What's First: Make Great Music or Build Your Fanbase? :: Wendy Day 2019

Hi guys, Wendy Day from Rap Coalition. As you can see, I'm still in my dining room. My, um, my desk which moves up and down is on the fritz, and I'm waiting for the— a new motor, uh, for it to come in so that the handyman can fix it. I'm so lost without my desk. It's really cool, it's a standing desk, so I can sit or stand, or— you don't give a fuck about that. Okay, so this is a question that Ghost Boy Swift sent to me. He emailed to me, and it's such a great question that I wanted to share it with all of you, um, and the answer as well, of course. So, um, he asked, what would you say is better when starting a rap career? Number one, hone your craft and find your sound privately and become really good at what you do first before releasing music so you become easier to market when the time comes. Or choice number 2, which is release whatever music you do make now, even if it's just average or decent and not that great yet, so you can start building a potential audience ahead of time. And you, in, in that case, you don't worry about marketing like that until you become better at your craft. So these are two extremes, and I think the answer is actually somewhere in the middle, right? You don't want to put your first stuff up because it's probably not very good, you know. Um, but if you do happen to luck out and make really great music, you should start marketing and promoting that, putting it up, getting it out there, and build a fan base as soon as humanly possible. But you shouldn't do it if it doesn't sound good. And this is where you need to have some really great people around you. Um, not your attaboy squad, not the folks that listen to everything you do and say it's great no matter what. But the people that are around you that are genuinely honest and don't want to see you embarrass yourself, I would get their opinion as to how your music sounds, if it's competitive. Um, if you really want to do this by yourself, you could listen to, um, you could listen to a popular song, your song, and then another popular song. Like, put your song in the middle, like sandwich it between 2 songs and listen to all 3 of them straight through, like the way you would on a playlist or on the radio or in the club, and see if your song kind of fits with those other popular songs. Um, see if it has the same quality, the same sound, the same depth. The one thing that I see new artists doing is their music doesn't sound very full. And I'm not sure I can explain this because I'm not a creative person, I'm on the business side, But sometimes with a new artist, the track won't be great, or the song just won't sound like there's enough in it. It'll sound like music and rapping, like they're— like it doesn't have enough depth or enough fullness to it. There's not enough in it. There's not enough instrumentation in the beat or, um, enough backup in the vocals. It just sometimes it just doesn't sound good. And as an artist, I would wait until you were past the experimental stage, and I would definitely be getting feedback from people you don't know as well. Like, the market for rap— and, you know, rap is predominantly what I do, so I kind of know that like the back of my hand, um, that's why I'm saying rap, not songs or reggae or pop music— but rap, the age group that is the target market is 13 to 26. So you may want to play your songs for people that are in that age range from 13 to 26. Like, go to a high school and play your music for people you don't really know and ask for feedback. Ask them to be honest with you. The best thing that you can have as a new artist is feedback. If you just ask your friends and family, you could shit in a bag and they're going to tell you it's great. So Go to people that won't just feed you the, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great, nothing needs changing, it's wonderful. Get people that will give you honest feedback like, yo, your hook is too long and intense, it should be simpler, or the subject matter is what everybody else is out here rapping about, or, you know, just to give you feedback because you're going to spend money and time marketing your music. You want You want to spend your time and your money on the best shit that you have. You know, on a good day, the music industry is oversaturated, so you're competing against thousands of rappers out here who obviously are competing with you. They're marketing and promoting their own music. They may have a bigger budget. They may have better connections. They may have a better team. They may have better music, better producers. They might have, you know, a feature from somebody on one of their songs that they've cleared, right? So you've got to have the best product possible. And if you're not at that level yet where you're making your best music, then you're not going to want to put a lot of time and money into promoting it. On the flip side, one of the best ways that you can find to get feedback is to put your music up on SoundCloud, put your music up on YouTube, get feedback from strangers, see if if people are sharing your songs with their friends. If you put it up and nobody's sharing your music and you're not getting any feedback whatsoever, that's very telling right there in and of itself. So the answer to your question really is to find, um, a happy medium between the two. You want to have your music at a point where it's good enough for fans to hear, but also you want to have it so that you're getting feedback and building a fan base, because that's what's most important in this. So it's not really one extreme or the other, it's somewhere in between those two things. I hope I answered that, um, well for you. And another thing that triggered when I first read your email that I want to address is bear in mind that As you grow, your music is going to grow. So you may start out rapping about one thing, and then as you're moving along, you find that your fan base is really grabbing onto something else. And Lil Donald is a great example of this. Lil Donald used to make these really catchy gimmick-type songs, and that's not a diss, that's just, you know, he's great at that, with these really cool hooks to talking about, um, juice and talking about different slang that's popular. Um, when people started to say things twice, he made a song called Say It Twice. So he's kind of always on that cutting edge of different fads that are going on out here in the world, and he makes songs about it. Um, and he thought that that's what his fans were going to gravitate towards the most But he started making, um, songs for his female friends. Um, one of his friends was in a relationship where her boyfriend was beating her, so he made a song called "Do Better" about getting out of a domestic violence situation. His nephew committed suicide, so he made a song about how that felt. His mom died, so he made a song about you know, the death of somebody he loves. His grandmother who raised him passed away from cancer, so, you know, he's been surrounded by a lot of death at a young age. So he's made songs that resonate with pain. So his fan base seemed to really gravitate towards that music more than they gravitate towards the club music. So as you move forward in your career, you may find that your fans redirect the type of music that you make. And there's nothing wrong with going in the direction that your fans want you to go in, as long as you're still authentic and true to yourself. You shouldn't go in a direction that's not you. You shouldn't talk about shit you know nothing about. And you certainly shouldn't see somebody else that's successful and try to bite their style or their subject matter. Like, oh, Drake is a great emo rapper, let me talk about the same shit he's talking about. No, they're already a Drake. There's already somebody that's doing that. Be unique, be you. And then once you see that your fan base is really embracing who you are, go hard and, and increase that fan base, you know, market and promote yourself. Stand out from the rest of the rappers out here that are in a similar lane to you. Um, but that authenticity is so important, you know. I remember working with a white rapper out of Chicago, and it felt like every month he was a different type of rapper. Like, one month he was, um, super lyrical, the next month he was super woke, the next month he was, um, you know, anthem rapper for club anthems, then the next month he was, um, trendy and, and doing whatever the latest fad was, the latest dance. And he wasn't true to himself. Like, nobody really knew what he stood for. And then at the same time, along came Eminem, who just came out in gangbusters and was like that lyrical guy who just painted pictures in your head of whatever he was talking about, and super duper duper talented. And he came and just crushed all the other white rappers because he was authentic with what he was doing. He was super duper talented. And he was just killing it. He was talking about topics that his fan base could relate to, and people were sharing his music left and right. And this completely overshadowed the rapper in Chicago, and he got really bitter and pissed off because he wasn't able to build a career doing what he loved. And that was because he just wasn't authentic to who he was. He wasn't making one type of music and sticking to it and seeing if his fan base was going to gravitate. He was just all over the place, and that's what kind of came out, you know, about him as an artist, was that he was just all over the place. So be true to who you are, be the best that you can be, make the best music you can, record as much as you can. Um, T.I. has done a shit ton of interviews talking about how he'll record 100 songs when he's working on a new project. And then he'll narrow it down to like his best 50 and give it to his team, and then his team will narrow it down to like the best 25 or the best 20, and then he'll take those best 20 and he'll pick the 10 or 12 that are going to go on the next project. But he starts with a whole lot of music, and I think that's amazing advice. I think you guys need to do that too, within reason for your budget. You shouldn't go broke recording, but you should definitely get as much practice and hone your skills and make as much music as you can, and then narrow it down to your best songs, and then get some input from other people as to what they think your best songs are. And, you know, appreciate and embrace that feedback, whether it's positive or negative, because these folks are, are protecting you from spending too much money on something that's not going to go anywhere. So I love people that say, Wendy Day, I hate this song and here's why. You know, as long as they can verbalize what it is they don't like about it, I'm excited. Because by saying that, you know, it has to be a bunch of people saying that, it can't just be one person's opinion. But they're saving my client like $100,000, because that's what it really takes to put a budget behind something to get it to that next level, like superstar status, right? It takes millions of dollars to get there. So I, I love that you're saving me the initial budget that I'm gonna spend to see if I have something. So I hope that's helpful, guys. Thanks for tuning in. This is Wendy Day. Make sure you subscribe, hit the little bell so that when I post, you know that it's there and you can come watch these videos. They're free. Why not? It's a great jump-off point for you to learn a little bit about a topic, and then you can go and do more research on your own and study and become, you know, as great as you possibly can be. If I can do this, you can do this. That's real. Bye, guys.