I Survived 61,320 Hours Mastering The Music Business

And I was going to buy a lot of bitcoin. I was going to put about 150,000 into Bitcoin. But I was so paranoid about our staff and the economy and, like, what's going to happen. So I didn't do it. I waited until late August, and then I started buying bitcoin. If I would have bought the bitcoin in February, the way that I said I would have bought it, that 150,000 would have been about $18 million. God damn. You know what I'm saying? Even to this day, if I would have just bought it at 13,000 and spent that, you know, 150 grand and.

Just held on to it.

And just held on to it, that should be worth about 15, 20 million.

And we're back with another episode of you Money with tan. Yo, I'm yo, that's my man. Ty. Ty. Hope y' all know who we are by now.

Or if you're new.

Yeah. If you knew.

If you knew.

Welcome. This is money and Ty, today's episode. You had an idea, and I want you to kind of break it down for the people.

Yeah, I had an idea that, you know, we wanted to do what's going over, like, the top four things you should do with your money once you make it in the music business. And this can be practical across any business that deals with products, goods, talent management, all those different things. But that's what I want to break it down is I want to start with the top four things that I suggest that you do.

Right.

That we've done to continue to diversify your business as a whole, but also it grows your music business as well as right now.

Where do you want to start? Do you want to list them first, or do you want to just break them down?

We're going to list them first, and then we're going to break them down.

Gotcha.

So top four things that I believe you should invest into when you have success. Monetary success. Very, very important. We talking about just winning the Grammy because you don't necessarily get no money. No Grammy. It looks really good.

It looks nice.

But monetary success, Top four things. Number one, real estate. Number two, stock market. Number three, startup companies. And number four is to reinvest into the very thing that made you money.

Right.

And you want to try to figure out all four of these things, and you want to do it equally. You don't want to put one thing more heavier. You want to figure out how you can do it equally.

Okay. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on this. But when you say when you have money to invest, like how much money you think a company needs to be making before they start allocating the funds to other avenues.

So that's just the misconception, right? The misconception is I got to have a lot of money to invest.

Right.

But in actuality, you just got to have a plan, like an investment plan.

Okay.

So for instance. Right. For real estate. Real estate probably can come off a little bit more difficult from those aspects of it. Right. Because when you think real estate, people just think buying a property, 100%. Selling a property, owning a property. Right. Where in actuality, in this day and age, real estate can mean that. Airbnb.

Yep.

Where you can find a property that you can get a house that you can lease out, and you can build it out and create a Airbnb property. Right. That is technically a real estate investment.

100%. Wow. I guess people don't really think about that like that.

You got to understand your sc. Your scaling or your. Your scaling and your strategy when you were talking about the different money. Right? So now it goes from. Wait a minute, If I make $100,000 in profit into the music business.

Right.

25,000, I'm a reimburse. Reinvest back into the business.

Right.

25,000,. I'm a re. I'm a reinvest into stocks. And we can even put crypto in crypto. Right. So you want to get positions. Right?

Right.

The third thing is you want to go and you want to reinvest money back into your. Into what a real estate opportunity would be, and then you want to find those tech investments. Now, with tech investments, 90% of tech investments fail.

Right?

So being that 90% of tech investments fail, it's important to try to find opportunities where you can put small dollars amount in.

Okay, Right.

And usually what those are is what they call the syndicates.

Right.

So we'll start with technology to be the first thing we break down. You can take five, you can take $25,000, and you can find 10, five to 10 tech investments that you can invest into between $1,000 per investment or $5,000 per investment. And the way that you get into these investments is that you find syndicates, which. Which is short for like they use spv. And syndicates are nothing but pooling money together.

Right.

Okay, so let's say you got a company, you. You raising money, and the minimum check is $100,000.

That's minimal.

Okay, well, with your 5,000, you won't make that qualification, right? No, but if you are introduced to the opportunity through a syndicate, the syndicate is pulling the money together. So it might be 15 people that have put $10,000 a piece in.

Right.

On average now, boom. You can get involved into this. That was our first real investments is that we started being introduced. When you go distribution with Venice, press them, say, hey, you want to get introduced to some of those opportunities because you're distributing with them.

Right, Right.

But that's how we got introduced to these small opportunities to put $1,000 in. 2,500, 5,000, you know, and these are like you're saving, you know, $600 a month to have $6,000 to invest, right?

Yeah.

And that's a really big thing that a lot of people don't know about.

Now, on the tech side, when you're meeting these companies, do you feel like you're betting on a winner or you just trying to spread your money out?

You want to bet on what you believe in, but the thought process of something that has a 90% rate of failing, you want to spread it out so that you can get as many irons in the fire as possible.

Right.

So if you got 25 grand and you can invest $1,000 on 25 different joints, that's probably the route you want to take because it's the tech startup.

Right, Right.

Versus another vertical business that we'll touch. I've had a mentor tell me that they took 25,000 and invested into a company and it turned into a million dollars. Whoa.

Right.

So that you gotta think about it for. So it's. It's a rare occasion, but it's still a possible occasion.

Yeah.

So you want to make sure that you're finding those opportunities. And it's a lot of different platforms that you can go about. I mean, you can find stuff on. They got like Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a raise. Like you can look at it's engine room, I think is another one or something like that where you can go and people are constantly trying to raise money for they. They're trying to crowdfund their business.

Right, Right.

I would suggest that is the, the best way in the world, but it is giving you an opportunity where you could probably invest $500 or a thousand dollars so you can get a good understanding to learn those different things. Because with the universe, that I believe when you start putting out energy of things that you want to actually participate.

In the universe start feeding back 100%. Okay. So with tech, spread it out, spread it out now with real estate, I want to go back a little bit. When you got into real estate, what was the inspiration?

To diversify the money.

Yeah.

Point blank, period. It was diversify the money. And I found the right partner.

Right, right, right.

So with real estate, if you got some money, you could potentially find the right partner. Right. That you can actually put the 10% down, put the 20% down to get $150,000 loan, $200,000 loan to go get a property, or you could take the 25,000, you can find like a little space, you can rent.

Right.

And then you can just Airbnb it.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Airbnb is not an easy thing, though. You got to have a strategy to market it. You gotta figure out the right city that you're gonna do it in, so it makes sense. Is it close to a college town? Is it close to the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Is it close to South Beach? You gotta figure those different things out.

But have the upkeep.

Yeah. So you can start that with, you know, if you got rent, that's $2,500 or 3,000, you got your $25,000 budget, you got a little couple of grand to, like, do some decorations, you got some digital marketing you can do around it. It's a whole nother different job. Yeah. But you can either partner with somebody that's already doing it, or you can just take the time and know that this has a positive return if we're.

Doing it properly, the ability to turn that over over and over again, it's going to bring money in. But finding the right partner, how did you find your partner?

I found my partner through another friend.

Okay.

You know what I'm saying? People are always looking for collaboration.

Yes. Right.

And you want to trust your investments through your circle of people. People that once you start making your intentions visible and speaking them out, to be able to talk to people and be like, hey, man, I want to start getting into investment. Hey, man, a woman. I want to start getting into real estate.

Right.

You know, I was talking with Troy from Earn your Leisure. I was like, yo, I'm about to start back getting back into real estate. I mean, to the stock market. See? Any advice? And he literally asked me, what's the strategy? You know what I'm saying? Like, what strategy? What are you trying to like, like, do into it? I was like, man, I used to have a strategy, but I'm gonna have to wait. Give me some time. He's like, yeah, you know, they give great information around that. That aspect of it, you know what I'm saying? Him, Troy, Ian, I mean, Troy, Rashad, Ian, they give really great information that I've been following once since I started back up. So the partnership, seeking it in, like, understanding and seeking the information is so important when you're talking about rediversifying your money.

What I just heard you say was also, like, don't rush in. Like, you can be inspired and interested and maybe you even have the money to allocate toward an investment. But to his point, what is your strategy? Yeah. Now, when you first got into stocks, do you know how. How long ago was that?

I first started investing into the stock market. I wanna say 2018. 2018, I started investing into marijuana.

Okay.

Cause I think that's the last year that Obama was in office, if I'm not mistaken.

I think.

Oh, he was run.

I think that was 2016. I could be wrong.

Yeah. Whatever. His last day, his last year of office is, they thought the marijuana would get legalized. Cause of who? Donald Trump. Potentially winning.

Yeah. You know, you're right.

And I started to invest heavy in the marijuana stocks. Oh, wow. Yeah.

That was the only thing that you saw. You were just like, oh, people believe that this is about to happen.

Yeah, I was just thinking about marijuana stars, bro. That was my strategy. All marijuana. I think I probably got some Spotify stock and some Amazon along the way, but the bulk of that time was then did I transition and start investing into crypto?

Okay, but before the transition to crypto, did you. What did you learn from the marijuana stock investments?

It's risky.

Yeah.

You talking about penny stocks? You know what I'm saying? Risky. Yeah, Very risky. A lot of it failed. Some of them still. Companies are still functioning, but a lot of it.

But a lot of it failed.

Yeah. Would you.

Would you suggest to somebody that wants to find something to invest in now, start with penny stocks or.

No, I would never suggest them to start with penny stocks. I would suggest them to really sit down and do the research. Having the money is one part of it. Doing the research is the other part. You know what I'm saying? That's something that we got to be very clear about when we talking about investing.

Right.

I always wanted to. I always had to do the research. I knew marijuana is going to get legal. I might have been 10 years in advance.

Right. Early.

Right. But I still know that at some point it's going to get legalized. And I mean. And so that was just doing research to know, oh, it's a president change. Of guard, right. That means that regulations are going to change, tax laws potentially going to change. Just knowing that information was like where the strategy was at. Even like today, like it's a president election is going to happen of the year. So the stock market is doing what the stock market is doing. You should, knowing that information, you can take your $3,000 and maybe grow it to $10,000 between now and January. Because you know that information, just based.

On knowing it's an election year, these things will change. And I guess maybe that's the thing about investment is like the ebbs and flows of it. How do you protect yourself within investing? I know it's a risk, but like.

How you gotta, you gotta start, start smart. Don't, don't, don't invest money that you can't afford to lose. You gotta make sure that you're doing the knowledge, getting the education. Rather you're paying for some type of ebook training or you're looking at people that are really doing it as experts that have proof of concept. Right. And you know, you just gotta start small. Start small, do the research on the companies. A lot of these guys that are really great at doing the market for themselves, they always give these disclaimers like hey, we're only giving you these options that we are personally investing in. We encourage you to go do the research, learn about the company, learn about the product, learn about the transitions, the CEO, the CFO and all of those different aspects of things. You know, very important.

I don't know if we ever talked about it on the show, but you once told me about how you found out about crypto and how you wasn't able to invest immediately into bitcoin. You want to share that story with the people?

Yeah. So we can bitcoin and, and, and stocks, all of it is about investing into positions, right? So they, they kind of like go hand in hand to a certain degree, especially with, with bitcoin specifically because this is exploding. It's con. It's going to continue to grow. When I first learned about bitcoin it probably had to be like 2008, 2009. I barely could talk English. So me trying to articulate to my friends this, this blockchain crypto thing that's on the dark web that they using for buying arm arm goods. And I couldn't articulate that that well. And it was so hard to get access to it before coin based and all those different things. It wasn't until later, maybe like 2017, one of the manager, one of the managers I co managed the talent with named Chad was like, ty, give me $30,000 and I'm gonna go buy bitcoin for you and he's gonna blow up. And I was like, I ain't giving you $30,000. He might have said 10, right? He might have said 10,000. So he went to my man Irv, said the same thing. IRV, give me $10,000 or $30,000 and I'm gonna go invest it into bitcoin, which for you. Yep. Irv was like, I'm not giving you that money. The difference between me and Irv is He took the 10,000 and he went about cryptocurrency, he went about bitcoin, and he went about ethereum and he went about litecoin.

Oh, right.

So when Irv bought this in 2016, man, if I'm not mistaken, bitcoin was like a thousand dollars, bro. Yeah, thousand dollars. He bought ten thousand dollar worth of bitcoin. I think he probably spent another five grand to buy some ethereum or whatever the case may be. I never bought this. So when 2019 hit, I'm like, end of 2008, I didn't do, I didn't do the shit. I started spending all the money in marijuana. I'm like, marijuana, need to smoke marijuana. So I know one thing I don't know about this cryptocurrency shit, but I didn't know definitely gonna smoke this marijuana. So I'm like betting on that heavy. If I would have put that same amount of money that I was betting into marijuana into cryptocurrency. This is the same layer of risk so that I may act. Investing into penny stock marijuana companies in 2018 is the same risk as investing into CryptoCurrenc. 2018. I just took a different risk based on something that I just knew that smoke I want, that's just what it's going to be. I started to get back into that and started to really be like, oh man, let me start investing in 2019, slowly doing it. It wasn't until 2020 that I was like, okay, I'm sold. And that was when Covid happened. When Covid happened. I'll never forget this. It was March 16th, but Bitcoin was 13 grand. And I was going to buy a lot of bitcoin. I was going to put about 150,000 into Bitcoin. But I was so paranoid about our staff and the economy and like what's going to happen. So I didn't do it. I waited until late August and then I started Buying bitcoin. If I would have bought the bitcoin in February the way that I said I would have bought it, that 150,000 would have been about $18 million.

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You know what I'm saying? Even to this day, if I would have just bought it at 13,000 and spent that, you know, 150 grand and.

Just held on to it, and just.

Held on to it, that should be worth about 15, 20 million right now.

Right?

So I started buying in August. Yeah. And as it was, as it was growing, I would cash it out. Then I started buying Metaverse. Shit, I started buying nft.

Yeah.

All this other risky shit. That was having a moment, right.

You were taking a risk everywhere.

Yeah. So invest at your own risk is another thing that we want to put as a disclaimer in these top four, you know, things that you can use your money to, things you can invest into.

Right.

So I, I don't want to get too deep into the, the bitcoin rabbit hole, but I want y' all get.

Into the rabbit hole. I wanted to highlight the way information comes to you and you try to make decisions. It's just like an ebbs and flow. But like, oh, this person said you should invest in this. It's like, well, I believe my intuition tells me, go over here.

Right.

It's just the fact that I think once you start investing, you don't get a lot of information, right. A lot of suggestions. Sometimes you bit, right? Sometimes you gamble, things change. But I appreciate that story because it shows how, man, you could have just.

Made a bet, man. Listen, the most important thing about all these things is in 2008, 2009, I didn't understand, I was trying to understand. I, I knew that it can be something that I should invest into Bitcoin. I didn't have the money nor the knowledge, nor the intellect to even be able to articulate it to you clearly. So you know what it was. But then 2010 I learned about screaming, right? So the, the investment journey for me and the risky investment journey was that I didn't get bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I really didn't. But I got screaming.

Yeah, right, yeah.

And from that, investing heavy into that created a lifestyle that we can build a company around. Now I can take these risk more so now moving forward, like I'M betting a lot on AI in the stock market, you know what I'm saying? I'm going to be focusing on that. I'm going to start back with cryptocurrency. I've already started back, but I'm a start like getting deep into it. It just hurt my soul when I see Bitcoin. 66 grand. When I know that I sold a lot of my shit to buy NFTs. And I still have like a large collection of NFTs. I probably got about 200 NFT collections. That's in the cold, that's in cold storage. But that is me being like, all right, I call one of the ways. Yeah, if you can catch all the ways, you're a different motherfucker.

Yeah, if you can see always.

If you get catch all the ways, you're different. I caught the screaming music wave. Yeah. Right. So.

But that was a big bet because a lot of people didn't bet on no.

1000%. 1000%. So right now I'm looking for the next thing and I know it's going to be AI.

Well, okay, let's talk about that fourth one, number four. Reinvesting into the way you made your money.

Yeah.

Is that.

Well, let's, let's, let's go to. So we talked about real estate, we talked about stock market. Yeah, we talked about.

I thought it was tech.

We talked about startups. Right, so startups, tech and the real estate. Real estate, yeah. So when you want to reinvest back into the thing that made you the money that is in this case, music.

Right.

Some of the investments that we did back into music was once again building to the infrastructure that we talk about on one of our others, on our other season of episodes. Reinvesting to infrastructure. Reinvesting into talent, you know, rather, that is signing talent, trying to invest into them, doing publishing, whatever the case may be. And one of the biggest things is that distribution. We reinvested back into distribution. And what that means is finding an artist that feel like they're about to go to the next level and doing like a $50,000 distribution deal with them for two projects or one project that we license and we have a 10 year license on and we're reinvesting into that. Right. And then you gotta keep reinvesting into the very thing that's earning you the most money within the music business.

Right.

So reinvesting into infrastructure helps us build infrastructure around a Brent Fiat. Right. Or if you wanna, if you are got a Summer Walker or if you got a Sexy Red. You reinvesting into infrastructure when they're independent is also you reinvesting back into the very thing that music, I mean, that made you the money.

Right. Now, did you see that being done before you were even in a position to do that?

No, what I saw was people that made money in music would turn around and dump it all back in music to try to make some more money.

Right. It wasn't the same.

No, it wasn't necessarily the same. Or they didn't have no money to invest, so they had to just, like, try to figure out how to go get somebody else money by having another talent that they can go assign over here.

Yeah.

To get another advance so they can kind of like maintain their livelihood or whatever the case may be.

But you think that creates a cycle in which you can invest. You never have money to pick elsewhere. You're kind of keeping this cycle going.

Right, Right. And one of the things that is very important, that is the fine print for these top four suggestions that I would suggest. When you reinvest in the money you make in the music business, owning your masters and controlling, that you are the first line of contact when the money comes in. And what that mean is if you got a. If you put your stuff out on stem, all your money come to you first. Right. And then STEM also is paying everybody else out. But you're the first line of defense from your distributor. So your distributor pay you the money from here, and it goes here to your company. When it goes to your company, then you're getting paid every month. It's way easier to develop a reinvestment strategy and an investment strategy if you get a revenue every month. If you're not getting revenue every month. And you're getting it twice a year.

Yeah.

You know, four times a year. Once a year. It gets a lot difficult. It gets a lot different.

It's too sporadic.

Yeah, too sporadic. I wouldn't suggest making those type of big banks unless you're talking about you getting a million dollars a year from your royalties and all those different things.

Right.

That means that you got to make sure that that million dollars floats the next time around. But when you're getting money monthly, it's easier to build out projections for your company. Simple as that. And it's easy to invest. So you can literally say every 10% that we make every month, we're gonna put to this pocket, and every six months, we're gonna pick out the best investment.

Right. But it has to be guaranteed every month for you to even project that.

You gotta be able to project it. So it has to be. It has to have a pattern. Has to be a certain earning pattern. Guaranteed is a really tricky word, but as close as guaranteed as possible, that's.

What you want to do. Earning pattern sounds a lot legit. Like you have an earning pattern and you can kind of now say, all right, this has been going on for three or four months. I can start pulling things out and putting things places. But once you have an earning pattern, it's a good idea to start investing.

1,000%. Yeah, 1,000%. Because the biggest thing about it all is when you decide that you want to grow your business, you got to know that investing and not overly diverse. That's why we just said like we just picked out three things, right?

Yeah.

Because I could have been like, you can go get a franchise.

Yeah.

Then when you get your franchise, you can go get start your form. And then you get your form and say, you know, you can go get you a T shirt business, your T shirt business, then you can go get you a tow truck. I ain't say all of that. I ain't say you go get you a vending machine. Do you know these are just the top three things that I think you can leverage against. If you have a stock market, if you're in the stock market and you have a portfolio, you can leverage that portfolio portfolio and you can pull out a loan against it.

Right.

If you got real estate, rather if you own the real estate, that adds value to your net worth and your personal finance statement. Right. Which you can pull equity out of that house. Right. And then when you start talking about tech startups, that's just the risky part of it.

Yeah, that's.

You know what I'm saying? Tech startups is pretty much cryptocurrency as well. Because cryptocurrency comes from tech startup companies and they're just as risky as music. You see what I'm saying? They're just as risky as music. So the tools and the tips about these four vehicles that you reinvest into. And then the fourth thing, when you say reinvest back into music, that's your expertise.

Yes.

You're reinvesting back into your expertise. Ye. Everybody should be trying to do that.

Right.

Because it can kind of. Even though it's difficult to be successful in music, you're already successful.

Right.

So reinvest back into your expertise. That's something that I'm getting back to the point now in 2025.

Yeah.

All of 2023. All of 2024 and even parts of 2022, I was running from music and investing to other things to now get back to 2025 where I'm like, I'm doubling, I'm back doubling down on investing into music by like 10% more. If I was doing 25% investment now I'm going to be doing 35% reinvesting back in the Music 100 or whatever the profits are. Right.

Tell me this, how do you control when you know you're going to be investing into a certain sector? Because it seems like you were able to kind of recognize that you weren't investing in music as much as you were investing in maybe like tech and all these other things. But I'm assuming that if you were trying to invest in everything at the same time equally, it probably wouldn't worked out the same way. Like how do you know what you're focused on and when you'll be focused back on something else?

Based on the people that I can get information from.

Right.

When I started focusing on like startup companies, it was specifically because I was talking with Susie and Troy at Venice.

Yeah.

And they was like, I was just curious. I like man, I want to be investing into stuff like that, you know, and. And they start bringing opportunities because it helps them, because it makes so that their money can scratch too. Because if you got a million dollars and every time you want to invest to a company, it's a hundred thousand dollar minimum. That means that you can only invest into 10 companies.

Yeah.

But if you got a million dollars and you can pull money from different people, Right. You can invest $50,000 into the SPV.

Yeah.

Then the other people that are pulling the other a hundred thousand now you created an spv, you manages it, so you get a carry. And what that means is that let's say that you invest 50,000, you invest $100,000 into this company, this company blows up and they sell and you do that 400,000, that 100,000 turns into 500,000.

Right.

So that's $400,000 in profit. When you manage the SPV, you get a percentage of that landfall. So you get a percentage of that 400000 because that's the profits. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So now you put 50000 in there yourself.

Yeah.

And you get your fourth, you know, you may you put 50,000 in. Then this thing, you know, you got 200000 profits. Yeah. Then that other 200000 profit, you get a percentage of that because that's other people money.

Yeah.

You vetted this investment out. You introduced them to it. You did all those for things, different things. So now that million dollars, you put it in 20 investments instead of 10. SPV works out for the people that got money, and it works out for people that don't have enough money, but they got enough money to invest, but they don't have enough money for the minimum check.

Right. So that's why knowing the right people allows you to expand upon that.

So just back to your original question is that I started focusing on that because I was like, man, they can give me guidance. I can find some guidance in this. You know, they would say, a thousand dollars, 2500, you don't invest a lot. Try to just get your feet wet, start learning the business. Then eventually, man, my deal flow now be crazy. I got, I got to return calls today because, you know, people are calling me about the investment of their company. In 2024, we did about a little bit under a million dollars in tech investments, you know what I'm saying? By the time the year ended, we was almost close to about a million dollars that we invested into funds.

Yeah.

To companies, directly to SPVs, you know, and, and that's something that year over year, we're going to keep. Keep doing and taking a bet on the technology. The founders. And as a, As a young investor, you're going to be at. Sometimes you get an opportunity to meet.

The CEO I was about now founder.

As a young investor. Young, meaning that you're just new, not age, like you're. You're a new investor.

Yeah. You knew this face.

And you can get in front of them and if you can talk to them and they feel like you get it, you instantly become valuable to them. Now the next thing they, they create for, for that they want to invent, they're going to think about you. They don't think about like, man, like, you were so smart. You got it. And that's happened to me a lot of time where I've gotten to the table because of Brent.

Yeah.

But I stayed at the table because it was like, now you smart.

This guy gets it.

You know how to use what you're doing. You're smart. You know what I'm saying? And so for me, that was like a really, really big thing with the tech startup side of things.

Incredible. Anything else you want to say, man? Then you covered the four.

Yeah, we covered the four. You know, invest into real estate. Yeah. Invest into tech startups. Invest into the stock market.

Yeah.

Reinvest into the thing that you are the expert in that help you make the money.

Yep. Right.

And then you wanna seek guidance. Yep. You want to start small.

Yep.

You want to have calculated risk.

Yep.

And you want to always, always, always come back and watch for your money. Yeah. So you can go down and get a rewind just in case you miss taking notes.

Thank you guys for watching another episode. This is Ty. This is Yo. Fuck you, money.

Peace.