How This Artist Grew to 25k Monthly Listeners for $0 Using TikTok feat. Flowstage / AZKAL

If you only had one minute to give music artists the best advice you possibly could, what would you say one minute on the clock? >> All right, that's a really, really great question. I think for music marketing advice in one minute, I would say that the two most important pillars of music marketing are firstly consistency and secondly intention. And by that I mean that consistency broadly spans the way that you should think about marketing. It is not like music marketing generally is not a sprint. It's a marathon. And I think a lot of the time when people think about marketing, they think it's they definitely think it that you do it in terms of like, oh, I have a release coming out and I want to put out as much content as I can for the release and then after the release I'm going to stop marketing because I'm done. That is very much not how it should be done. You need to stay consistent between releases because that's how the algorithm remembers you. In addition, consistency doesn't just apply like to your broader strategy. It applies like within individual accounts like when you're making these posts. Like you've got to Oh man, I'm running out of time. You've got [laughter] you've got to make sure that within and every account your content is just like consistent enough so that your audience will continue to come back and like know what the niche is going to end up being. And I know I'm a little bit over time, but just briefly to touch on intention. I believe that a the other big mistake that I see a lot of artists make is when they create content, since that's my specialty, I I feel like I could talk a lot about creating content on social media. I think when people create content, they generally just like do whatever they want. like they try like a bunch of different things which is totally fine but I'm a big believer that you should every single piece of content you you create every single strategy you employ it should have a desired objective like even if the step that you take is thinking before I make a video or before I like run a fan account or like a theme page like what who is this targeted for like who do I want to address with this and then how can I shape the content to like reach it because I think even that just makes a world of difference so in summary consistency and intention stay consistent when posting Don't go into don't um don't stop posting just because you don't have a release coming out and then everything you post make sure it has a goal. >> Totally, man. Yeah. And and you're you're kind of known well for for a couple things now, but I mean you're known for your platform Flow Stage, which we're going to cover a bunch in this talk, but uh your band was the case study and Flow Stage was really just built as a tool to help your your music essentially. And so you you guys promoted your music from I believe from zero to like 25,000 or so monthly listeners >> uh before you ever even touched any ads, right? So that was all just organic Tik Tok marketing. And you have a case study on your website which there'll be a link to flow stage below and and you go on there's an awesome case study that shows how Rahm attacked this. Um I think it was like it was like three to five accounts. There was like a 1975 kind of fan page. There's like one where you're like running through New York City. Uh, and there's your lips sync one for your band and then there's there's something else. I can't remember. But, um, you know, you a lot of people think like it's impossible to grow with organic content or that you have to do like stupid dances, but the reality is there's like a million ways you can do it. Um, and it's very possible to grow organically. >> Yeah. I mean, I I fully agree. I'm happy to delve deeper into the details of the case study if you feel like that would be interesting for the purposes of this podcast, but yeah, like I I 100% think that there like I guess the first thing I'll say is that as everything your mileage may vary. What worked for me may not necessarily work in exactly the same way for a lot of people like listening to this. And the ultimate takeaway is that everything I say take with a grain of salt and tailor to your own specific use case. That being said, my strategy for growing from 0 to 25 was pretty simple. I and I guess a lot of the context and I guess we can talk a little bit about the context of like how flow started because it's all it's all sort of interconnected, but the full story was I have a background in computer science. I have like a I used to be a software engineer like in my previous life, but I've been an independent artist since 2021. I used to believe similar to probably a lot of you who are listening to this um that you don't need to actually create content to go to like blow up that you can just make really really good music and just by virtue of your music being amazing. You will get streams. And so in 2021 I released an EP and I was super proud of it. I produced everything myself like had it mixed and mastered and I bought into this myth and I ended up getting like a 100 streams and friends and family and I was like well that really sucks. So, like everybody else, I looked at what people were doing for music marketing. At the time, it was Tik Tok. I started posting on Tik Tok in around like 2022, very sporadically, mostly because I had like a full-time job and I kept trying to post on Tik Tok and then getting burned out. And I would do like lip syncs, I would do like lyric videos occasionally, but I wasn't really committed to like any one thing. And sometimes I would post like I would have like sprints where I would go three times a day like let me post on TikTok for like two weeks. And then at the end of the sprint, I'd be like, "Okay, I'm done. Like, I can't do this anymore. Burned out. take a break for two or three months. So, back to the point of consistency being super important, I wasn't very consistent at all. In 2024, however, I decided that that was going to be my year to like really lock in. And so, from a case study perspective, I was like, "Okay, like I have one account. I'm just going to do two times like one to three times a day, every single day." And so, in the over the course of 2024, I made over a thousand Tik Toks by hand on like Cap Cut, on Tik Tok, just like lip-sync videos or lyric videos. But, I was really really consistent. And so even from that, I saw my streams ba like just skyrocket from basically nothing to around like 1,000 to 2,000 monthly listeners regularly just from like having one account. And that was all well and good, but then I started looking more into music marketing strategy and seeing what other people were doing. And I was I started realizing that a lot of people were actually having these like multiple burner accounts. So, like people were having like three accounts and then five accounts and then 10 accounts and then some people even going up to like 30 or 40 or 50 depending if they have like big label budgets. And when I learned that in 2025, I was like, this is probably the worst thing that could ever happen right now. Because as an independent artist, like I was struggling so much to make content for one account. I can't imagine making it for all these other ones. And I was like, especially because as an artist, I really care about the kind of content that gets created. Like I don't want it to just be some sort of like AI videogenerated like garbage where it all looks the same or like there's no personality to it. I want it to look like I made it or like I want it like I was like sometimes I want my face to be on it, sometimes I want it to be a lyric video, but I want like my personal touch to be on like everything. And so at the time I was like, how do I take essentially the customizability of something like Cap Cut or Tik Tok, which I think are the most authentic editing platforms, and then combine them with like a scalable sort of like automation so that I can have my cake and eat it too, so to speak, I can play at the level that all these labels and artists with like bigger budgets are playing on and see like how far we can get. And so we ended up um building Flow Stage, which lets you do both of those things. And [laughter] so and I we ended up being our own first case study mostly because I built it for myself. Like the entire story of like how flow stage sort of got bigger and how a bunch of people are using it now and Andrew how you probably discovered it is I built it I I built a version of it like way back in 20 in in like early 2025. I was using it to post really really consistently across a couple accounts for a while. I got a lot of my friends on it who were also artists cuz they would just see how the content I was making and they were like, "Oh, how are you doing that?" And then they told their managers and their managers told their labels and then I started posting on TikTok about Flow Stage and then it sort of cascaded out from there. But ultimately the goal was always to find a way to like market my music in a way that in a way that was compliant with what the market and like what the current strategies needed but was still also very authentic to who I was as an artist. And so now I know that was like a tremendous amount of exposition to actually get to what the case study is. [laughter] >> No, no, that that's super useful for context and like to answer your qu your kind of question um about like like how did I come across the stage in the first place, it came up in our our our podcast. >> Oh, no way. And and I think Jesse mentioned it or something and and he was like >> I think I talked about how was he using Kashi and then he mentioned like oh there's this other platform flow stage and I think Dustin or I think everyone else had like used it before was aware of it except for me. >> So I was like I got to look this up and they were like yeah it's kind of like Kashi but it's like on steroids like it can do way more. And I was like oh okay well that sounds cool. And I checked it out and I was like what? like it just kind of blew me away honestly. Um and I'm not just saying that because you hear it like it's genuinely kind of >> shocking what it can do especially where like you're you're a soloreneur pulling off this site. Um I think you you you have some people on your team right but like it's you're the developer. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, it's very impressive um how like what the site can can do and like it's hard to describe when people ask like when I tell people to use it I'm like trust me just go just go sign up and just go to the free trial just make a couple videos you'll get it but it's kind it is kind of hard to describe what it is the way I kind of have been like explaining it to people is like it's a way to make it's a way to make and repurpose social media content for music easily and and it is it is kind of like a lot of the stuff you you can do in Cap Cut. In Flow Stage, you can come up with all these like presets to just click like generate 10 clips and within like 5 minutes kind of get 10 social media posts typically. So, we use it a lot for ads, but also I've been using it a lot for for social media content and like it performs well on ads um to the point where we kind of like dramatically shifted my agency's like creative approach to be more flow stage heavy because we can make all these custom aesthetics, right, as you call them. Um tailored for individual genres and artists and stuff like that. So, anyways, that was also a lot of rambling, but um given all that context, let's go back to the case study. Yeah, absolutely. And and I appreciate the kind words. We try to we do try to make it like as powerful of a video editor as we can manage while still making it like very musicoriented because as an artist like I think that we all have really terrible experiences using stuff like Cap Cut and like using stuff like Tik Tok and Flow Sage is really just trying to make that as easy as possible so you can pull off strategies like the one I'm about to talk about. But anyway, to segue back into the case study, at the time in like 2025, like our real starting point was probably somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 monthly listeners. And I was like, hey, like I want to see if we can run this multi-account strategy in an effective way while still saying very authentic to our to like who we are as a band and the kind of music we make. And so the overall strategy employed what I call like the I don't know if there's a formal name for it, but I call it the artist universe strategy. And so what it is essentially is it is like before we started talking about what it is, let's talk about what it's not. It is not making a hundred fake fan accounts that pretend to be fans of my band Ascal just to pretend like that I pretend that I have the social capital to do that and like boost myself like inorganically through the algorithm just by pure like volume and like posting and like slob. You know >> what we try to do. will say um >> that also does work. >> Yes, it it also it also definitely does work. Yeah, I I don't I'm not saying I guess like my massive caveat is I actually feel like a lot of the music industry uses the fake fan account strategy. This is not to say that it is ineffective. I just think that the way I think about music marketing is also similar to the way I think about my music, which is that I want to do it in a way that feels like right and like real to me. And so for me like I it also like it stems from both like that ethos and also the pragmatism. Like at the time I was an an artist with like a thousand monthly listeners. It is inconceivable that I would have 20 like fan accounts for my band who were all like hyperfixated on like me and my music, right? So >> a lot of the time like there there are two a couple different ways you can approach fan accounts. We chose to approach it using um like a more like authentic approach. And the way we did that was we like within the artist universe strategy, the idea is to take everything about your B like about your artist persona, not just the music, but like who you're inspired by, like what you do outside of the music, like everything you're comfortable like sharing on social media. Anything you can think of that might get people to connect with you as the artist. And all of those things, you put them on separate accounts and all of those accounts are like hyperfixated on their individual niches. And the reason this works is because like alluding to the I I'm going to say the word consistency a lot during this podcast as I did during the intro. But if you're if you have if you were to take all of those different things and put them on a single account, not only would you never be able to like not only would you be posting like 10 times or like 20 times a day on one account, which would very quickly get that account banned, but you would be giving your viewers so much whiplash between the different kinds of content. Like imagine you were looking at my page and you saw me like lip-syncing and then you saw an anime edit and then you saw like me like running or like eating and all of the music was like wildly different because I make music in a couple different genres. You probably like the you wouldn't know what to think. Like you would be scrolling and be like, "Oh, I really like this guy's like anime edit style music, but I don't like his like 1975 synop style music." And so every time I see one of those, I'll scroll and it'll hurt your performance in the algorithm. So we segmented them all on different accounts. And the double the double like that has like three main effects. The first effect is that from a consistency standpoint, all of those accounts will find their own individual niches and grow a lot faster. Like some of those accounts have like like a couple thousand followers now just by posting like lyric edits that are all constrained to the same like genre or constrained to like the same visual like landscape, you know. Um, second second big impact is you get the reach that having multiple accounts gives you since like every account on average if you like the rough numbers on Tik Tok are if you getting above a thousand views and you're like a brand new account for like a relatively small artist you are doing great. And so imagine you've got like 10 accounts and you're posting like once a day and you're getting like and you're all getting 10 like a,000 views on all of those on all those 10 accounts like 10,000 views a day and then all of a sudden you're pulling like 300,000 views a month and then it just like sort of scales from there and even within that even within that architecture some of some of stuff will like pop off like you'll have see things that spike to 50,000 or like 100,000. And lastly, from an authenticity standpoint, it also shows your entire audience what you're interested in besides music. Like stuff that you couldn't really talk about on your main page or like that you don't have the time to talk about. Like I've had people who found my fan accounts or not maybe fan accounts is the wrong word, like who found my theme pages. They'll they'll be like, "Oh, I didn't know you were like a huge 9075 fan and like a lot of your music was inspired by them. Although if you heard my music, you probably would be able to tell." or like I didn't know you like these sorts of shows or I didn't know you were like this into fitness and so it all becomes like part of your universe where you're like central account is like the sun and everything else is like the planet. So they all sort of funnel back into your ecosystem >> and let you get that sort of reach while staying very like organic and very authentic. And so we ran and so numbers wise we ran we started running five of those like last November. We went from like 1,000 to 5,000 monthlys on Spotify pretty quickly. And then I took a break because I went back home to the Philippines where I wasn't able to post in the US because all my phones were geoence to the Philippines. And then when I came back, I talked to my I tapped my band down and I was like, "Hey guys, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to run 15 accounts. Everybody gets an account and I will personally run like eight to 10 of them, but all of you guys, all you have to do is you have to post. I will make all of the content. Don't worry about it. I'll like set everything up and you'll just get a text with a video link. You'll download the video. You'll like open up um your TikTok and you'll just post it with a caption in the text. That is literally all you have to do. And I guarantee you >> stage notification system was born. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like and so and so they were like, "Okay, like sounds crazy, but we'll try it." And we posted maybe like 15 to 20 times a day for a period of 3 months. reached around like 20 to 25,000 or I think at our at our peak without doing ads we were at like 30,000 monthly listeners on average and then we started and then the data gets like really messy because we started experimenting with like other forms of growth like we started releasing more music and then we also started running ads and so then >> what was your streams per listener when it was when pre- ads because one thing I've noticed about the conversion rate from Tik Tok to Spotify >> is the listeners you get have an absurd ly high stream per listener compared to anything else. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I'm checking right now. My current Oh, very interesting. So, when I started running, so before I started running ads, my streams per listener was like 4.5ish. Now it's 3.9ish because I started running like more ads um to target like listeners especially in my home country where I can't reach organic. But I completely agree. The biggest the biggest hypothesis I have for that is when you're on Tik Tok and you see a song that you like, there is a lot of friction to convert over to Spotify. You have to like open up Spotify and then you have to search the song and if you like the song that much, you're most likely going to stream it a bunch. And so I actually feel like Tik Tok is like a great way to get like super fans. >> I uh I've been running a test over the past uh 3 weeks that I'm going to make a video. I don't know if this video will be out before this interview or after it or or whatever, but um I I get a song, I distributed it. So, new song, new artist, no socials, no ads, no marketing. The only marketing that the song had is posting on Tik Tok across a network of like theme pages. Mhm. >> So basically the purpose of this is I could measure we get x amount of views and we get x amount of streams. What's the ratio of of views to streams? >> Yeah. >> Um and it's it's if you count just Spotify streams it's about 3 to 4%. >> If you count >> Yeah. Which which is way higher than I was expecting honestly. >> Yeah. If you count >> that's a fascinating case study. I don't have Apple Music artist stats yet because you have to like request it. But I got YouTube music stats. If you include those, it's more like five to six%. Um because we we got a considerable amount on YouTube and I'm sure Apple will be a chunk as well. And um you know, this is just one song. I'm planning on doing a couple more songs like this across different genres to test it because like you know, just for my audience, that's cool data. Um, and the interesting thing is the stream per listener is was absurdly high. And I knew it was high because I used to be co-owners of this company that we had like a Tik Tok edit service where you >> post music all these Tik Tok edit accounts that would sync your song to like TV shows and stuff. Yeah. >> And in all those case studies, the Tik Tok stream per listener were like, >> you know, stupid high, like way higher than any other form of >> Yeah. >> of marketing. And in this case, um, it's actually been about four weeks. The stream per listener is eight. >> 8.1 song. This isn't multiple songs. This is one song getting 8.1 streams per listener. So, we've only had 59 listeners, 476 streams, 71 saves, 21 playlist ads, only five followers. But, um, you know, >> it it shows and I think you're right about the friction because like you can't just click a link and jump. You have to either look at the audio, look at the name, and maybe you do the add to audio library thing, but I think most people are just like looking at the name and then going to Spotify and typing in the the name. >> I'm curious with this strategy, are you running um like does the artist have a main page? Like, are they faceless or >> They're completely faceless. >> Interesting. >> And there's no main account and they'll probably never have a second song. Well, I mean, based on how good it's going, I might just do it anyways. >> Um, >> yeah. >> So, but yeah, there's no main account. It's just because I have all these pages that I made like for my my actual band. >> Um, we have like a, you know, like a Millennial video games. >> Yeah. >> Type. We have like a gym rock metal one. We have like a >> Yeah. >> 2000's nostalgia one and a couple others that we've made. And um we just posted cuz there several of them are multi artists. So we'll do like >> breaking Benjamin uh do tree >> our band >> um cross fade you know whatever go down the list of like and each each thing has its own categories too. So like this one's a little more like divorced dad rock. >> This one's a little more like modern >> bands etc. Um exactly what your artist universe was. It was kind of like, well, what do people what do people listen to this music um associate with the genre do while they're listening? It's like, well, a lot of people listen to the genre music when they're working out. Um, a lot of people doing this um are roughly my age. They grew up playing Halo and Call of Duty 4 and whatever. >> A lot of them remember, you know, um early YouTube days and MySpace and and like MTV and Viva Bam. So I I just thought about all the things that I grew up with and what I associate with the music and hosted it. And so that's the artist universe strategy. >> That's amazing. That's I I also love hearing that. Do you mentioned in 2026 they are like one of my favorite bands of like all time honestly. >> Fun fact to get to pet his dog. >> That is a really crazy fun fact. [laughter] >> How did how how did you how did you get to pet his dog? One of my one of my a friend of mine uh is is the guitar tech for a large band and Dorree was opening for the band. >> Um and so we're just hanging out backstage and like Chris Dor is walking by with his tiny like not it's like a Shih Tzu or something and um he the dog just came sniped us and I was like, "Oh my god, can I pet your dog?" And he was like, "Oh yeah, cool." And he's just like a cool a cool dude. But fun fact of the day, I've petri duck. [laughter] >> That's amazing. >> Um, so going back to um we went through the strategy and so you kind of employed all your band members to to just expand this this whole thing. Um, >> what I think of what the next logical um spot is. How long did you execute that like 15 page strategy? Like how long was it going from the 1 to 2k up to the 25k? >> Yeah. Um I would say probably between 2 and 3 months. I would like we were very very locked in from mid January to I want to say like mid-Marchch and then I think after we had completed that case study I think we all sort of lost a little bit of motivation mostly and I and partially driven by the fact that we were trying to release a bunch of new music and our EP was dropping in March. So we started shifting our focus over to that and then everybody had some like personal life stuff going on and I was just like all right that's totally fine. like we we hit the number like like let's see like I I like to run experiments, right? And so the experiment I ran when we hit like March is I was like, "Okay, so like what happens if we like really scale back? Does it stay the same? Like are these listeners going to stick around?" And so we did really scale back. Like I think most of the band like wasn't posting as much like like maybe like one of or two of them were. And then I like um deprecated some of the accounts that I was posting on and really only focused on the ones that I really liked personally just for like vibes. And we found that it did pretty like once once we were at like um 25 to 30, we did hover around 25 to 30 like pretty consistently without releasing new music. Just like posting like reasonably consistently but not posting like 20 times a day. And so where like I I think we're just managing our um strategy moving forward such that if we like if we really need to like drive a spike, for instance, I keep telling my band members that hey like you can have five Tik Tok accounts per phone. I have two phones. I already have like 10 going. Can you imagine what we would do? What we would be able to do if we were down to lock in and everybody was to post five time like on five accounts every single day. Like we could get to 100. I bet we could get to 100 in like two to three months. But >> I'm I'm kind of planning a big video. It's probably going to take a couple months, but you know, and again, this is kind of all your fault, so I'm going to blame you. Um, I got my phone >> and I have uh three music accounts in there. I have my old iPhone which now has four accounts on there. Android one, Android 2, Android 3. And so the the goal was um one to keep making more accounts for the band, but two >> um I have a lot of music projects that that I've done over the years and I also am co-founders of a label and also I have a marketing agency, right? So um and my YouTube channel. So, I want to have like a and case study for kind of how this works. Um, and show kind of the intricate details of of how to do it because there's there's a lot that goes into it. >> Um, it's not as simple like you you can't just make a Tik Tok account >> and go. >> Yes. >> Right. You and you can't there's all these little rules with Tik Tok >> that you have to follow if you don't get banned. Like I tried using cloud phones. Most of them get instabbed using like GLARK. I tried using Multilog. I've tried using the service called District Droid, which is real phones remotely controlled in the server. So you could like you could be in the Philippines. >> Yeah. >> And control a US phone that's sitting in their warehouse remotely, >> which is very cool. Um, but like you there's all these warm-up procedures and safety things you have to do and how many so like what's like your crash course and I know you in your in the Discord stage you literally have a crash course for how to do this but what's like like a couple minute explanation of like >> I want to make a fan account and I don't even have the account set up like what's the best practice in a couple minutes of how to get an account? >> Yeah, absolutely. So um number one thing to do is to what we call warming up an account. And when you're warming up an account, it's just it's basically just like hygiene of pro what it translates to in like English is proving that you're a real person to Tik Tok. So you add a profile picture, you like add a bio, you have the account named like something real and not like something like some like random string of numbers. You and then you and then most importantly you scroll for a few hours. And so when you scroll for a few hours like it's training your algorithm. you're figure it's figuring out like what the account like likes and like what what the ideal content it should be or what where its content should go like when it's eventually posted. And so actually what I recommend if you're warming up a music account specifically is you can kill two birds with one stone like with with like stuff like flow stage. What people really benefit from is like doing market research. Like go look at everybody who is posting videos that match the style of your music and then use that as your baseline. And so when I warm up accounts or when I or like I advise other artists on how to warm up accounts, usually the step step number one is follow like imagine my account is to promote like a song that like that sounds similar to the 1975. First thing I'm going to do, I'm going to go follow the 1975. Then I'm going to scroll through my feed and see other artists that come up that are like the 1975 and I'm going to follow all of them and slowly my feed will get more and more artist focused. It'll get more towards and I might start seeing like 1975 fan accounts pop up. I'll follow those guys and I'll start then. But when you know you've struck gold is when you start seeing fan accounts for or like um theme pages for smaller bands that sound like the 1975. And then not only are you like not only is that great for you cuz you're discovering new music and that's always awesome, especially if you're a fan of like one of the bigger bands, but you start seeing what they are doing and what works for them. And so I might see like a couple accounts that are for like smaller artists that are doing like really scenic lyric edits that are all in black and white. And then I'll say, "All right, now what I'm going to do is as I'm warming up this account, I'm just going to fire up Flow Station, I'm going to make a black and white like mood board and use that to power the first round of content for this account." And so you do and so like by the end of like scrolling for an hour, you ideally you should have a really good idea of what aesthetic you might want to use to like run that account. And and by and by that time, you'll have given enough like organic reach that you're good to go. And the only other things that I will say as caveats are before you start posting, make sure you can actually follow accounts. Make sure you can leave comments because sometimes like you'll follow an account and then you'll reload the app and it won't the follow won't have gone through which is usually a sign that Tik Tok is like, "Hey, there's like something going on here." >> Yeah. >> But yeah, like >> that's the cloud phones I made, two got instabbed. And a cloud phone like essentially just a software phone. It's like a fake phone in in a server or something. Um, two of them get instabbed and two of them uh were seemed like they were throttled like they couldn't follow any account and they couldn't do anything. If I liked a post, the post didn't show on our liked posts. >> Yes, exactly. >> All I could do is watch and and save post. And comments again, if you refresh the video, they they'd vanish. And um Tik Tok's sneaky like they they look at everything about your device and your behavior. Like they're not just like you can't just open account and go. Like they're they're looking at like the hardware specifications of your phone. They're looking at how you Yeah. what type of email address you used apparently. Like I I've learned that um reg like log making an account with the Google one is apparently more trusted by Tik Tok than using an email apparently. So you're you're more likely >> Interesting. >> Yeah. And I could be hearsay but like I I this is what someone was swearing. and they're like the highest trust a score from from Tik Tok is um if you make your account with the Google login because then they're kind of assuming like well you made a Gmail account so it's statistically like they Gmail throttles how many accounts you can make so it versus if you use like a email extension or you you use like um um like a a email from a domain that they don't know like a domain that doesn't have a trust score >> and similarly like a phone number registration apparently has a higher trust score than it's like kind of Google and then phone number and then email from like a thing with a reputation. So, a Gmail email is still good, but it's not as good as like um romas ascalmusic.com. >> That won't be trusted as a regular romc. >> So, they're very they're very sneaky with how they track all that stuff. I I think I think that like I think those are all really good points. I will say that I think those matter only if you're trying to do like above 20 or 30 accounts like when you're really just trying to like get like sheer volume like when you're getting into the 50s or the hundreds of accounts like that stuff is really important to note. However, I do think that in at least anecdotally so and of like 15 for my for like my accounts, it generally has not mattered as like I the biggest correlation I've seen between views and uh like is actually not like the email created but like just the amount that the person is active and I think it all boils down to activity. Tik Tok is an ecosystem. Instagram is an ecosystem. They want to see you participating. They want to see you consuming content, not just creating it. And so we actually I actually did run like a my like a mini study just anecdotally um to see but in my band there are some people who are much more online and there are some people who are very not online. There's some people who only ever open Tik Tok to post our content. And then there's some people who scroll. And if you look at the chart between the people who I feel like are more online and the people who I feel like are less online, the average views of everybody who's more online is like a thousand plus. Sometimes like spiking to 5, 10, you know, and everybody who's less online like maximum a thousand. And that's okay. like those um like those of you still do eventually like those of you still can convert to streams, but ultimately the TLDDR even if you make it with like a not so great email as long as you're active enough on the account and you're like human enough on it, Tik Tok will eventually just like treat it as a regular account. There's a there's a deck that I'm pretty sure you've seen our deck on this, but we have a deck that shows the exact number of accounts you can get from like one phone number and I think it's around 12. You can do um four cuz one phone number can make four Gmail accounts. You can from those four Gmail accounts, you can also make four Google account like Google accounts. And then you can also make four Yahoo accounts. And then I guess it it could be even like more than 12 because you're not even counting the number like like the phone number itself or the Apple ID or like Facebook or whatnot. But yeah, so phone four >> Google accounts and or four Gmail accounts, but those Gmail accounts can you can log in via Google or login with >> Exactly. >> Correct. >> And then you can you can have four what did you say? Hotmail. Yahoo. >> I know which one you said. [laughter] >> You say um yeah, you can hop Yeah, you can hop. It's Yahoo, Gmail, and Google. I actually don't know if you could do Hotmail. I feel like maybe you can do even more accounts, but those are the those you can sign up with the phone. Um >> Yeah. And yeah, and and honestly like you can't even put that many accounts in one phone anyways. Um you can only put like five I think is what you recommend per phone, right? Yeah, it's the the technical upper maximum I think is like eight, but I person like my internal maximum is five. I just think it's a lot easier to manage like five and also like splitting your focus between like five to eight I think does make a huge difference. Like my friends who are at agencies who like run eight accounts on one phone see much higher shadowban rates. >> I I've I I've seen people go astream as saying you shouldn't you should only have one account per phone. But >> I mean every I think anecdotal evidence treats everybody a little bit differently. I've been totally fine having like five or six on a single phone at any given time. I have six on this phone. Yeah. I mean, only three of the music, but then there's like our podcast account, there's my main one, and then there's uh I forget what else, but there's ones that are not related to our our music, and then they have four. This one it's been it's been great. Um so, um now, one thing I want to point out, Flow Stage is actually kind of two two things. Uh there's the desktop interface and then there's the mobile app. Um which honestly is just confusing as hell, but [laughter] my opinion, um which I'm sure you've had people be like, "Oh, I have the app. How can I do this?" Oh, no. The browser, but they do connect. Which which is which is makes sense why this it kind of makes sense why they're named the same thing. Um, but just so everyone's on the same page here about what these two are, I'm gonna I'm gonna send my editor two clips and he's going to put them on screen right now. So, right now I'm the only person on screen >> and right here >> uh this is going to be the the desktop browser that shows what making like making content on Flow Stage um where like you upload your song, you sync your lyrics and you make these aesthetics and then it's it's syncing the lyrics and different parts of the song to that. So, this is one example of that. This over here is the mobile app. And this what you can do with the mobile app is it's basically like a way to film. If you think of like when you record music, you're recording music synced to a DAW and you're recording like your vocals on top of you're turning your guitar on top of your drums, you're recording your vocals on top, everything synced to the grid. This you can record videos synced to your song and then have it automatically chop them up and re repurpose them different ways. So these are the two different things. You got the desktop and you got the app. Everything we've talked about thus far is really with the desktop um thing, but the app is actually very handy because um you can for example film a couple videos of you lip-syncing, playing guitar, doing whatever um and that that those let's say three takes can be repurposed kind of infinite ways. So, for for example, you could have it cut between all three takes and have it cut nine times between those three takes. Or you could say, I'm just going to use these two takes and only have it go back and forth three times. And then you could change the lyrics, how they look on screen. So, you can have like just a couple videos that you spent five minutes doing turn into like 10 pieces of content if you really want to milk it. >> Um, but how do you use the >> the now that I've kind of framed it and what it is and shown people what it is? Yeah, great question. I mean, um, the I think the best descript I agree that the having both the mobile app and the desktop app named the same way is like pretty confusing from a in from a product standpoint. We thought about naming the mobile app something completely different, but then ultimately we were like h you know like that that itself is going to open up a whole host of problems. I think the best way of thinking about >> giving it a nickname like it's flow stage snap or something. Yeah, we we actually it's actually on um it's actually called internally dynamics by flow stage because it's like meant to capture dynamic motion and so we're thinking about changing the name on the app store but dynamics by flow stage didn't fit in the box initially so I was like okay flow stage I'm just going to figure it out later we might change the name in in the next update though I think it's a good call but the the way that we think about the difference is that both like flow stage at its core is meant to scale video editing it's meant to take like authenticity and make it like very very scalable. And so when you think about the way videos are edited, there are a couple different components. There's like the media management and like editing and distribution side, which the web app is phenomenal at. And then there's capture. And pre in the previous world, like with capture, like you would always be either on TikTok or you'd be on Capco just like filming yourself lip-syncing or just like in your camera roll. But then you just have like all of this footage that you need to like manage yourself and like figure out how to make edits of. And what the flow stage camera app does is it is a lip. It's like B, as Andrew mentioned, it allows you to do capture at at like a an incredibly efficient way, but it also lets you get like something out of it while you're capturing. So like imagine I film myself like five times from five different angles to the same song. I can press a button, edit them all together, get a really awesome video that I can post right now. But it'll also save all of those clean takes without any overlays, without any audio. And I can use them wherever I want. I can upload them to the Flow Stage app and do the exact same edit like 50 different ways. I can like export if I feel like I'm sick one day, I can go back through my take log and I could pull one of my takes and just make it another video like a week later. And so the app is really designed for capture and it's designed for content repurposing. And with flow stage like the app is also for the core for almost all the core functionality of the app the the app is actually completely free and compatible with like flow stage free plans. Like our big thing with the with the with the app is we want people to think like hey and um I need to take a video right now like imagine like as an artist the my content flow with flow stage is on Sunday I'll sit down and do like 150 videos in like 45 minutes. But sometimes I'm just like oh I actually really like my outfit today. I feel like filming a lip-s sync video. I'm going to film it in the flow stage app so that that way I not only do I get like the lyrics exactly right every single time since it pulls from the desktop and like pulls all of your audio in so you it like knows but also like then I get it's two birds with one stone because I can either reuse that take within the app as much as I want or I can upload it to flow stage have it autosync in the desk in like the web app and then make like 10 more edits with like all different lyrics styles right so they are very they are very interlin but The flow stage app is mainly designed to be a camera app. >> Yeah, that that's a great way to to put it. Um, and one example of how it like killing the two birds with one stone is like I recorded a thing. I have this like part of one of my songs that was from goes from breakdown to guitar solo to chorus. And so I recorded a lip sync of breakdown, guitar solo, chorus. Obviously in the guitar solo I'm not doing any singing. the breakdown there's the stringing part and the chorus there's the singing part and then the guitars are just doing you know playing through the whole part and then I posted one where it it goes like there's only like three cuts there's like it starts off me screaming the breakdown shows the guitar like once and then it goes to guitar solo then it goes to just vocals and then like a week later I just open the app back up I use the same two clips but now during the breakdown it goes back and forth like four times the guitar solo is obviously still just the guitar solo, but I changed the lyrics on screen and so through the same two videos for the same two recordings without any extra effort really, I was able to get a second video. Um, and then in another instance, I had three videos I recorded three separate times that I was able to easily just snap into multiple videos. So, it is like super timesaving I found. Um, and as someone who hates making music content, it's awesome. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, man. That that's why we're here. I actually have I actually have a random question for you because um especially as we've been experimenting with the meta ads world. What is your take on having like it's I guess segueing also from like the idea of like the flow stage app to like the web app to like the website. >> What is your take on running ads with your face on them versus not with your face on them like like performance style content versus like lyric visualizers? So ideally, you'll have your ads run with your face on them just so that way like people are getting used to seeing who you are and connecting with you. >> Yeah. >> But at the same time, you want just a good cost per result, right? Because if you're if you have a faceless ad that's getting, you know, 20 cents conversion and your one with you in is getting 60. >> Yeah. >> It's hard to justify that difference just because this one has your face in it. Um >> Yeah. >> So I tend to take I try both. um for our we we dropped an album a couple weeks ago and we're using just everything. We have we have lyric videos that we made in the past. Um we have lip-sync video that we made. Um and then for the newest stuff we we have uh we have flow stage visuals. We also have kashi visuals. We also have the flow stage app visuals. Um and then just some regular lip syncs that I had made outside of the flow stage app too. >> Yeah. >> And it's pretty consistent. It obviously depends on your aesthetic. >> Yeah. >> What you're doing. But like I've had some pretty consistent wins with using postage aesthetics just because like when you're making an aesthetic, you're usually kind of curating uh footage to match like something that makes sense for the user. Um so for example, it might be like skateboarding clips for a pop punk song for example. or um trying to think of like um night driving footage for for certain styles of of music or like race cars going around a racetrack or something. You're curating this like visual aesthetic to match the song. So like a lot of the times that does work and like for what our agency has been doing for the last several years. That's a big part of what we do for artists that don't have creatives is we we didn't have an app to do it. We would manually, like we tell our video editors like, "Go find us clips of like fancy sports cars driving around the racetrack at night with neon lights, put this text on it, um, and cut it up into four parts of the song." Um, so we've been like doing how Flow Stage kind of organizes clips just manually. Um, and telling our video editors to do it and now we still do that because we can there's different way like they use After Effects so they can kind of get with the animations and stuff >> but um, >> in in the ads world it's so advantageous to just have more, right? Like I don't launch four videos in my ads anymore. I launch 40, for example. Um, my latest or latest single literally had 44 ads. Wow. >> So having a tool, you know, whether it's flow stage or Kashi or just your filming on manually is kind of like critical unless you have a lot of time to make all this stuff manual. Um, so yeah, that's that's my take on that. Ideally, have your face in it, but for sure. Yeah. I mean, the reason I ask is because I feel like a lot of the time like I try to have my face in my my ads, but all like the lyric visualizers tend to perform better. And I don't know if it's just like I'm doing the wrong things from a performance standpoint or maybe it's just the audience the the audience um just really loves like the black and white, you know, like >> Well, I've had that happen with some artists over the years where anytime you put their face in it, it just does worse. And you know, that's it's kind of like as an artist [laughter] >> a little bit. >> I just like am I just like funny looking or something, you know? >> Yeah. Um, and I think it's that the like visual aesthetic of who you are doesn't match up with what the sound is when they hear it. >> Yeah. >> And so to me, what that means is like the the look of you doesn't match what the music should be. And that might it might like if it's just oneoff doesn't matter. But if it's like systemic like every single song, >> anything with you in it gives them the wrong like makes the do worse. that might mean that like you need to work on like what you're wearing or what the location is um or both or how you act on camera. Um and I for you I don't know if you already tried this but like you guys have a bunch of live footage. >> Yeah. >> And your live footage I've seen some of it like it looks pretty cool. You could sync that to the song and cut that. I have a feeling that would work miles better than >> the bedroom stuff. But it also depends cuz sometimes the bedroom stuff is better. But it all comes down to like what does the audience expect. Um for for my stuff some of the aesthetics have done better cuz like I don't go out to a cool location. I don't look like a metal singer. I don't have tattoos. I don't look like a badass. I'm just like your average 34 year old dude with a wife and kid. Right. So, um, sometimes visuals with me on it do well, but, um, I don't think people think of me when they hear the music. And I've had some ads where I've been able to play on that on purpose where um >> like I've done some some content that was like, >> you know, when when you sound like this but look like this or when you sound like this but you're you're a 34 year old uh married guy with kids or >> um something along those lines. Just kind of playing the fact of like you you you're you hear this like crazy scream in a breakdown. you're expecting this like tatted up dude with piercings and when whatever and spiky hair and then you you get me, you know, [laughter] and so um there's a lot of things you can play with and it's very much trial and error. >> Yeah, absolutely. I I was actually going to say that I think the some I feel like what's pretty interesting between the disparity between how like my meta ads do and how my Tik Tok posts do is I think Tik Tok loves the disparity. Like a lot of the time like I think I make music in two main genres. The first one is like very 1975 core synth pop and the second one is very like the band Camino core like alt pop like rock leaning. And sometimes I'll just be like, "Oh, it's just like me in my room in like a very flowy cardigan just like ripping like the craziest like top line [laughter] on on a very like rockcoated song." I think it's great because I think people don't expect it like especially because as like being Filipino I think a lot of people expect me to sing like ballads or like R&B and I I do do that sometimes at karaoke but like the music I make is very different and so um we play a lot on that on like the text hooks we use on like the content that we create like more broadly but I I just think it's kind of fun you know like it's it's cool to challenge expectations in that way. >> Totally. Totally. Yeah. So, so there there totally are differences between like running ads and then content, specifically content on Tik Tok versus like Instagram and YouTube. Like the content that pops off on each can be like wildly different. >> But I have had really good results getting like high performing >> Tik Toks and throwing them in meta ads. Like we had a song where in the past the best the song ever did with >> with I forget what ads we made for it was like 60s something cents a conversion which is is just kind of bad. and we we just grabbed like the best five performing pieces of content we did from flow stage edits and it got it down to like 25 cents. Um yeah, >> and it was one of those songs like I always believed it. It was one of my favorite songs we ever made >> and it just never did good. Um so it kind of like saved the day for that song. >> And this case Faceless Faceless Content, it's literally like clips of like retro video games, right? So, it's kind of a weird um not weird, but it's, you know, it it was not something you would just like expect to run as a default. Like a lot of artists, I need [clears throat] a music video. I need >> need to go like dance on screen or do this lip sync thing. And you wouldn't expect like let me get some clips of like >> cinematic visuals from Halo Combat Evolved. >> Yeah. >> Or Tony Hawk Pro Skip. >> Great game. Both great games. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. and and then like putting some cool caption on it or or whatever. Like there's you wouldn't really expect that stuff to work, but it actually like can work incredibly well. And and it's cool to like you're posting all this content and that's kind of like a big perk of posting so much whether it's once a day or three times a day, whatever, is like Tik Tok in some way is like a content testing engine. um you post a ton of content and then you let their algorithm tell you how things do and like whatever gets the best watch time typically or whatever the best combination of watch time and shares and saves and all whatever their algorithm factors in is going to do that. And Meta really just cares about the same thing with their ads. If your ads keep people on the platform, they make it cheaper to run, you know. >> No, absolutely. I mean, I I actually do this exact same thing. I think also something very interesting that you mentioned is like how a lot of the time people think that like one type of creative is going to do better than the other. Like the reason I think when you get into music marketing, one of I when you asked me the question at the start of the podcast, I was weighing two answers like the consistency thing and then the second thing I was weighing was the concept of like you need to basically just leave your ego at the door because as an artist like you have a lot of different ideas of like what kind of creative would really match your song, like what would really do well and like what the best section of the song is. But >> a lot of the time with music marketing, it's about taking your art and then finding the like if your art is like this, finding the subset of it that is like marketable. I think like there are a couple approaches to like blowing up your music, so to speak, where sometimes people will say, "Oh, actually I know like what is marketable is over here. So, I'm going to go make music that is like in this box." That's something something I personally like doing. I like making my music and then finding the box within the music that it fits in. Um, but my guess for that that box is usually wrong initially. And so like as I get better at music marketing, I get more of an intuition. But for instance, like I have I've I've wrote a song like a couple months ago that I thought had like a really like awesome chorus and I thought it was going to do phenomenally well on TikTok. Posted the chorus, totally flopped. I was like, "Okay, this song sucks. I'm never going to run it again." Then I made a couple like flow stage posts on the pre chorus because I was testing like one thing I like to do is I just like to cut up a song into like five different sections and test each of them to see what does really well. And then the pre chorus like went semi viral and I was like oh shoot like I I guess I was totally wrong and like I was actually even thinking about scrapping this pre chorus but I guess it is good and like maybe like people like that's like the earworm part of the song even if I personally don't really like vibe with it. So we ended up making a lot more content around that. And then even for meta ads, I was like I I literally was like, "Okay, here are my top five like flow stage pieces of creative. This one I think is going to do really really well. We should like I'm going to prioritize this one." And then the winner that got like nine like I think nine CPL like 0.09 CPL was like one of like a completely different section that I did. >> Sorry. Sorry. Cost per um what what's the what's the standard metric? Um like cost per listen cost per click. Oh, well I I you uh cost per conversion. You call it CK, which like cost per action, but um yeah, I think I think somebody mentioned to me it was like I've heard like C cost per like listen if like conversion, but um >> Oh, interesting. Okay. >> Yeah, but like we had we had a 9 cent um cost per conversion on that like ad. So, it did phenomenally well. I just want to just to flag for everybody like watching this, my strategy with meta ads is very different than a lot of um like a lot of strategies that have been me that have probably been like mentioned at like some point. But what I like to do is because my core audience is like my core audience is actually bifurcated. It is mostly in the US if you discover me through Tik Tok. But because I'm from Southeast Asia and I can't reach Southeast Asia with um with like Tik Tok since all of my phones are fenced here, I'll just run ads in Asia. And so we only started doing that like this past um like month or so. But I was like, hey, you know, like eventually I might move back to the Philippines. I can't like VPNing into Manila and just like posting over and over again when I'm on a 12-hour time difference is going to be a huge like pain in my ass honestly. And until I hire somebody in the Philippines that I can just send them content and they can post is like probably not that far away. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to put all my ads like take all my streaming revenue and put all it all into ad spend in the Philippines and Indonesia and like Singapore because those are countries I like have been to a bunch of times that I know are really going to like like certain songs that I that I've like written because they were inspired by like the soundsscapes that are so popular in those countries. Right. >> They're also like very cheap countries to advertise to. Yeah, exactly. >> Good perk. And like to a lot of to a lot of people from the States, uh, they purposfully don't do those countries because they're like, "Well, I'm never going to go to the Philippines, right?" So, >> um, >> and I mean, I know people who tour in the Philippines every year and that from the States, their music just went like crazy viral over there. So, there's some like big there can be some big opportunities there. The problem is obviously it's it's kind of it's very expensive to >> to travel there and tour there and do that, right? you need a very any kind of international touring is >> is um it can be Have you found it tricky to advertise there and not just get like swarms of clicks that don't turn into streams? >> Not really. I mean I think that like I think that for the most part we have seen like crazy conversion off of like fill the Philippines, Indonesia, etc. Like I also think that part of it is because the songs that we write are so like like for instance the 1975 like Fly by Midnight like anything in this sort of like synth pop genre is super super popular over there. And so >> like when I like when I release a song it wasn't like oh I'm testing this in the Philippines and like people just click on it out of curiosity. I was like I know that if I can get this in front of like my hometown people are really going to like it. And so like that was and and I also do think like to your point about touring in the Philippines, it may be expensive to go out there, but we Filipinos love music. Like we are obsessed with it. And so sometimes there'll be like random songs that'll sound like something from the '8s that'll just blow up in the Philippines like unexpectedly. I think one of the craziest examples of this, it's this um artist that I followed for like 2021. But are you familiar with like Starleta? >> Uh no, I don't think so. He he does like he's um he I think he got it I I think he started like posting on TikTok like 2020 2021ish but he does a lot of um 80s style um synth pop and he had a song called Over You that somehow just blew up in the Philippines and he got like he got like a bunch of streams from them like like Manila like loves that song because it falls in that very like specific soundsscape. like not to get too much into the the music the music uh landscape of the Philippines, but I'm uh I'm very bullish on like hey if you make I guess I guess the other big takeaway other than like all the stuff that we talked about from a music marketing strategy perspective is if you make sin pop you should consider running ads in the Philippines and Indonesia because we love it over there like we would like we would welcome you with open arms. >> Also I found like uh one artist I know that is really good there does like adult contemporary >> um and the other one does kind of like soft soft pop. So, it's like >> Yeah, that track >> happy, sentimental, just acoustic guitar and a very soft male vocal. >> Yeah. >> His biggest countries are Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea. >> Yeah. >> Um ads do great there. And I think I think part of it is I don't know what what his like ethnic background is, >> but he might he's he's something from Southeast Asia. >> Yeah, that also makes sense. And and I know a lot of I've worked with a lot of artists who do like um Hindi or Punjabi music and like marketing in India is tough like there's you usually have to do a lot of workarounds to not just get like stuck with bots and get like spam >> but every time I work with a Hindi or Punjabi thing it ends up just kind of working out and I think there is something to be said for one >> understanding the culture two looking like you belong there. >> Um when they see an ad for like you know me Mr. Mr. Overweight White American popping up on their feed. [laughter] It's like I don't think I I gel as much with the what? Like, you know, we respond to ads where you look like yourself. Yeah. It's part of it. >> And then understanding the culture is a huge part of it. Um I'm doing some ads for someone who's Brazilian and like we're translating all the ads that run in Brazil. >> Yeah. >> And just to make it extra hit mode the market and we're also doing a Japanese specific thing because he knows his stuff responds well in in Japan. So, um, super >> clever clever strategy that you're you're targeting it like that. >> Thanks. >> Yeah. Is it the Philippines that has the big um karaoke culture? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the re the reason there's a flow stage um preset that looks like a vintage karaoke machine is because I'm from the Philippines. Like, we are we love karaoke over there. And so, um, a lot of the time, like selfishly with low stage, like as I mentioned before, like a lot of the product roadmap is based off of me and what I want. And so, I like I think ever since I've been a kid, cuz I grew up in karaoke culture, I've had a dream of like seeing my song on a karaoke machine. And then I was like, I how hard could this possibly be to code? Like, [laughter] I know I know what it should look like because I've seen it so much. Like, let me just really lock in. And I think it took me like three or four days to get it really dialed in until it was exactly what I imagined it to be, but it was so worth it. >> I think people underuse that aesthetic. [laughter] >> Yeah, I think some something about like seeing the the words get like colored in as it go is kind of like a >> like an a watchtime hack in a way because like it gives your eyes something to follow along with. >> Yeah. >> Um the next one you should do is do like a bouncy ball one or something. >> Yeah, dude. That it's coming. Don't worry. We're we're we're try we're we're trying. [laughter] Um, have you heard at all about um the whole geese scandal with Chaotic Project? We've talked about it on our our podcast a few times, but >> um you know what they're it's what they're doing is not the same as what your artist universe strategy is, but like there's a big overlap here, right? They they control >> over a thousand accounts and they're making content for this at scale targeted in certain like basically aesthetics. Um have you have you like have any insight on like that that what like how they operate or what they do or >> Yeah, I mean um soa chaotic goods model is pretty interesting. I think that they have a very like the I think they actually have a very unique approach slash advantage that is like pretty hard to replicate from a fan account standpoint because I do think that they do a lot of firstly they do a lot of like sort of like fake fan account style stuff where there's content of the artist and it's like positioned from like a fan perspective like number one like Tiffany Day fan or like or number one Geese fan or whatever. However, I interestingly enough, I feel like I don't actually have as much of like a argument against what they are doing because the value that their content adds is actually quite high for like if if I'm an like I I'm a Tiffany Day fan and I think that and I I love seeing like the fan accounts even if I know that they are like not organic because what they do is they'll have people who can get really close to her because they're on the team and they can get like really good footage like up close and like really personal and like all the angles and then they'll just like redistribute it and like clip it over and over on a bunch of different accounts and like yeah like is that entirely truthful? No. But as a fan would I rather see that or like if I'm like truly a fan I love seeing that. Like I don't want to see like some random like footage 300 ft back where I can barely hear the artist for everybody screaming around. I want the footage up close and if they are if they're giving me that like a lot of the time I think it also all all boils down to when you make content generally like regardless of where you make it regardless if it's like on flow stage or on cap code or like whatever the goal is for it to be entertaining. The goal is for it to like add value at the end of the day to like somebody. And so a lot of the time it's like oh like they're discovering a new song and that's the value you're adding or the edit is like to a to like a a movie or a TV show that's like really apt for the song. So there's like a sort of like fandom overlap, but for the entire like geese or like chaotic good accounts, the value that they add a lot of the time is like, hey, I would never have seen this footage otherwise and I'm as a fan, I'm kind of grateful that I get to see it regardless. >> Totally. Yeah. It someone I know is running a campaign with them for one of their artists and uh so I got to see their dashboard reporting page and got to see some videos that they were running. Um, and none of them were that type of content where they the they like provided close-up and personal footage. It was all >> content made by the respective content owners. Um, but they were they were all like still entertaining and valuable, you know, >> cuz like for for example, without like letting people know who it is because there's like probably a thousand accounts that do this exact thing. >> There's this page that uploads maybe 10 videos a day. Each video is just them staring at the screen. It's like smiling or making a face and then there's like a big block of like yellow text. >> Yeah. >> Um and they do like 10 posts a day, each one with a different song and they get they have like several million followers doing >> um that's apparently part of their network. I don't know if they own the page or someone. >> Yeah. And then there's a bunch of other accounts. So like I went down the rabbit hole and saw them. There were other accounts doing similar things. someone staring kind of like curiosity curiosity curiously at the at the camera with like a block of text on the kind of basically the face they had kind of matched the song and the text on screen kind of matched the mood. >> Um, so they would stare and kind of look sad or look off in the distance like they were thinking or be like really happy or something. And these posts just have crazy high volume. >> Interesting. I think I think that that actually brings up a very um a cross-section of a topic that I've been thinking a lot about lately, which is the idea of like music foreground versus music background content. And this came because I got asked on Reddit um like a while back like, "Hey, why can't I just post a bunch like I've been posting a bunch of um a bunch of like meme videos with my song in the background and I get millions of views, but I don't see any Spotify conversion. Why not?" And my hypothesis for that like the framework that we use at blow stage is like there are two types of content. There's music foreground where your music is the focus in some way like it's a lyric visualizer or it's a performance video. And then there's like content foreground/music background which is your music is just there. It's like not really adding anything. It's not even really related but like the content itself is like very engaging. And so like usually if you're a smaller artist content like people are get generally baited to do music background stuff because they're like oh my god I can get millions and millions of views if I just post memes. But even though it gets like significantly more views your actual conversion to streaming is exponentially lower unless there is some way to associate your to bring your music to the foreground of something that has content foreground. And so what um and so what a lot of people are doing these days or like the strategy that I really like is like the movie or TV show edits because it is really easy to like envision a song with like lyrics to a TV show that people really like the the like the sort of like the aura or the clout comes from the TV show. But if you edit it correctly and you do it like in a thoughtful intentional way, your music will be like your music compliments it. Like people will like listen to it and be like, "Oh, that's really cool. I like how the lyrics match up. What song is that?" versus oh like completely unrelated meme that's like hilarious and you'll get a million views but your song is just like sort of buried like no one is looking at like a if like I think the example you mentioned is quite interesting and I would be very interested to see what exactly the account is doing to take that sort of like music for like content foreground stuff and bring the music like more into the foreground so like the conversion ends up being better. Yeah, it was largely like the the the text on screen >> was thoughtful [clears throat] enough in that it it like portrayed the emotion or the lyrics of the song. >> So it wasn't like completely unrelated either. >> Got it. >> So, but I I have to imagine that that the conversion rate of that is worse >> than like for example in Flow Stage now, which thank you for adding this feature. Um, the cut to beat thing >> I use in like every video now because it's [laughter] >> I think um, no, maybe not every video, but most of them now because like one it automatically kind of like cuts the main thing to be in sync. I don't know if I've just like gotten lucky or that's on purpose. I'm guessing it's on purpose, right? >> Yeah. >> All the default cuts are on king, but then you can go in and >> and have it be like really like chop up 18 cuts and have them all be on the grid. Um, and I think what that does is if you have, let's say, a TV show with some moments that kind of vibe with the the theme of the song, if they're cut on the beat and there's lyrics popping on the screen, it's like the entire video loses meaning without the rhythm of the song. So, it kind of forces you >> to like get into the groove of the song, which means aesthetically or um subconsciously is what I mean is like you're more likely to get >> get into the track, right? If you're kind of like grooving to the edit, whatever. And so and then the lyrics paired on like you have this one thing called like statement where it takes that the lyrics pop up take like a good third of the screen. >> Yeah. >> Which on one hand when I've been making videos I've been like I feel like on one hand this is annoying because it's blocking the content. But then I'm also like >> well I'd rather have 500 views of people who care about the song that's played than 5,000 where it's solely background. You know >> interesting. I so the the when I when I built the statement lyric style, I actually wasn't even thinking about that at all. I was thinking like the it was more inspired by like the stylistic effect you see on a lot of like hyperpop videos like where like the the lyrics are so big that they block that they're almost part of the video. They're like an element of the creative itself rather than just like auxiliary. And so I think we're like that's a style that we're always like working on making better and better and like adding more customization to. But it's interesting that cuz I feel like even when I watch these sorts of like hyperpop videos, I don't even really read the lyrics. I'm like, "Oh, that's just really cool." You know, like I'm subconsciously processing the lyrics, but they're so much part of the visual that I'm just like, "Oh, I'm just I'm just having a great time." [laughter] >> But that's what makes you like actually care about the song though, you know, cuz like otherwise >> you might just only interact with the video and the music is just background almost like, you know, you put on a playlist in Spotify and someone's song was just in the middle, right? it's like completely passive, but if the if the song's cut to the beat and there's lyrics on screen. Um, and and also if the hook maybe connects the song to the to the um what's being portrayed on screen like like um uh I have some hook in one of my things that's like POV, you put this on your MySpace page immediately, you know, so like it's the millennial nostalgia one, right? So the idea is like you heard the song and added it to your MySpace profile. >> Yeah. Um, I don't know if you remember back in the day MySpace, you could like pin a song, right? >> So, I'm not that young. I remember that. [laughter] >> Cool. Cool. I didn't know that sixyear gap can make the difference between MySpace or No My Space. [laughter] >> Um, but like the that that hook is related to the song. So, >> yeah, >> I if sometimes you you don't want that obviously, but like at least what I've been trying to do is I try to mix mix it up. So, I'll have like some hooks where it's only about the the video. Um, some videos where maybe the there's no lyrics and some videos where the lyrics are like the big statement one and other ones where the where it's the brat ones just to like see what >> does better. And then I'll try to cross check with Spotify and like one of my burner >> like that that ghost artist that I made just to track this be like, oh, like we got a spike in this video on this day and then we're seeing a spike in streaming on that day. Like what video >> did that, you know? >> Interesting. Yeah, that >> that's a super cool experiment. I I really am excited to see the result of it. >> Yeah. Yeah. After we get off, I I'll give you a little sneak peek. Um but there'll be hopefully a more fleshed out one. But um anyways, man, we've been going for a while. So, is there anything you want to leave the people with >> aside from go check out Flow State? [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean, I guess probably the biggest thing is that um I it's I guess it's more about like the mission of Flow Sage sort of ties into like broadly how I think about music marketing in general. Our motto at Flow Sage is create with intention. And I think a lot of the time like when something like when condom becomes easier to create, there's like a idea that you can just like take your hands off the wheel completely and let and like let the machine do its thing. But ultimately, we're all artists. like everything about like being an artist is not just about making really really good music. It's about like building a world and it's about building a brand and it's about like developing that. And I think that if people do that with intention, it always has better results than just saying like, "Hey, like I'm going to go completely hands-free and just like automate everything." Like I don't think personal branding should be fully automated. I think there's always got to be like a human in the loop. Even when you make content with Flow Sage, like there was a there was a previous version of Flow Sage like way way back in the day where you could actually set up an set up a rule that said, "Hey, make me a slideshow every day." And I never sign on to the platform again. And a lot of people really like that. Like they were like, "Oh, it's really cool. It'll text me an option and I could choose whether or not to post it." But we are try like we we'll see whether or not we bring that feature back. But for the most part like flow stage is meant to be is flow stage is not an AI generative tool where you add your song and then you just like let it like run. It is the most efficient video editor for musicians and it's an editor and so it ultimately scales your taste. If you have real like we want people to create with intention and to have good taste and to have and to enable people who have like really good taste to make more content to compete with all the AI slap garbage that like other like sort of like AI like like generative video tools for instance are like putting out >> especially like probably less of a risk now that Sora is like officially dead. [laughter] But we were like we initially when it came out we were like hey we want to sort of position as the antithesis of that like we want real human content. We want real human like eyes on it and we just want to just help make people louder. So yeah, like that's that's probably the last thing I would really just want to index on like create with intention but at scale, you know. >> Heck yeah, man. Well, thanks for coming on. This was awesome. >> Of course. It's always great chatting, dude. [laughter]