And yes, sir. OK. Welcome, everyone, to the sixth episode, Standing Ragged Straight. This is MJ Harris.
This is Jack Graves. And yeah, welcome back to a whole new school year, totally different school year when that's not on campus, but on the interwebs. I, it's been a minute, actually. I don't remember the last episode that's officially out.
I think it may have been the unlocked. Yeah, it was the unlock. It's OK. Yep.
So, and that was around March, I think. So literally right before the pandemic and all the things I would transpire afterwards. But I mean, we're still here now. So I mean, overall, ultimately, so making content for y'all.
I don't mean, Jack, we got to chop it up a little bit about just how overall things are doing. But yeah, Jack just wanted to ask you quickly. How is everything going? Yeah, man.
It's been a long time. It's been a long summer. It feels like it's almost like when I'm back home, it's just when we were in quarantine, there was no sense of time whatsoever. And I just thought it was like two weeks of passing.
It would be a couple days. But it's time to sped back up now. I guess, yeah, I went back home to Seattle in Cowell, changed the classes online back in March. And then I was just during the whole lockdown era.
I was just in the house with my parents and sister. And that was funny. I got to watch a lot of TV with my sister and had a lot of family dinners and stuff. It was definitely a fun time.
And then I guess finally in the summer, I was looking for jobs for a super long time. And I got a job being a cashier at a golf store, which is, I don't know anything about golf. I didn't know anything about golf. So it was an interesting experience.
I learned a lot about differences between the circular golf balls from each other and the. Probably the different types of endings on the goth stick. I can't remember the drivers. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. So no lot of stuff. I don't think I'll really be using it that much. But yeah, I took a couple of summer classes at Berkeley too and online, of course.
But that was pretty interesting. And now I've finally, about a week ago, moved back in. Berkeley on the south side of campus. Been really excited to see my friends again.
It's looking like the town is not as empty as I thought it would be surprisingly. There seems like there's a decent number of people who came back. But yeah, I'm excited for the school year. Yeah, now that's, I wonder how it was at the golf store.
Were people still going over just, I mean, oh, I'm assuming it was just like a regular golf store. You would purchase actual equipment, not going golfing. Yeah, yeah. We had a lot of people coming in actually.
I mean, the main clientele was like rich old people who were retired and had nothing else to do with golf and would come in and buy a pack of golf balls for their weekly round or whatever. But it was an experience. Yeah, I remember you were talking about that in March and you were like, oh, hopefully I get something in there. And the summer year.
And it turns out golfing was the calling, or at least helping people buy stuff. But I guess, yeah, I guess for me, the summer has actually been a little bit hectic. Fortunately, I haven't been hit really too hard by the pandemic. I was able to score a virtual remote internship with this nonprofit organization.
At the same time, I've had to work as a recording engineer at the local studio in Oakland. And it's funny is I think during one of those, I think after one of those sessions, I was taking the bus back one night and I ended up getting jumped by four people. She is. All the way for the bus.
Yeah, that was a little weird because I think, yeah, it was a little sus how everything just kind of transpired. I was just sitting and waiting for the bus. Two people just come out of the corner, very suspiciously and I knew it was sus because there was nowhere else. No other people in that vicinity.
So I was like, all right, I'm just going to prepare myself. And then I think one of them tried to snatch my phone, but I was able to, I kind of knew how that was going to happen. So I just quickly moved, defended myself, then started to attack me or not really attack me, but they tried to like square up, I guess. And then I think in the middle of that, a car comes over and then two more people exit the vehicle.
And at that point I was like, let's just find a way out of this situation. So I basically created enough space. So I moved forward while they moved back. Once I had enough space, I just yeeted across the stoplight towards a well-lit bank.
And yeah, they tried to chase after me, but once they saw where I was running, they just quickly turned back. And yeah, I think the only thing they took are my glasses. And yeah, but look at this. I'm pretty sure the audience won't get to see this, but holding my phone.
The phone that they tried to take. So I am satisfied with how it turned out. I did actually get injured in the eye though. And for a while I was on eye medication.
I couldn't see out of that eye for a minute. And it hurt a little bit, but I mean, like I said, I got my eye forward. So that's all good. That's crazy.
I don't think I've ever heard of someone who escaped a four-person mob into attack. And that's something to be proud of, basically unscathed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, that's true.
That's kind of how I've been looking at it is like, oh, I face like a four-person army low key. Yeah, so we can get on to the main topic for today, which is basically COVID-19 and its impact on the current music industry. And I kind of wanted to talk about this not only because it's relevant today because we're actually going through COVID-19, but also because I feel like it might be interesting for our listeners to get a better insight into how deeply musicians and artists are being affected by COVID. And I think as fellow musicians and producers ourselves, I feel like we can kind of sympathize and relate to a lot of the struggles that current artists are going through right now.
Even though we're not, I wouldn't say, we're definitely not at the top tier commercially successful type, but hopefully something. Yeah, no, I just wanted to get into that because I find this very interesting and very complex at the same time. So obviously with COVID-19, one of the main ways in which COVID-19 has been impacting a lot of musicians and artists is by affecting touring dates. As you can tell, a lot of festivals and concert companies and live event planners, they started to cancel shows, even the bigger headliners like Billie Eilish, Harry Stiles, towards the second week of March had their shows canceled.
And yeah, and I think this aspect of the music industry is really being hurt right now by COVID. I also, I think it's also important to provide a little bit of background into just how artists and musicians make money in the music industry. And from what I've researched, the way artists and musicians make money is pretty convoluted and just, it's really messy. And I'm kind of hesitant to go very deep into this because I can quickly sense that our listeners are just going to turn this off.
But I think just the most important things to take away from this money-making thing is that artists and musicians, they basically make money from kind of these main sectors. So live performances, so touring and live shows and things like that. Guail teas, which is kind of the recurring, which is the money that you basically get as your song or album continues to get placed. Synchronizations is when you get placements on radio programs or on movies.
Merchandise, which is merch. Obviously that's a very popular thing among current musicians and artists kind of plugging their merch. And also brand deals as well. So you have big artists like Drake, for instance, partnering up with Nike.
And then Kanye partnering with Gap. But that's more of a fashion type thing. But I guess I could also go with merch. But anyways, nevertheless, that's kind of the main sectors, which artists make their money.
And keep in mind that when talking about how artists and musicians make money, you do have both the big commercially successful artists. But then you also have these very small indie bands, these small artists who are just also trying to get their name out there who don't necessarily have the same number of plays as Billie Eilish or Lady Gaga or things like that. So yeah, it can be really frustrating. And I think one thing I also forgot to mention is just how much of a factor record labels in record companies play into this whole process.
Because ultimately the record companies and record labels that sign these very big musicians end up recouping a lot of the money being made. And artists ultimately would see like, and ultimately artists won't see a majority of that. And so that in itself is already kind of troubling to hear, especially now with COVID, kind of making it harder for a lot of these artists and musicians to have to recoup that kind of big chunk of money from live performances. Yeah, and another thing too about the, one of the sectors was royalty slash like streaming profits and stuff.
And I was doing a little reading on that too in the streaming profits, which is if you're a small artist and you can't play live performances, you probably don't have a super big following that maybe merch sales will have like a big impact. Streaming is really the only thing maybe you have right now as an income. And the streaming income is so messed up on Spotify and Apple Music. It's so ridiculously low.
Like I was doing the math, it says they pay about between 0.006 cents and 0.008 cents per song. And if you do the math on that, if you have a song that maybe say it blows up and gets like 500,000 streams, pretty rare for an artist, unless you're one of the top like 400 artists in the world, maybe or something like that, you'll make about $4,000 from that song, which seems so low to have 500,000 streams. And that's all you're going to make from that song. It's so messed up right now for artists.
It's crazy. It really doesn't conform to the traditional process of getting music out. It can't really conform to that, especially with those values. It's just crazy, man.
I know just to get a dollar on Apple Music, for instance, you would have to have at least a couple hundred plays. And I think for Spotify in that case, you did the same math to get around a dollar would be around 200 or around 300 plays. YouTube's ratio is even crazier because I know 1,000 views would translate to a dollar or something like that. So I guess the benefit, or the silver lining is that there are, I guess the silver lining is that there are many distributors.
So it's not just, it's not necessarily just $4,000 for one song, $4,000 for a song on Spotify. And then you were to tally up all the distributors, you would get like probably around maybe 10 K or 20 K based on the number of distributors out there. But even then, that's still not, that's still not like, it's, I still ain't it. Like that's not, that's in no way, all resembling the amount of money, I'm pretty sure artists back in the day would make by selling records just off the print.
And yeah, no, I can't. I think that's especially why a lot of current artists, especially those who aren't signed to huge record labels, have to rely on other forms of income. So live performances or merchandise, because those things, I feel like the record companies don't really have a lot of control over. So yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that COVID-19 is really affecting those aspects of the artist making their money.
Yeah, and I saw a good example today on social media of like a big artist being kind of cognizant about the struggles of a small artist. So it was Tyler the creator, he put out a vinyl edition of his record today. And I saw he on a social media, he was saying like, don't buy this from my big label, buy it from like your local record, your records store company. That's good that he's aware of that too, like just, I wasn't even aware of how like buying it off their website would obviously go directly to them.
I didn't even think that much of a micro level, but that, that totally makes sense. And yeah, I think what kind of makes this issue even worse is just with how United States especially is just handling the response to the pandemic right now. Like, I feel like everything that the current president who shall not be named is kind of delaying a lot of the artist's ability to go back into the life performances or to go back to touring. And it's just really kind of messing things up.
So I think the, it's interesting overall just to think of how COVID is impacting particularly musicians and artists among everyone else. Yeah, it's wild. I had a, I myself, I mean I have a lot going on here at Cal in terms of classes and I was working at Summer Job, so I didn't have really a full experience. Maybe you have some of my friends from high school would come on to the music track in their lives.
But I've watched a few of them, so I've kind of seen what they've been going through. I mean I have a couple friends who were trying to do something really cool for their community, where they were having concerts out on their front lawn for their whole like block of people week. And just, they got into the newspaper in Seattle, the Seattle Times and people started coming around and I thought that was like a really cool way for like an artist to come up with something in this time. And also I have a background playing jazz in high school and there's this, there's this artist I listen to a lot on YouTube and Spotify is named Chad Lefquitz.
He's a sax player and I was on, he made a thing called a virtual big band where he, they got everybody on Zoom or something and they were playing songs together and he made YouTube videos out of it. And it was actually a pretty cool video. They sounded like, they're in person to me. And he's getting views off that and just getting people's name out there in the open.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's also just overall transition to just how despite all of these challenges that COVID-19 is presenting, how artists and musicians are really trying to bounce back from this and the ways in which they're doing it too is just, it's very creative, very innovative and also very entertaining but just especially, you just gotta give props to them for continuing to push through a global pandemic. Like that in and of itself is something worthy of raising. But yeah, one of my friends who also makes beats, he got a chance to perform for a live stream benefit concert through Twitch.
And yeah, it was just kind of funny how it all just transpired like you would just see him on the screen and like it seemed like pressing pads and then the chat would react real time. It felt, I was just like, it just felt a little bit weird to me because I feel like with a live concert a lot of the performers would like feed off of, you know, actual people and energies and things like that. But with live performances through Twitch or something like that, you don't really have that same kind of, you don't have that same aspects to depend on. And so you're just kind of having to wing it out and figure it out.
I think for him, his performance, he seemed like he was pretty chill. It didn't even look like he was really trying to focus on like how other people are reacting to it. He was more just like making sure everything on his and those give. Yeah, I remember hearing about, I think YouTube was planning to have features for their live concerts where it would be you could pay to have your message go up to the top of the chats that the artist would see it maybe, or you could pay putting some money in requests to song with the artist would play.
Was that what was going on in your, in that guy's Twitch streamer? Was it a little different? I think with his it was more, they had a set list. So it was just like, I would play this artist for a set amount of time and then we're going to switch over to the next artist.
Yeah. So it was a little less interactive I'd say, but it was still kind of cool to see how that all transpired regardless of how weird and off putting it was. But yeah, speaking of live streaming, I think another kind of innovation in how musicians are responding to the pandemic is just going to Twitch. So artists like Kenny Beats and Alex Tume, a famous recording engineer for Young Thug, to ultimately like to huge people like Timbalin, he had the, it's one of the most prolific and kind of notable sounds in the 2000s and ill mind, he's worked with many, many great hip hop legends.
You have all of these kind of artists and musicians just hopping on on Twitch and hosting live streams. And each of them, I feel like they have their own kind of twist to how they're doing their live stream. So I think the one I'm most familiar with is Kenny Beats, who he launched this Twitch early March, I think after the cave, you know, he couldn't film his YouTube series, the cave because he couldn't go to the studio because we're in a global pandemic. So he's had to, he ended up, I think he and his team had to kind of figure out a way to live stream stuff.
He got a system where now it's grown to like this huge community. It's a discord where producers and artists can collaborate. He would host weekly beat battles and bring on guest judges to judge beats. So we have like Billy Eilish's brother Finneas as a judge.
He had Timbalin as a judge. He had someone from disclosure, he was his famous EDM group. He had them as a judge too. So it's just kind of crazy how all that's transpired and on top of that he's able to make his money through donations and subbing on Twitch.
And I find that really cool. Yeah, I was also in this time where everybody's been locked inside. There's been a surprising amount of music that's actually come out in the hip hop world. Few people that I follow, like I follow a lot.
I know Jake Holle released a couple songs a couple weeks ago. There was a funny Travis Scott Kanye West collab which I was not expecting to see given the recent turn of Kanye's music. But surprisingly I thought it was kind of an interesting song. It was a kind of classic kind of Travis Scott upbeat type beat and then of course Kanye had to come in with the Holy Spirit lyrics and such.
But that was, I had a fun time listening to that song. And then I know also Juice World put out the post-humous album of his which a lot of people liked. I haven't gotten around to listen to the whole album but I've had listened to a few songs a couple of friends and I really liked it. I heard that it's a really popular album.
And then there was a future album a couple of months ago that I personally liked. I'd gotten more into the future a little bit over the quarantine as well. I had a lot of things have really like peaked my interest specifically. I think other than, actually no, I think the only thing that really peaked my interest was the logic album just because it was, I'm not like a huge logic fan but I was very surprised when he announced his retirement and I had been listening to his music like prior.
So I just kind of, I was, yeah I listened to that album and I don't want to spoil kind of how I feel about it. I'll say that for the review. And I think yeah just like, actually no, Drake's latest record Dark Lane Demotapes. That also was something that peaked my interest a little bit.
I was just kind of digging the, I kind of dig more of that instrumental moody sound. Maybe a little bit excited for where he has to come for his main record that's gonna come out soon because I know Dark Lane Demotapes is just like a filler kind of project. Yeah I did like that kind of vibe with the moody instrumentals as well. Also one thing I saw on that was that was his first album in some crazy long period of time that didn't debut as number one on the Billboard 100.
So I'm thinking this is about to be the, is this finally the end of Drake's reign of popularity over the hip hop? Could be starting to slow down a little bit. Yeah well I mean he did come out with that single with a little Dirk. Oh yeah right.
I don't know if it actually hit the billboards at all. Oh nope it hit number one. Oh okay. So it's yeah but yeah I found those parts to be interesting.
Obviously Wap came out with Megan Stallion and Cardi B. It's a prequel song. And speaking of Megan Stallion, oh my goodness the drama and the horror. Obviously I feel Megan Stallion is not gonna listen to this but if she does and the low chances she does I hope you have been doing well man I suck at this.
Yeah it's terrible to hear what's happened to her and on top of that the backlash that she's received from the incident that occurred and yeah no I'm just kind of sad that it's happening. But yeah no I guess sorry for sidetrack but just going back to the main topic. Yeah the catalog of just new music coming out right now it's still, it makes me hopeful how current artists and musicians are still kind of chugging along through the pandemic and putting out hits. That Jack Carlos song actually I'm surprised that's kind of been the hit for him.
Like especially during quarantine like that the what's popping song has been popping like crazy. And I've followed Jack a little bit I've listened to some of his stuff I think before he came up with when he had the glasses and was sober. So yeah though it's interesting to see kind of his growth. I mean he got the all star track list on what's popping.
Yeah I guess that's probably what's going to do with it too. Also you start listening to J. Peg Moffee I've seen in the outline how Jack. Yes I did.
One of my friends back home got me big into him. Yeah I mean I really like this album Veteran. I haven't gone too into his most recent one all my heroes are corn balls I need to listen to that a couple more times. But Veteran it's just it's crazy how like just the experimentalism and all that kind of ties together and it's like I don't know and I like his flows a lot too and it's like he makes it all himself like a title creator kind of guy I think right.
Yeah. And he records everything produces everything writes his own lyrics the chords makes his own masters everything that is other than Tyler like those people are we consider triple or even call that like they're they're just that's crazy musicians like to be able to do that you just have to have such a talent and put in so much work it's kind of it's like I have so much respect for people like that. Yeah his own backstory is just crazy too he's he's literally a veteran he used to be I think he served in the Air Force at one point and then yeah he got honorably discharged and he talked about how he made his album too in one of his interviews I think he just recorded like 89 songs and then just chipped away at like and then once he was finished he was like I which ones do I like the most like this this this and that's what made Veteran yeah and that yeah he's just like he's just the beast he also found him too. He deserves to get some more fame anybody's listening should go put on some J Big Mafia and yeah get him some more streams and he deserves it.
I guess TLDR for me it's been it's been a really tough time for musicians but it is been also really like inspiring to see what people have been coming up with in terms of ways to circumvent restrictions but new ways to come up like with socially safe ways to display their music and additionally hopeful makes me home for the future with the music that's been coming out. I guess that's my little summary. Yeah yeah no that's good summary. Well we've heard it here first we got the next episode of Summer Record Straight being the review of Logic's final album No Pressure.
We don't know we don't have a day for that yet we're still figuring out this process but it'll come soon. Yeah we'll get back on the regular schedule get some more episodes pumped out. Yes sir so yeah this has been episode six of Standing Record Straight once again this is MJ Harris. This is Jack Graves and signing off.
See you in the next time.