OuttaDeeBox Podcast
OuttaDeeBox podcast is a pre-recorded bi weekly show geared towards supporting former and current inmates and their families in Wisconsin. Our mission is to inform listeners about community resources that can assist them in securing employment opportunities, housing, mental health and substance abuse support, with the goal of reducing recidivism in Wisconsin. We also give listeners and guests the opportunity to share their unique inspirational stories through spoken word and other forms of musical artistry.
OuttaDeeBox Podcast
DJ Pain 1 From Aspiring Rapper to Multi-Platinum Record Producer part 2
Ever thought about breaking into the music industry but felt overwhelmed by its complexities? We get it, and that's precisely why we're here to simplify it for you! Our prolific professor, who's juggled roles from student to role manager for a prominent group, brings to light the significance of setting achievable career goals. He unpacks fascinating insights from his journey, shedding light on the virtues of flexibility and openness to new opportunities in this dynamic industry. More than just talent, he emphasizes the power of small wins, scaling up, and celebrating your milestones, however small they may be.
Navigating the studio environment can be daunting, but we've got your back! Our chat revolves around the imperative of preparation and the essence of professionalism. Are you curious about the various roles and responsibilities within a studio? We break down the uniqueness of each, from producers to engineers, delineating what every service entails. But that's not all! We also offer an exclusive peek into the Music Entrepreneur Club - a platform where we dissect an array of pertinent topics.
Finally, we address the elephant in the room - the business side of music. It's more than just about making great tunes; it's also about building constructive relationships and mastering the art of selling music publishing. We delve into the dynamics of partnerships in the industry, the importance of doing your homework before collaborating, and managing expectations. Also, don't miss out on our bonus segment as we expose the realities of fame and its navigation. So, if you're gearing up to leave your mark on the music industry, this episode is a must-listen!
But that's what I'm. So there is so much and it goes back to what I was saying earlier a lot of musicians who start out like I'm trying to be a rapper, I need to hit this pinnacle, so I got. They don't even realize there are steps and once you start taking those steps and you start really celebrating your smaller wins, you know, like I got my first page show. It was only $100. Great scale it up.
Speaker 2:That's amazing to celebrate that you go in my studio you see that in a frame I got a $20 bill. In that frame that $20 bill means more to me than just that $20, because that was the first actual money that I made from my company. So I was like I'm not gonna spend this, I'm gonna frame this.
Speaker 1:And you have to do stuff like that. Like we were selling CDs hand to hand in the streets and it was like if I made $50 in a night, I felt amazing because there was my music. I did that, I built that and that's my creative intellectual property. I'm monetizing it. Oh my God, this is amazing. Now all I have to do is scale it up. So it took some time. But if I compared myself to somebody, if I compared myself to Dr Dre, every day that I woke up I'd be paralyzed, I wouldn't get out of bed, right, and so I really I hope the people watching this don't do that to themselves. You're gonna torture yourself. Focus on getting 10 fans first. Focus on getting one fan and then just go to two, go to three. You know, we always talking about climbing the ladder. It's one rung at a time. We have all these metaphors right and we don't follow any of them.
Speaker 2:So I guess the simplest way to say this let's start by setting realistic goals.
Speaker 1:Set all types of set short-term goals, set long-term goals. But law of detachment right. Like you might think that, like for me, you might think that first big opportunity is gonna change your life forever. I had to pivot so many times. I know people in the music business that started out as rappers and like I wanna be a rapper.
Speaker 1:And they failed at that, but now they're successful as managers. Or they're successful as producers, or someone who became a producer and then didn't do that very well, but now they're an A&R. So you're working in the field that you dreamed of working in.
Speaker 2:And that was one of the things they told us too. They were like okay, we're gonna go around the room tell us what you wanna do, what are you going to school here to do? So everybody went around and said what they was gonna do and they were like nine times out of 10, what you are going to school to do right now it's not what you're gonna probably end up doing when you graduate, as far as like in the entertainment industry, because it just doesn't work that way. You get in where you fit in. This door might open up a bunch of doors and you'd be like, hey, man, I actually like that. Or you might get an opportunity and they say, hey, we want you to be a role manager.
Speaker 2:I went to an MMI, so we went. All our professors were crazy. One of my professors was a Eminem's role manager and he was a Dr Dre's role manager. He was a 50 cent role manager and he was like man, I started off doing something completely different and then he got to become the role manager for the biggest group, for the biggest act in the world, which was YouTube at the time, and he did their legendary tour and he was a role manager for that, so he didn't start that way.
Speaker 1:It was like J Cole was the producer.
Speaker 2:He was the producer and I look at him right. Yeah, you didn't even say J.
Speaker 1:Cole, I haven't worked with him. I met him, but I can't put that on.
Speaker 2:I know I seen some video. You was riding around in the car with him or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Wow, that was way back.
Speaker 2:That was a minute ago yeah, but no, what's crazy was he actually quit being a professor and went back on the road. He got a call and said hey, we want you to come back on the road, we want you to be some big name group, you know role manager and do you want to do it? He's like yeah, and went back in Chris, Chris, I forget his last name, but he's-.
Speaker 1:I know who he was talking about because I was at the camp. I met him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, chris, yeah, from Nine Inch Nails. What's his name? Marilyn Manson, so super cool dude. And he was like man. You know, my hands hurt right now. He's like he needed a break, you know. But he was like I still gotta pay the bills. So he just took this job, you know. Well, I learned a lot from him. You know what I mean Telling us like crazy stories about Marilyn Manson. You know how he's like, but he's like a legit engineer, you know. First, I mean, he's a kick-ass drummer to a world-class drummer, but he's a legit engineer. He knows this stuff.
Speaker 1:It helps to have different abilities too, right, I mean, you provide value. I think a lot of people, too, are afraid of pivoting or they're afraid of expanding, cause it's like I love doing this, I love writing music, okay, but maybe you could do this over here and help yourself. Like I learned video to help myself and then I was like, oh, youtube, I can make my own videos for myself and create this brand for myself and that helps. You know, and I know people who did the same way, and then now they're shooting music videos for other people and making money that way.
Speaker 2:So yeah, when I was in college, you know, I was like music, music, music, you know, yeah. So I went there, so I was to be an engineer, and then my best friend was, he was going to school for video motion graphics. So he was like man, you know, let me teach you how to work this camera. So I went out, bought a camera. He taught me how to you know work the camera right. So I was like I'm thinking in my mind well, maybe I can go and do something that I used to see Raphael doing riffraff.
Speaker 1:Shut up to him. You had the DVDs and all that.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking well, you know, he started off, he was just in a club, he was the cameraman in the club, so he would, you know, set up a backdrop, people come in front of it, he'd take a picture and you come out, you know, charge him 10, 15 bucks for it.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking I can do that while I'm going to school. I could be doing that for money on the side and I, you know, got to learn a little bit about the camera and then I started taking some pictures and then opportunity opened up for me to do product photography. So now I'm taking pictures of little cell phone clips, you know, but I'm getting paid for it, you know. So now I got that on my resume and then I started taking pictures of my kids and then I turned that into a photography business. So now I'm, you know, charging people to take pictures of their kids, and you know, and you know, so I was like, okay, cool, so I started doing that. And then my buddy is teaching me how to, you know, edit videos. So now I'm doing videos for people, you know. So it's like I got a bunch of different little weapons that I can use, that, you know, I can use to help.
Speaker 2:I can bring value to pretty much any situation when it comes to entertainment, and that's key also. I can get on a set and be like oh man, we need somebody to run, sound, I can. Oh, we need somebody to take pictures, I can. We need somebody to, you know, hold a camera, I can, you know.
Speaker 1:You know what's beautiful about that too. So back to the original question. So if you're an artist and you're building up your career, the more you know, the more the stronger your team is when you finally select them. Because if you don't know anything about the music business, right, then you don't know what your manager's doing. If you don't know anything about videography, then you don't know who's good or not If you want to hire them or put them on your team. If you don't know anything about engineering, you're not really controlling the product that's exiting the studio with your name on it. So once you've, at least to an extent, learn all these things, you can hold people accountable, you can pick the right people and you're spending your money wisely. You're not spending your wheels. I've seen so many people spend their wheels, throw money at again. You can't throw money at a music career and expect it to grow. That's one of the biggest myths of it. Like, oh, you can just get some trash, put 100,000 behind it and you're famous. If that was the case, everyone would be famous.
Speaker 2:Okay, that leads to my next question how do you pick the people that you personally work with? Now, I know we had a conversation off camera when you were saying you know personal friends, right, and it's like okay, this is my homeboy, whatever he's got a budget, I'm just gonna work with him because this is my friend. But at what point is it? This is my friend, but this is trash. Like I can't really keep doing this, bro, I don't wanna you know what I'm saying. Like at what point?
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean.
Speaker 1:I don't one. I feel like I'm a great judge of good music but I also am not a perfect judge. So what? There are songs that I don't like that are popular and there are beats that I've made that I was like this isn't great and it goes viral. So I acknowledged this, that I'm not the end all opinion, so I try to keep that out of it. I mean, unless it's terrible or like super offensive. Don't want to judge my way out of a situation where you know maybe you make the music and someone likes it and you know I don't get it. But cool, I don't have to. As far as working with people directly, I just kind of don't.
Speaker 2:I think that's why you do B star.
Speaker 1:I do B stars because it's just now, it's a international, worldwide audience and it's just like. It's affordable, it's accessible to everybody. I can work with tons of people and like some of the music that I hear on my beats I'm like I don't really think that's great.
Speaker 1:But again, I'm not going to worry about it. Some of it I think is amazing. You know I've had major artists get beats from me, from there, and artists that aren't major but I think are just amazing either way. But as far as you know, I started just in at my parents' house as a kid recording whoever would come by, because I just was having fun doing it. And then you realize, all right, I'm setting more of a standard for myself after a certain point and you'll weed people out. I feel like it is my job as a producer to speak my mind on a record, not me being in the studio, being like that's trash, do it again. That's not helpful. But you know saying, hey, this is off beat, this line doesn't make sense, this is out of tune, do another take, and if people can deal with me doing that, cool, but a lot of them can't and so they'll just stop coming to me. They'll go find someone else to work with and that's fine with me. I've had a lot of people stop working with me because of that.
Speaker 2:We'll leave it there, Because if we go any deeper, then we're gonna you know what I mean we might offend some people. You know what I mean Because, like you said, everything that people put out isn't your cup of tea and it's not mine. But one thing I learned about this business is that we never speak bad about our colleagues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we don't have to like look, there are people out there that will swear up and down that Beyonce can't sing and that Drake is the worst rapper on the planet, which is wild. And the beautiful thing is, it doesn't matter, doesn't affect them, their fans are still their fans.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So I could swear up and down that someone's song is terrible and it becomes a hit tomorrow.
Speaker 2:So what about the songs that you like? Say, somebody does something on one of your songs, right, and you actually like it, you're like oh yo, this is dope. Is there anything that you would do to help?
Speaker 1:that artist. I mean, if it's really amazing, I'd just be like let's just do a whole project. Because, I just I think that's an ardent of itself, doing an entire project, either beats that I've already made but I curate them for the artist, or making new stuff, just having a. That's like the old school approach. Public Enemy had Bomb Squad, gangstar was a producer and an emcee. I think that's a lost art.
Speaker 2:Actually putting together a cohesive project.
Speaker 1:With, just as a duo, someone that producer that really knows the sound and the rapper that really compliments the sound. Yeah, I do that all the time. And then I'll just be like, look, I'll just give you a deal, Like let me know how many PC1, whatever. But yeah, I look at it, I'm a sucker for talent and that's gotten me in trouble, where you. I'm sure you've experienced it. This is why you're laughing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you become a sucker for talent. You get so hopeful and then you say, oh man, you start thinking about the possibilities. You know it's like man, let's do the soul talent thing. If we could just give them a shot. You know what I'm saying. But talent doesn't always equate to professionalism, and that was something that we were talking about before, like proper studio etiquette and just how you conduct yourself when it's time to work, and that's why I think it's a red flag.
Speaker 1:When someone is incredibly talented, they've been doing it for a long time and they haven't made progress. If someone just started and they're talented, I'm like cool, let me just sit back and observe. I'll help them out in whatever way I can, but I'm not Gonna invest, I'm not gonna lose myself, yeah Cause you've done that before A million times where I'm just like, oh, this artist is so talented, let's build this together, you know. And then I wake up one day and I'm like I'm doing 90% of the work they're not even showing up to sessions.
Speaker 1:They're not answering my calls. I can't keep doing this. Unfortunately, that's how it happens. So nowadays, the beautiful thing is we have all these metrics. So a lot of people will hate me for saying this. I'm sorry. This is how we protect our time. I have to look at an artist. If they're talented, I have to look at their numbers. To an extent, I have to look at their output. If I go to their Instagram and their last post was from 2019, I'm like oh, you're not consistent. Or if I look at their Spotify and they have five monthly listeners, I'm like well, why is that when your music is so amazing, what are you not doing? You know what I mean, because, if I walk into the situation, am I gonna have to manage your social media market? You, as well as produce, as well as do all these other things?
Speaker 2:that and be your road manager and be your therapist. Yeah, and your human alarm clock.
Speaker 1:But if I look, at someone and I see, oh, wow, look at that. You have music videos out. You're dropping consistently. You don't have crazy numbers, but they're growing. I see the trajectory. It's moving towards a good place. Then that's what my investment is based on and I think that's fair.
Speaker 1:A lot of people will say well, that's not fair. You're not judging people on talent. It's like one talent is subjective, right, and two, talent isn't the only thing that will get you places. Talent won't move the needle. Talent's like the minimum that you need in the music business and in all things. You know like you could be a talented.
Speaker 1:How many people are amazing athletes in like certain contexts, like at the park, everyone knows you can't beat this person on the court. That doesn't mean that they're going to wake up and put in the work that it takes for them to get into the NBA. So same thing with music. You know you got to maximize. You have to use your talent as the foundation and build off of that. Talent is necessary, but it's not the determining factor of success. So I mean I'm not just speaking to musicians and rappers and producers. This is like management people that are aspiring execs, you know, like people that want to run a label, that kind of thing. You know they have that problem too. They fall in love with talent. They might spin their wheels. Seen it happen. It's unfortunate.
Speaker 2:So I really want to touch on some of the things that we were talking about off camera as far as studio etiquette, because I think it's important, right. So a lot of the times, people actually get well, younger artists and just some particular artists get it confused as far as, like, how are you supposed to act in the studio? First of all, the studio is not a club, right. It's not a place where you're supposed to be smoking and drinking and kicking it and hanging out and stuff like that. So one of the red flags that we were talking about is when someone comes into the studio and says, hey, I got this beat. Can you pull it up on YouTube, right? So that's why we say that's a red flag is because it's saying, well, you didn't even believe in it enough to go and purchase it, right? You're not even investing in yourself, right?
Speaker 1:And you're not prepared. Yeah, you should have just had the beat as a way to preferably track out on a USB drive or some virtual drive, and you just pull it up so tell us some of the do's and don'ts of studio etiquette.
Speaker 1:Well, it goes back to the whole saying if you want it to be a job, you have to treat it as a job. You can't really show up to a job unprepared. You can't really show up to a job drunk. You can't show up to a job with your friends. No one takes their friends to their job, so granted in a lot of studio sessions.
Speaker 1:People are high, people are drinking their friends there that don't necessarily need to be there, but it's because the artist is just focused. So I think focus is the key. You can tell when someone's not focused. So the studio's job is to record you. That's it. If you're going to a studio to record, that's what their responsibility is. That's where it starts, that's where it ends, I mean, unless you're also paying for mixing and mastering. But their responsibility is technical. It's a very clear cut service. So when you show up and you expect them to find you a beat, I mean, if that's not predetermined, you know, like maybe, that there's a producer. A lot of producers are engineers, so they can you know they might see.
Speaker 2:That's the. I think that's a big misconception of. I mean, nowadays, you know that's what guys are, a little sand too Like. When people come to the studio, they think that the tracking engineer is actually the producer also. So they want you not only to record it, but they actually want you to produce it right, because they're constantly asking how does that sound? You know what do you want to do next? You know like, can we do my overdubs? You know how does this overdubs? What do you think that we? You know what kind of plug-in do you think we should use? Or how did you know what I mean? Like, like it's like now I'm not even like recording this. You know what I mean. I'm actually producing this. Which is two separate jobs.
Speaker 1:It is, and Godzilla is a real producer. I think you run the average engineer who just says hey, I'm a tracking engineer, is not going to produce your record, no, and they're not going to make the beat for you Because they don't even. That's not even what they do. If you're lucky, you find somebody like that. Those are separate services. You know you can't. You can't come and say, All right, I'm paying 50 an hour for studio time. All right, pull up a beat and give it to me.
Speaker 1:It's like no, that beat was created separately on separate time. That's a piece of intellectual property that has intrinsic value. So are you paying for that beat? Well, if that's the case, now you're getting the beat and you're spending your hours in the studio writing. You could have written at home. Why are you writing in the studio? And some people have those relationships. There's a lot of gray area. But I would say, if you're starting out and you're just getting into recording with with an engineer, be over prepared. Have the beat in multiple formats. Have the song written, have memorized. Have a yes, because if you're just yeah, you can tell you're going to want to rerecord it anyway. If you're just reading off the sheet of the phone, but have. I was like I have a clear vision for how you want it to sound so you're not relying on the engineer. That was a big mistake we made when we were recording, because when you start out, you just don't know.
Speaker 2:Right. So I don't know what you don't know.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I give people the pass for that. You should know that you need to beat them. But anyway, we would go to the studio, we'd record and we're like, okay, cool, it's done. I didn't even know what a mix sounded like, right. I was like this sounds way better than my mic at home. And so at the end of it the engineer would look at us and be like, okay, what's next? We're like what do you mean? Put it on a CD? Yeah. And he's like, well, what effects do you want? You know what? And we're like effects, right. So beginner mistake we had to learn. That Beautiful thing now is you can look up anything and be prepared for whatever it's. Go on YouTube, studio etiquette. Someone's going to tell it, tell you exactly what to expect that way, because otherwise you're going to waste your time and your money, and I would rather you not do either and even though the engineer might charge you for an extra hour for all the, all the BS, they don't want to be doing that.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about your podcast. What is your podcast about and what are some of the topics that you address on your podcast?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the name of the podcast is the Music Entrepreneur Club podcast, mec podcast for short. It's co-hosted by Dame Ritter and Aaron Knight. Aaron Knight is from Build your Own Dreams. Dame Ritter is formerly of funk volume and so he's famous for all that. We talk about that a lot. Trust me, we have to because because I did.
Speaker 1:The funny thing with me is I didn't like I knew who funk volume artists were like, oh, you're a great artist. Hopson can rap. I was a fan of the music. I didn't know about the reputation that came from that fallout. So when I met Dame, I just came in with an open mind. I appreciate that. I came in with an open mind and I'm like, yeah, let's work. And, and, damon, I worked and there was never a shred of I'm better than you, I'm bigger than you. No, no, because the because the rumors. When I went back, I finally like it was like two years into me working with him that I finally listened to a Hopson interview and watched the Ill-Mina Hopson 57, whichever one it was where he goes off on Dame Ritter. I'm like none of this is true.
Speaker 1:What are you talking about? I've been on tour with this guy. He's not hiding money. What are you talking about? There's a spreadsheet. I know exactly where the budget is going, so that's hilarious. We talk about that. We talk a lot about the manager-artist relationship. We talk about pretty much everything we covered here. But we'll discuss news. We discussed Summer Walker's contract when that came out that she only got 80,000.
Speaker 2:As an advance, we talk about what are some of the recent topics Did you guys discuss Megan Stallion's when she and Harris came out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that was part of that same conversation.
Speaker 2:Did you guys discuss the future selling his catalog?
Speaker 1:That just happened, so that's going to be this coming week's topic. But yeah, we've talked about that scenario selling off. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:It's business it's going to happen. That's the whole point of building a catalog is to at some point sell it. And then you make a new catalog and then you sell that. You know what I mean? Like it's, you're not selling your masters, you're just selling the publishing. So you're basically. Basically what they're doing is this let's say, you got five years worth of music. You build up a decent catalog, so it's a good catalog. So they're going to use a matrix. What times 12 times 24.
Speaker 1:They know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, basically, they're going to take that what it's worth, and then they're going to you know how much you're going to make for that years and times it by 12 or times it by 24. And then they're going to pay you out for that, right, and they're saying, hey, we're going to give you all the money that you would make for 12 years right now, up front, and we'll take the back end. We'll take the money slowly, you know, we'll collect it that way, and then you could take that money and do whatever you want to. You know what I mean. You could take that money and buy back your original masters, right? You can buy out of your contract. You could use that for studio time. So you can, you know, put that money into another project.
Speaker 1:And it's 60 million Right, Because I think a lot of people have opinions and they're like I would never sell that. It's like 60 million. Yeah, you're going to sell it, I would sell a lot for 60.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and people sold a lot less for a lot more, for a lot less.
Speaker 1:I would sell all my catalog for 60 million, right, because I'm just going to keep making music. I do it every day.
Speaker 2:And it just makes more. It just makes so much sense for an artist like Future, because Future makes so much music, right, and he's like he's. You know that what that catalog is worth right now, 10 years from now, it's not going to be worth the same, no, right? So it's at its peak right now. So now is the best time for him to sell that catalog, because all he's going to do is drop another four or five albums right now and guess what? He's going to have a whole another catalog that he, that he can sell, and it's not. He's not selling his masters, he's. He probably doesn't own those, though, to begin with, right, but he's not selling that. He's thinking, you know, oh man, he's, he's selling his masters. No, he's not selling his masters, that's a publishing.
Speaker 1:He's selling his underlying composition. The other copy right yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like first you got to even know what you're talking about before you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:That's, I think that's a problem, and I I talk about this all the time. If the music business this is a good thing to say right now, I should have said earlier the music business boils down to this in one sentence this is what the music.
Speaker 2:I've heard you Go ahead.
Speaker 1:The music business. Every song you record generates two copyrights the master recording, slash sound recording and the underlying composition, commonly referred to as publishing. The music business is simply the exploitation or sale of one or both. That's it. That's the music business.
Speaker 2:Ta-da.
Speaker 1:And once you understand that all the other stuff learning, all the different royalty streams they all just branch from those two things. I mean. Even someone will say well, what about performing? You're exploiting your copyrights, that's it. I mean you can submit your performance sheets to your PRO and get paid off that. You're getting paid off the underlying composition copyright when you do that.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:It all branches back. It doesn't matter what, it is it all comes back to that.
Speaker 2:So how do you deal with fame? I?
Speaker 1:don't. That's a trick question, because I got to acknowledge that I have a lot of fame. There you go, man.
Speaker 2:I mean at the end of the day, man, you got to call a spade a spade. You know what I mean. Like you are a famous person, right? So I mean it is what it is right.
Speaker 1:I was calling myself a public figure. Well, and I'm glad the crazy thing is someone impersonated me and was trying to scam people for $50. And I'm like, wait a minute. That's the whole point of verification.
Speaker 2:So this doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:And people were still having conversations with the fake DJ Payne one.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. So what's next? What's next for Payne?
Speaker 1:I really don't even know. I know I'm working every single day on a million projects. Something's going to happen. I've had bigger records come out this year, like the Michi Darko record and another record on Atlantic I forget the name but as far as just expanding the brand goes, there's a lot I'm considering that. I don't want to say but I'm working on it. But the podcast will continue. I have a new show on Beastars. We just got I don't know how we got half a million views in a day on Twitch through their partnership and it's a beatmaking show, a live beatmaking show.
Speaker 1:So that particular episode featured multi-planet producers, beat demons, and that's every Tuesday, two PM Eastern time, one PMR time, and I make at least a beat a day, so expect that from me.
Speaker 2:Let me get a throwaway.
Speaker 1:I mean you can get one. It's not going to be a throwaway, but yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm playing, I'm D-Star, I'm DJ Payne one. Until next time, guys.
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