believe that anymore. There's just too many things out there.
Speaker 1: So you have a track that is a stone cold smash,
Speaker 1: what is the process of trying to have it get noticed?
Speaker 1: Hacking culture, I think you have to do things to
Speaker 1: cut through and to stand out. Um, I agree, I
Speaker 1: think there is there is a lot of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: over saturation today. I think there's a somebody said this
Speaker 1: so I can't I don't. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: completely accurate. There's a hundred and fifty thousand songs being
Speaker 1: uploaded Spotify in a seven day week, which is which
Speaker 1: is absurd absurd um. But again, it's how you look
Speaker 1: at things, right. I try to look at it from
Speaker 1: an optimistic perspective. There is what the consumption is at
Speaker 1: all time high, is how I look at things, um,
Speaker 1: And music consumption is at all time I think every
Speaker 1: day that goes by tomorrow will be the music consumption
Speaker 1: will probably be at the highest point in in the
Speaker 1: history of the world. UM. And I think as things
Speaker 1: continue to grow, that's going to continue to happen every
Speaker 1: day it's going to grow. UM. So it's looking at
Speaker 1: it from that perspective. And how do you cut through
Speaker 1: doing certain things like our VMA performance? Right? How do
Speaker 1: we let's go before that though, because the VMA was
Speaker 1: really a huge spike and turned it all, you know,
Speaker 1: or put poor gasoline on the fire. You have a track?
Speaker 1: Do you sit at deaf jam and say what playlists
Speaker 1: are we gonna get on? How we gonna work this? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's that's absolutely part of it. I
Speaker 1: think playlists is essential. Again, it's where the attention is.
Speaker 1: So having relationships with the digital the DSPs, Apple and
Speaker 1: Spotify and and you know, making sure they're engaged and
Speaker 1: they understand there's records coming. And now do you personally
Speaker 1: go to Spotify and Apple? I do. I have great
Speaker 1: relationship and you'll say, what we have new music and
Speaker 1: we have this particular song, is we're really excited about. Okay,
Speaker 1: since the song ended up being gigantic when you played
Speaker 1: it for them, did they understand it? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: they did. And it was also making sure they understood
Speaker 1: in the narrative of the entire album and how things
Speaker 1: fit in and and you know, we weren't just focused
Speaker 1: on one song during the initial rollout, I think post
Speaker 1: album or least, Yeah, let's let's move forward and let's
Speaker 1: focus on this one track because we think it's special
Speaker 1: UM and has potential, but it was for us. He's
Speaker 1: logics and album artists. He's always been that. UM Again,
Speaker 1: not having a hit and selling you know, two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand albums first week, you're an album artist.
Speaker 1: So what did they say that we're going to do
Speaker 1: for you? Um? You know, you get playlists, but there's
Speaker 1: more to that's about building the story and there's there's
Speaker 1: little things that you can do. I think looking back
Speaker 1: at that, UM, there was probably two things that stand
Speaker 1: out to me. And timing is very important as well.
Speaker 1: Right was the music video when we held onto it
Speaker 1: for a long time, UM, because we're looking, we're waiting
Speaker 1: for when we needed something to spike it, and that
Speaker 1: did absolutely phenomenal. I think the song had been working.
Speaker 1: And again you learn things as you go. I think
Speaker 1: music videos are more important, important for international markets than
Speaker 1: they are in new in the US. UM and we
Speaker 1: knew that. And why do you think, well, especially I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I can answer it. I think
Speaker 1: in Latin America, YouTube is everything. I think that's how
Speaker 1: they can see music. That's why videos do do really well.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at Desposito right very quickly became the
Speaker 1: most viewed music video in YouTube history. UM. I would
Speaker 1: attribute out a lot to the Latin American audience, you know,
Speaker 1: So we held onto that when we decided to release it.
Speaker 1: We had already been charting, right if you even focus
Speaker 1: on the Spotify chart, because that's something I look at
Speaker 1: every day. We had been charting on the Spotify chart
Speaker 1: in the US. This is the Spotify top correct, and
Speaker 1: had not globally. The twenty four hours after releasing a
Speaker 1: video we jumped onto the global charts. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: it's twenty four hours so and then to right now, Well, no,
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask a number of views, but really, Stratos,
Speaker 1: I'm church triple digit millions, but we don't remember what
Speaker 1: it was then, Okay, so how do you cook up
Speaker 1: the v M A performance conversation with logic? What's his inspiration?
Speaker 1: Where's your head at? Um? Let's go back one step.
Speaker 1: How do you actually get on the show? To begin with?
Speaker 1: I I credit um Steve Bartle's and gave to Sorio.
Speaker 1: So Steve was at the time the CEO of def
Speaker 1: Jam and gave still is he runs pr over there.
Speaker 1: They had great relationship with MTV and and hounded hounded
Speaker 1: them about it. Hounded them because the track wasn't a
Speaker 1: hit at the time, and at the time it was building.
Speaker 1: It was building, but they were just saying put them on.
Speaker 1: They weren't saying we're going to do this whole production number. Correct,
Speaker 1: we didn't even We just wanted to get an offer,
Speaker 1: perform and then we'll get into the details of that
Speaker 1: UM at the time. So then they did that, and
Speaker 1: they did an amazing job at getting us on the show,
Speaker 1: and then I I built a relationship with with them
Speaker 1: now that I have right and that's a beautiful part
Speaker 1: about management. UM. But yeah, I credit I credit Stephen
Speaker 1: Gabe with that. Okay, then how did you decide to
Speaker 1: have the ultimate performance you did. Logic was in Nashville
Speaker 1: rehearsing for tour. We had just got the offer, and I,
Speaker 1: you know, I I certainly wanted to make it special.
Speaker 1: I know Logic was going to too. I jumped on
Speaker 1: a plane, I went to Nashville to have dinner with
Speaker 1: him so we could talk out what what his inspiration
Speaker 1: was and put a performance together. And we did it
Speaker 1: at that dinner, I think, okay, and MTV immediately said five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we were fingers crossed going to remember and
Speaker 1: reason with the Nashville because like twenty four or forty
Speaker 1: eight hours later, I had a production call with them
Speaker 1: and we had to pitch what our idea was, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and it was very ambitious. We wanted
Speaker 1: we just wanted to be genuine as possible with this song.
Speaker 1: And and for those people, I can't believe that anybody
Speaker 1: wouldn't have seen it at this point in time, but
Speaker 1: assuming they haven't walked through what the performance was, it was,
Speaker 1: you know, we incorporated what what we're calling and we've
Speaker 1: learned as their cult survivors, right, either people who were
Speaker 1: were were have attempted suicide and and and survived or
Speaker 1: unfortunately lost loved ones to to to suicide. Um. We
Speaker 1: had them as extras. I guess you could say in
Speaker 1: the performance that we were being revealed at certain moments
Speaker 1: of the song. UM. And they had T shirts on
Speaker 1: right where where the messaging on them was you are
Speaker 1: not alone and letting them know, UM that that you know,
Speaker 1: if you're struggling with that and you're in a really
Speaker 1: low pleasure, not alone, and there's people you can talk to,
Speaker 1: and there's people, um that are here to help. And
Speaker 1: that's what the song is about. So we wanted them
Speaker 1: incorporated and to make sure they were real people, right, um,
Speaker 1: and not actors or anything is silly like that. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the also the special things
Speaker 1: about it was so at the time the speech that
Speaker 1: Logic gave at the at the end of the song
Speaker 1: was never part of It wasn't part of the conversation.
Speaker 1: I was in l A at the time because I
Speaker 1: had flown out here for the performance, and it was
Speaker 1: probably forty eight hours before Logic was on tour, so
Speaker 1: he basically we basically ended the tour. He flew in
Speaker 1: to do the performance. He got here three in the
Speaker 1: morning the night before and he called me probably four
Speaker 1: hours before. I was in a dinner out here, I
Speaker 1: remember it. I stepped out. I was like, what's going on?
Speaker 1: He goes, dude, I wrote something and I need to
Speaker 1: say it. And I said, okay, how long is it?
Speaker 1: I said a minute? You need to get me another minute.
Speaker 1: Now in television that's like an hour, it's like a day.
Speaker 1: And we're forty eight hours before the show and I
Speaker 1: call I called Bruce who who was putting on the show,
Speaker 1: and was like, I gotta make this happen, and and
Speaker 1: and and and pitched him on it, and I think
Speaker 1: pushed him into it and we we got an extra
Speaker 1: minute out of it. So before it happens, I know
Speaker 1: from talking to you before it happens, you knew this
Speaker 1: was gonna be a transformative moment. You hope, because what
Speaker 1: I see you to three days before, I probably saw
Speaker 1: you the same day or day after Logic called me. Um,
Speaker 1: I would hope. I would hope, right, And that's all
Speaker 1: you can do. You can you can you can bet
Speaker 1: on things and and think, but you know, I think
Speaker 1: the stars have to align and they did for for that.
Speaker 1: What was it like being at the actual performance? It
Speaker 1: was special. I was backstage, UM watching on a little
Speaker 1: TV UM, and I obviously heard the live audio and
Speaker 1: the way I the way I knew right was I
Speaker 1: heard the we're at the forum. I think I heard
Speaker 1: the arena erupt And that's when you know, right. So,
Speaker 1: especially at a show like that, when when people stand up,
Speaker 1: same thing happened to him at the Grammys is when I,
Speaker 1: let's say, I want to get to that eventually. So
Speaker 1: is the reaction is the gasoline on the fire media?
Speaker 1: Because yes, we shot to number one in the Spotify
Speaker 1: US chart UM and iTunes probably top five by the
Speaker 1: next morning, and it seemed like sustained for months, correct
Speaker 1: And and that gave that gave I think the promo
Speaker 1: people at def Jam, who did such an amazing job
Speaker 1: breaking this record at at Rhythm and Top forty Radio,
Speaker 1: I think it gave them all the ammunition they needed
Speaker 1: to take it to the next level at at radio.
Speaker 1: And then how do you end up on the Grammys? UM?
Speaker 1: You know something we wanted? It started with the denominations, UM,
Speaker 1: and then pushing and hoping that we get a call
Speaker 1: for for a performance. Did you get any bounce from
Speaker 1: that that's quantifiable? UM? I did, and and like I said,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a I'm a dad, a nerd right
Speaker 1: in a weirdo. So so I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: the next Monday morning or it was a Tuesday morning
Speaker 1: after the Grammys when you like, I think Spotify tchart
Speaker 1: might be twenty five hours delayed or whatever. The first
Speaker 1: thing I did, right, I woke up and I need
Speaker 1: to look literally first, it was probably in the morning.
Speaker 1: And iTunes we had a three jump. That's big. It's
Speaker 1: really big, right, I think a lot of the songs
Speaker 1: that had performances at night had that big of a
Speaker 1: jump um on Spotify and Apple zero change. It's A'm like,
Speaker 1: all right, how do how do I? What does that mean?
Speaker 1: That's all I try and do, right, figure it out
Speaker 1: and and learn from it. What does that mean? And
Speaker 1: this is my and it's funny. I had, you know,
Speaker 1: a group chat text message with everybody who works for
Speaker 1: VISI name music group and works with me. And I
Speaker 1: started a conversation, uh eight thirty in the morning. I said, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at something. It's really interesting. Let's talk it out. Le'
Speaker 1: figure it out. When I get into the office. And
Speaker 1: what I attributed to is I said, there's a three
Speaker 1: increase in the song, and I got that number from
Speaker 1: def jam, I think, and you know, zero from what
Speaker 1: it seems like on the streaming services. So what I'm
Speaker 1: attribute is the demographic, right, this is and again this
Speaker 1: is me just making my best judgment on it. And
Speaker 1: this is how it's interesting to me because I learned
Speaker 1: and again I'm a weirdo like they ship is legitimately
Speaker 1: interesting to me. I think the probably older demo who
Speaker 1: who who watches the Grammys tends to use iTunes a
Speaker 1: little bit more right and purchase song and that song,
Speaker 1: that performance, that song may have been brand new to
Speaker 1: that viewer. They may have not heard that song ever, right,
Speaker 1: And I think the younger demo who tends to lean
Speaker 1: more on streaming services, was already uber familiar, probably like
Speaker 1: sick of this song at this point and didn't need
Speaker 1: to react because they knew the song already, so they
Speaker 1: didn't go and rush and stream it. That's my that's
Speaker 1: my best guests on on why you saw such a
Speaker 1: difference between the streaming services and that sustain There never
Speaker 1: was a bump on streaming, and there wasn't a bump
Speaker 1: on YouTube either, I didn't look at YouTube. That's a
Speaker 1: good question. Okay, So what's next for Logic? What's next
Speaker 1: for Logic? Another project and and and a tour? Okay,
Speaker 1: how do you feel having had this incredible success? Is
Speaker 1: that pressure to come up with the track to follow up?
Speaker 1: Not at all? Not at all, double double the fan base,
Speaker 1: double a touring, everything else, to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1: And you don't think he feels the pressure, not at all. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's let's go down some of the landscape here.
Speaker 1: You mentioned streaming versus I tunes. Let's start with something
Speaker 1: a little bit different at this point in time, with
Speaker 1: someone like Logic and with the demo that you appeal to.
Speaker 1: How important is terrestrial radio? In my opinion again this
Speaker 1: is I think it's very important. Okay, So do you
Speaker 1: think again? I again, coming from a perspective, I only
Speaker 1: care about attention. Where's the attention? Well, I'm talking, I'm
Speaker 1: weighing things out, okay, because what do we know. We
Speaker 1: know that Best Boy said they're gonna stop selling CDs,
Speaker 1: so it's gonna be hard to even find a CD
Speaker 1: have to order Amazon. We know that iTunes sales of
Speaker 1: tracks is down, and streaming is up. We know that
Speaker 1: if we look at the Spotify Top fifty in America,
Speaker 1: it's mostly hip hop, so we're seeing trends. So I'm
Speaker 1: asking you where do you believe, especially since you're the
Speaker 1: act represent is speaking to a younger demo, certainly under
Speaker 1: the age of where do you think it's all going?
Speaker 1: Likely likely towards a streaming world. Is where it's going? Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and I to me, it's it's I
Speaker 1: think it's easier for people like I think streaming killed music.
Speaker 1: Pirating You don't really don't pirate music, And I agree,
Speaker 1: it's too much time and I can't imagine doing it
Speaker 1: because if you if if you create less of because
Speaker 1: obviously we've all pired of music. Whether you want to
Speaker 1: write or not, you have time. You don't know what
Speaker 1: you're getting when you click that download link, right, Am
Speaker 1: I downloading some some bullshit virus that is going to
Speaker 1: screw up my my computer or whatever? Um, I think
Speaker 1: streaming made it easier for the consumer, so it won't
Speaker 1: that simple. I guess what I'm saying because you brought
Speaker 1: up the issue of the bounce on iTunes is opposed
Speaker 1: to Spotify. What we know is if someone who's Drake
Speaker 1: or The Weekend puts out new music and immediately goes
Speaker 1: to the top of the Spotify chart, whereas radio. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a big controversy in the UK edge they're
Speaker 1: changing the Shark charts because Ed Shearon put out a
Speaker 1: record and like all of his wrecked tracks were at
Speaker 1: the top of the chick I think I think radio
Speaker 1: happens a little bit, there's lag there. I think streaming
Speaker 1: is immediate and and then when things react there then
Speaker 1: it it'll happen at radio. It doesn't make that audience
Speaker 1: any less important. But do you think that audience is stable, increasing,
Speaker 1: decreasing or what at at radio? Probably stable? You really think? So?
Speaker 1: You think that your audience, which certainly lives on the Internet,
Speaker 1: whether it be on a handtel, the desktop or whatever,
Speaker 1: you believe that they're still listening to terrestrial radio. I don't.
Speaker 1: I think the younger demographic tends to lean more towards streaming, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and the older demo is on
Speaker 1: terresto radio. Okay, So if I were to pull up
Speaker 1: your album Logics album, obviously one eight suicide prevention song
Speaker 1: has got you know, a gazillion streams the to the album.
Speaker 1: Are the tracks consistent in the number of streams they
Speaker 1: have or do they vary? The tracks are consistent, I
Speaker 1: think one hundred outlier, but there's a handful of tracks
Speaker 1: and there I think on Spotify Loan that over a
Speaker 1: hundred million streams. So you believe people are listening to
Speaker 1: the album as an album, absolutely, I mean the numbers
Speaker 1: show that, right. I think I think all this the
Speaker 1: way I look at it at a single, right, I
Speaker 1: think it's just a gateway drug to that artist and
Speaker 1: to pull them into to that world and and and
Speaker 1: dive in. And I think that's well, there's a story
Speaker 1: as we sit here in the story in the Well
Speaker 1: Street Journal, I believe today talking about Cardi B. Who
Speaker 1: is you know, maybe the biggest act of the last
Speaker 1: six months doesn't even have an album, right, So then
Speaker 1: you say, well, you is it that you're you're um?
Speaker 1: Is it that logic has got an extended message that
Speaker 1: his audience wants. Yeah, because I think they're they're bought in.
Speaker 1: I think there's a really big base there and I
Speaker 1: think they they follow his narrative right and and to
Speaker 1: the Cardi point there, there's more than one way to win.
Speaker 1: That's one thing I learned more than anything. Um, I
Speaker 1: think you have to adapt and pivot based on the artist, right.
Speaker 1: I think I've been very fortunate to work with Lodging
Speaker 1: John who who are very, very, very talented songwriters, and
Speaker 1: they write from from their narrative, in their perspective on
Speaker 1: how they view the world and things they went through.
Speaker 1: I think that's what's helped us for both of them
Speaker 1: build two really strong bases, is that there's something there
Speaker 1: that a fan can attach onto that story, that narrative,
Speaker 1: and they can relate. I think relatability is the most
Speaker 1: important thing. I think that's that's really what a die
Speaker 1: hard fan is, feeling like there's some sort of personal
Speaker 1: connection between you and that artist. That's the zeitgeist. I
Speaker 1: couldn't agree more. And that's why one of the reasons
Speaker 1: so much of today's pop music in the last twelve
Speaker 1: months has failed. It's failed to achieve that. Okay, you
Speaker 1: own a house, do I know where? Do you live
Speaker 1: in Manhattan? So you rented apartment? I do? Okay, do
Speaker 1: you in a relationship currently? Now? Okay, theoretically if you
Speaker 1: found uh the right person, do you have enough time
Speaker 1: for that? Absolutely? You make time for it's important. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: some people are dedicated to their work. So how many
Speaker 1: people are working for your organization now? Currently? Total? Three? Okay,
Speaker 1: what do you want? I want to keep it this size?
Speaker 1: You want to grow, We're gonna scale. I think it's inevitable.
Speaker 1: It's a goal mine. Um, absolutely, And you have not
Speaker 1: You have such success with logic. Do people come to
Speaker 1: you to manage as Yeah? I think so. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: whether whether I have the time to kind of look
Speaker 1: at everything or not it you know, I think that's
Speaker 1: the That's what matters. I think, you know. For me,
Speaker 1: it's all gut still right. I just need something. I
Speaker 1: need to feel that thing and be like, Okay, you've
Speaker 1: had a lot of experience since two thousand nine, but
Speaker 1: in this business there are people who have much more
Speaker 1: experience than you. And it's also a business. I don't
Speaker 1: care despite any kind of college program, Uh, you really
Speaker 1: can only learn by doing. I couldn't agree with that more.
Speaker 1: I think if you want to work in the music business,
Speaker 1: and this is very I'm gonna make it, don't go
Speaker 1: to college. Don't go to college at all. Don't go
Speaker 1: to college at all. You cannot learn this business in
Speaker 1: a textbook period. Okay, I agree with that. Do you
Speaker 1: believe your college experience paid any dividends in your life
Speaker 1: forgetting the music business? Or maybe intersecting with that, would
Speaker 1: you say college itself was no of no benefit to
Speaker 1: you from zero. I have a major issue with with
Speaker 1: the higher education in this contract. Well, I'm fascinated. What
Speaker 1: is it? Um, it's a business, is what is the
Speaker 1: problem with it? You're charging you cannot put a price
Speaker 1: on education. I don't know how you do that. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't understand the concept of it. And I was.
Speaker 1: I was the squeaky wheel and likely pain in the
Speaker 1: ass every college I went to, all four of them,
Speaker 1: where I had major issues with the way things were
Speaker 1: and couldn't really get real answers on a lot of
Speaker 1: this stuff. Um. Even even you know, at at at
Speaker 1: a Delphi, I remember I had there was banners on
Speaker 1: the campus about like I think it was some sort
Speaker 1: of entrepreneurship kind of having kids go out and do
Speaker 1: it themselves, which is exactly what I was doing. Um.
Speaker 1: And they're saying, you know, they're here to help you.
Speaker 1: And remember having all conversations with with professors at the
Speaker 1: time Hey, I'm doing I'm the manager. I'm doing this
Speaker 1: at the time because again at the time when I
Speaker 1: was starting, I borrow my dad's car, pick up my artists,
Speaker 1: and we drive to a show. That's how we did
Speaker 1: it right in My commission would be a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars probably, And I said, listen, you know, is
Speaker 1: there anywhere I could take the exam earlier figure it
Speaker 1: out a way around it. No, And it was I
Speaker 1: ran into that over and over and over again. And
Speaker 1: even you know, I was a business major, having to
Speaker 1: take art classes my senior year in order to graduate,
Speaker 1: I took. I had to had no choice. Handbuilding with Clay.
Speaker 1: I would literally go to and and do pottery and
Speaker 1: and I would fight my advisor and and ask her
Speaker 1: how is this benefiting me as a businessman? Um? And
Speaker 1: she couldn't really answer it. It was it was simply
Speaker 1: because they wanted money from the credits. Those credits cast
Speaker 1: the same as managerial finance Sam Price. Okay, I can
Speaker 1: play with Clay for free. Okay, the uh the management
Speaker 1: courses you took help you at all? No, I don't
Speaker 1: think so, okay. So I was half checked in, half
Speaker 1: checked out. I understand. I mean, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: they have these college courses in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs are born.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think you can teach somebody to
Speaker 1: be an entrepreneur. I think I agree with that. I
Speaker 1: think it's a lot of it is d NA, right.
Speaker 1: I think as I've gotten older and become more self aware,
Speaker 1: I recognized that that it was just it was partially
Speaker 1: who I was, and it just took me a long
Speaker 1: time to figure it out, I think. But it is
Speaker 1: fascinating because you know, when you're first on your first
Speaker 1: club tour, most people are not interested. But as you
Speaker 1: have success, it's like when you make a deal for
Speaker 1: a tour, there are people who've been doing this for
Speaker 1: forty years who obviously no more than you and they
Speaker 1: and there's nowhere to learn that other than the school
Speaker 1: of hard knocks. And then many people are worried that
Speaker 1: you know, their act is gonna go with someone more experienced.
Speaker 1: You haven't had that. But it's you ever, I mean
Speaker 1: you mentioned a couple of times during the podcast you
Speaker 1: ever say you know, God it if I knew then
Speaker 1: what I know now, absolutely, But you you can't. You
Speaker 1: can't know back then what you know now, it's not
Speaker 1: how life works. And I think i'm I'm a much
Speaker 1: better manager today for all of the things that I
Speaker 1: learned by trial and error and and and learning as
Speaker 1: I went right. You you you can look back and go, shit,
Speaker 1: I made the right decision, or oh shit, I made
Speaker 1: the wrong decision. I'm I'm grateful and unfortunate. I didn't
Speaker 1: make any wrong decisions that were career threatening or ruining
Speaker 1: to to to my artists. So so before we started
Speaker 1: the podcast, you were saying you're very bullish on music,
Speaker 1: very bullish on the scene. Could you go on a
Speaker 1: little bit about that. I think it's I think it's
Speaker 1: the most exciting time to be in the business literally right,
Speaker 1: because if, if, if you can pivot and and and
Speaker 1: adapt right, I think a lot of people spend time
Speaker 1: and energy complaining about the current state of the music business. Um,
Speaker 1: it's funny. I was in the studio back in New
Speaker 1: York with John the other day and we're having this
Speaker 1: We just talked about the business conversation. A lot of
Speaker 1: people get frustrated. All we're living in a singles culture,
Speaker 1: so what so what like then adapt and and and
Speaker 1: do that right? Rather than then I wish the business
Speaker 1: was like but it's not right. And I think if
Speaker 1: you can do that and you can adapt quickly, and
Speaker 1: you have an artist who can do that as well,
Speaker 1: you're you're really gonna win. And that's what that's what's
Speaker 1: exciting about it to me, because I think I'm learning
Speaker 1: every day. Um again, having an artist performed at the
Speaker 1: Grammys and then the next morning looking at dad, I
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, Okay, what did that do and
Speaker 1: let's learn from it? And and um, you know, having
Speaker 1: a group conversation with you know, everyone who works with
Speaker 1: me and trying to figure it out. Um, that to
Speaker 1: me is what's exciting. And do you have a lot
Speaker 1: of people who you're contemporaries who you communicate with? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've as I've been very lucky to make some amazing,
Speaker 1: hopefully lifelong friends in the business. I mean, that's just okay.
Speaker 1: And the other thing is you're you live in New York,
Speaker 1: but you're out here in l A. You see it
Speaker 1: come on a regular basis, take meetings. Who you what
Speaker 1: kind of people are you meeting with? Label people I've
Speaker 1: I've you know, it's just part of networking in the business,
Speaker 1: whether it's you know, Live Nation or a g because
Speaker 1: we're touring. Um, different agents are agents. Logic agents are
Speaker 1: based out here, John's are as well. I think last
Speaker 1: year I spent close to sixty days out here. Okay,
Speaker 1: So for those people who literally know nothing and don't
Speaker 1: have your personality, you just say I'm gonna go to
Speaker 1: l A. You make meetings in advance, you say let's
Speaker 1: go to lunch. What do you do? Right? We we
Speaker 1: were on email about a week and a half ago. Right,
Speaker 1: So I'm figuring my schedule out and and um schedule lunches, dinners, breakfast.
Speaker 1: Wherever I can get in front of people, I'll do it.
Speaker 1: I like to be busy. I think downtime is I
Speaker 1: hate it, especially when I'm traveling, right, because then you
Speaker 1: feel like you're wasting your time. I hung with I
Speaker 1: hung with Logic. He lives out here. I was with
Speaker 1: him in the past two nights, was at his house.
Speaker 1: So what's he up to these days? Working on music?
Speaker 1: He's never not working. So and he's now married. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's been married two years. Um, he's a challenge when
Speaker 1: you're an artist, but everybody tries and he's uh, he's
Speaker 1: working on music. We're getting ready for something and a
Speaker 1: tour hopefully. Okay, So at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: forty years from now, any big goals, anything you've really
Speaker 1: wanted to accomplish, No, I said, I said small goals.
Speaker 1: I said, year goals. Um with with the company, will
Speaker 1: sit down and we'll we'll set goals. What do we
Speaker 1: want to accomplish this year? And again it's one of
Speaker 1: the it's part of my thesis. If you do that
Speaker 1: every year, you're you're you're gonna win in the end, right,
Speaker 1: double the bass, double the touring, and if you focus
Speaker 1: on that, things are gonna happen. Okay, just want to
Speaker 1: go back to chapter because he said, you know they're
Speaker 1: bumps in the road. The goal is to double. Let's
Speaker 1: assume you start going down the path and it's not
Speaker 1: going in the right direction. What do you do? Pivot?
Speaker 1: That's all you can do. Right, Well, I see this
Speaker 1: is an audio podcast. You can't see the big smile
Speaker 1: on his face. But it's very different from the baby
Speaker 1: Blue mentality, which they'll double down on what they're already doing.
Speaker 1: The concept of pivot, which really the term comes as
Speaker 1: a result of pivoting in the tech business too many people.
Speaker 1: If it's not working, It's like you know, I tell
Speaker 1: people all the time, if you're putting up on music,
Speaker 1: you're not getting a reaction. Correct and assuming you're you're not,
Speaker 1: you're unhappy with that. You gotta pivot. But that's a
Speaker 1: beautiful thing. I think, because I was having this conversation
Speaker 1: recently with somebody, I think we're living through There's no
Speaker 1: such thing anymore in my mind as a bad album
Speaker 1: or bad record ruining your career like it used to write.
Speaker 1: I think if you look at the nineties and if
Speaker 1: you let's say, the sophomore slump was a thing, I
Speaker 1: don't know if that exists anymore. You're always as good
Speaker 1: as your last at bat right. And I'm not here
Speaker 1: to name artists, but there's some some major artists I
Speaker 1: think in the past year, um male and female pop
Speaker 1: artists right that can can or have been selling out
Speaker 1: arenas in some stadiums, that came out with an album
Speaker 1: that didn't do well well. Lady Gaga, right, Lady Gaga's
Speaker 1: last album is basically as Stiff. She was out with
Speaker 1: Tony Bennett and then she not alone. It's kind of amazing,
Speaker 1: but you look so you're good at your last a
Speaker 1: bat so so if if if that artist were to
Speaker 1: come with a hit record tomorrow, everybody forgets about about
Speaker 1: the flow. It's that that's what's cool about what we're
Speaker 1: living through. I think, okay, But let's the other thing
Speaker 1: is when you've got a choice in this matter. There
Speaker 1: used to be, you know, when the business became institutionalized
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties, there'll be you know, a
Speaker 1: three to five single process and the album would come
Speaker 1: out every three years. You look at Drake, He's putting
Speaker 1: out multiple projects per year. So I think you also
Speaker 1: have the ability he had Biber. Biber experimented for all
Speaker 1: of a sudden he had his huge comeback. So I
Speaker 1: think you also have to say I have the tools
Speaker 1: that if something is not working, I could come back
Speaker 1: up to back correct, whereas if you wait three to
Speaker 1: five years. If you look at the Justin Timberlake situation,
Speaker 1: which is fascinating because everyone seems to agree that the
Speaker 1: album is a disappointment, which is also a difference because
Speaker 1: a lot of times, you know, the spin goes otherwise. Um,
Speaker 1: he waited so long, I believe that he he were
Speaker 1: to put out new music within a year, this project
Speaker 1: would be forgotten. Certainly live business phenomenal. But if he
Speaker 1: waits three to five years, you know, let's let's go
Speaker 1: one step. You know, Kesha was off the market for
Speaker 1: a long time and she came back. It was very successful.
Speaker 1: What's your analysis of that? It was genuine She had
Speaker 1: gone through some some from what I understand, some horrible
Speaker 1: things and she wrote about it. That's I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's you literally believe it's the music and the message
Speaker 1: she was sending. Absolutely. I think it's always that if
Speaker 1: you can make something that connects or resonates with people,
Speaker 1: you're gonna win. And that's again, that's what's exciting. So
Speaker 1: you can you know, you say, oh, we're in a
Speaker 1: we're in a it's too much consumption and it's oversaturated.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, until you cut through and then you're you're
Speaker 1: loving it, right, So it's it's about perspective. And again
Speaker 1: you can flop, but keep it moving. Don't don't wait
Speaker 1: three years and cry about it. Keep it moving. Okay,
Speaker 1: And certainly on street being services, both the two biggest
Speaker 1: in America, Apple and Spotify hip hop dominates. Do you
Speaker 1: anticipate that will continue to be the case, because I
Speaker 1: think it's clearly connecting in culture. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: and it dominates on those services because that's where the
Speaker 1: audience is. I think it's the younger demo that use
Speaker 1: those that use those services, and and that's what they're
Speaker 1: listening to, right, I think country might be they those
Speaker 1: listeners may consume music a little bit differently, the same
Speaker 1: with rock and and and and even even pop. I
Speaker 1: think the consumer the same pop consumer. What's funny hip
Speaker 1: hop is pop now that's all it is. It's of course,
Speaker 1: but it's so dominant. I mean, on some level, we
Speaker 1: have a landscape with no coherence. Everything is its own vertical.
Speaker 1: But if you look at hip hop is pop. But
Speaker 1: there's never been a sound that's been this dominant. But
Speaker 1: look at what Look what's common in hip hop. The
Speaker 1: consistency at which these artists drop music. That's why they're
Speaker 1: winning because they just let's put out two projects a year,
Speaker 1: three projects a year. He talked about Drake. He's done
Speaker 1: that now for three or four years in a row.
Speaker 1: There is no coincidence. Kendrick Lamar, right, it's no coincidence
Speaker 1: to me. He drops his album two weeks before Logics
Speaker 1: seen he just put out another album, right, the Black
Speaker 1: Panther sound, Right. I mean it's consistency, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: how how important the socials as opposed to the music itself.
Speaker 1: To me, that situational depending on the artist. Right, If
Speaker 1: you want to be public facing and you want to
Speaker 1: have a narrative with your fan base or with the public,
Speaker 1: then it's important. And if you don't, it's not. Well
Speaker 1: let's just assume, I mean forgetting phenomena like if you
Speaker 1: do not have socials and the songs are very good,
Speaker 1: can you make it there? There's there's a there's a
Speaker 1: million examples of that, and they call Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean.
Speaker 1: How much of being part of the scene important? Again,
Speaker 1: I think it depends on the artist. I think you
Speaker 1: can be a part of the scene if you want
Speaker 1: to and you want to be you know, out in it,
Speaker 1: and some don't. We I mean like other people guessing
Speaker 1: on your your track, you guesting on their tracks such
Speaker 1: that people would serve the net and become aware of
Speaker 1: what you're doing. I think hip hop's winning because they
Speaker 1: get it right. What what guest features are? It's cross promotion,
Speaker 1: all right? Let me let me get in front of
Speaker 1: your base, you get in front of mine. That's cross promotion,
Speaker 1: that's business, one on one, right, Um, not saying that
Speaker 1: they're looking at it like that. I just think that's
Speaker 1: what's happening. Well, we could go out for hours here.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you specifically want to say before we go? No,
Speaker 1: I appreciate you having me on. Okay. You know, we
Speaker 1: get a perspective from someone who's not only the younger
Speaker 1: generation but very successful with a hit act Logic and
Speaker 1: another one on the way. And the other thing about
Speaker 1: it is very optimistic as opposed to the old forts
Speaker 1: who believe music and the music business has been ruined. Chris, So,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for coming on the PUD. That wraps
Speaker 1: up this episode of the Bob Lefts Podcast with my guest,
Speaker 1: Visionary Music Group President Chris ru I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: just like I did hearing the story of getting from
Speaker 1: a Delphi University all the way to the v M
Speaker 1: a S and the Grammys, managing Jack's like Logic and
Speaker 1: John Belliam. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: tune in Apple or your Apple choice. Until next time,
Speaker 1: I'm Bob left Sets can think of me reas and
Speaker 1: don't know exactly one must be its out down EA