Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.
Hey,
what is up everyone? Welcome back to a new episode of electronic dance money. I’m your host, Kristian conceito. Hope you guys are doing well. So quick little housekeeping stuff, I actually got a, a book list set up for the podcast, basically, it’s, it’s gonna have all the books I’ve mentioned on the show, plus additional ones that I’m currently reading and will probably end up actually suggesting on the show. But if you go to Envious audio.com slash book list that will be there for you to check out should just be a full Excel spreadsheet that you can look over with some links, Amazon links to go grab a copy of that book that is an affiliate book list as well. So if you go use that, that throws some little money my way to help support the show. So again, that’s Envious audio.com slash book list. I’ll have it on the show notes as well, you guys can just click the link that’ll take you to that page. And you can check out some of the books that I’ve recommended. And that I will continue to recommend. But in today’s episode, we’re going to be kind of diving into the world of re mixing. And some of my thoughts and ideas on re mixing because this is something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while and I guess you know, remixes and bootlegs. As well as maybe we’ll touch on some mashup stuff, but there’s a lot of value in just focusing on doing remixes and mashups and bootlegs. Primarily, I mean, one of the biggest things is obviously, if you’re re mixing or doing a bootleg of a track, usually it’s a bigger track that is more well known. So there’s kind of already hype behind it, there’s a name behind it. And when someone sees a remix or a bootleg of that track, they’re more interested in checking that out because they want to hear a new version or a take of that track. So you might initially get some a decent amount of eyes on a track right away with little to no marketing, needing to be involved. But first of all, let’s talk about what the difference is between a remix bootleg and a mashup. Because this is something that a lot of people kind of get confused. Now specifically, what a remix is, is if someone gives you direct access to the stems or multi tracks of a specific track. So if you’ve got a good friend, that’s a producer who sends you stuff all the time, it would be super easy for you to say hey, can you send me the stems for that track, I’d like to remix it, that would be considered a remix if they actually send that over. Now if you just take a really huge popular song and find the acapella vocal for it or you strip the the vocal out of it. And you start making a remix without any permission or getting any actual physical stems, that’s a bootleg, you’re basically bootlegging the stems from the track without necessarily, quote unquote, permission, and you’re making your own version of the track. So that’s the like, direct difference between what a bootleg is and a remix. And then a mashup is basically taking two songs and more or less DJing and mixing them together. So you know, you strip one vocal from one track and put it in the breakdown of another and that’s a mash up DJs from Mars are like, I mean, they’re great. They do a lot of mashup stuff. Same with mash and culture. I think those two artists, those two duo’s have probably made a good amount of they’re grown a good good amount of their fan base with just doing mashups stuff, and remixes as well. I know they definitely do remixes.
But
you can see direct success from what they do, just based off of doing remixes and mashups. And they do it in a very business minded sense. So the entire time that they’ve been doing mashups the entire time that these artists have been making remixes. Usually you’ll see that they’re putting the content out for free. And that’s for a couple of reasons. One, they’re using it as a marketing tool. So they’re collecting emails in order for you to get the download for that track. But then the other reason is, well, if they’re boots legging. You know, if they’re making remixes without getting stems or permission or anything, then they can’t go. And you they can’t put that track on Spotify without a licensing agreement or approval from the record label, because then they’re making money off of original work that
is technically
not theirs. You know, it depends on how much they changed the track. You know, if they strip the original vocal, and they’re using an original vocal or an original melody from the track, then yes, they cannot go ahead and remix that and put it out and make money off of that. That would be copyright. You know, they’d get cotton, that’s copyright infringement. But instead, what they do is they give it out for free. By collecting an email that is completely legal, you can completely do that. Now. This is where doing remixes and mashups and bootlegs and giving those out for free, can play a huge role in your marketing tactics and getting you to start growing a fan base, especially when you start putting out original singles, and you have that establishing a marketing list, then you can send one email to 1000s of people immediately, they can immediately start streaming your track right away, or pre save link, which all helps with the Spotify algorithms. This is all stuff we’ve talked about in the email marketing episodes. So if you haven’t checked those out, definitely go look at them. I think they’re episodes 21 and 22, or 22, and 23. I can’t remember, but I’ll have those on the show notes. But going back to just the general idea of remixes, and bootlegs there are that, you know, the nice thing about remixes and bootlegs is that some of the contents are even some of the track has already been written for you, you know, there’s not a ton of ton of extra work that you have to do, especially if it’s a vocal. And this is what I always suggest to my clients, I always tell them, Hey, if you’re re mixing, just use the vocal use a vocal because if And normally, this is if they’re trying to professionally really said, or do a contest, which I’ll get into contests in just a little bit. But I tell him to use the vocal because if the if they get copied, you know, if there’s a copyright strike, or they don’t win a contest, or the label doesn’t want to release it, well then you can strip the vocal and you have an original track now that you can just release as is or you can go find a vocalist to hire and get them to record on that and you’re good to go. Let’s say you are able to get a big remix for a track or a label does want to release a remix you do there are so many tracks that have been released.
That
blow up probably just as big as the original or even bigger than the original, more well
known.
One of which, which I would argue is probably not bigger than budget like as big as the original track would be Steve Aoki remix a pursuit of happiness. I think everyone’s heard that track.
It’s
huge. It’s crazy how big that track got another one that’s more than a niche within our industry is probably seven lines remix of still with me by tritonal and Christina Soto. The the original track with that is, I think it’s like a it’s almost like a lullaby ish piano ballad, not ballad, but piano track with some orchestral elements to it. And seven lines is able to take that track and make it into like a huge festival banger that is that I mean, that track is still played on Sirius XM all the time, I hear played so many times. And everyone’s heard it and it’s a great original track. And I would argue that that remix is bigger than the original, definitely bigger than the original. So there’s a lot of value in creating remixes now in even, you know, establishing your career based off of remixes if you can get really good at re mixing. People like that. And you have more original, here’s the thing, you have more original tunes, you know, quote unquote, original tunes, with, let’s say you’re just using a vocal of like a proper rap track that’s big that other people don’t have. So you know, you can go and play a show and you’re playing original music, but it’s a remix of track that people really love. That’s really powerful. That’s a powerful tool
to have.
When you’re creating like an original set and people go
after the show. They’re
like, Oh shit, that was such a good set. I haven’t heard any of those tracks before but I’ve heard all the original vocals or maybe the original melody. That’s a lot of fun for a lot of people and it’s easier to sell people your music if it’s something they are already know and recognize. And again, this is based off of, if you’re just using a vocal people know a vocal, and they know the title of a track, they’re more inclined to want to listen to it, because it’s something that they, they already recognize, it’s very similar to melody, you know, you want melodies to repeat a little, because it’s this resemblance of, of remembering and being able to understand something, because you’ve already heard it before. And this is all basic music theory stuff. Now, when you’re looking at what kind of track you’re wanting to do a bootleg of or remix of, it is important to also pay attention, especially when you’re doing marketing stuff. So if you’re using this as a marketing tool, which I do recommend you do, because you know, like I said, you can release the tracks for free or remix or bootleg and collect emails for it’s a great, great, great marketing tool.
But you also
again, we’re gonna get more into the technical stuff of marketing and business here. And it’s all about looking at your target audience, especially with the track your remixing. You know, if you’re a future house producer, it might not be the best to go remix a dubstep track and then try to market that to listeners of future house. They’re not gonna know the original, they’re probably it’s not, you know, a lot of there are future I love future house. But then I also loved some dubstep tracks too. But I don’t know, a ton of dubstep, I’ll tell you that right now, I don’t know a lot of it. I know some of it. I know all the classic tracks. So if you’re re mixing something like a classic Skrillex track, you’ll probably be, it’ll probably be easier to remix that and get Pete future house people to listen to it, because it’s a different take. But if it’s some obscure artists that more of the dubstep crowd recognizes or knows, it’s gonna be harder for you to remix that track and market it to listeners of future house. So you have to kind of determine your audience and what you’re trying to remix. Now, I wouldn’t suggest doing a future house remix of a future house track, because it’s the future house version of that has already been done, you want to change it up a little bit, you want to give someone a different perspective on that. So it’d be better to stay within like the same BPM and maybe almost similar styles. So it’s like if you’re, if you produce future house, and it might be better, more beneficial for you to produce, or do a remix of like a progressive house track, or maybe an electro house track, something that’s still within the range of what you’re working in, but can be different. You know, if you have it, there’s a deep house track, you can remix it to a future house one still within the same relative genre, but you can still add a different twist on it. And it’s going to make you know it more than likely future house people are listening to to other house genres. So that audience is already probably more inclined to know the track that you’re referencing, or your re mixing. So this is going to be step one in figuring out what tracks you want to bootleg what tracks you want to do remember, do a remix of, and then being able to market that to the right target audience, you already know that your product is going to do well with that audience. Now that’s not to say that you can’t go remix or bootleg a dubstep track if you’re a future house producer. By all means, if that’s what you want to do, go for it. But there might be some pushback in the sense that you might not reach the same amount of people that would recognize a track that’s more similar to that genre. And there’s plenty of tracks where
other
you know, producers outside of that genre going remix a track and do like, you know, let’s say a dubstep producer does a remix of a house track that happens all the time. But usually it’s a much much bigger artist. But if you do go and look at remix packs, or remix it, you know, a remix EP of a track, go look at the other ones that were released. On that EP most of the tracks. And the genres are relatively similar to the original, relatively, they’re not the same. But you might have you know, you might have a techno version of a future house track or Progressive House track, or a deep house version of that Progressive House track or an electrical version of that Progressive House track. They’re all relative genres that are near the same family tree, especially if they’re being released, they’re labeled. Because they’re going to be released through the label of the original, you know, the label that released the original track. So they’re trying to think about their target audience and their listeners. So you’re way less likely to see that label going. You know if it’s a progressive house track Let’s say like mix mash records is coming out with remixes. They’re in it’s a progressive house track, they’re probably not going to be or a more of a popular track, they’re probably not going to excision and asking for a remix. Because it’s just not going to fit that vibe. But I mean, you, you’ll see, like, bigger pop tracks do get those remixes by someone, like excision, if it’s a huge pop track that kind of everyone knows and everyone enjoyed in general, a lot of like x, you know, and at that point it more it becomes more of the artists vision, or the producers vision of wanting to change that track and make it more in tune with the genre, their own genre going for their actual audience or when they’re playing at a festival. Let’s take excision For instance, if he goes in remixes aren’t in Ariana Grande a track that’s huge. And plays that at EDC, it’s, uh, odds are that the, the audience is going to know that song, they’re all going to be able to sing along to it, but the audience is also there for excision. So they get a nice little twist on a track they already know, which is probably going to blow their minds, you know, everyone’s got their phone out, record it and upload to YouTube, that sort of stuff. And then everyone’s on the edge of their seat waiting for that remix to be released. Sometimes it never is, sometimes it’s good to not release it, you know that that’s all about the scarcity aspect, and it gets people to want to go to excisions excisions. show a little bit more, because you’ll never know what he’s gonna play some new original remix that is just out of this world. So moving on from that once you’ve figured out your target audience, and you can start to determine what types of retracts you want to remix and where you kind of want to stay at. And then you can start moving into the releasing aspect and promoting it in marketing. Now the awesome thing about marketing with remixes and bootlegs and mashups is that you can have a much smaller budget. You know, with original tunes, if you’re independently releasing them, or if you’re even releasing through record label, you still want to set aside some money you want a marketing budget to have. Now if you’re releasing an original tune, and doing it like independently, I would suggest a marketing budget for that single release anywhere from like 250 to $500. That gives you some good cushion room to really invest in yourself. Hit up some blogs, maybe get a blog, right, get some video stuff done. And you can promote it right maybe run some ads, if that’s the route you’re wanting to go. But with a remix you can keep it much smaller because there’s one thing you’re going to want to be going for and that’s emails with remixes. So you can keep a much smaller budget of anywhere from like one to $200 and mostly focused on running ads, testing ads, remember test test test test you want to test everything multiple ad images, multiple headlines, multiple descriptions, you want to test everything to see what gets you the most clicks and signups now obviously in we’re getting into kind of tedious territory that I don’t want to get into quite yet but more clicks does not mean better. You want to make sure your work converting your conversion rates are what is that’s the key ideal there if you’re converting then you know you’ve got the right target audience you know that your ad is working well and if you’re getting a lot of clicks with a lot of conversions, you know you’re doing well. So if you’re getting a lot of clicks with not a lot of conversions, that’s bad, you’re wasting money.
So that’s
just some very small insight if you are going to go down the rabbit hole of running ads definitely do a lot of research if you’re going to be going that way. But the point is is if like you should be using remixes to build an email marketing campaign ultimately grow that email marketing list have people in or you know, set up a MailChimp account, you can set up a landing page through MailChimp. You can run ads to that that landing page for MailChimp people enter in their information, their name, and their email address, whatever other information that you want to get from them, they sign up and then they get a download link and now you’ve collected that that email now you have something of real good value, and you’re giving away your product for free. I think with Wyatt and I from our episode a few episodes ago and we were just talking about like sales funnels and marketing in general. We talked about his buddy who runs hyped it hyped it hyped it hyped at it. I never get it right. But a lot of people are using that service so you can turn your like download button on Soundcloud to send people to that hype to link in Collect emails that way, which is a great resource or great tool to do that. And immediately start collecting emails, I think I have a couple of clients that are starting to do that. And I’m wanting to see about getting him on the show the creator of that. So we can do more in depth analysis of, you know, marketing your music in that way. And using that as a tool, because I think it can be very vital to a lot of artists. But make sure you collect those emails. And with that, you can also send promos out, which this is kind of including email marketing, again, go back to the email marketing episodes we talked about. But you can send your remix promos to bigger artists and the original artists, big artists want remixes, they want originals of original tracks of with a twist on on, you know, a bigger track a bigger pop track, or even their own version of it to play out. They love that sort of stuff. Some labels do some labels don’t. But that also gives you the opportunity to send the promo to the label as well to the label that originally released the track. Now you never know you might get a shitty label that basically sends almost like a cease and desist letter to say, hey, you can’t put this out or promote it anywhere. That’s possible. I haven’t necessarily heard of that happening. Unless you’re actually selling the track. You know, if you put it on Spotify, then you might get a cease and desist letter. But if you’re just putting it out for free, I don’t necessarily think that that would happen. But the bonus of sending it to a label to the label that originally released the track as they might want to release it, especially if they see that it’s getting good traction, they may want to officially release that for you. So keep that in mind too. When you’re doing promo sending track, eat remix is out to your promo lists, send it to a bigger audience, a bigger collection of bigger DJs. And as well as the labels. A lot of DJs have promo promo list emails to which would be used sometimes it’s like promos at whatever their website name is, you know might be promos@ts.com, something like that. You can look it up, you can google what their what their emails are. I talked about using I think it was in the email marketing episode I talked about using hunter.io. to basically enter you put in a website address and they’ll give you a list of the emails associated with the website. Some of it is like they like Asterix out some of the email, but you can pretty quickly determine what the actual email is. But it gives you a good idea of what like the email domain addresses. So you can actually send emails out to those people hunter.io is awesome for like building a promo list of, of DJs emails that you don’t physically have. I’ll have a link to that website as well in the shownotes. The nice thing about remixes too is that they tend to be a bit easier to make than originals again, because if you’re just using one element from it, the rest is kind of easy to fill in. It is important to keep in mind remember when you’re doing a remix, the goal is to make the track better than the original. You don’t
want to do do a disservice to the original track, or just make the track in the light of a different genre. And what that would look like don’t be sending out emails or giving out remixes or bootlegs for free they’re dogshit and what I mean by that is if you can’t stand the track up next to the original and it sound just as good or better then don’t release it. You can’t be putting out shitty remixes because people will well remember that labels will remember that if you send it to them. The original artists will remember that if you send it to them and they don’t want to hear shitty remix of their track. So make sure you do enough research in terms of sending it to people as well as referencing it to the original make sure it sounds just as good if not better. Otherwise don’t even worry about releasing it just leave it in the library of practice tracks this is gonna be a short episode for today guys, that’s pretty much it. Remix I you know I wanted to do this episode because I see remixes as being a pretty vital part of artists careers, but they don’t seem to be doing them enough or utilizing them in in a in a good way. And I’m sure many of you have thought well what do I need to do to build an email Mark? Listen, this is a great way of doing it, giving exclusive original remixes or bootlegs away to your audience just for them, giving you their email for you to utilize later on. Great marketing tactic. Great way to grow your fan base. So, start re mixing, start doing bootlegs
and have fun with it. Other than that, head to Envious audio.com slash Episode 46 to check out the show notes, and I will see you guys next time.